Grandma Gregory and the
Pendergast Machine
Somewhere we have a
penciled thank-you note from
John W. Davis, who is about as
famous as whichever team
finished third in the National
League pennant race in 1939. (It
was the Dodgers, 12 1/2 games
out.) Davis was the Democratic
nominee for President in 1924,
and he did far worse than the
1939 Dodgers. He was trounced
by the less-than-effervescent
Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge’s
workdays at the White House
were at most seven hours--he
might suffer eight, but only if
Martians landed on the Treasury Building--punctuated by naps on the
porch in the summer that had to be suspended when he began collecting
dense crowds of gawkers who weren’t quite sure he was actually
breathing.
Meanwhile, John W. Davis would go on to a distinguished career arguing
150 cases before the Supreme Court, being noted mostly for being on the
wrong side of every one of them. If it was racist, reactionary, or repressive,
he defended it eloquently, and the crowning of his legal career—thank
God—came when he lost Brown v. Board before the Warren Court.
But the Democrats could’ve run Leopold and Loeb in 1924, and I think
Grandma Gregory–a wide, strong woman no windstorm could knock
down– would’ve worked her heart out for them as long as they were
Democrats. She was a delegate to the convention that year, and this, only
four years after women got the vote, when she was elected the Texas
County, Missouri, Party Chairwoman. Eventually she became a
formidable power broker throughout the Ozark foothills.
Before every election, my Dad remembered, a new car would pull up
outside my Grandfather’s farmhouse and two men in three-piece suits
(usually reserved for funerals, and even then for the Deceased) would
deposit a bank bag full of cash on one more stop on a kind of purgatory
circuit–you had have a real passion for soybean fields to make the drive
enjoyable–through the Missouri hinterlands.
They were bagmen for the Kansas City Pendergast Machine, one of those
old-timey operations that really did practice the kind of voter fraud that
terrifies the right wing today, because the fact that it’s so uncommon
makes it so obvious to them that voter fraud is actually as common as
dinner peas, and the mainstream media is covering it up. They did the
same thing when they covered up Communist fluoridation of our drinking
water.
Jim Pendergast had laid the foundation
for the family at the turn of the century;
as an alderman, he’d proved adept at
mobilizing the Irish vote, and the Kansas
City Irish voted enthusiastically if not
alphabetically, like the Texas border town
that helped Lyndon Johnson whip Coke
Stevenson by 47 votes (hence, "Landslide
Lyndon") in their U.S. Senate race. Jim’s
first personal mayor was named Reed
and Jim’s little brother, Tom, at right,
found his vocation as Superintendent of
Streets, and the brothers prospered.
Eventually, Tom would become to Kansas
City what Lorenzo de Medici was to
Florence, but he grew bootleggers, gamblers, and whores in place of the
artists Lorenzo cultivated in his sculpture garden. Both men went to Mass
regularly, and with immense serenity.
And Tom Pendergast had Texas County in the bag, so to speak, because, in
the deepest Depression, my pre-teen Dad handed out fives from that bank
bag left on the kitchen table to waiting voters, murmuring, “The
Democratic Party thanks you,” over and over, like a priest at Eucharist, so
the Democrats never lost Texas County. Ever.
Pendergast also saved desperately poor people from starvation, for rural
America’s Depression had begun years before Wall Street’s, and would
bottom in depths unknown to the Dow. But My Dad helped distribute
food, too, and. discovered that grapefruit puzzled Hill people. Neither
boiling nor frying improved their opinion of grapefruit, and it was the
only time they balked at Tom’s largesse, for they knew he enjoyed the
power their votes gave him, but they knew, too, that he cared about them.
Henry Ford didn’t. Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur didn’t. A
Kansas City Irish Catholic who wore cuff links and silk ties would not let
the Ozark Hardshell Baptists in his care go hungry. To him, that was an
insult, in his country, America, and on his turf, one-half of the state of
Missouri, and so the man who could buy county judges in bunches
spent much of his hard-earned graft on food.
Pendergast also made the career of a
county judge named Harry Truman
(both of them pictured at left)
possible, which indirectly made me
possible: Truman favored my
grandfather’s blackberry wine on
campaign swings downstate, and
that little sideline of Grandpa
Gregory’s--he also developed a
passion for ginseng, which grew
right alongside his tobacco and
corn-- paid off in World War II.
Senator Truman got my father
appointed to Officers’ Candidate School as a Quartermaster, which saved
me the inconvenience of having Dad vaporized by a German 88
shell before I had the chance to be born.
I wish I could say I loved my Grandmother, but she was a steel-spined
schoolmarm who didn’t tolerate foolishness, by which she meant
Consciousness, Breathing, and Moving, and she used to whack us absently
with her cane. We stole her eyeglasses in revenge. And, sadly, by the time I
knew her, she was edging into dementia, and though she couldn’t locate
her dentures, she could remember, in vivid detail–you could almost smell
charred flesh and sick-room alcohol–how every person in southern
Missouri had died between the War Between the States and the 1939
Dodgers. It didn’t take a lot to prompt a Grandma Gregory Death
Story.
But, as a younger woman, she was shrewd, forceful, and I think
had the same instinct, in a political sense, that leads orcas to crippled seals.
I would not mess with that woman. And for that, for her steel, I admire her
immensely.