FOLLOW THE LEADER

 

"A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party, he is a leader."
Harry Truman

Ohio born from Irish immigrant parents,  eldest son James Pendergast (above) was a steel worker and laborer in Kansas City, Missouri, who struggled to support his large family until he won big - betting on a race horse named Climax.  Or so goes the legend.  More likely the fortune came from some successful but illegal enterprise. 

James invested his 'winnings' in a collection of bars (above), a restaurant and hotel in Kansas City, Missouri's West Bottom neighborhood.

The town was then divided between the uptown establishment Republicans who lived on the high ground, and the working class Democrats who were literally on the flood plain below them (above).  James' business success allowed him to became one of the town’s most powerful councilmen. 

His competition for Democratic votes was Joe Shannon (above) who controlled the Democratic votes in the Kansas City suburbs. But James Pendergast's  first instinct was always to negotiate. and "Big Jim" cut a power sharing deal with Shannon, which ultimately worked to Big Jim's advantage.

“You use a saw to shape wood, not a hammer.”
James Pendergast. 1892

In the early 1890's James Pendergast hired his youngest brother, Tom (above), as cashier and bookkeeper. Big Jim also schooled Tom in local politics, lecturing him that, “The important thing is to get the votes.” 

In 1900 James (above) secured Tom the position of Superintendent of Streets. Tom immediately hired two hundred new employees, all loyal goats, as Pendergast supporters and voters were called.  Then, in November of 1911, at just 55 years of age, big brother James died of kidney failure. 

Tom Pendergast stepped in to fill his brother’s seat on the council, but resigned after just five years. The position was no longer powerful enough for him. Tom’s first instinct was always to go for the power, knowing the votes would follow. 

“Today, politics may be our friend, and tomorrow we may be its victims.”

Owen D. Young. Chairman of General Electric. 1922-1939

In 1916 Tom Pendergast had himself appointed to the leadership of the Jackson County Democratic Party, headquartered in a two story yellow brick building (above, left)  at 1908 Main Street. With the votes from the Irish and Italian neighborhoods in his pocket, Tom became the invisible hand in writing of the new city charter, adopted in 1925. 

“Boss” Tom, as the Republican newspapers called him, could now manipulate both the city and county governments, both the Democratic and Republican parties, from behind the scenes, following a simple rule; The important thing is to get the votes-no matter what.”

“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

Plato 400 B.C.E.

Boss Tom’s name never had to appear on another ballot. As one Republican St. Louis writer noted, “Pendergast never did hunt ducks with a brass band. It has always been hard to tell what he is doing, but easy to tell what he has done the day after the election.” 

Tom helpfully described the methods he had learned from his older brother. “Every one of my workers has a fund to buy food, coal, shoes and clothing. When a poor man comes to old Tom's boys for help….we fill his belly and warm his back and vote him our way.”

“Politics have no relation to morals.
Niccolo Machiavelli. 1532

James "Blackie" Audett claimed he knew the methods Boss Tom used to gain power. “My first job in Kansas City was to look up vacant lots…we would give addresses to them vacant lots. Then we would take the address and assign them to people we could depend on – prostitutes, thieves, floaters, anybody we could get on the voting registration books. On election days we just hauled these people to the right places and they went in and voted…”  

It's a standard Republican charge, but a moment's thought will reveal that all vacant lots already have numbers. That is what defines them as being vacant. And it ignores that people vote for Democrats when Democrats give them what they need.  But almost a century later, such Republican smears are still accepted about Kansas City, and all Democratic voting cities as fact. 

“The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority, acting against a divided majority.”
Will Durant.

With the arrival of the Great Depression, Boss Tom did not wait for Hoover to sympathize with Kansas Cities’ 38% unemployment. In November of 1930 the town voted a $40 million bond issue, for a “Ten-Year-Plan”. 

What Kansas got for its investment in the future was the “Power and Light Building”, still a landmark in KC., as well as a new City Hall, the Jackson County Court House, a new Police Headquarters, a new Municipal Auditorium, and several schools. 

When the KC “Star” described all these new buildings as “Pendergast’s concrete pyramids”, Tom merely smiled. And the hundreds of unemployed who found work building Kansas City's future, smiled too. The truth was Pendergast Ready-Mix Cement was a legal business and although fraud was heavily charged it was never proved. But what brought Tom Pendergast down was yet another perfectly legal business; political consultant.

“There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting for traces of blood to appear in the water’
Alan Clark. 1974

Since 1922 regulators for the State of Missouri and 137 fire insurance companies had been sparing over rate increases.  As a compromise, for 15 years the companies were allowed to charge higher rates, but the difference between the old and the new rates was impounded, Eventually, the impounded fees reached $10 million. Then, suddenly, the state agreed to a settlement, giving the insurance companies $8 million in higher rates, all their impounded funds, and the right to future increases. 

In May of 1938 Republican Governor Loyd Stark (above, right), a Tom Pendergast pick, ordered an investigation. This investigation uncovered that the insurance companies had delivered a half million dollars in cash to Tom Pendergast as a “political consulting” fee, just before the settlement. Now, since Pendergast had no direct authority over the insurance commissioner, this fee was legal. However it would have been at least politically embarrassing. And in order to avoid the embarrassment, Boss Tom had not declared the income on his Federal income tax. And that was illegal.

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”

Adlai Stevenson.

The end came quickly. On 7 April, 1939 Boss Tom (above) was arraigned on two counts of tax fraud. On 22 May, 1939 he pled guilty. 

"Boss" Tom Pendergast paid a fine and served 15 months in prison, and was never involved in Missouri politics again.  His photos reveal a man not nearly as fat as the Republican newspapers wanted him to be.

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”
George Eliot.

The reformers patted themselves on the back, and the Republicans reveled in their triumph over Democratic sin. Governor Stark (above) hoped to use the toppling of Boss Tom to propel himself into the U.S. Senate. 

But in 1940, Stark lost a nasty election contest to Harry Truman (above), who had been a long time Pendergast man.  After that it was Stark who was through in Missouri politics. 

When Boss Tom died in January of 1945, his funeral was well attended (by vice President Harry Truman, among others), and the only thing that changed about Missouri politics were the names on the ballots. The working men and women of Kansas City, Missouri, knew he had been their friend, and had thought about them when the Republican bankers and power brokers did not. They erected a statue of him, gazing paternally down upon the bottoms he had risen from.

“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

Harry S. Truman.

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BIRTH OF THE BOYCOTT

 

I can describe the exact moment of conception. On the evening of 22 September, 1880,  Father John O’Malley was sharing a meal with American journalist James Redpath. At some point during dinner the priest noticed the American had stopped eating. 

When queried, Redpath (above)  explained, “I am bothered about a word. When a people ostracize a land grabber..." Redpath then struggled for a moment, before explaining, "But ostracism won't do" 

According to Redpath Father O'Malley (above, center) then, "...tapped his big forehead, and said, 'How would it do to call it "to boycott him?” , “Redpath wrote later, "He was the first man who uttered the word, and I was the first who wrote it.” (Talks About Ireland, 1881) And thus was born another contribution to the English language. Of course the importance of this invention requires a little explanation.

Freed from its incubator in the central highlands of  Mexico, 'Phytophthora infestans' -  the Potato Blight - arrived in Ireland in the 1830’s. By then the humble potato had become the primary food for the 8 million people of Ireland. It could be grown almost year round. It produced so much protein per square foot that a family could be supported on a quarter of an acre of land. But because of this dependence, in the decades after 1845, the blight created "The Starving Time". Each year more and more of the crop was consumed by the moldy blight.  And because it did its work underground, unseen, its ravages would not be realized until the attempt to harvest the crop.  By 1855  20% of the population of Ireland had starved to death, and another 20% had emigrated.

The British government struggled to respond to the disaster with church based relief, but religious bigotry and politics then compounded the human misery.  The English landlords were mostly Protestant and the Irish farmers were Catholic. Potatoes were molding away in the fields. But wheat, which was growing healthy and abundant in Ireland, was too expensive for the starving Irish to buy,  thanks to the internal tariffs called the Corn Laws enforced by the English Parliment. 

These were duties (taxes) charged on grain imported into any part of the British Empire. This was done to protect the Irish and English landowners from having to compete with cheap American or European wheat.  But by 1880, of the four million souls still surviving on the emerald isle, fewer than 2,000 owned 70% of the land. The three million tenant farmers owned nothing, not even their own homes, and over the two previous years their rents had been increased by 30%, and many were being thrown out of the their ancestral rented homes (above).  And to be expelled meant starvation. The very life was being squeezed out of the people of Ireland.  Law and order demanded it.

Meanwhile, most of the largest, wealthiest landowners, those benefiting from the Corn Law duties, were absentee landlords, Englishmen and women who hired local farmers to manage their Irish estates. “Captain" Charles Cunningham Boycott was one of these local farm owners/managers.  Those tenants who could not pay their higher rent were evicted by the managers. Those who were evicted usually died (above). To argue it was not intended as “genocide” misses the point. Intended or not, it was mass murder. Ireland was teetering on the edge of a social disaster.

On Tuesday, 3 July, 1880, outside the quaint village of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, three men emptied their revolvers into the head and face of twenty-nine year old David Feerick,  an agent for an absentee landlord.  No one was ever charged with that murder.  In early September, outside of the same village, “Captain” Charles Boycott, called on the tenants to harvest the oat crop of absent landlord Lord Erne. 

“Captain” Boycott (above) would be described by the New York Times (in 1881) as 49 years old; "a red faced fellow, five feet eight inches tall, the son of a Protestant minister who had served in the British Army." However he earned his title of Captain not in the military but for his daring attitude in sport. Besides managing Lord Erne's property, Boycott owned 4,000 acres of Irish farmland for himself, farmed by his own tenant farmers.  The day he called Lord Erne's tenants back to work, Boycott also informed the tenants that their wages were being cut by almost half.  The tenants simply refused to work at those starvation wages.

The Boycott family and servants by themselves struggled for half a day to cut and harvest the oats (above) before admitting defeat. Mrs. Boycott then appealed to the tenants personally. They responded to her by bringing in the oat crop before the winter rains ruined it.

On Sunday, 19 September 1880,  Irish politician Charles Stuart Parnell (above), addressed a mass meeting in the town of Ennis.  Parnell called on the crowd to shun any who took over the property of an evicted tenant. 

“When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and the marketplace, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone — putting him into a kind of moral Coventry — isolating him from his kind like the leper of old.”  

It was the birth of the modern non-violent protest. Unstated, was the reality that this was a religious war, the Catholic south of Ireland against the Protestant controlled north and England.

On Tuesday, 22 September, 1880, a local process server, under orders from "Captain Boycott",  and accompanied by police, issued eviction notices to eleven of Lord Erne's tenants.  The tenants were not surprised. Speaking of Boycott, one tenant told a local newspaper, “He treated his cattle better than he did us.”  

The server would have issued even more eviction notices, but a crowd of women began to throw mud and manure at the agent and his police escort (above) until they had to retreat into the Boycott home. That night, in the house of Father O'Mally, the word "Boycott", as a verb, was invented.  It was put to immediate use.

The next morning, Wednesday, 23 September, a large crowd from Ballinrobe (above) marched to the Boycott home and urged the servants to leave. By evening the Boycotts and a young niece living with them, were alone in the house.

A letter written by “Captain” Boycott was published in the London Times. It made no mention of the raising of rents, only of the refusal to pay those rents. It made no mention of the cutting of salaries, only of the refusal to work. 

It did detail the travails of Captain Boycott and his family (above). His mail was not being delivered. He was followed and mocked whenever he left his farm, and had to travel with an armed escort. “The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed…”

Harper's Weekly Illustrated News for 18 December, 1880,  reported what happened next. “A newspaper correspondent first started the idea of sending assistance to Captain Boycott…one person alone promised to get together 30,000 volunteers.  Mister Forester, Chief Secretary for Ireland, at once vetoed the project of an armed invasion…

"It was accordingly decided to pick out some fifty or sixty from the great number of Orange (Protestants) from northern Ireland who were anxious to volunteer. Under military protection (of 1,000 troops) these men harvested Captain Boycott’s crops… The cost of this singular expedition was about ten thousand pounds…” (over 200,000 American dollars, today).

It took two weeks under military guard for the inexperienced Ulster men to bring in the crop of turnips, wheat and potatoes, valued by Captain Boycott as worth about three hundred and fifty pounds ($8,000).  Mr. Parnell estimated the harvest had cost the English government “one shilling for every turnip.”

Boycott left Ireland with his family on Wednesday, the first of December, 1880,  shrouded in the back of a military ambulance (above) and escorted by soldiers.  His exit had been achieved by nonviolence. He never returned to Ireland. Someone described his exile as the “death of feudalism in Europe".   Or perhaps, with more hope, the birth of modern Ireland.

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