The Pendergast
Machine – Lyle W. Dorsett
Kansas City Swing – blues-based, fluid with extended solos and riffing - is my favorite kind of jazz (if you care). In the
1920s and 1930s, The Jazz Capital of the World was full of nightclubs where
musicians could jam and have cutting contests where two or more musicians would
alternately play parts of solo choruses. The reason is that KC was so wide-open to nightlife
pleasures such as drinking, gambling, and prostitution, all of whose sensations are heightened by hard-driving music.
Collecting protection from the vice lords, the
politicians – mostly Democratic – provided welfare services to their
underprivileged African American, Italian, and Irish constituents. The voters
rewarded this charity at election time so politicians could deliver majorities
and thus dominate politics in the city, country, state, and influence
federal pork to come their way.
This slim volume examines the Democratic machine that
grew to dominate KC and Missouri politics from 1890 to 1940. The founder was
Jim Pendergast who used his saloon as a base to appeal to voters in the working
class sections of town. After Jim died in 1911 his younger brother Tom took
command.
He extended favors to middle class people who needed
influence to cut red tape and land lucrative contracts, not help with jobs,
housing, and health care the working, the poor, and the working poor did.
Gradually, with sometime setbacks delivered by reformers, Tom Pendergast was
able to exert political power in all of Cowtown and Jackson County. When the
New Deal came to town, the machine's leading position in Missouri’s Democratic
party made it the natural canal for the diffusion of federal largess to
Missourians.
The downfall of the Pendergast machine came through
nepotism, cupidity and electoral chicanery that was so conspicuously bad that that it outraged even the endless tolerance that Americans have for bosses and
strong men. I grow tolerant with age and don’t see as outrageous one boss
controlling the financing of campaigns and influence by way of owing of favors
to arrange patronage of jobs in the public sector. Let the bastards flourish as long as
they are not shutting out ordinary people, probably of different colors and religions, from getting ahead.
But of course it doesn't work that way. Inevitably bossism falls due to favoritism, avarice,
and narrow-mindedness because human beings, being fallible and unimaginative,
lose their heads when the money and power get too good. They optimistically
think the party is going to last forever and get sloppy. And mean about cutting
up the pie. Furthermore, bosses and their long time minions become temperamentally unfit to be leader. They age and become erratic and unstable, besides their natural lack of principles and obsessiveness about money and power.
That’s why it’s important to fight local, state, and national oligarchies – because they are predictably, unavoidably corrupt and their decay causes a lot of damage.
That’s why it’s important to fight local, state, and national oligarchies – because they are predictably, unavoidably corrupt and their decay causes a lot of damage.
I'll bet this was interesting. I was young in the last years of the elder Daley's machine, and didn't really get to vote against it until it was pretty much gone. But they did get some good things done. I'm much less of a pureheart now than I used to be. If it works...
ReplyDeleteWhen I lived in Japan in 1979-80, one of my fellow students was from Chicago. He said that he worked to get out the vote (for Daley, I guess) and got patronage jobs out of it. He had zero problem with the 'this for that' though he was decidedly not a Reagan Democrat. As I age, though, I realize that ageing leaders get less attentive, more easily distracted, less decisive, more procrastinating, less easy-going about change, and more prone to bees in the bonnet, all of which cause problems beyond their inner circle.
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