Viewers. The political machine boss of 1925 to 1939. Om the political machine got its start from toms older brother, jim pendergast, who came to kansas city in the 1880s and got started establishing this machine in the first ward of kansas city, which was in the industrial west bottoms down by the river. An irish committee, africanamerican community. Very diverse. Lots of workingclass people, saloon. Pendergast had a this machine that was based on favors, basically helping people get jobs in exchange for votes, helping people through giving them loans that they did not have to get a jim wouldk loan, and loan the money settling gambling debts, skimming money off of the top of illegal activity such as gambling money and prostitution and so on and so forth. Was gettingdergast older, his health was failing, his younger brother Tom Pendergast got started in the s. Hine around the 1900 he was elected city alderman and was in charge of streets for the early years of the 1900s. Tom pendergast really was in a position to take over the inhine by the time jim died 1911. A political machine is basically i described it as the act of doing favors in exchange for votes. When you boil it down to its base elements, that is what it amounted to, being tied into and othercrime illicit activities, taking bribes and kickbacks and using make sure that your preferred candidates are elected. Once you control the city 1925, the, by pendergast machine had full control over the city. They have five out of nine city councilmembers who were pendergast. By tom the city manager position was really more powerful than any other position in kansas city at the time. Henry mcelroy as manager was in charge of the day to day operation of the city. They hoped the manager would be this professional that takes care of business, but since he was this pendergast man, it was very improper. Cityver they did construction projects, mcelroy would make sure that these companies thatto were owned by Tom Pendergast, owned mostlyt construction companies. Basically everything from quarries to cement to there was a ready mixed cement companies that was one of the big ones. He had insurance companies. He had liquor companies, of course, which, at least officially, they changed to Beverage Companies during prohibition. So all of these city contracts went through mcelroy back to pendergast, and he gets the money, and its a circle of alwaysand pendergast is getting his cut, and people affiliated with the machine would get their cut. Could hire what they call ward healers to go precinct by precinct and intimidate voters from the opposition or bring out their own voters. The election of 1934, for example, there were four people. Illed the way they were able to do this, through power and money, is they could get away with it because after four people were killed and 11 were injured, people demanded that the governor call out the National Guard and, you know, come in and reestablish order in kansas city. Well, who would do that . , whoovernor of missouri himself was a pendergast crony. The power actually went gotewide by 1932, when he guy park elected. Pendergast eventually elected truman for senator of missouri. He was elected in a statewide vote, but at this point, through pendergast, i believe the number was that he could produce about 70,000 fraudulent or ghost votes in any given election at this time. With that, just the sheer number of votes that he could produce out of kansas city that will be tallied, and they were official, if they were real or not. He had the power to do this, and he had plenty of real support. Pendergasts machine affiliates could win elections even without stuffing the ballot boxes because they gave people jobs. They built infrastructure throughout the city. They had roads. If you walk around the city today, you can see the courthouse still there. Municipal auditorium, 10,000. Eats still there by 1932, he is on top of the world sending delegates to the National Democratic convention. Had senators, governor of missouri, big portion of the state legislature, and pendergast himself had a gambling addiction, specifically at horse racing. At some point, he racked up several hundred thousand dollars in the 1930s, Great Depression era dollars. He needed to raise even more money than his corrupt machine could raise to pay off his gambling debt. Late 1930s he 1937, 19 38 he got involved in an insurance kickback scheme, and its not clear if he broke the law with the scheme itself. Im not a lawyer, so i cannot explain that, but where he really ran into trouble is that he did not report the income to for income tax on his tax returns. Was thee al capone, it irs that finally caught up with Tom Pendergast, and he was went to in 1939 and jail in leavenworth federal penitentiary. Pendergast was nothing by this point, by 1945, and pendergast , natural causes. Truman came to his funeral. Truman, who just became Vice President , came to the funeral of Tom Pendergast during wartime on a military plane. Big controversy. Roosevelt died, and truman was president of the United States, so truman could never completely distance himself from his background with the machine, and he owned it. He said that pendergast always kept his word, and he was not going to abandon his friend. So what we are trying to do is , andicate that history ive done a little bit of that in this interview, but we are building a website that will currently, we have about 9500 scans of original documents. We have photographs, letters people wrote to one another back then. Mentioned the court cases that unveiled voter fraud. It is an interactive website that will combine these original documents with new scholarship, 2015 to 18ed out in or other professors Museum Professionals or historians who have produced fulllength articles. They would go in a book. There are some new ideas in there. Or new topics that just have not been explored in any kind of depth before this. Website versions of those they are a little those will go on the website. Everything will be linked together, so when you are reading the essay, you can and see the documents that support the research. You can go read the court case in jail. Pendergast it is not as dry as a Typical Court case my sound when you think about everything that was going on at the time. Those are the elements of the website. It will look Something Like this when the graphics are finished. We have eight or nine different categories of topics that we are covering, so theres machine politics, organized crime and reform, economic boom, depression, and recovery. Kansas city jazz, prohibition, labor and industry, race relations, communities and neighborhoods, womens rights. The scope is focusing on pendergast and the machine, and then exploring all of the implications of machine rule in kansas city, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when they were at their peak. Look at jazz, we are mostly interested in jazz from the perspective of the machine. How did the machine enable a culture of nightclubs and people called it the wideopen town at the time. Kansas city was the original sin city before vegas, basically. Looking at that aspect. How everything ties together. It makes sense to do this digital platform. You can do a lot of things on a website that you cannot do it a book. We are developing word maps. Google. Ing showing the wards, you will be able to and see the first award, and that is where Tom Pendergast came from. That is where they got their start. You can see the other machine bosses, and you will be able to and go back to the documents. You will be able to go from documents to essays that to maps. A timeline. We might be able to create some kind of line map that shows connections, but then the machine to sort of visualize in an info graphic. It is really difficult to do any of that in a book in an interactive way that is an immersive experience, and this gives people the opportunity to really learn about the time period. Favorite places, run by kerry brown and carrys greatgrandparents started this business. We say it is the oldest continual Retail Operation west of the mississippi, maybe in the whole world, but browns it is kind of our community center. One of those great Little CornerGrocery Stores where people were extended credit in the neighborhood. People came here are generations, and now it is kind of that same thing where people come to gossip and compare health and kids and all those kinds of things, so it is much like a small town Crossroads Store in ireland. Entendred of a double in the sense that in kansas , so, we are along the river it creates this river bottom land where a lot of irish immigrants first lived because it was an expensive, and lived in shanties along the river, and eventually, they worked their of the bluff, so physically, they moved up and also came up the social ladder at the same time. Means both geographically and socially. In the 1850s, kansas city was still just a little money, Riverfront Community of storehouses and shanties and and half breeds and a lot of french traders, but the priest that was assigned to this area he actually traversed an area and likened it to a small european kingdom. Miles oner, like, 300 way and 150 miles the other way. He started a church on the hill and was part of the City Community in the 1850s that was trying to expand the city. When you have these 100 and 150foot lots along the river, in order to expand the town, you have to go through these limestone bluffs. A call and put advertisements in boston and new york and irish papers, and advertised for experienced laborers and skilled tradesmen to come to kansas city and pay your fair to come here and guarantee you a job and place to live, so those guys made, like, one dollar day and carved these streets sometimes 80 feet deep through these bluffs, and that was the genesis of the irish population in kansas city. Hundreds of immigrants responded, mostly from baltimore, boston, new york, along the coast. They were mostly male. Women followed. Kids followed, but they were brought here for a very simple reason to wield a pick and streets. D cut the they dug cisterns. They dug foundations for buildings. Latrines. They put up brick. They put up stone there were stonemasons. Are caverns underneath where we sit right now. There are underground caves carved out of the limestone now used for storage and office space. The irish would look around the city and you would see the. Oundations of homes course, we were a major stockyard operation. Early on, before the eastern europeans can end, it was the the cattlek cutting into steaks. The guy oiling the chain was irish. It was those kinds of jobs that brought the iris to kansas city. Really, they built the city. The American Protective Association was a very antiirish, antiimmigrant sort comingp because irish across the country, settling in on these railroad jobs in those kinds of things and before you knew it, they were taking over qaedas halls and al of places in the midwest, and there was pushed back then, but the irish population was burgeoning in kansas city. Almost 10 of the irish almost 10 of the population was irish born. There was violence. There were killings. Hat was in the 1890s , thats whenrew the pendergast dynasty was established. His family was from ireland. Ofcame from a big family brothers and sisters. Liked to gamble on horses and he won on a bet on a horse named climax and with the winnings, he opened a saloon and a boarding house. There were a lot of irish down , and he didiver very well. A reallynsidered tough, very positive sort of guy , very honest guy. He held a lot of the old immigrants money in his saloon. He was kind of their banker. They did not trust banks. In andd take young men at the encouragement of their parents, they would take the pledge to quit drinking. He was hugely popular. They encouraged him to run as an alderman, and he won, and he until he diedin in 1914. He built up a trust among the poor especially because he did it the oldfashioned way. Today, politicians promise platitudes and things they can never deliver. He delivered. When youred coal needed it. I talked to immigrants sons and grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants, and they say he paid for the funerals of their Little Brothers and Little Sisters when they died young of all the diseases and different maladies that would take young lives back in the early 1900s, and he would deliver coal to people who were freezing in the winter. Those kinds of things in return for votes. So he built this gigantic political dynasty. That lasted up until the 30s. Unlike his father, big jim, tom had more of a penchant for resources and bedding. Evasiono tax but there were accusations of corruption. You heard a lot of Violence Associated with the political structure. Patronage was rampant. They were giving people something they needed. You are giving them jobs, you are giving them funds for when the tragedy occurred in the family. On benevolence, but yes, it was also built on self interest. Erawhen you came into the of prohibition, the stakes got higher and higher in terms of the underworld, if you will. I think that is when the irish started losing their grip on the political system, it was during the depression when it was at its highest because they were providing jobs and whatnot. But they were losing it on the other end during prohibition that is really when the italian element began to take over that part of the vice in the city. I think the irish backed away from the violence of that era. Our cousin andut second cousin on the payroll of the county courthouse, but we were not shooting people. We were not burning cars. I dont mean to denigrate the but the mafia influence came into kansas city and became a major, major problem. If you look at how it segued into sicilian control of a lot of vices, i think the irish did not have quite the penchant for force. To get a perspective on this, its the evolution of kansas city. Most people fly over it and think it is gorsuch and buggies and, you know, it is horses and buggies and, you know, cattle. But when the irish first arrived here, there were 500 people. Half of them were halfbreed africanamericans, it was a melting pot in the sense that you were practically melting in the mud, because remember, there were no streets. It smelled. People were dirty. To build out of that core, the irish basically helped to build this, to put stone on the streets and build the buildings and put the bricks together. We did all of those things. The irish came into a little ball of mud with shacks and turned it into a city. And of course, i am pretty proud of that. Is, certainly the vast majority of white people were engaged in slavery and were slaveholders. Unfortunately, that has lessened the idea that slavery was a mild institution in a place like missouri. Some people have argued that somehow it was more domestic of an institution because people were living and working closely with one another sometimes. Sometimes lived in the households, in fact, so that might have made it better. There really has not been a lot of research into trying to figure out if that was the case. House in the john wornell in kansas city, missouri. John was an influential kansas citian. Banker. Farmer and a slaveholder. Lso a slavery was a substantial institution. All the way out to the border and stretching near it in the years before the civil war, the population went from 25 to 35 . Most people think when they think about slavery, they think about plantation slavery. There were perhaps 100 or 200 people enslaved on the property. They think about cotton plantation, sugar, but they do not think about farms. The vast majority of slaveholders in the United States throughout the antebellum era were engaged in smallscale slavery. Here in missouri, that was this case. Most people in fewer than 10 only justd some owned a few. The question is, did that make a difference . Operate in a it different way than it did in other parts of the south . That is what i set out to do. To try and look at whether , according different to where it was located. Immigration to missouri came mostly from the upper south. People came from virginia and kentucky, and tennessee to a lesser extent, and even north carolina. There was all of this wonderfully for thailand. Wonderfully fertile land there was diversification of agriculture, but also cash crops. They raised corn. They raised hogs. They also grew tobacco, which are all labor intensive. The white man forced africanamericans mostly to do that work. Ofves worked in all kinds capacities, but most typically on the farms. Enslaved women would engage in a tremendous amount of domestic work, even in the kitchen like this. This was not easy work. Here weree out cooking on open flames. They had to tend the entire day. , washing clothes, cleaning. Men typically worked as wintertime tohe prepare for spring planting, and tended crops throughout the year. They tended to livestock. A whole host of other kinds of work that they were engaged in, just to keep the farms going. I will admittedly say that did not want to be sold down the river. Literally. They did not want to be sold to the new orleans slave market where they would end up in the cotton fields of mississippi or, you know, the sugar plantations of louisiana, which were just brutal. They were brutal working conditions. As far as working conditions go here, they were better. Better than there. One other way that was different , and i think this is probably one of the most significant things that i found, is that smallscale slavery had a dramatic impact on slaves families in the community. If you think about it demographically, you know there are just a few people on any of these farms. Typically, just a few adults. The adults may be related to one another, whether brothers or sisters or parents of other children. Children. Per marriage, i dont mean legal marriages, because they did not allow them legally. But it was clear through the records that i read that people were married to one another in their own eyes and in their communitys eyes, and even in the slaveholders eyes. They were married. They engaged in what were called broad marriages. Oftentimeseant was, on one property while the mother and children were on the other. The man could only go to visit his family once a week. He would leave on saturday after work was done. Sunday wa