Thomas Pendergast

Thomas Joseph Pendergast (July 22, 1873 – January 26, 1945) was an American political boss who controlled Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri from 1925 to 1939. Though only briefly holding elected office as an alderman himself, "T.J." Pendergast, in his capacity as Chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Party, was able to use his large network of family and friends to help elect politicians (through voter fraud in some cases) and hand out government contracts and patronage jobs. He became wealthy in the process, although his addiction to gambling, especially horse racing, later led to a large accumulation of personal debts. In 1939, he was convicted of income tax evasion and served 15 months in a Federal prison. The Pendergast organization helped launch the political career of Harry S. Truman, a fact that caused Truman's enemies to dub him "The Senator from Pendergast."

His biographers have summed up Pendergast’s uniqueness:

Thomas Joseph Pendergast, also known to close friends as "TJ", was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. He was raised Catholic and had nine brothers and sisters. The family's name is misspelled as Pendergest in the 1880 census and is listed accordingly.

It has been claimed that Pendergast attended St. Mary's College, a boarding school for boys as young as nine and as old as eighteen, conducted by the Jesuits in St. Mary's, Kansas, but records of the school, kept in the Jesuit archives in St. Louis, disprove this claim. (St. Mary's College was not connected in any way to the girls school of the same name in Leavenworth, Kansas, conducted by the Sisters of Charity.) It is sometimes claimed that he earned a football scholarship to St. Mary's College, but that also is untrue. There were no athletic scholarships awarded at that time, and there were no intramural games.

In the 1890s young Tom Pendergast worked in his older brother James Pendergast's West Bottoms tavern. The West Bottoms were at that time an immigrant section of town located at the 'bottom' of the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, above which spread the more prosperous sections of Kansas City. James Pendergast, an alderman in Kansas City's city council, tutored him in the diversities of the city's political ways and systems and in the strategic advantages of controlling blocs of voters. Jim retired in 1910 and died the next year, naming Tom his successor. Following his brother's death, Pendergast served in the city council until stepping down in 1916 to focus on consolidating the factions of the Jackson County Democratic Party. After a new city charter passed in 1925, placed the city under the auspices of a city manager picked by a smaller council, Pendergast easily gained control of the government.

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