Hibernia

Harry Truman’s Irish Links

To judge by the rush to claim kinship with him by this year’s presidential contenders, Harry S Truman may well be on his way to history’s accolade as one of the most effective Presidents of all time.

Both Bush and Clinton kicked off the official Labor Day start to the campaign by claiming the Truman legacy.

More than any other President with the exception of John F. Kennedy, Truman would never have accomplished that legacy were it not for key Irish American connections along the way.

As David McCullough’s definitive new biography Truman, published by Simon and Schuster, outlines, Truman was a creation of three acts the first of which was the First World War where he commanded a Kansas City Irish American battalion. The second was the Jim Pendergast political machine which launched him in Missouri politics and into the U.S. Senate. And thirdly, his surprising vice presidential nomination on the ailing Roosevelt ticket in 1944, a nomination engineered almost wholly by Bronx Irish boss Edward J. Flynn.

Truman himself had Irish roots. Andy S. Truman, his grandfather, was of Scotch-Irish background, according to McCullough, as were his grandparents on his mother’s side, the Youngs. Both the Trumans and Youngs lived in Jackson County, Missouri, called after their idol, “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson, whose parents were Ulster immigrants.

Writing of the people of Jackson County, McCullough noted, “The great majority were of Scotch-Irish descent. They saw themselves as the true Americans. Their idol was Andrew Jackson, the first President from west of the Alleghenies who was of their own Scotch-Irish stock.” To the end of his long days Truman had a special reverence for Jackson.

On Thursday morning, July 11, 1918 during World War I, an apprehensive Captain Harry Truman took command of his first field force, Battery Company D of the 2nd Battalion. “By reputation most of them Irish Catholics from Kansas City,” McCullough notes. “They were a pretty wild bunch of Trish I’ll tell you that,” remembers a former officer quoted by McCullough.

Truman was later to write that commanding those men during some of the toughest battles of World War I was a definitive time in his life, giving him his first taste for leadership. The bonds between him and his company grew, melded by the white light of war. One of them, Edward McKim, would be an ever present sidekick, even in the White House, where Truman fixed him up with several honorific jobs. The President also always tried to make their annual St. Patrick’s Day reunion.

Years later, during one of his early campaigns the Ku Klux Klan, a much more powerful and accepted political force at the time, asked him to join.

Truman refused, partly because they wanted a pledge that he would not hire Irish Catholics.

After the war, Truman returned to his Missouri hometown of Independence, and his career appeared on a downward spiral after his clothing store venture failed in 1922.

Then fate took a hand in the person of Jimmy Pendergast.

Pendergast, the son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants, had come to Kansas City in 1876 and settled in the West Bottoms, the notorious Irish slum in the city. Thanks to a lucky win on a horse, he opened a successful saloon and hotel and quickly built a political base in the First Ward, and like many other Irish in big cities kept out of power, he created a political machine lo take on the entrenched interests. As one contemporary observer quoted by McCullough stated: “No descrving man or woman or child who appealed to Jim Pendergast went away empty handed, and that is saying a great deal as he was continually giving aid and help to the poor and unfortunate. There was never a winter in the last twenty years that he did not circulate among the poor of the West Bottoms, ascertaining their needs and after his visit there were no empty larders.. grocers, butchers, bakers and coal men had unlimited orders to see there was no suffering among the poor of the West Bottoms and to send the bill to Jim Pendergast.”

By his death in 1911 Pendergast had created a machine, which his brothers Tom and Mike took over, that would dominate Kansas City politics for another 50 years. At the time a rival machine run by Joseph Shannon was attempting to take over the city, and the nominees from the two factions became known as the Goats on the Pendergast side and the Rabbits on the Shannon side.

Mike met Truman through his son Jim, an Army buddy of Truman. Mike thought the young war hero would be an excellent candidate for county judge, not a judicial role actually but an administrative one.

Boss Pendergast’s only proviso was that Truman have no links to the Ku Klux Klan or any other anti-Irish Catholic groups. The two men became as close as father and son. “I loved him as I did my own daddy,” said Truman.

Truman, his business in ruins, accepted the offer of running for judge with alacrity, taking the first step on the road to the White House. Truman always claimed Pendergast never interfered with him then, or in his subsequent rise. “I did my job the way I thought it should be done … and he never interfered,” he said.

Truman’s run for the Senate was Jim Pendergast’s suggestion after three others had turned it down. He was also backed by Shannon, by then a member of Congress. His ties to the Pendergast machine was a major rallying point for his opponents during his first race. When he won, Tom Pendergast gave him some succinct advice.

“Work hard, keep your mouth shut and answer your mail.” At first in the U.S. Senate he was widely described as “The Senator from Pendergast.” Throughout his Senate career a portrait of TJ Pendergast was prominently displayed in his office. Truman made his name heading up the Senate committee which investigated waste and fraud in the military build-up during World War II. By the time of the 1944 convention it was clear that whoever was running mate for a clearly ailing Franklin Roosevelt could expect to inherit the top job.

The front runner was incumbent vice president Henry Wallace, who was too liberal, intellectual, and untested for the tastes of many of the party bosses who realized how high the stakes were.

The key plotter was Bronx boss Edward Flynn, like Pendergast a successful machine man who had more influence on Roosevelt than anyone since he had engineered his successful bid for a third term in 1940.

Flynn read mixed signals from Roosevelt about whether he wanted Wallace on the ticket. Roosevelt seemed to be leaning towards James Byrnes, who had been named to the Supreme Court but had resigned to become Roosevelt’s war mobilization director.

Byrnes, however was a lapsed Catholic who had become an Episcopalian, all unpardonable political error in Flynn’s eyes, as it would earn him the wrath of Catholics and also the suspicion of religious bigots who would question his conversion. Byrnes, a Southerner, had also opposed a federal anti-lynching law which meant that blacks would strongly oppose him.

Flynn wanted Truman on the ticket, he saw him as ideal. “His labor votes were good, he seems to represent to some degree the conservatives in the party, he came from a border state and he never made any ‘racial’ re-marks. He just dropped into the slot,” Flynn wrote later.

As McCullough relates it, Byrnes arrived at the Chicago convention with the nomination seemingly in hand, so much so that Truman had agreed to propose his nomination. So certain was Robert Haneghan, son of a St. Louis police officer, and part of the “Irish mafia” coalescing around Truman that Byrnes would win that he told Flynn when he arrived at the convention that Truman’s chance was gone. Flynn, however would have none of it.

In a smoke-filled room party bosses gathered and Flynn made his pitch. Byrnes would cost 200,000 black votes in New York, Flynn stated. Later he remembered, “I browbeat the committee, I talked, I argued, I swore.” Byrnes was unacceptable to organized labor; Roosevelt could lose the election. Eventually he won over the key group. A call was placed to Roosevelt who agreed, finally, that Truman was his man.

But Truman was still not home and dry: a major floor demonstration for Wallace threatened to stampede the convention. On the first ballot he was ahead. Then on the second ballot Flynn made his move throwing his 74 votes from the New York delegation to Truman. Shortly after, Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts lined up his state’s 34 votes to put Truman over the top.

On the campaign trail a smear was put around that Truman had Jewish blood and another that he was in the Ku Klux Klan.

It took the oratory of the inimitable Mayor of Boston, James Michael Curley, to bat those rumors down, declaring in a speech he delivered while on the same platform with Truman: “We have a very unusual candidate for Vice President. He goes to California, the word comes back he’s a Jew. He arrives in the Midwest the word comes back he’s a member of the Klan. Mr. Vice President, I now invite you to join my lodge, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. We’d be glad to have you as one of our members.” 

Matt Connelly, Truman’s press secretary, remembers turning to Truman and saying, “That takes care of the Klan.” Eighty-two days after becoming vice president under Roosevelt, Harry Truman, product of two Irish political machines, became President when the incumbent died. The atom bomb, the recognition of Israel, the Korean conflict, the famous election victory over Dewey, “Give ’em Hell Harry” and “The Buck Stops Here,” and much more, all lay in front of him.

Desecration of Famine Site?

Thousands of people fleeing the Famine in Ireland ended up in mass graves on a tiny island in the St. Lawrence River, 30 miles from Quebec City. Now plans to develop Grosse Ile, which served as a quarantine station for those trying to enter Canada throughout the worst years of the Famine, have the Irish worried.

According to the development concept for the proposed national park, “It is felt that there should not be too much emphasis on the tragic aspects of the history of Grosse Ile. On the contrary, the painful events of 1832 and 1847, which have often been overemphasized in the past, need to be put back into perspective, without robbing them of their importance.” While one doesn’t immediately foresee hamburger stands catering to tourists on the several mass graves on the island containing the mortal remains of some 15,000 Irish victims of fever, typhus and starvation, there is reason enough to be worried that this “hallowed ground,” may not be treated with the respect it deserves.

The Action Grosse Ile committee feel that an effort to conceal the real history of Grosse Ile is underway. The development concept for the national park is somewhat of an understatement on the events leading to the mass Irish exodus notes only that: “Vast numbers of Irish had left their country since the 1820s to escape overpopulation, repeated food shortages and the reallocation of land by landlords and, from i845, the Great Potato Famine.” The Action Committee see this as a serious misrepresentation of the historical record and are further worried about the fate of the 45-foot grey granite Celtic cross, erected on the highest point on Grosse Ile, on August 15, 1909. The inscription, in Irish, declares: “Children of the Gael died in their thousands on this island having fled from the laws of foreign tyrants and an artificial famine in the years 1847-48.

God’s blessing on them. Let this monument be a token to their name and honor from the Gaels of America. God Save Ireland.” The Cross was paid for by public subscription of $5,000 collected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the United States.

Another monument erected at one of the gravesites by a Doctor Douglas who administered to the sick and dying, bears this inscription: “In this secluded spot lie the mortal remains of 5424 persons who fleeing from Pestilence and Famine in Ireland in the year 1847 found in America but a Grave.” The mass grave marked by Dr. Douglas was the formal cemetery site, but it was only one of many burial grounds on the island.

Apparently this sort of reminder of the catastrophe of the Irish Famine may be too much for Environment Canada who feel that the tragedy has been “overemphasized,” but if you believe that the Canadian government must correct the historical facts in the Development Concept and ensure that the mass graves on Grosse Ile are properly acknowledged and fully incorporated and perpetuated in the proposed National Historic Site, get involved.

Dublin’s Hotel Conrad: Another Irish American Success

The Hotel Conrad in Dublin, a subsidiary of Hilton Hotels Corporation USA opened its doors in October 1989 opposite the National Concert Hall and St. Stephen’s Green, in the heart of Dublin’s commercial, retail and cultural district. It quickly went on to establish itself as Ireland’s first truly international business hotel, receiving the international award for “Best New Hotel” from Business Traveller Magazine.

This past June, Patrick Keough, president and CEO, and Charles Boyle, executive director of ICCUSA (the Ireland Chamber of Commerce in the United States, Inc.) hosted the 1992 Business Partnership Conference and chose the Hotel Conrad as their Dublin conference center. Over 30 U.S. companies attended and over 70 appointments and site visits were arranged. The goal was to bring together representatives of American and Irish companies to explore business opportunities.

As to ICCUSA’s selection of the Hotel Conrad for their host hotel in Dublin, Charles Boyle commented, ” The service and attention to detail shown by the Conrad’s staff equaled or surpassed that of any quality business hotel in the U.S.”

 

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the October 1992 issue of Irish America. ♦