“I've certainly striven to conduct myself as my mother would wish me
to,” said William Marshall Boyle to a Senate investigating committee.
Many citizens mistakenly assumed that this statement by the chairman of
the Democratic National Committee was a piece of pious patter. But Bill
Boyle was in sober earnest. His mother is still honored in Kansas City
as one of Boss Tom Pendergast's best precinct workers of the 1920s.
Friends of the family, discussing Bill Boyle, say somewhat
condescendingly that he is a nice, pleasant fellow; Clara, his mother,
now retired, was “the politician of the family.” The political climate at certain high altitudes of the Truman
Administration is the climate of Clara Boyle's generation of machine
politicians. The big-city machines were a lot huskier then than they
are today. They recruited thousands of people like Clara Boyle, who
considered themselves and were considered by their neighbors as decent,
God-fearing men & women. The machine politicians of the
precincts and the city-hall corridors had ethical standards which were,
in all the everyday affairs of life, as high as those of their
communities. In politics, however, they had a special code: it was not
wrong to take personal advantage of a political position. It was
terribly wrong to fail in helping a political friend —even if the help
might involve some damage to the public interest. This code is in force again in Washington. It was absent—or nearly
absent—for a long time. After the Harding scandals, the Coolidge and
Hoover administrations were as clean as Washington had been for
generations. The New Dealers were dedicated men: some were dedicated to
ideas, some to their magnetic leader and some to the personal
acquisition of power. They were not boodlers, grafters or dealers in
personal “influence” in the old machine sense. To most of them, a job
applicant recommended by a political boss had two strikes on him. They
had a contemptuous name for politicians: pols. From 1933 until late in
the war, the New Dealers kept the pols down. About 1944 the pols began
to seep back. Harry Truman opened the floodgates. Green Pastures. The New Deal vastly increased the opportunity to make
private hay with public funds and the pols who came after 1944 were not
dedicated men. A friend was a friend, a favor was a friendly act, and a
gift was a friendly act in return, and why in the hell shouldn't a man
get a little something for all his hard work and loyalty to the party? The Democratic burro was hungry for party funds, and some of the men who
carried the party load of getting out the vote were hungry for personal
rewards. In expanded federal agencies there were green pastures for
both. The friendship boys from city hall, who made up the Democratic
burrocracy, thrived on the new bureaucracy. The Chicago Daily News recalled last week that Tom Pendergast used to
hand out signed cards that said simply: “This man is my friend.” The
card, said the News, “promised nothing, but it was immunity from
everything.”
