Missouri's brassy old Democratic machine spilled gear teeth and broken rods all over the Ozarks last week. Missouri voters thought the old machine had finally wrecked itself, would never roll again.
The machine was a beauty once. That was in the '30s, when Tom Pendergast held the controls in Kansas City; while in St. Louis Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann and his slick sidekick, Lawyer Robert E. Hannegan, had the throttle down all the way.
But Tom Pendergast went off to jail in 1939 for income-tax evasion. In 1940 Barney Dickmann tried to get his...
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