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"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. (It would never have occurred to Clara Boyle that her friend Tom Pendergast was a crook; they both attended the Visitation Roman Catholic Church.) 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."