Sprawled across the sidewalk in front of a Kansas City polling place lay the body of William Findley, Negro election worker, blood on his face, a bullet in his brain, spats on his feet.
Slumped in a heap lay Lee Flacy, deputy sheriff, pumped full of buckshot. To his bride of a fortnight went news of her widowhood by radio: "A shooting at 5824 Swope Parkway—Lee Flacy killed—."
A mortal head wound crumpled Larry Cappo, sleek little gangster, onetime prizefighter, night-club headwaiter, in the back of a wrecked sedan.
Few doors away Pascal Oldham, 78, hardware merchant, was locking up his store when he turned to see a car flash by, to hear guns crackle. A stray bullet drilled clean through his head. Hours later he died in a hospital.
Slugged and beaten with blackjacks, brass knuckles, gun-butts and baseball bats were a housewife, a Kansas City Star newshawk, a candidate for the City Council, a chauffeur, a policeman, and five other persons.
Such was last week's score in Kansas City's municipal election. When blackjacks were pocketed and votes were counted, Kansas Citizens knew the worst: The Fusion attempt to break the rule of Boss Thomas Joseph ("Big Tom") Pendergast's Democratic machine had failed. Re-elected by a 59,566 plurality was Boss-backed Mayor Bryce Byram Smith, a mild-mannered baking company official in his spare time. Defeated was Dr. Albert Ross Hill, 64, anti-Boss Democrat, onetime (1908-20) president of the University of Missouri, holder of a dozen college degrees and author of The Epistemological Function of the "Thing in Itself" in Kant's Philosophy.
Thus ended Kansas City's hope of a municipal New Deal, as represented by the Citizens-Fusion ticket put forth by the National Youth Movement. Founded a year ago by a small group of young, public-spirited citizens, the National Youth Movement aimed to depose the Pendergast machine as Tammany had been deposed in New York and the Vare machine in Philadelphia.
For all its defeat the Citizens-Fusion party could look with some pride on the past, some hope to the future. It had won two of the nine seats in the City Council. With no Seabury as Grand Inquisitor, with no LaGuardia to dramatize the issue, it had managed to present to the electorate these facts and allegations: Twenty-five members of the police department have criminal records, and the acting chief had served a term in the penitentiary; burglary insurance rates are the highest of any city in the country; Conrad Mann, president of the Chamber of Commerce and good friend of Herbert Hoover, was saved from serving five months in a Federal House of Detention on a lottery conviction by a pardon from President Roosevelt (TIME, Nov. 27).