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from a fine family. He’ll make a fine judge.’ 3
    Even so, Truman won with difficulty. The Democrats were split into two factions, mysteriously named Goats and Rabbits. Truman was an hereditary Goat. So were the Pendergasts, although the division pre-dated their sway. But the Rabbits were quite strong and made a determined attempt to get a local banker named Montgomery nominated. The Ku Klux Klan presented an additional complication. They began to erupt into Missouri at this stage, and torches were burnt near Grandview. Truman was at first inclined to join them, and offered a $10 subscription (the extent of their intolerance had not fully surfaced) but his Battery D loyalty came to his rescue. He was asked to give an assurance that, if elected, he would never give a job to a Catholic. That would have excluded 90% of his beloved associates. He firmly refused. The $10 were returned. That was the end of his flirtation with the Klan, but not of his embroilment with it.
    The primary was on August 1st. Truman had a bare majority of 288, in a vote of over 11,000. The run-off was a formality. That autumn, at the age of thirty-eight, he was Eastern Judge for a two year spell, with a modest salary of $6,000, debts of well over that amount, considerable opportunities for graft, and his foot upon a rung of the political ladder.
    Whatever else is in dispute about Truman’s career, his repute, and relations with the Pendergasts, it is clear that he was totally untouched by personal monetary corruption. However great the temptation, with his debts and lack of financial prospects, however loose the surrounding practice, he was aggressively clean so far as anything approaching a bribe or even the free use of public expenses were concerned. He lived and died the poorest president of the past fifty years, probably of this century. (His closest rivals are Wilson and Coolidge.)
    In this respect his administration of his new little office was therefore spotless. So far as jobs were concerned it was less immaculate, and this was to continue to be his pattern. But this fault stemmed from a mixture of instinctive partisanship and excessive loyalty to old friends rather than from paybacks for financial benefits. As county judge it took the simple form of appointing only Goats and never Rabbits.
    When he came up for re-election two years later this made his basis of support too narrow. The Rabbits bolted the ticket. TheKlan, then near to its peak, 7 was viciously against him. This accumulation of opposition counted for more than a good record of administration, particularly in relation to the re-funding of the county debt and the beginning of an efficient road building programme. An obscure Republican harness maker, who only got on the ballot paper by accident, was elected fairly easily. It was the only election which Truman ever lost. It left him once more without a job, and with only the most minor political achievement behind him.
    He was out of office for two years. It was the height of the boom of the 1920s, and, although he certainly did not become rich, he had no difficulty in supporting his small family (Margaret Truman, his only child, had been born in 1924) in their habitual modest small-town prosperity. He became a minor Kansas City man of affairs. He established himself in an office in the Board of Trade building there. Successfully, and for a commission, he sold membership in the Kansas City Automobile Club. He became state president of the National Old Trails Association, but this, which remained an abiding interest, was a voluntary activity. And he had a business partnership with a gentleman crookster (as he subsequently turned out to be) from Independence, the suspiciously grandly named Spencer Salisbury. Salisbury had been a fellow captain from the 129th Artillery. They did housing finance business together, took over and then quickly withdrew from a tottering local bank. Jonathan Daniels, in his otherwise friendly life of