Hannegan's Wake?

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 own man elected Governor, and took a licking: Missouri elected its first Republican Governor in twelve years. Dickmann, Side-Kick Hannegan and other party leaders got together in a smoky hotel room and decided that the election was illegal; the machine-tooled Legislature would investigate it, throw out the Republican, put in a Democrat.

A steal of the Governor's chair was too much for Missouri's patient voters.

At last spring's St. Louis election, a 65,000-vote Democratic majority turned into a 35,000-vote deficit. Out went Barney Dickmann. Out went hundreds of the machine's jobholders. St. Louis hoped it was rid of the Dickmann-Hannegan crew.

Not so. Last week Missouri discovered that its Senators Bennett Champ Clark and Harry S. Truman had endorsed Hannegan for a fat sinecure--$7,000 a year as Collector of Internal Revenue.

This time the voters were really fit to be tied. They remembered that Champ Clark had sat in on the hotel conference where the Governorship grab was planned, that Truman got into the Senate through a Pendergast push.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch urged its wrathy readers to write to President Roosevelt, who must make the formal appointment of Hannegan. Senator Clark was reminded that he comes up for re-election two years hence; was asked, man to man, if "he thinks it will help him hold his seat to have this discredited politician [Hannegan] lifted out of the discard and on to the Federal payroll."

The Treasury Department had already given Hannegan a preliminary O.K. Since Missouri's two Senators are both for it, the silent Senate would likely show its customary, unquestioning "Senatorial courtesy." Hannegan said, with statesmanlike simplicity: "I never quit under fire."

But whether Hannegan got a job or a wake, the machine was stripping its own gears. Editorialized the Post-Dispatch: "Senators Clark and Truman are delivering the best Republican stump speeches that ever rang out between the Mississippi and the Kansas line. . . ."

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