Kansas City must accept the fact that it is no longer a convention competitor with the larger cities of the country.”1
Yet if the convention committee and the larger Chamber of Commerce earnestly desired a bigger convention hall, financing required voter approval of a city bond issue by a two-thirds majority. An initial modest bond proposal for $800,000 to acquire land for a new “Municipal Auditorium” had failed to receive the needed majority in November 1925. A second attempt, to secure $3.5 million to construct a new assembly hall in 1928, also went down to defeat.
The succession of bond issue defeats during the 1920s, including eight separate proposals in 1928, led the chamber leadership to propose a very different political strategy that would encompass not only the proposed Municipal Auditorium but a host of other needed public investments. In his November 1929 address to the Chamber of Commerce annual meeting, chamber head Conrad Mann argued, “We are going after this [bond issue] thing piecemeal…. It is just a makeshift program and the very nature of this program creates hostility among our citizens.” Mann called on his colleagues to back a “non-partisan ‘Kansas City Spirit’ movement that will put this thing over.”2
Mann’s view of a comprehensive bond program was remarkable in fiscal terms. The failed 1928 bond program had involved some $18.5 million. Now Mann said the business leadership should “center your efforts upon a major program and submit to the citizens of Kansas City a bond issue of not less than 75 million dollars.” He concluded,
We must give visible evidence of our confidence in Kansas City to people, regardless of where they may reside, that as Kansas Citians, we have faith in our own city; that we are willing to carry the burden in order to make our city a place of happy homes as well as an abiding place for industry and business in general. There is no way in which we can do these things in a more substantial, a more convincing way than by voting a bond issue and by so doing make funds available to meet the expenditures for improvements which are so much needed for our town.
In early 1930, city manager H. F. McElroy proposed that the chamber’s Conrad Mann chair a Committee of 100, charged with crafting a ten-year “plan of improvements” that would be the basis of a comprehensive package of bond proposals. While Mann and city officials sought a broad base of citizen involvement, they were not about to leave a proposal as critical to the city’s economic future as the proposed auditorium to chance. The subcommittee charged with reviewing the plans for the auditorium was headed by the president of the firm operating the Muehlebach, the city’s leading hotel; the secretary was the manager of the convention bureau.3
Citing an annual loss of millions of dollars of “convention business … directly attributed to the lack of an adequate public auditorium,” the subcommittee recommended a $5 million bond proposal for the new convention facility. Business interests united behind a site adjacent to the existing convention hall, preserving the advantage for nearby hotels such as the Muehlebach. And despite the fact that most such recommendations were seriously trimmed to fit city financial resources, the final recommendation of the overall committee was for a $4.5 million auditorium bond—the second largest of 16 proposed city bond issues.
Mann’s political calculus proved quite correct. With solid business backing and support of the Pendergast political machine, all 16 bond issues on the March 1931 ballot were approved, with the Municipal Auditorium winning a 79.2 percent “yes” vote. The Auditorium was able to take advantage of a $1.29 million federal public works grant, and some $750,000 from the sale of the existing convention hall, and opened in October 1935.4
Kansas City’s successful 1931 bond program neatly illustrated both the potential and the constraints of voter-approved general obligation bonds for major public building projects. With Missouri’s requirement for a two-thirds majority for each bond proposal, minorities of the electorate had a substantial impact on individual projects. A broad package, calculated to win the support of a broad popular coalition, could deliver what a single scheme for a new auditorium or civic center could not. That pattern of broad electoral coalition-building through a collection of public investment projects—projects that could be distributed across the community—was also exemplified by Missouri’s other major urban center, St. Louis.
St. Louis in the 1920s faced a political and fiscal situation parallel to Kansas City’s. While the business leadership had embraced a series of major development schemes for a new complex of public buildings and parkways, the required bond issues had often failed to pass. The city’s first attempt at a grand, comprehensive package came in 1920 with a bond program including 18 individual items, with a total cost of $24 million. For the downtown interests, the 1920 package included $1.25 million for the central parkways and $900,000 for a new Municipal Auditorium.
The May 1920 effort saw six of the proposed 18 bond projects receive the required majority. The proposed auditorium garnered a 62 percent “yes” vote, and thus failed to pass. Its failure was part of a larger pattern described by historian James Primm: “For decades, small and middle-class property owners, especially in the heavily German wards, not trusting the big-business leadership and feeling that increased taxes would fall most heavily on themselves, had maintained a conservative stance that amounted to civic neglect.”5 But the failure of the auditorium and other proposals did not deter the commitment by some to a broad program of public investment. Less than two weeks after the vote, the city’s chief planner, Harland Bartholomew, argued, “That plan, though it has not yet been approved by the necessary majority of voters, is practicable and necessary, and it is only a matter of time when people will recognize its necessity and it will be adopted.”6
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch joined the call for a new bond effort, noting in December 1921 that the city needed $25 million to put local sewers in safe condition. The Chamber of Commerce also added its weight behind a broad program of improvements, including the failed public auditorium plan. As the notion of a broad package of public investments gained support, it also began to grow in size and scope. In early 1922 a General Council on Civic Needs, comprising more than 200 members, met to assess the full scope of required public spending. Their recommendation to the city government came to more than $75 million. The city’s official fiscal watchdog, the Board of Estimate, reviewed and altered the plans, adding a $4 million proposal for a new courthouse. The final package came to $78.1 million. At each step in the development of the capital program, new groups and interests successfully pressed to include their own “needs” and spending priorities. And in order to win African American votes, Mayor Henry Kiel and Council President Louis Aloe agreed to finance a new city-owned hospital serving the black community.
The grand product was a February 1923 bond program including 21 separate issues, with a total cost of about $88 million. The broad, comprehensive program proved a political success, with 20 of the proposals winning the required two-thirds majority, including the new auditorium with a $5 million price tag. St. Louis’s new Kiel Auditorium opened in 1934, combining an auditorium seating 3,600 and a massive exhibition hall, enabling the city to host major national events.7
For St. Louis, Kansas City, and a host of other cities in the first half of the twentieth century, the route to building a new convention hall was politically and fiscally difficult. The need to win majority or super-majority voter approval in most states limited the scale of public investment and often resulted in outright defeat. The electorate often proved less convinced than the city’s business and political leaders of the virtues in hosting conventions. The common political response was an effort to create a broad, indeed all-embracing, political coalition through a comprehensive package of public improvements. Kansas City and St. Louis succeeded by tying the public buildings and parkways sought by downtown interests to neighborhood-level improvements and basic facilities such as sewers and local parks, carefully distributed across the city and to specific voter groups.
The political pressures to marry proposed new convention halls and auditoriums to a host of other public improvements, however, did not necessarily
