Death of "The Chief"

Historical Date

On May 8, 1974, H. Roe Bartle, a former two-term Kansas City mayor and long-time Boy Scouts of America executive, died in Kansas City. Popularly referred to as "The Chief" (and the namesake of the Kansas City football team), Bartle was eulogized as one of the region's most impactful youth leaders and a dynamic public figure in Kansas City history.

According to his headstone, ship passenger lists, and US Census records prior to 1940, Bartle was born on June 25, 1901, in Richmond, Virginia, or Solon, Iowa. His WWII Draft Registration Card and the US Social Security Death Index, however, show that he was born on June 25, 1896. This is but one of many discrepancies in his and others' accounts of his early biography. His full name was Harold Roe Bennett Sturdevant Bartle, but he almost always used the shortened version. In high school, he made full use of his large physical size by playing football. His father, a Presbyterian minister, encouraged him to enter the ministry, but Bartle never felt the calling and instead took an interest in a law career. Several biographies, dating back at least to the Saturday Evening Post in 1956, state that he served in the military as a "combat veteran" during World War I, possibly with the Virginia National Guard, under a reserve commission as a major in the Army. But an Army enlistment record could not be found and, if his 1901 birth date is to be believed, he would have been too young. In the Saturday Evening Post article and in at least one speech recorded in 1948, he claimed to have served with his father in the Mexican border campaign, before being recalled to fight in World War I. However, the US Census showed him attending Fork Union Military Academy, a military preparatory high school, in 1920.

H. Roe Bartle
H. Roe Bartle, 1938

Many biographies state that he attended law school at the University of Chattanooga, graduating in 1920, and also practiced corporate law in Kentucky for four years in the early '20s. By this timeline and account, he went to World War I during his "junior year" of college, not high school. Alternately, he dropped out of Chattanooga due to pneumonia, before completing a degree. He does not appear in the Chattanooga yearbooks from this time, and once again the various accounts clash with one another. Other sources show him earning a J.D. in 1921, from the Hamilton College of Law in Chicago, a correspondence school.

We do know that he gained an interest in the Boy Scouts of America, which was then just over a decade old, and he made a connection with Dr. James E. West, national chief scout executive, who arranged for Bartle to serve as a scout executive in Wyoming. In preparation for moving to Wyoming, Bartle may have come to Kansas City sometime in 1921 for a brief training session to prepare for a one-year stint with the Scouts. Afterwards, he lived in Wyoming for two years, where he oversaw the growth of the state's scouts from 4 to 50 troops, made up of 1,400 youths. While in Wyoming, he said that he spent time on the Wind River Indian Reservation. He also claimed he was "inducted" into the Northern Arapaho Tribe as a blood brother--although tribes do not induct members in this manner. The tribe's Chief Lone Bear is said to have been Bartle's sponsor and have given him the name "Lone Bear" as well--however, an obituary shows that Chief Lone Bear died in November 1920, before Bartle ever arrived in Wyoming. Alternate accounts say that it was the son of Chief Lone Bear, who was still alive, who bestowed the honorary name. In any case, Bartle's work with the Scouts and adoption of the Chief nickname have since been criticized as cultural appropriation.

For the mid-1920s onward, facts over Bartle's biography become more certain as he became a more public figure. Still working with the Boy Scouts, Bartle gained considerable renown for his leadership. He built an honor society, named Tribe of Mic-O-Say, in 1925, basing it on Native American imagery in an act that is also criticized as cultural appropriation. In the context of that time, though, his efforts attracted thousands of young boys to scouting. In 1928, Bartle went on to Kansas City and became the chief area executive of the Boy Scouts. By then, the Kansas City region had a total of 2,300 Boy Scouts and scout leaders, and under Bartle's guidance, it grew to more than 30,000 members by the early 1950s.

By this time, Bartle was widely known as "The Chief." At six feet, three inches tall, and more than 300 pounds, the former football player cast a noticeable physical presence in any room. His deep, baritone voice reflected his skill as an accomplished orator, which had been honed by debate, law practice, and years of public speaking. By the 1950s, he was known to give up to 700 public speeches each year, mostly for the Boy Scouts, other youth groups, and charitable organizations. Although he did not always charge high fees, he sometimes earned as much as $500 per speech; an extraordinary amount at the time considering that the average household income was only about $3,000 in 1950. Consequently, Bartle's speeches gradually became his main source of income.

During World War II, Bartle worked as the executive director of American War Dads, and each year he turned down the $15,000 salary that was offered to him. As a longtime board member and then president of the Missouri Valley College in Marshall, Missouri, he also worked without a salary. In 1948, he founded the American Humanics Foundation, which first partnered with the Missouri Valley College to educate young people in the management principles necessary to operate nonprofit organizations. Humanics still carries out its original mission today, but on a national scale. Bartle also served on more than 50 other boards for hospitals, youth organizations, and other foundations. Somehow he also found the time to own two working ranches (one in Oklahoma, the other in Osceola, Missouri) and a farm in Cass County, Missouri.

It was almost an afterthought, then, that Bartle entered politics instead of retirement in the 1950s. At the urging of President Harry Truman, he became the regional stabilization director for the federal government in 1951. He campaigned for mayor in Kansas City in 1955 and won handily despite running as an independent instead of on the non-partisan Citizens Association or Democratic tickets. As mayor, he perhaps devoted more energy to speech-making and ceremonies than to his other duties, but he nonetheless successfully promoted economic expansion and a reworked tax code. One of his most notable actions was attracting the Dallas Texans professional football team to Kansas City. In honor of Mayor Bartle, Texans owner Lamar Hunt renamed the team the Chiefs in 1963.

H. Roe Bartle
H. Roe Bartle

Other notable events during Bartle's tenure as mayor included the arrival of the Kansas City Athletics major league baseball team, the Municipal Auditorium Plaza Garage, the Sixth Street Interchange, and additional annexations of land to Kansas City (especially much of the Northland, which is still growing today). He also oversaw the creation of the Kansas City Commission for International Relations and Trade, which sought to improve Kansas City's trade relations in the western hemisphere. When running for reelection in 1957, Bartle received support from the local Democratic party, which caused some concern that he might use his popularity to revive the boss politics of the defunct Pendergast machine. In this vein, some critics accused Bartle of making a handful of patronage-based appointments, but these isolated incidents never amounted to anything resembling a real political machine.

After completing two terms as mayor in 1963, H. Roe Bartle continued his volunteer work and speech-giving for another decade. He died on May 8, 1974, and was buried in the Forest Hill Cemetery. Today relatively few people remember that the Chiefs were named after H. Roe Bartle, but he his also memorialized with the Bartle Hall convention center (completed in 1976) and at the H. Roe Bartle Scout Reservation in Osceola, Missouri. 

This article was revised on July 20, 2020, and September 28, 2021. Special thanks to Dr. Robert "Bob" Prue, associate professor of social work at UMKC and member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, for research into Bartle's early biography.  

View images relating to H. Roe Bartle that are a part of the Missouri Valley Special Collections »

Check out the following books and articles about H. Roe Bartle, held by the Kansas City Public Library:

Continue researching H. Roe Bartle using archival materials from the Missouri Valley Special Collections:

  • Vertical File: Bartle, H. Roe.
  • Charles S. Stevenson Papers Finding Aid; collection contains information on the first 48 Kansas City mayors, spanning 1853-1971.
  • "The Indomitable Roe Bartle and What He's Really Like," by Tom Leathers, in the Kansas City Town Squire, December 1968.
  • "The Colossal Mayor of Kansas City," by Hartzell Spence, in the Saturday Evening Post, January 28, 1956.
  • Vertical File: Bartle Exposition Hall.
  • South Central Business Association Records Finding Aid; contains five pictures of Mayor H. Roe Bartle.
  • Richard Corliss Photograph Collection Finding Aid; contains a photograph of Mayor Bartle with firefighters at a midtown fire scene, 1958.
  • Robert Askren Photograph Collection Finding Aid; contains a picture of Mayor Bartle cutting ribbon.

References:

Lawrence O. Christensen, William E. Foley, Gary R. Kremer, and Kenneth H. Winn, The Dictionary of Missouri Biography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 31-32.

Susan Jezak Ford, Biography of H. Roe Bartle (1901-1974), Mayor of Kansas City and Boy Scout Executive, The Missouri Valley Special Collections, The Kansas City Public Library.

Richard Fowler, Leaders in Our Town (Kansas City, MO: Burd & Fletcher, 1952), 21-24.

George Fuller Green, A Condensed History of the Kansas City Area: Its Mayors and Some V. I. P.s (Kansas City, MO: Lowell Press, 1968), 133-134.

Vincent Schilling, "The Tribe of Mic-O-Say Dance Teams Regularly Perform’ in ‘Native-Style Regalia’", Indian Country Today, September 17, 2019.

Dave Caldwell, "The True Tale Of The Original Kansas City Chief", Forbes, February 01, 2020.

"History of Mic-O-Say", Boy Scouts of America, Heart of America website, accessed July 20, 2020.

U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014, Ancestry.com. Accessed September 28, 2021.

"Draft Registration Card: Harold Roe Bartle."

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/draft-and-wwii - Accessed September 28, 2021.

United States Federal Census, 1930.