For Bess, life was ordered, private, sociable within bounds. She belonged to a bridge club and served as secretary of the Needlework Guild, a group of women who collected clothing for the needy—such activities as appeared among the society items dutifully reported by young Sue Gentry in the Independence Examiner. And for Bess that was quite enough. Her family was her life. She had no wish for more, no desire whatever for public attention or acclaim.
Margaret would remember her own life being nearly perfect. “I was an only child and I had lots of aunts and uncles with no children. And everything went to Margaret. It was lovely.” The only disciplinarian in the household was her mother, whose eyes could turn steely and who on occasion spanked her, as her father never did. Her mother, Margaret recalled, was far more likely than her father to be hard on people who deserved it. “I could twist him around my little finger.”
At dinner, Grandmother Wallace sat at the head of the table, Father at the other end. Margaret sat with her mother on one side, with Uncle Fred opposite. Dinner was served at 6:30. There was a white linen tablecloth, linen napkins, and good silver. Father did the carving, and “beautifully,” according to Vietta Garr. The atmosphere was calm and proper, always. Grandmother Wallace did her hair a little differently for dinner and put on a fresh dress. “My manners were expected to be perfect,” Margaret remembered. If her father and uncle discussed politics, her mother occasionally joined in, but never her grandmother, who did not care for politicians, or politics. “Her presence was very much felt. Even though she didn’t talk a great deal.”
The food, ordered each morning by Madge Wallace by telephone, was straightforward and ample—baked Virginia ham, standing rib roast, warm bread and old-fashioned biscuits, baked sweet potatoes, fresh vegetables in season, cakes, pies, peach cobbler. Harry particularly liked corn bread and Missouri sorghum. His favorite dessert was angel food cake, according to Vietta Garr, who, in all, would spend thirty-six years with the Truman family. “Yes, I spoiled him,” she would say, “but he was always such a nice man.”
On Sundays, Harry, Bess, and Margaret would drive to Grandview for a big, midday fried chicken dinner at the farm, where, as Margaret remembered, the atmosphere was “entirely different.” It was not just that her father looked forward to these visits, but her mother as well. “She liked Mamma Truman immensely.” Mamma was “full of spice,” with opinions on nearly everything, including politics. The difference between this spry little “country grandmother” and the one in Independence was extreme. With Mamma Truman one felt in touch with pioneer times, with a native vigor and mettle that seemed ageless. Mamma still went rabbit hunting with Margaret’s boy cousins, Vivian’s sons. Once when she offered food to a tramp at the back porch and the tramp complained the coffee wasn’t hot enough, she took the cup, went inside, and promptly returned with a shotgun. He could be on his way, she said, or she would warm more than his coffee for him.
It pleased Margaret to see the enjoyment her father took in Mamma’s company. “Now Harry, you be good,” she would say as they were leaving. But Mamma could also observe that “Being too good is apt to be uninteresting,” a line they all loved.
With the Ogden sisters and a half-dozen other neighborhood girls, Margaret put on plays in the backyard at 219 North Delaware. For one called The Capture of the Clever One, with Margaret in the title role, the Examiner sent a photographer to make a portrait of the cast. Performances were after dark. A Ping-Pong table tipped on its side served as a backdrop, lights were strung, kitchen chairs set out for the audience. Harry attended dutifully. “I want her to do everything and have everything and still learn that most people have to work to live, and I don’t want her to be a high hat,” he had written to Bess.
He was habitually dutiful and responsible about all kinds of family matters, the sort of father who checked to see that the tires had good tread and 35 pounds of pressure, who had the oil changed every 1,000 miles without fail. “The car was washed every few days,” Margaret would remember. “And the upholstery was vacuumed and cleaned and people did not throw gum wrappers around—they were put in the ashtray—and he did not like people to smoke because he had never smoked and because the smoke would get into the upholstery…. He was very particular about his cars.” And about himself—his suits, ties, his shoes. He never went out the door without his hat, as few gentlemen of the day ever would, and his hat was always worn straight on his head. “Straight, absolutely straight,” she remembered.
He was interested in the weather, like most farmers. “He read all the weather maps in the papers and he always had a barometer where he could see it.”
He was a string saver. He could get two weeks’ use out of a straight razor by stropping the blade on the palm of his hand before each shave. Interestingly, for all his years on the farm, for all he knew about tools and odd jobs, he did no repairs around the house, never cut the lawn or put up screens. Undoubtedly, his mother-in-law had some say in this. Such work was for the yard man.
“It never seemed like the Truman house,” Sue Ogden remembered. “It was so clearly Mrs. Wallace’s house. And she was clearly in charge of everything about it.”
Another of Margaret’s childhood friends, Mary Shaw, would remember hearing her parents say, “How does Harry put up with that?”
“It was very hard on my father,” Margaret would concede long afterward, while showing a visitor through the house. “You know, my father was a very quiet, nontemperamental man at home. He got along. I mean, he made it his business to get along…because he loved my mother and this was where she wanted to live.”
Up early every morning, well before dawn, and always before anyone else, he had the house to himself, to read the papers, including the comic strips which he loved, and especially Andy Gump. (Told that as county judge he could have any license plate number he wished, he had picked Number 369, because it was Andy Gump’s number, a point he delighted in explaining to anyone who asked.)
In the evenings he would turn to his books and become wholly immersed. “You could talk to him if he were reading and you wouldn’t get an answer.” Indeed, Margaret could not recall her father sitting down quietly at home without a book in his hand.
He became a great joiner. In addition to the Masons, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he belonged to the Elks, the Eagles, the International Acquaintance League. Monday nights he went uptown to the Square to play poker in a back room over the Farmer & Merchants Bank. It was a regular game among the same old friends, several of them Army pals like Edgar Hinde and Roger Sermon, a grocer who had become the town’s mayor. They named themselves the Independence Harmonicon Society, or Harpie Club, because one of their number had once distinguished himself playing the harmonica, or French harp, extremely poorly but with exuberance in a contest at the local movie house. The game had a 10-cent limit. A little beer or bourbon was consumed, Prohibition notwithstanding, and the conversation usually turned to politics. Such was the social life of Judge Harry Truman in the early 1930s, the worst of the Depression, years when Adolf Hitler was rising to power and Japan invaded Manchuria.
As much as he enjoyed going out to the farm to see his mother and sister, he had no desire ever again to live in the country. He loved the town. “He liked his walk up to the courthouse square,” said Margaret. “He liked people…he genuinely liked people and he liked to talk to them….”
In many ways it was still the town he had grown up in. Farmers crowded the Square on Saturday nights, but the rest of the week, nights were quiet, broken only by the sound of passing trains and the striking of the courthouse clock. Margaret Phelps and Tillie Brown still taught history and English at the high school. The town directory listed most of the old names of the original settlers—Boggs, Dailey, Adair, McClelland, Chiles, Hickman, Holmes, Ford, Davenport, McPherson, Mann, Peacock, Shank, not to say Truman, Wallace, and Noland. Harry knew nearly all the family histories—it was good politics to know, of course, but he also loved the town.
His devotion to Bess appears to have been total, no less than ever. On his travels, at summer Army camp, he wrote to her nearly every day. How had he ever gotten along without her before they were married was a mystery he pondered in a letter from Fort Riley, Kansas, the summer of 1930. “Just think of all those wasted years….”
“Have you practiced your music?” he wrote to Margaret from. Camp Ripley, Minnesota, another summer. He had splurged and for Christmas bought her a baby grand piano, a Steinway, a surprise she did not appreciate. She had dreamed of an electric train. “I’m hoping you can play all those exercises without hesitation. If you can I’ll teach you to read bass notes when I get back.”
As early as 1931 there was talk of Harry Truman for governor, a prospect that delighted him. “You may yet be the first lady of Missouri,” he told Bess. Whatever inner turmoil he suffered, however many mornings of dark despair he knew, the truth was he loved politics. He was as proud of the roads he had built and of the new Kansas City Courthouse as of anything he had ever accomplished, or hoped to. Work was progressing on the new Independence Courthouse, his courthouse, as he saw it, and everyone approved. “From the time of the establishment of Jackson County until now,” wrote Colonel Southern in the Examiner, “men with the same indomitable courage of the county’s namesake, Andrew Jackson, have dwelt in this ‘garden spot of Missouri’—with eyes always fixed on the future greatness of this great domain and with the thought uppermost to build, build, build a county that the rest of the state would be proud of.”
But the greater satisfaction for Harry was in what he had been able to do for ordinary people, without fanfare or much to show for it in the record books—things he could only have done as a politician. Years afterward, over lunch in New York with the journalist Eric Sevareid, he would describe how as a county judge in Missouri he had discovered that through a loophole in the law, hundreds of old men and women were being committed to mental institutions by relatives who could not, or would not, cope with their care or financial support, and how by investigating the situation he had restored these people to their rights and freedom. This, he said, had given him more satisfaction than anything.
“He loved politics,” remembered Ted Marks, “and he strived for something and never let loose until he got there. I think no matter what job he held he put all he had into it. He enjoyed it and did the best he knew how….”
He had not found his real work until late in life, not until he was nearly forty. But then, observed Ethel Noland, hadn’t he been a late bloomer all along? “He didn’t marry until he was thirty-five…. He didn’t do anything early.” Politics came naturally. “There,” she said, “he struck his gait.”
Harriet Louisa Gregg Young and Solomon Young.
Mary Jane Holmes Truman and Anderson Shipp Truman.
Martha Ellen Young Truman and John Anderson Truman at the time of their marriage, December 1881.
Harry S. Truman at about age ten.
In a graduation portrait of the Class of 1901, seventeen-year-old Harry Truman stands fourth from the left at the back. Bess Wallace is on the far right, second row, and Charlie Ross sits on the far left in the front row. The Latin inscription over the door says: “Youth the Hope of the World.”
The center of Independence, Jackson Square, at the turn of the century. The courthouse is on the right.
Truman at about the time he was employed as a clerk at the National Bank of Commerce, Kansas City. “His appearance is good and his habits and character are of the best,” wrote a supervisor.
Cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, to whom he was the adored “Horatio.”
The junior partner of J. A. Truman & Son, Farmers, stands with his mother and grandmother Young by the front porch of the house at Grandview.
The work day began with his father’s call from the foot of the stairs at 5:30 A.M. Here, Truman rides the cultivator across a field of young corn.
Truman at the wheel of the second-hand, right-hand drive, 1911 Stafford touring car that transformed his life. With him are Bess Wallace (in front), sister Mary Jane Truman, and cousin Nellie Noland.
A summer outing on the Little Blue River with Harry at the oars, Bess with the fishing pole. “Harry was always fun,” remembered Ethel Noland.
The portrait of Bess that Harry carried to war in 1918. “Dear Harry,” she wrote on the back, “May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”
His AEF identity card shows a newly commissioned Captain Harry S. Truman with no glasses and a regulation haircut.
With Harry “over there,” Mary Jane was left to run the farm. “It was quite a blow to my mother and sister,” he later conceded.
Truman (third from right) poses with some of his fellow artillery officers “somewhere in France.”
Wounded soldiers from the Argonne are tended beneath an undamaged painting of the Ascension in a ruined church in Neuilly, September 1918.
The war over, Captain Truman (on the right) relaxes in the sunshine at Monte Carlo.
Harry and Bess Truman pose for their wedding portrait with bridesmaids Louise Wells (left) and Helen Wallace, Bess’s brother Frank (center rear), who gave her away, and best man Ted Marks, who made the groom’s suit on special order. The day, Saturday, June 28, 1919, was extremely hot and humid—standard for summer in Missouri.
The Gates-Wallace house, 219 North Delaware Street, Independence, as it looked at the time the Trumans moved in “temporarily” with Bess’s mother, following their honeymoon.
Truman & Jacobson, “the shirt store,” as Truman called it, opened for business on 12th Street, Kansas City, in November 1919. Above, on the left, haberdasher Harry S. Truman strikes a characteristic pose at the sales counter.
Thomas J. Pendergast, the “Big Boss” of Kansas City, beams for photographers at his daughter’s wedding.
All but lost in floral tributes, Truman is sworn in for a second term as Presiding Judge of the Jackson County Court, January 1931.
Michael Pendergast, whom Truman “loved as I did my own daddy.”
James Pendergast, Michael’s son and Truman’s devoted friend.
Judge Truman speaks at the dedication of the new Independence Courthouse on September 17, 1933, one of the proudest days of his life.
Ten-year-old Margaret with her parents, the summer of Truman’s first campaign for the Senate, 1934.
Throughout the campaign Truman stressed his farm background. At right, for a publicity photograph, he sits on the porch swing at Grandview with the two other most important women in his life, his mother and sister Mary Jane.
Crisscrossing the state, the candidate spoke at one county seat after another, his platform usually the courthouse steps. Town loafers and boys on summer vacation often represented a good part of his “crowd.” He was not a captivating or impressive speaker, but people also had no difficulty understanding what he meant and seemed to feel better for having listened to him. The punishing heat and time on the road bothered him not at all.
At first “under a cloud” in the Senate because of his Pendergast connection, Truman nonetheless kept a portrait of “T.J.” prominently displayed in his office.
A rare photograph of Truman and Tom Pendergast together was taken at the 1936 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. With them are Kansas City attorney James Aylward (center), FDR’s political adviser, James A. Farley (the tall figure at rear), and David E. Fitzgerald, Sr., Democratic National Committeeman from Connecticut (right foreground).
John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers (seated near left), makes a dramatic appearance before the Truman Committee, as Chairman Truman (far right) listens impassively.
Truman, who loved the Senate “club,” became one of its most popular members. Here, in his office, he is surrounded by fellow Truman Committee members (from left to right) Homer Ferguson, Harold H. Burton, Tom Connally, and Owen Brewster.
In the midst of the 1944 Democratic National Convention at Chicago, Truman signals his feeling about
the drive to make him FDR’s running mate.
Bess and Margaret at the moment Truman is named the nominee for Vice President. Margaret would be remembered cheering as if at a football game. Bess, however, rarely smiled for photographers.
Truman and Roosevelt smile for photographers at lunch in the Rose Garden at the White House, August 18, 1944. Shocked by the President’s appearance, Truman later told an aide, “His hands were shaking…physically he’s just going to pieces.” This was one of the few occasions when Truman and Roosevelt were seen together.
6
The Senator from Pendergast
Friends don’t count in fair weather. It is when troubles come that friends count.
—HARRY TRUMAN
I
Francis M. Wilson, known to rural voters as the Red-Headed Peckerwood of the Platte, was a freckled, old-fashioned Missouri stump speaker who excelled at charming country crowds with his poetic tributes to the natural splendors of their beloved state. A convivial man, he had also attained, by age sixty-four, something of the air of a statesman, and in 1932, as the Pendergast choice for governor—and with Franklin Roosevelt heading the national ticket—he could look forward to certain election.