They had new stationery printed for “J. A. Truman and Son, Farmers.” By the standards of the family’s time-honored way of life, not to say the viewpoint of the surrounding community, Harry Truman had arrived. “To be a good farmer in Missouri—that’s tops. That’s the finest thing you can say about a man,” Vivian would declare emphatically a lifetime later. Harry himself, writing in October 1911, summed up generations of bedrock faith in the old Jeffersonian dream of a nation of farmers:
You know as long as a country is one of that kind, people are more independent and make better citizens. When it is made up of factories and large cities it soon becomes depressed and makes classes among people. Every farmer thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little bit better.
This was in a letter, one of many, designed to inform and influence Bessie Wallace of Independence, who knew nothing of farms or farming. For by now Harry was head over heels in love.
III
“Well, I saw her,” he is said to have exclaimed with a grin to the Noland sisters one summer night in 1910.
Ethel and Nellie Noland, who had both become schoolteachers, were still living in the family house on North Delaware Street. According to Ethel, keeper of family history, Harry had stopped for a visit when someone mentioned a cake plate that should be returned to Mrs. Wallace and Harry volunteered “with something approaching the speed of light.” He crossed the street, went up the walk to the Gates house, up four steps and onto the porch, cranked the bell of the tall, double-leafed front door, then stood waiting. “And Bess came to the door,” remembered Ethel, who must have been watching from her own porch, “and of course nothing could have been a bigger occasion than that, to see her again and talk to her.” He didn’t return for two hours.
From the farm to North Delaware Street was only sixteen miles, but a long ride by horse and buggy—four hours or more round trip—even assuming John Truman would make the horse and buggy available when Harry wished. Nor was going by train much faster or easier. Harry had to walk into Grandview and catch the Frisco to Kansas City, then change to an Independence train. Relatively few trains stopped at Grandview, however, and connections were poor, with long delays even if everything went right. The one other possibility was to hitch a ride by buggy to a point called Dodson on Blue River, where he could take the interurban, the electric streetcar, into Kansas City, then transfer to another streetcar to Independence. Whichever way he chose seemed designed to make life difficult. Yet he made the trip at every opportunity, often spending the night on a couch at the Nolands’. Old friends and relatives in town were greatly impressed by such ardor. To people in Independence, Grandview was “the sticks.”
He was invited to Sunday dinner and sat politely with Bessie and her very formal mother, her brothers, and Grandmother and Grandfather Gates, as a black servant passed dishes. In the parlor afterward he played the piano for them. Bessie also accepted his invitations to concerts and the theater in Kansas City and went with him to meet his former piano teacher, Mrs. White. Harry was sure they would like one another. (“Isn’t she a caution?” he said later of Mrs. White.) Yet Bessie, as others noticed, did not go out to the farm to meet his family.
But it was in letter after letter—hundreds of letters as time passed—that he poured himself out to her, saying what he found he never could in her presence, writing more than he ever had in his life and discovering how much satisfaction there was in writing. He also longed desperately for her to write him, which, as he told her, was the main reason he wrote so often and at such length. Phone calls on a party line were out of the question, with the neighbors listening. He didn’t like the telephone under any circumstances. “I’m always rattled and can never say what I want to,” he explained to her.
What she wrote to him, what tone her correspondence took, can only be imagined, or deduced from what he said in response, since none of her letters from this period has survived.
It was a cheerful, often funny, consistently interesting, extremely alert, straightforward, and irrepressible young man that she came to know in this outpouring of mail from Grandview. And she possessed many of the same qualities. Her vitality and good humor, in particular, had made her quite popular in her own circles. Several young men had found her attractive well before she was rediscovered by Harry Truman. Chrisman Swope, son of one of the wealthiest families in Independence, had come calling frequently. There was a Mr. Young, a Mr. Harris, and a “romance” apparently with a young man named Julian Harvey from Kansas City. As Harry understood from the start, she was used to attention.
He could not spell very well, as he was aware. (“Say, it sure is a grand thing that I have a high school dictionary handy,” he wrote. “I had to look on the back to see how to spell the book itself.”) And clearly he delighted in talking about himself. He was his own favorite subject, yet nearly always with a sense of proportion and a sense of humor. She had never received letters anything like them—and very fortunately she saved them.
It is necessary to sit about half a mile or so from the horses when you drive an old binder [he explained in one] and it’s yell or stand still. My whip is just too short. If I make it longer it grinds up in the machinery and causes a disaster not only to the insides of the binder but to my record in the Book of Justice. It’s cheaper to cuss the team.
“This morning I was helping to dig a grave,” he reported in another letter, attempting to illustrate that farmers “get all kinds of experience in lots of things….”
It is not nearly such a sad proceeding as you’d think. There were six or seven of us, and we’d take turns digging. Those who weren’t digging would sit around and tell lies about the holes they’d dug and the hogs they’d raised. We spent a very pleasant forenoon and then went to the funeral.
They were hardly love letters, no “nonsense or bosh.” He told her about Uncle Harry, about the hired men, and while he bragged occasionally of how hard he worked, he in no way romanticized life on the farm for her benefit. If anything, he went to the other extreme. “I have been to the lot and put about a hundred rings in half as many hogs’ noses. You really haven’t any idea what a soul stirring job it is, especially on a day when the mud is knee deep….” He described being stuck in the eye by a blade of corn, and how his face had burned to the color of raw beef after hauling hay all day.
He had strong opinions and no small share of bigotry, though she never saw it that way, never found his use of expressions like “coon,” “nigger,” “bohunk,” “Dago,” or “Chink” objectionable, or she would have let him know and that would have been the end of it, since as he said, “I’m horribly anxious for you to suffer from an excessively good opinion of me!”
In his way he could also become quite philosophical, a word he didn’t like.
“You know when people can get excited over the ordinary things in life, they live,” he said at one point.
“You’ve no idea how experience teaches sympathy,” he observed in another letter, soon after breaking his leg.
Of his religious convictions, a matter he knew to be of great importance to her mother, he said that while he remembered well their Presbyterian Sunday School days together and though he had since joined the Baptist Church, he was only a reasonably good Baptist as the term was understood in Grandview. “I am by religion like everything else. I think there’s more in acting than in talking.” Bessie had invited him to attend an Episcopal service in Independence. (The Wallaces, too, had abandoned the Presbyterian Church.) It was his first time at an Episcopal service, he told her. He knew nothing of “Lent and such things.” Once, on a Sunday in Kansas City, he confessed, “I made a start for church and landed at the Shubert.”
They exchanged views on writers. Mark Twain was his patron saint in literature, Harry said. The year before, as he did not tell her, he had spent $25 of his own money for a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works. She urged him to read the longer novels of Dickens and in a letter written in May 1911, after his accident, he t
old her that to his surprise he was greatly enjoying David Copperfield:
I have been reading David Copperfield and have really found out that I couldn’t appreciate Dickens before. I have only read Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities. They didn’t make much of an impression on me and I never read anything else. A neighbor sent me Dombey & Son and David C., and I am glad for it has awakened a new interest. It is almost a reconciliation to having my leg broken to contemplate the amount of reading I am going to do this summer. I am getting better fast and I am afraid I’ll get well so soon I won’t get to read enough…. I do think Mr. Micawber is the killingest person I have run across in any book anywhere. He is exactly true to life. I know a half-dozen of him right here in Grandview. They are always waiting for something to turn up….
Then, out of the blue, that June, he proposed to her by mail, mixing affection with a little self-deprecation and caution, fearful she might laugh at him.
You know, were I an Italian or a poet I would commence and use all the luscious language of two continents. I am not either but only a kind of good-for-nothing American farmer. I’ve always had a sneakin’ notion that some day maybe I’d amount to something. I doubt it now though like everything. It is a family failing of ours to be poor financiers. I am blest that way. Still that doesn’t keep me from having always thought that you were all that a girl could be possibly and impossibly. You may not have guessed it but I’ve been crazy about you ever since we went to Sunday school together. But I never had the nerve to think you’d even look at me…. You said you were tired of these kind of stories in books so I am trying one from real life. I guess it sounds funny to you, but you must bear in mind that this is my first experience in this line and also it is very real to me.
Three weeks passed without a word from her. He waited, agonizing, then wrote to ask if he had said anything to offend her. She responded by turning him down, and apparently over the phone. That same day he wrote as follows:
Grandview, Mo.
July 12, 1911
Dear Bessie:
You know that you turned me down so easy that I am almost happy anyway. I never was fool enough to think that a girl like you could ever care for a fellow like me but I couldn’t help telling you how I felt. I have always wanted you to have some fine, rich-looking man, but I know that if ever I got the chance I’d tell you how I felt even if I didn’t even get to say another word to you. What makes me feel good is that you were good enough to answer me seriously and not make fun of me anyway. You know when a fellow tells a girl all his heart and she makes a joke of it I suppose it would be the awfullest feeling in the world. You see I never had any desire to say such things to anyone else. All my girlfriends think I am a cheerful idiot and a confirmed old bach. They really don’t know the reason nor ever will. I have been so afraid you were not even going to let me be your good friend. To be even in that class is something.
You may think I’ll get over it as all boys do. I guess I am something of a freak myself. I really never had any desire to make love to a girl just for the fun of it, and you have always been the reason. I have never met a girl in my life that you were not the first to be compared with her, to see wherein she was lacking and she always was.
Please don’t think I am talking nonsense or bosh, for if ever I told the truth I am telling it now and I’ll never tell such things to anyone else or bother you with them again. I have always been more idealist than practical anyway, so I really never expected any reward for loving you. I shall always hope though….
Then, promising to put on no hangdog airs when next he saw her, he changed the subject. Did she know of any way to make it rain?
They exchanged photographs and Harry had a standing invitation to Sunday dinner at the Gates house. Week after week, with no success, he tried to get her to come to Grandview. In August, he announced he was building a grass tennis court for her on a level place near the house. She could bring her friends, make a day of it. At Montgomery Ward in Kansas City he bought a heavy roller. Since neither he nor anyone else on the farm, or anyone in Grandview, played tennis or knew the requirements for a court, he had her send directions. He hoped to have everything ready by Labor Day. Mamma would cook a chicken dinner, he promised. “Not town dinner but midday meal, see? So be sure and come…. Now be sure and come out on Labor Day.”
In the flurry of excitement, seeing how intent on success he was, Matt decided to have several rooms papered. With only three days to go, Harry sent Bessie a map with directions. The Sunday before Labor Day he worked the day through on the court and by nightfall had everything ready, including a supply of watermelons.
But she didn’t come. She sent word it was raining in Independence. He wrote at once of his “disappointment” and asked if she could make it another time, adding that Mamma would still like her to come for dinner and that the weather in Grandview on Labor Day had been fine. When she did at last appear, for an impromptu visit some weeks later, the court was found to be insufficiently level for a proper game.
Yet, he would not be discouraged. He kept at courtship as he had kept to his piano lessons, with cheerful, willing determination. He told her of his progress in the Masons, he sent her books, commented on stories in his favorite magazines, Everybody’s, Life, and Adventure. “I was reading Plato’s Republic this morning,” he also informed her at one point, “and Socrates was discoursing on the ideal Republic…. You see, I sometimes read something besides Adventure.”
He knew he had a gift for conversation. He had found he could get most anything he wanted if he could only talk to people. The letters were his way to talk to her as he never could face to face.
That he particularly liked cake, pie, Mozart, Chopin, and Verdi became clear. She learned also how much there was he did not like: dentists, guns, snobs, hypocrisy in any form, prizefighters, divorce, the Kansas City Star (for its Republican bias), lawyers (now that his grandmother’s will was being contested), and Richard Wagner, who he thought must have been “in cahoots with Pluto.” He regretted much about his looks. He wrote of his “girl mouth” and the fact that he blushed like a girl. He confessed to such other ladylike traits as yelling when he had a tooth pulled and an “inordinate desire to look nice” when having his picture taken. Coming home alone in the dark, he could get “scared to an icicle,” he told her. He was afraid of getting knocked on the head by the hoboes who hung about at the point where he changed trains at Kansas City, fearful of both ghosts and hoboes as he made his way home on foot from the Grandview depot on nights when there was no moon.
Once approaching the house in the pitch dark, groping his way to the kitchen door, he walked headlong into the pump. The next day, he painted the pump white.
One man was as good as another, he thought, “so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” His Uncle Will Young, the Confederate veteran, had a theory that “the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.” Apparently Harry thought this would amuse her. “He does hate Chinks and Japs. So do I,” he continued. “It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”
But on an evening when Mary Jane was practicing a Mozart sonata at the piano, he wrote, “Did you ever sit and listen to an orchestra play a fine overture, and imagine that things were as they ought to be and not as they are? Music that I can understand always makes me feel that way.” Had Bessie been the girl in a stage musical of the kind he took her to see, she would have accepted him then and there.
The fact that he had no money and that he craved money came up repeatedly, more often and more obviously than probably he realized. In Grandview circles, financial wealth was something people seldom talked about or judged one another by. “We never rated a person by the amount of money he had,” remembered Stephen Slaughter. “Always, first and foremost, it was his character, his integrity.” No family, not even
the Slaughters, had large bank accounts or costly possessions. Everybody, including the Slaughters, had debts. But Harry wanted more than what sufficed for Grandview; or, in any event, he clearly wanted Bessie Wallace to think he aimed higher.
He told her of his longing for an automobile. “Just imagine how often I’d burn the pike from here to Independence.” He saw a $75 overcoat in Kansas City that he wanted. If ever he were rich, he too would live in Independence. Writing one cold night before Christmas 1911, he told her also of the secret burden he carried with his father, the “hat-full of debts,” asking only that she keep this to herself since no one knew. Later, he said he had two reasons for wanting to be rich. The first was to pay his debts and build his mother a fine house. The second was to win her.
If only she cared a little, he would double his efforts “to amount to something.” Bessie replied saying that she and Mary Paxton had concluded that a woman should think seriously only of a man who could support her in style. Harry said he would take this as a sign of encouragement, whether she meant it that way or not.
He wanted so to live up to expectations, and his own most of all, but he didn’t know what to do with his life, what in the world to be. Like David Copperfield, he longed to know if he would turn out to be the hero of his own story.
He was pleased to learn that her mother admired his piano playing. (Mrs. Wallace herself was considered an accomplished pianist. In her youth she had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory.) “I really thought once I’d be an ivory tickler but I am glad my money ran out before I got too far,” Harry told Bess honestly. He had dropped out of the National Guard. Military life, too, had lost its pull: “I am like Mark Twain. He says that if fame is to be obtained only by marching to the cannon’s mouth, he’s perfectly willing to go there provided the cannon is empty….”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 421