In March, the regiment moved south to Courcemont, near Le Mans, where the officers were again quartered in luxury at the Château la Chenay, once the home of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the great canal builder. Harry had one more chance at a flying visit to Paris, during which he saw Woodrow Wilson ride by and, in a shop on the Rue de la Paix, he bought a wedding ring. Then on April 9, 1919, with the 52 other officers and 1,274 men of the 129th Field Artillery, he sailed for New York on the former German liner Zeppelin.
On this homeward voyage, the last act of his great adventure, the returning hero was violently seasick nearly the whole way. For a time he wished he were back at the Argonne where he might die honorably. Yet he could bear any agony, he knew, given the direction they were heading.
Part Two
Politician
5
Try, Try Again
I’ve had a few setbacks in my life, but I never gave up.
—HARRY TRUMAN
I
As his observant cousin Ethel Noland once remarked, Harry Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man. He had been born when Chester A. Arthur was President and among the more pressing issues was whether the nation should continue building a wooden Navy. He was a grown man, thirty-three years old, middle-aged nearly, by the time of the Great War, the event which, more than any turn of the calendar, marked the end of the old century and the beginning of something altogether new. His outlook, tastes, his habits of thought had been shaped by a different world from the one that followed after 1918. As time would show, the Great War was among history’s clearest dividing lines, and much that came later never appealed to Harry Truman, for all his native-born optimism and large faith in progress.
He had been more at home in the older era. He never learned to like the telephone, or daylight saving time, an innovation adopted during the war. He tried using a typewriter for a while, but gave it up. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens remained his favorite authors. Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee were to be his lifelong heroes. Until he met George C. Marshall, he wondered if the “modern” times were capable of producing a great man.
The kind of art that had burst upon the public with New York’s Armory Show of 1913—the first big American exhibition of modern paintings, which included Marcel Duchamp’s sensational Nude Descending a Staircase— had no appeal or meaning for Harry Truman. “Ham and eggs art,” he called it. He liked the old masters. His taste in American art, not surprisingly, ran to the paintings of Missouri riverboatmen and Missouri politics by George Caleb Bingham, or the western scenes of Frederic Remington, who had once owned a saloon in Kansas City.
If Harry Truman had even a little interest in the theories of Einstein or Freud, he never said so. Words like “libido” or “id,” so much in vogue after the war, were never part of his vocabulary. Indeed, he despaired over a great deal that became fashionable in manners and mores. He disliked cigarettes, gin, fad diets. He strongly disapproved of women smoking or drinking, even of men taking a drink if women were present. When after much debate Bess decided it was time she bobbed her hair, he consented only reluctantly. (“I want you to be happy regardless of what I think about it,” he told her.) He disliked the very sound of the Jazz Age, including what became known as Kansas City jazz. Life in the Roaring Twenties as depicted in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald or John O’Hara was entirely foreign to his experience, as it was for so much of the country. He never learned to dance. He never learned to play golf or tennis, never belonged to a country club. Poker was his game, not bridge or mah-jongg. “It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all,” insisted F. Scott Fitzgerald, but Harry Truman, in those years, discovered politics to be his life work.
As the war was a watershed time for the world, so it was in his life. “I have always wondered,” he later wrote, “how things would have turned out in my life if the war had not come along just when it did.” What it most obviously did was to take him from the farm, and he would not go back again, except as a visitor. That much was settled for him, as it was for tens of thousands of others who came home. (“How you gonna’ keep ’em down on the farm/After they’ve seen Paree?” went the hit song of 1919.) More important, he was not the same man who left for France only the year before. The change was astounding. He had new confidence in himself. He had discovered he could lead men and that he liked that better than anything he had ever done before. He found he had courage—that he was no longer the boy who ran from fights—and, furthermore, that he could inspire courage in others.
He had come home with a following, his biggest, best “gang” ever, his battery “boys,” who looked up to him as they would an older brother. He was the captain who brought so many sons of Jackson County home safe and sound. Alone in the dim light of his tent or dugout in France, late at night, he had spent hours answering letters from the mothers and fathers of men in his command, a consideration not commonplace among officers of the AEF, and one that would not soon be forgotten in Kansas City.
He had been a big success as a soldier. The war had made him a somebody in the eyes of all kinds of people, including, most importantly, Bess Wallace, who had only decided to marry him once she heard he was enlisting. By nice coincidence, the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles and their wedding took place on the same day.
Also because of the war he had met and befriended Eddie Jacobson and Jim Pendergast, who, with Bess, were to have so much to do with the new and different life that began the morning the 129th Field Artillery had its triumphal return.
“Well, I remember when he came back, what a day it was,” said Ethel Noland. “We all went into the city and saw them parading through the streets…. Then we went to the Convention Hall and had a great reception.”
The 129th marched uptown from Union Station in dazzling morning sunshine, under full packs, wearing their “tin derbies,” as they had marched in France. Harry and the other officers were on horseback. Flags brightened buildings and lampposts. The crowds along both sides of Grand Avenue were fifty deep. At 11th Street stood a huge Welcome Arch. People were cheering, weeping, holding up children to see. One young woman, carrying a baby, walked parallel to her husband from the station all the way to the Convention Hall in high heels.
Three days later, May 6, at Camp Funston, Kansas, the men were given their final discharges, and seven weeks and four days after that Bess and Harry were married. But not before two important events took place.
On May 8, Harry’s birthday and his second day home, he and Bess had their first and apparently their last heated argument. Possibly it was over the wedding plans, or possibly over her mother’s insistence that they live with her. Whatever the cause, Harry would remember the day and its misery for the rest of his life. In a letter to Bess written thirty years later, he would refer to it as their “final” argument.
Then, a month in advance of the wedding, he and Eddie Jacobson took a lease on a store in downtown Kansas City. Though Jacobson had served with another battery in France, they had seen each other occasionally and Jacobson, too, had come home on the Zeppelin. They had decided to join forces again and open a men’s furnishing store, a haberdashery, convinced their partnership at Camp Doniphan had been only a prelude to great merchandising success. It was a decision made quickly, even impulsively, and, on Harry’s part, it would seem, one designed to impress Bess and her mother.
The wedding, on Saturday, June 28, 1919, took place at four in the afternoon in tiny Trinity Episcopal Church on North Liberty Street in Independence, and the day was the kind Missouri summers are famous for. The church, full of family and friends, became so stifling hot that all the flowers began to wilt.
The bride wore a simple dress of white georgette crepe, a white picture hat, and carried a bouquet of roses. Her attendants, cousins Helen Wallace and Louise Wells, were dressed in organdy and they too carried roses. The groom had on a fine-checked, gray, three-piece business suit made especially for the occasion, on credit, by his best man, Ted
Marks, who had returned to his old trade of gentleman’s tailor. The groom also wore a pair of his Army pince-nez spectacles and appeared, as he stood at the front of the church, to have arrived directly from the barbershop.
Frank Wallace, the tall, prematurely balding brother of the bride, escorted her to the altar, where the Reverend J. P. Plunkett read the service.
Present at the reception afterward, on the lawn at the Gates house, were Mrs. Wallace and her mother, Mrs. Gates, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wallace, Mr. and Mrs. George Wallace, and young Fred Wallace, while the “out-of-town” guests, as recorded in the papers, included Mrs. J. A. Truman, her daughter Miss Mary Jane Truman, and Mr. and Mrs. J. Vivian Truman. All the Nolands attended, of course, as did several of Harry’s former brothers in arms. One who was unable to be there wrote to him, “I hope you have the same success in this new war as you had in the old.”
Punch and ice cream were served. The wedding party posed for pictures, Harry looking extremely serious, Bess a bit bemused. Presently, bride and groom departed for the train in Kansas City, driven by Frank Wallace, with more cars following.
At the station, waiting on the platform, Ted Marks remarked to Harry’s mother, “Well, Mrs. Truman, you’ve lost Harry.”
“Indeed, I haven’t,” she replied.
Recalling the day years later, Mary Jane spoke more of what she had been through before she and Mamma ever reached the church. They had been harvesting wheat at the farm. Mary Jane had cooked noon dinner for twelve farmhands—meat, potatoes, fresh bread, homemade pies, “the usual,” she said.
Ethel Noland remembered Harry’s expression as he stood watching Bess come down the aisle. “You’ve just never seen such a radiant, happy look on a man’s face.”
It had been nine years since the night Harry returned the pie plate. He was now thirty-five; Bess was thirty-four.
The honeymoon couple stopped at Chicago, Detroit, and Port Huron, Michigan. In Chicago, they stayed at the Blackstone. At Port Huron, they were at the beaches of Lake Huron, where the weather was as perfect as their time together. So sublime were these days and nights beside the ice-cold lake that for Harry the very words “Port Huron” would forever mean the ultimate in happiness.
It was all too brief. Worried over her mother’s health—Madge Wallace suffered from sciatica, among other real and imagined complaints—Bess felt they must return to Independence sooner than planned. As her mother wished, they moved into 219 North Delaware, taking Bess’s room at the top of the stairs on the south side. The immediate household now consisted of Bess, Harry, Madge, Fred, who was a college student and his mother’s pet, and the elderly Mrs. Gates, who had a room on the first floor off the front parlor. In back of the house, beyond the driveway, in what was formerly the garden, two small, one-story bungalows had been built, facing Van Home Boulevard, one each for brothers Frank and George and their wives. Thus the whole family was together still in a “kind of complex,” under the watchful eye of Mother Madge Wallace, a neat, straight little woman with a rather sweet expression, her hair done up in a knot, who still wore an old-fashioned velvet choker. Among the neighbors she was perceived as possibly the most perfect lady in town and “a very, very difficult person.”
Bess considered the arrangement temporary. She and Harry would stay only long enough for her mother to become accustomed to the idea that she was married. Harry moved in with his clothes, a few books, and a trunk full of his Army things, which was nearly all he owned.
II
Truman & Jacobson was located at 104 West 12th Street, Kansas City, on the ground floor of the Glennon Hotel, catty-cornered from the larger Muehlebach Hotel, which made it a choice location. By agreement Harry was to keep the books; Eddie would do the buying. Between them they would take turns with the customers.
Jacobson, short, cheerful, and conscientious, was twenty-eight years old, but with his glasses and rapidly thinning hair looked perhaps thirty-five, and unlike Harry, he had had twelve years’ experience in the retail clothing business. One of six children and known by everyone as “Eddie,” never “Edward,” he was the son of impoverished immigrant Jews from Lithuania who had settled first on New York’s Lower East Side, where he was born, and later in Kansas City, where he went to work at age fourteen as a stock boy in a dry goods store. Eddie, too, was soon to be married—to Bluma Rosenbaum at B’nai Jehudah, Kansas City’s oldest Reform temple, in December of that year—and so, like Harry, he had every reason to wish to succeed.
It was to be a “first-class operation,” specializing in famous brands. They would sell no suits or coats, but a full line of “gents furnishings”—shirts, socks, ties, belts, underwear, hats. To get started, they combined their money and borrowed from the bank. The store was remodeled inside and out. The cost of their initial inventory came to $35,000.
Harry put in $15,000, most of which he obtained by selling off livestock and machinery from the Grandview farm. He had hoped the farm might continue as before and tried to persuade Mary Jane to keep it running, but she refused if he was unwilling to be there and do his part. Two years had been enough, she said. That fall they auctioned off horses, hogs, plows, seed drill, nearly everything, the proceeds going to Harry for the store, an arrangement that was hardly fair to Mary Jane, given all she had done, and that pleased no one in the family except Harry. The land would now be rented for someone else to farm.
The store opened for business in late November 1919, and would be remembered by friends and patrons as “right up to snuff,” “a sharp place.”
The name “Truman & Jacobson” was set in colored tiles at the street entrance, between two large plate-glass show windows filled with shirts in striped pastels, fifteen to twenty hats, and a hundred or more stiff, detachable collars, suspended by wire in vertical columns. The shirts and collars were all Ide brand, as proclaimed in formal lettering across the top of the storefront, above the plate-glass windows. Inside, long showcases were filled with shirts, leather gloves, belts, underwear, socks, collar pins, cufflinks, while behind, on open shelves, were boxes of more shirts, more detachable collars—“Marwyn” collars by Ide, which, like those in the windows, featured “the smart roll-front.” But what immediately caught the eye was a display of silk neckties, hundreds of ties in every color and pattern, strung from an overhead wire on the left that reached the length of the store.
It all looked fresh and clean. The tiled floor was kept shined. Glass countertops gleamed. There were big electric fans overhead, a glistening new cash register, and close by on one showcase, the store’s proud conversation piece, a huge silver loving cup, four feet high, a gift to “Captain Harry” from the boys of Battery D. Above the hat shelves at the back of the store, arranged like a bouquet, were the five flags of the Allied nations.
With the loving cup and flags, the atmosphere was not unlike that of a college shop, the college in this instance having been the war. For anyone who liked clothes as Harry did, who had liked always to “look nice,” the effect must have been very pleasing.
Yet it is hard to imagine the adjustment from battery commander to storekeeper as anything but difficult, hard to imagine him not finding it a painful comedown from such career aspirations as he had confided to Bess, or from parading with a victorious army up Grand Avenue. Nor does there appear to be an explanation, unless it was that he—and Bess also—wanted money quite as much as in the years before the war and saw the partnership as the opportunity, while at the same time keeping contact with his “boys,” the city, and people of a kind who might do him good should politics ever become his “line.” His only explanation later was, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
He and Eddie opened their door regularly at eight every morning and remained open until nine at night. Times were prosperous. “Sporty” 12th Street—the 12th Street of Twelfth Street Rag—was “jumping.” Conventioneers poured in and out of the Muehlebach. In the Dixon Hotel, across the street, were two gambling houses. Prostitutes worked the neighborhood. Day or ni
ght, salesmen, secretaries, shoppers from outlying towns, nearly everybody seemed to have money to spend. “Twelfth Street was in its heyday and our war buddies and the Twelfth Street boys and girls were our customers,” Eddie Jacobson would recall with pleasure. “Silk underwear for men, and silk shirts, were the rage. We sold shirts at sixteen dollars. Our business was all cash. No credit.” Shirts, the main stock in trade, were Eddie’s specialty. Harry, who called it “the shirt store,” would stand poised for business between two of the showcases, an elbow on one countertop, a hand on the other, his shoes shined, tie straight, the overhead lights glinting in his thick glasses. Like the store, he always looked fresh and clean.
As hoped, it became a rendezvous for their Army pals, a number of whom now looked to Harry as financial adviser, legal adviser, “and everything else,” as Eddie said. “We’d all drop in there sometime during the day—it was the hangout,” remembered Eddie McKim. Some evenings there was barely room for the real customers. “But Harry seemed glad to have us,” said former Sergeant Meisburger. Even the policeman on the corner, Walter “Cushionfoot” Teasley, had been a first lieutenant with the battery at Camp Doniphan.
Harry returned the favor of their patronage as best he could. He bought his suits from Ted Marks, had his hair cut at Frank Spina’s barbershop. They were just like his family, he would say. Bess objected to the haircuts. But Frank Spina was one of his boys, Harry would explain. “You can’t quit them.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 429