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 portra
it 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.
Though Wilson maintained a voting address in rural Platte County, his home was a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on East Linwood Boulevard, Kansas City, and it was there before sunup one morning in October 1932, just three weeks before the election, that he complained to his wife Ida of not feeling well. As only she and a few close friends knew, he had been suffering with bleeding ulcers. She immediately telephoned his brother, R. P. Wilson, a physician, who, with his wife and son, arrived as it was getting light.
At six o’clock Francis M. Wilson died. When someone mentioned calling the mortician, Ida Wilson said no. Once the mortician knew, the news would be out. She said to phone Tom Pendergast.
Dr. Wilson made the call, telling Pendergast only that he should come at once. At seven o’clock T.J. arrived, breathing heavily from the climb up the stairs. The Wilson boy answered the door. “Mr. Pendergast didn’t ask why or what or when,” he later recounted. “He said, ‘Have you called the mortician?’ ” Told they had not, T.J. asked what their wishes were about a replacement for Wilson in the election. The family said they thought it should be Guy B. Park, a Platte County circuit judge and neighbor, to which T.J. responded, “Who the hell is Guy Park?” After some discussion, Pendergast, who kept standing the whole time, told them he had to leave and that they should speak to no one until he called back.
They waited for nearly four hours, the body of Francis Wilson on the bed in the adjoining room. At eleven o’clock Pendergast called and said only three words, “Call the mortician.”
Thus it was that white-haired, sober-looking Guy B. Park went to the governor’s mansion, and Harry Truman did not.
Harry Truman had wanted more than anything to be the nominee for governor, and well before T.J. ever picked Francis Wilson. Encouraged by friends and complimentary comments in several papers suggesting he would make a good chief executive for the state, he had been hugely disappointed when Pendergast refused him the nod. Then came the stunning news of Wilson’s death the afternoon of October 12, the same afternoon, it happened, that Harry and thirty-five thousand others were celebrating the completion of the road program at reputedly the biggest country barbecue ever put on in Jackson County. “It was my big day,” he remembered bitterly.
Apparently he lost no time in getting to Tom Pendergast, only to be told once again he was not the choice, that Guy Park had been decided on. That night Harry drove to the little resort town of Excelsior Springs north of the river and checked into a hotel to remain in seclusion for several days.
His anguish over his future was deep-seated and painful. Having served two consecutive terms in the court, he was ineligible to run again for county judge, and unlike so many others in public life, he had no law practice or insurance business to fall back on, nor any private income. He questioned seriously whether he had made the right choice in life. In a letter of advice to a nephew, he wrote, “It will be much better for you to go to work for a bank or some mercantile institution and get real experience than to get a political job where you learn nothing and lose out when the administration changes.” With the end of his term in 1934, Harry Truman would be fifty years old, and without the blessing of Tom Pendergast there was really not a lot more he could do in politics, whatever his aspirations. As he himself said, everything would be all right only as “long as the Big Boss believes in me….”
The previous June he had traveled to Chicago with T.J. as part of the Missouri delegation to the Democratic National Convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt. Pendergast had announced himself for former United States Senator James Reed of Missouri, who had begun his career as mayor of Kansas City in the era of Alderman Jim. The brilliant, egotistical Reed had been one of the “nine willful men” in the Senate who killed the League of Nations, and Harry consequently had no use for him. Pendergast’s enthusiasm was mostly a pose to please Reed. In reality he was playing a somewhat complicated game of a kind new to Harry. Pendergast, Harry was later to say, “understood political situations and how to handle them better than any man I have ever known.”
T.J. had already made a special trip to confer with Roosevelt at Albany before the convention. James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s highly influential political adviser, had also been warmly received by the Kansas City organization at a lunch at the Muehlebach. If anything, T.J. was more enthusiastic about Roosevelt this time than in 1924. Still, he put on a show for Reed under the lights at Chicago Stadium, and Harry, swallowing his distaste for Reed, went through the motions, the dutiful soldier, until the Big Boss began letting votes go to Roosevelt, a little at a time, exactly as Jim Farley wanted, to keep the Roosevelt tally steadily building with each ballot. At the end, Pendergast, Harry, the whole Jackson County delegation had come home extremely pleased with the outcome.
By the following spring of 1933 Harry felt he was more in favor than ever before. “I had a fine talk with T.J. yesterday,” he reported to Bess in high spirits, “and I am still on top. He told me to do as I pleased with the county payroll…he’d put the organization in line behind me. He also told me I could be Congressman or collector. Think of that a while.”
The power of Tom Pendergast had become as great as or possibly greater than that of any political boss in the country. Major changes had taken place, promising larger roles for nearly everyone of ability in the organization.
In 1930, the year Harry was reelected presiding judge, T.J. had at last resolved the old, nettling problem of the Rabbits by simply convincing Joe Shannon that he belonged in Congress. The silver-haired, silver-tongued Shannon was put nicely out of the way in Washington, where he served six terms in the House, distinguishing himself as an apostle of the old-time faith of Thomas Jefferson. Only those who had been through the Goat-Rabbit struggles of past decades could appreciate what a singular victory this was for the Big Boss, and all so smoothly done.
The year after, in 1931, Kansas City achieved “home rule,
” which meant control of its own police, who until then had been under state authority. Thus for all practical purposes, the organization now ran the police department.
In 1932, the Missouri legislature failed to establish new congressional districts as required by Congress, with the result that every candidate for the House had to be elected at large, instead of by districts. The possibilities in this for increased Pendergast power were almost too great to imagine, since the big Jackson County vote—the Pendergast vote—now bore directly on all congressional elections everywhere in the state. T.J. could not only name his own governor, but thirteen men for Congress as well. And that fall he had but one disappointment when Bennett Champ Clark of eastern Missouri made a vigorous campaign for the Senate and won, in open opposition to the Kansas City organization. (This was the same Bennett Clark, the son of Missouri’s famous Champ Clark, who at the railroad station in France had fooled Harry Truman into believing an enemy air attack was imminent.) So by the start of 1933, with Park in office as governor, Pendergast was riding higher than ever. The Capitol in Jefferson City was spoken of now as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” With Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal taking over in Washington, the prospects for the future looked boundless. In the small office at 1908 Main Street, a portrait of FDR now held the place of honor over T.J.’s rolltop desk.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 436