The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  The farm was worth quite a bit—$58,000 according to the Truman family’s 1910 tax return—but it was mortgaged to the hilt. There was a herd of about four dozen cows, about 50 pigs, 14 horses, 65 chickens, 40 acres of oats, 100 acres of corn, 60 acres of wheat, 40 acres of clover, 3 acres of alfalfa, and an acre of potatoes. Work began before sunrise, often in bitter cold, and ended with sunset, the heat seething in summer. In letters, Harry described the loneliness of his days on the farm. “I have memorized a whole book while plowing forty acres,” he wrote. “When I run out of something to think of I count the revolutions of the plow wheel and figure how many acres there are left.” Meanwhile the family continued to struggle. “We are living on bread and bacon with some canned goods thrown in,” Harry wrote. The farm, he recorded, was “a total failure.” Gone were the dreams of piano stardom. There was no inclination that the future held anything else for him—until the cake-plate incident.

  One day in 1910, twenty-six-year-old Harry was visiting his cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland. Across the street lived Bess Wallace with her mother, Mrs. Madge Wallace. (Bess and her mother had moved to this house, at 219 North Delaware—the home of Bess’s maternal grandparents, which the family had purchased back in 1867.) On this day, there was a cake plate at the Nolands’ that needed returning to the Wallaces. Harry saw opportunity. He walked the plate across the street and knocked on the door, and there appeared Bess Wallace.

  She was twenty-five now—the oldest Wallace child. Her mother was alone, so Bess was staring down a future of spinsterhood, taking care of Mrs. Wallace. The family had suffered terribly since Harry had last seen Bess. Everyone in town knew that Bess’s father, David Wallace, had taken his own life while lying in the family’s bathtub. No one knew why, though it was clear he suffered from alcoholism and financial problems. Bess was home and heard the gunshot. She was found minutes later pacing behind the house with clenched fists. The Wallaces had left Independence for Colorado for some years, to recover in privacy. Now, seven years after her father’s death, Bess found Harry Truman at her door—tan-faced, with the lithe body of a hardworking farmer.

  “Aunt Ella [Harry’s aunt Ella Noland] told me to thank your mother for the cake,” Harry said. “I guess I ought to thank her too. I had a big piece.”

  Bess smiled. “Come in,” she said.

  On that evening, Harry and Bess began a relationship that was not to end until Harry passed away sixty-two years later.

  ///

  Not that Bess was easy to get. Harry had to work hard for her. In the days before cars, it took several hours to travel from the Grandview farm to Independence by train. The exciting new technology—telephones—did not often function as advertised. So Harry’s courtship unfolded through letters, hundreds of them, in which he poured out his affection along with depths of self-doubt.

  He was awkward socially, he admitted. “It seems to me,” he wrote her, “that I never manage to say the proper thing in the proper place.” He confessed his dim financial prospects: “It is a family failing of ours to be poor financiers.” To get her to come to Grandview on Labor Day in 1911, he promised to build her a tennis court on the farm, since she was an ace player. He spent hours rolling out a court. His mother butchered chickens for a special dinner and even wallpapered some rooms to make the house look nicer. But Bess failed to show up, due to bad weather, she claimed. When Harry asked her to marry him, she said no.

  Truman was nearing his sixth year as a farmer. With the exception of his father, all the most important people in his life were women. Mamma Truman was still central to his everyday life. His best friends were his cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland. And then there was “Bessie.” Harry and his father, John Anderson, were business partners who had little in common. “He thought I was about right,” Harry recalled, “and I know he was.” Outside of farm work, they connected on one subject: politics.

  For years, John Anderson Truman had taken his family to Jackson County town picnics to hear local politicians speak. “Politics is all he ever advises me to neglect the farm for,” Harry wrote Bess. Harry had studied the lives of all the American presidents. His hero was Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States (1829–1837) and the founder of the Democratic Party, for whom Jackson County, Missouri, was named. Jackson’s adventures in war and politics made his life story read like an adventure novel. “I have been tossed upon the waves of fortune,” Jackson famously said. He was the first American president to come from the common people—people like the Trumans. “If Andrew Jackson can be President, anybody can!” was a common quip of Jackson’s day.

  In the fall of 1912 the presidential election was the talk of the Truman dinner table for weeks. Not in Truman’s lifetime had an election been so bitterly fought. A schism tore apart the Republican Party. The incumbent president, William Howard Taft, had won the nomination, leading a humiliated Republican opponent, Theodore Roosevelt, to strike out independently. With his newly created Bull Moose Party, his magnanimity, and his wild oratory style, Theodore Roosevelt riveted Americans. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson had only two years of political experience, and none in national politics. Less than a month before the election, a would-be assassin fired a gunshot into Theodore Roosevelt’s chest, the bullet passing through the pages of a speech he was about to give. With the bullet lodged less than an inch from his heart, he delivered the speech, then went to the hospital and survived. Two weeks later Vice President James Sherman died, leaving the Republican Taft with no running mate.

  “Nobody talks anything but election,” Harry wrote Bess on November 6, the day after the contest, which Wilson won, becoming the twenty-eighth president of the United States. The brutality of this election made Truman philosophical about his future and politics itself, especially when his father threw his hat in the ring, running and winning the local office of road overseer.

  “Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man,” Harry wrote Bess. “Between hot air and graft he usually loses not only his head but his money and friends as well. Still, if I were rich I’d just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos. Success seems to me to be merely a point of view anyway . . .

  “To succeed financially,” Harry concluded, “a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egotist or a fool or a ward boss tool.”

  ///

  By Truman’s thirtieth birthday, America was speeding toward its destiny as the world’s first modern global superpower. All the ingredients needed to become the wellspring of modernity were at the ready: coal, oil, gold, vast lands of fertile soil, endless human ingenuity, and the political freedom to put that ingenuity to work. In 1914, America’s movie industry was booming for the first time. Charlie Chaplin starred in his first thirty Hollywood films that year. Wall Street had become the world’s most important economic center, while Detroit’s motorcar industry was revolutionizing human life as nothing ever had. Henry Ford’s Model T had become an unprecedented consumer phenomenon, spreading the gospel of motoring and Americanism everywhere it went. Overseas, cars were still toys for the wealthy. In America, they were fueling the rise of a new middle class.

  In Europe in 1914, the outlook appeared vastly different. Europe’s societies were centuries older, and tensions had been building for years. Imperial rivalries and competition for resources were about to turn violent. When assassins shot dead the archduke Franz Ferdinand—heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—in broad daylight on a Sarajevo street on June 28, 1914, Americans took little notice. When huge armies mobilized, empowered as never before by the industrial revolution, few in the United States felt the danger. During the first two weeks in August, Germany declared war on Russia, France, and Belgium; Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia; and Britain and France declared war on Austria-Hungary and Germany. Still, Americans believed the oceans protected them, like a giant moat.

  Truman spent 1914 farming in obscurity, and chasing the love of his life. Two things happen
ed that year that altered his situation considerably. His mother surprised him with a wad of money, cash she had squirreled away so that her oldest son could buy the family’s first automobile. For $650, Harry purchased a used 1911 Stafford, built right in Kansas City. The car put his ambitions on wheels, especially when it came to Bess Wallace. (In 1914 nothing worked to woo a woman like a sixty-mile-per-hour motorcar.) Harry became a regular guest at the Wallaces’ on Sundays. Bess’s brothers George and Frank took to him, with his easygoing charm, but Bess’s mother, Mrs. Wallace, was ice cold. “Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry,” recalled one of the Noland family. “And she says, ‘You don’t want to marry that farm boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’”

  Also in 1914, Truman’s father died. John Anderson Truman had been convalescing from a dangerous intestinal surgery, at the farmhouse, with his son by his side. “I had been sitting with him and watching a long time,” Harry recalled. “I nodded off. When I woke up, he was dead.” Harry was devastated. He now had the full responsibility of the farm to himself—a farm deep in debt.

  He was desperate for money, as without it, there would be no marriage, nor any escape from the monotony of the farm. So he entered into a series of get-rich-quick investments. He traveled to Texas in 1916 because, as he wrote, “I am convinced that I can make some money down here.” He did not. Later that year he invested more than he could afford to lose in a zinc and copper mine in Commerce, just over the Missouri border in Oklahoma. “My money is in now and I am feeling better over it every minute,” he wrote Bess. “After next week the money will begin to return . . . If the bloomin’ thing fails to connect I’ll be so disappointed I won’t know straight up from crossways.” The mine failed to turn any profit, but still, Harry entertained his visions of grandeur. “My ship’s going to come in yet,” he wrote Bess. “I’ve been crazy about you since the day I met you . . . Who knows, I may be His Excellency the Governor of Montana someday (hee haw). How would you like to be Mrs. Governor?”

  In 1916 he set his sights on an oil-drilling operation, and with some partners he formed a company that became Morgan Oil. The company leased well sites across four states, then offered investors shares of these leases, hoping that the drills would strike black gold. He was determined to change the course of his life, but events overseas were about to change it for him.

  On May 7, 1915, the German submarine U-20 fired a torpedo into the hull of the RMS Lusitania as the ship was steaming past the Irish coast, bound for Liverpool. The Lusitania was the world’s grandest passenger ship. Like the Titanic before it (the Titanic sank in 1912), the Lusitania had captured the imagination of millions when it first launched. The Washington Post called the ship “Queen of the Waves,” “the wonder of the maritime world.” The German navy sent it to the bottom of the sea, killing 1,198 passengers. There were no soldiers aboard, but there were 128 American citizens. German officials claimed that the ship was carrying munitions from New York to British troops, and thus the killings were permissible according to international law. (While the British denied this claim, evidence in recent years suggests the Germans were correct—the Lusitania was apparently carrying munitions.)

  Americans were repulsed. “The country was horrified,” recalled Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. If President Wilson asked for war, Lodge said, “he would have had behind him . . . the enthusiastic support of the whole American people.” When German leaders announced unrestricted naval warfare—the right to sink American merchant ships—anti-German fervor swept across the United States. At countless lunch counters, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, and frankfurters—named for the German city Frankfurt—became hot dogs.

  As a novice oil speculator, Truman saw a striking opportunity. The war was going to make oil prices skyrocket. If his Morgan Oil drills would only strike . . . “I am simply on needle points,” he wrote Bess. He convinced her to invest in Morgan Oil, and he convinced his mother too. When the wells failed to produce, the investment went south; Bess lost her money, Mamma Truman was forced to take another mortgage on the farm, and Harry was left with near worthless shares of a company hanging on by a thread.

  He was overcome with gloom. “My luck should surely change,” he wrote Bess on January 23, 1917. “Sometime I should win. I have tried to stick. Worked, really did, like thunder for ten years to get that old farm in line for some big production. Have it in shape and have had a crop failure every year. Thought I’d change my luck, got a mine, and see what I did get. Tried again in the other long chance, oil.

  “If I can’t win straight,” Harry concluded, “I’ll continue to lose.”

  ///

  In March 1917, German submarines sank three unarmed American merchant ships—the Vigilancia, the City of Memphis, and the Illinois—killing many aboard. Reaction in America was violent. “[Germany] is firing upon our ships, sinking them, destroying or endangering the lives of our citizens,” the New York Times responded. “This is the very essence of war.” When President Wilson polled his cabinet, all ten men voted for war, some with tears streaming down their faces. On April 6, Wilson stood before Congress in the United States Capitol and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson’s speech would be remembered as one of the century’s milestones.

  “I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States,” he said. It would be “a war to end all wars,” he declared, to “make the world safe for democracy.”

  “I was stirred in heart and soul by the war messages of Woodrow Wilson,” Harry later said. “I thought I ought to go.” He decided to abandon his oil investment. (Months later, when he would be fighting in Europe, a well called the Teeter Oil Pool would strike it big, right next to one of his own. To quote one of Harry’s future friends and political advisors, George Allen: “The difference between a bold enterpriser and a sucker is no more than the thickness of a cigarette paper.”) At thirty-three, Harry was well beyond draft age, but he ventured to the National Guard office in Kansas City and enlisted. On June 22, 1917, he signed papers accepting a commission as a first lieutenant in the 129th Field Artillery Regiment. On his enlistment papers he scribbled his occupation as “farmer, oil.” He cheated on his eye exam to pass his medical by memorizing the letters on the chart before he was asked to take his glasses off. On the Fourth of July, 1917, he showed up at Bess’s house in his new uniform. She wept on his shoulder and asked that they get married. After all those years of courtship, he refused: “I don’t think it would be right for me, to ask you to tie yourself to a prospective cripple—or a sentiment.”

  Millions of young men had registered for the country’s first military draft since the Civil War. Truman put his sister, Mary Jane, in charge of the family farm. In September 1917 he jumped into the Stafford and pulled out of town, headed for an army camp in Oklahoma. Wars had a way of making heroes of ordinary men. For Truman, the war was also an escape from a life that seemed doomed to failure.

  7

  MOTORING THROUGH THE FLATLANDS of Oklahoma in the Stafford, Truman spotted Camp Doniphan through his windshield. It was a tent city spread over hundreds of acres of Comanche Indian reservation, outside the town of Lawton, on land so flat it looked like it had been shaped by a scythe. Soldiers came from all over to pass basic training at Don­iphan. Truman would remember his six months there in the winter of 1917–1918 as brutal.

  Drought had ravaged Oklahoma, and wind blew dust into everything. “Dust in my teeth, eyes, hair, nose, and down my neck,” he wrote of life at the camp. Winter moved in and unleashed a furious blizzard. “It was the coldest winter they ever experienced in the Midwest,” recalled one of Harry’s fellow soldiers at Doniphan, Floyd Ricketts. “We were in what were actually tents, and we had what they called Sibley stoves. We kept that thing going red hot all night long.”

  Each unit at Doniphan had to organize a canteen (a supply shop), and Harry wa
s put in charge of his battery’s. He partnered with Eddie Jacobson of Kansas City—“a fine Jewish boy,” Truman called him—who had been in the mercantile business and was experienced in handling cash. They staffed a tailor and a barber, and their canteen was quickly doing a booming business. Meanwhile, Harry was learning to soldier. The British, French, and Germans were employing chemical weapons—chlorine gas shells—on battlefields in Europe. At Doniphan, soldiers in training feared the gashouse, where they learned to put gas masks on their faces and on their horses while being exposed to the poison. If the gashouse inspired fear, these soldiers could only imagine what real combat would entail.

  Due to the success of his canteen, Truman’s superiors gave him the opportunity to test for a captain’s position, and he passed. He received orders to ship out ahead of his unit to attend Overseas School Detail in France, so he closed out the canteen and sold his Stafford for $200. On March 20, 1918, he boarded a train. In New York he loaded up on a half dozen pairs of glasses, all pince-nez—the kind that pinch the nose, with no arms, since the arms would get in the way of the seal when he donned his gas mask on the battlefield. On March 28 he penned a last letter to Bess before he set sail. “It is eleven o’clock,” he wrote, “and I’ve got to arise at three in order to get my goods and chattels in readiness to go on the boat, but I am going to write you one last letter on this side on the last day I can . . . Remember that I’ve always loved you and shall continue to no matter what happens.”

  On the day before Easter Sunday, 1918, Truman stood aboard the ship George Washington as it steamed from New York Harbor’s choppy tide. He was nearing his thirty-fourth birthday, standing shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers, most of them far younger than he, many by more than fifteen years. He had a picture of his mother and his sister in his right pocket, and one of Bess in his left, the latter inscribed: “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”