Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  He was also a part-time soldier, which helped to explain his square-shouldered stance. In 1905, he had joined Battery B of the Missouri National Guard and spent a few weeks each summer training with them. He had been promoted to corporal, which pleased him. Bess no doubt was surprised to learn that Harry had hoped to become a professional soldier and had taken special tutoring for the entrance examination for West Point the year after they graduated from high school. One day, it occurred to him that he ought to take a preliminary eye test at the Army Recruiting Station in Kansas City. They told him he did not have a chance to get into the U.S. Military Academy. So he decided to get a taste of military life, at least, in Battery B.

  Harry may have amused Bess with the story of his grandmother’s reaction when he came out to the farm in his National Guard uniform one day. All Harriet Louisa Young could think about were the gloating Kansans who had burned and looted the farm in the course of executing Order No. 11 in 1863. She told Harry never to wear his uniform home again.

  The passions of the Civil War had become quaint, almost amusing, to the younger generation. I don’t know what else Harry and Bess talked about that night, but the visit lasted two hours. When Harry returned to the Noland home, his eyes were aglow. “Well, I saw her,” he said.

  There is a glimpse of the awe and longing with which Harry Truman already regarded Bess Wallace in those words. He told the Nolands that he had asked Bess if he could call on her again, and the answer had been an offhand yes. The Nolands were forthwith warned that they were going to see a good deal of Cousin Harry from now on.

  But Independence was at least a four-hour trip one way from Grandview in a buggy, and the train connections were bad. Harry had to walk a mile from the farm to Grandview and wait for a Kansas City and Southern train, which was invariably late and did not take him directly to Independence. He had to walk a mile and a half along the tracks to the Kansas City terminal of the streetcars. As an alternative, he could drive the Truman family buggy into nearby Dodson, where he could catch an interurban streetcar, which required a transfer to another streetcar in Kansas City to get to Independence. Either way, the trip seldom took less than two hours. Inevitably – and to our great fortune - Harry and Bess began to communicate through the mails.

  The first few letters have been lost, but by the end of December 1910, Bess had begun saving his letters, a good sign, although Harry did not know it. I doubt if he ever found out how many of his letters Bess saved over the years. Everyone, including me, was astonished to discover some 1,600 letters from him, as well as hundreds more from Madge Gates Wallace, Mary Paxton, and other correspondents in the attic at 219 North Delaware Street after Bess Wallace Truman died. Included in this unique historical treasure trove, which is the foundation of this book, are hundreds of letters from Bess to these same correspondents.

  Harry’s first surviving letter revealed that they were exchanging favorite novels and that Bess had issued Harry an invitation to visit over the Christmas holidays. But he sadly informed her that it was out of the question.

  Nothing would please me better than to come to see you during the holidays or any other time for the matter of that, but Papa broke his leg the other day and I am chief nurse, next to my mother, besides being farm boss now. So you see I’ll be somewhat closely confined for some time to come. I hope you’ll let the invitation be a standing one though and I shall avail myself of it at the very first opportunity. . . .

  We haven’t quite got over the excitement yet. A horse pulled a big beam over on him in the barn. We were so glad he wasn’t killed we didn’t know what to do.

  If you see fit to let me hear from you sometimes, I shall certainly appreciate it. Farm life as an everyday affair is not generally exciting. Wishing you and all of you the very happiest New Year, I am

  Very Sincerely

  Harry S. Truman

  It is clear that Harry Truman was aware of the challenge he faced in his pursuit of Bess Wallace’s affection. In school, the distance between them had been social. Now the gap had been widened, not only geographically but psychologically. By going back to the farm, he had activated the classic conflict between town and country that was bred into every member of the Independence upper class.

  Let there be no misunderstanding about Harry Truman’s status. He was a farmer, as thoroughly and completely as any American who has ever dug a plow into the fertile soil of Missouri. On the Youngs’ 600 acres - a square mile of land - he and his father and brother Vivian were raising corn, wheat, and oats, as well as Black-Angus cattle and Hampshire hogs. As far as John Truman was concerned, it was a seven-day-a-week job, fifty-two weeks a year. He demanded as much work from his sons as he extracted from the hired hands, who frequently quit in exasperation at his sharp tongue and minimal wages. He expected his sons to be out on a gang plow wrestling a four-horse team across the fields each day at 5:00 a.m. If the furrows Harry plowed were not straight, “I heard about it from my father for the next year,” he said. “When it rained and we couldn’t plow or harvest, we’d take down the old scythe - and we had a dozen of them - and cut weeds in the fence corners and along the fences bordering the roads.”

  John Truman was a driven man. He had formed a company, J. A. Truman & Son, which took on the responsibility for paying off some $12,500 in debts he still owed from his financial collapse in 1901. By becoming a partner in that company, Harry Truman made himself equally liable for those debts. But he combined this loyalty to his father with a quiet determination to preserve his independence. When the Trumans and the hired hands trooped in from the fields to eat the lunch that Martha Ellen Truman had prepared for them, Harry surprised the hired hands by sitting down at the piano and playing Chopin or Liszt while they waited for the food to be served.

  He also continued to be an omnivorous reader, especially of history and biography. Beyond that habit, which went back to his school days, when he read every book in the Independence Library, his chief recreation was the Masonic Order. He founded a lodge in Grandview and traveled miles at night when he should have been resting or sleeping to administer degrees in other lodges. If he found any other consolation in this rural life, it was his mother’s company. He always had been her favorite child, and he reciprocated her affection with wholehearted admiration and gratitude.

  It was she who had noticed his bad eyesight when he was five and taken him in a farm wagon to Kansas City for an examination by a specialist. She knew that the thick glasses he had to wear prevented him from participating in sports like other boys his age and encouraged him to become a reader and a pianist. She selected many of the books he read in his early years. She had graduated from the Baptist Female College in Lexington, Missouri, where she majored in music and art. Between Martha Ellen Truman and her oldest son there was an intellectual as well as an emotional bond. He admired her caustic opinions about everything from windy preachers to crooked politicians and the blunt way she stated them.

  At first glance, this did not seem a good preparation to win the heart of Bess Wallace, a very different sort of woman. In fact, there seemed to be little in Harry Truman’s world that Bess Wallace would want to hear about. For the first year, the opening words of every letter he wrote her emphasized the distance between them. He addressed her as “My dear Bessie.” He did not know that her close friends, such as Mary Paxton, had abandoned that unwanted name. But Harry Truman had resources that were not apparent. He set out to make himself interesting to Bess Wallace.

  From his earliest letters, he never missed a chance to portray himself as a rugged outdoor man. In one letter, he told her that after sowing oats and hauling six tons of hay in a fierce wind, his face was so wind-burned “I look like raw beef or a confirmed booze fighter.” He described his farmer’s rags - “dirty and tattered and torn with hog snoot marks, splashed milk and other things too numerous to mention.” He casually added: “Mamma ropes me in once in a while and makes me exchange for a clean set, but they don’t feel right until I wear them a day
or two.” My favorite is his description of wrestling hogs to the ground to vaccinate them. “A 200-pound hog can almost jerk the ribs loose from your backbone when you get him by the hind leg. It is far and away the best exercise in the list. It beats Jack Johnson’s [the heavyweight champion] whole training camp as a muscle toughener.”

  At the same time, Harry displayed his taste in literature, music, and art to Bess. During his years as a bank clerk in Kansas City, he had attended the opera for a season and decided he did not like it nearly so much as classical piano music. He also had seen the great tragedians of the day, such as E. H. Sothern and Richard Mansfield, when they came to Kansas City. In an offhand, unpretentious way, Harry made it clear that he was no country bumpkin. But he also was honest enough to admit that he agreed with his Uncle Harrison, who “says he’d rather go to the Orpheum [a vaudeville theater] and laugh all evening than sit and grate the enamel off his false teeth to see Mansfield or Sothern or any other big gun.”

  This confession was as shrewd as it was honest. Very early, Harry Truman noticed that Bess Wallace loved a good laugh. He was soon amusing her with vivid glimpses of the comic side of country life. Here are some wry observations on the party line telephone: “When you want to use it you have to take down the receiver and listen while some good sister tells some other good sister who is not so wise how to make butter or how to raise chickens or when it is the right time in the moon to plant onion sets or something else equally important. About the time you think the world is coming to an end or some other direful calamity will certainly overtake you if you don’t get to express your feelings into that phone the good sister will quit and then if you are quick and have a good strong voice you can have your say, but you know confidently that everyone in the neighborhood has heard you.”

  His wit was even dryer when it came to farm manners: “They are endeavoring faithfully to better the farmers’ condition . . . all the time. You know our friend Roosevelt [Theodore] appointed a country life commission to spend the extra cash in the U.S. Treasury. Some fellow with a good heart has also invented a soup spoon that won’t rattle. I know he had farmers in mind when he did that. Some other good fellow has invented peas that are cubes instead of spheres so they won’t roll off the knife when you eat them. If I can get the seed I will certainly raise them. . . . Now if someone would invent a fork with a spring, so you could press it and spear a biscuit at arm’s length without having to reach over and incommode your neighbor - well he’d just simply be elected president, that’s all.”

  During a visit to Delaware Street, Harry heard Bess and Nellie Noland discuss Ethel Noland’s dislike of emotional excitement in religion. This inspired one of his best letters.

  I think you and Nellie could probably get up some religious excitement on Ethel’s part if you would do as a certain woman did Aunt Susan [his mother’s sister] was telling me about.

  You know they used to hold outdoor meetings when the weather was good and everyone for miles around attended and stayed sometimes for weeks. Along in the fifties they were holding a meeting not far from here and the preacher had exhorted and ranted and done everything else they usually do when they try to get something started, as they call it, but it was no use. He wasn’t a quitter though. Finally down one of the aisles one of the good sisters jumped out and began screaming and dancing up and down as they usually do when they get religion. The preacher made a dive for her with his hand extended, saying, “Oh, Sister I am so glad to see you come out and say you have religion.” Her answer between screams was, “I haven’t got it. I haven’t got it. There’s a lizard on my dress,” and she kept on dancing until Aunt Sue and someone else took her outside and one of those little lizards fell off her dress. Try it on Ethel. It will work I think.

  Like Bess, who had become an Episcopalian, Harry had “strayed from the Presbyterian fold,” although he still remembered his Sunday school days “very well.” He had become a member of the Baptist Church in Grandview, but he had very independent ideas about religion.

  I am by religion like everything else. I think there is more in acting than in talking. . . . We had a neighbor out here who could pray louder and talk more fervently in meetin’ than anyone I ever heard. He’d say in every prayer, “O Lord help this congregation to stop and think where they’s a going at.” We finally found that he beat his wife and did everything else that’s “ornery.”

  I think religion is something one should have on Wednesday and Thursday as well as Sunday. Therefore, I don’t believe that these protracted meetings do any real good. They are mostly excitement and when the excitement wears off people are as they always were.

  I like to play cards and dance as far as I know how and go to shows and do all the things they [the Baptists] said I shouldn’t but I don’t feel badly about it. I go when I feel like it and the good church members are glad to hear what it’s like. You see I’m a member but not a strenuous one.

  Another colorful aspect of farm life, horse trading (his father’s profession), inspired a lively letter and some significant thoughts about men and morals.

  A fellow traded me a horse yesterday. That is, he parted me from a hundred dollars and I have a horse. You know horse trading is the cause of the death of truth in America. When you go to buy they’ll tell you anything on earth to get your money. You simply have to use your own judgment if you have any. I haven’t much but I think I got my money’s worth. Can’t tell though until I work him a few days.

  A neighbor of ours once had a sale of his furniture and stock. He had a great many horses and some that were no good. He had one that was probably an octogenarian in the horse world. He was very aged anyway. This horse he wanted to sell to a poor lame man who had tried to buy it before the sale. So he took a quart of bad whiskey and soaked the poor lame one and then told him he wasn’t going to put the horse up. Well that fellow begged so hard that the horse was sold to him for $170. Just about $100 more than he was worth. The owner had a “buy bidder” to run him up. So that between the booze and the bidder he was mulcted for $100. O he the honest farmer. I have found that they sell gold bricks now. That is what rural delivery and party-line phones have done for our uplift.

  I am not a pessimist though. There are some honest ones and they are always well thought of even by crooks. They are always the last ones you get acquainted with too.

  We have moved around quite a bit and always the best people are hardest to know. I don’t know why that is, either. . . . It’s all a matter of viewpoint. A man’s mighty lucky if he has two.

  In this letter, Bess Wallace encountered one of Harry Truman’s most remarkable gifts, the ability to look at himself and other people, including his father, and see their shortcomings with a clear and steady gaze without relapsing into cynicism. He remained an optimist about himself, his fellow Americans, the future. Her father’s suicide had left Bess with a different attitude toward life. She was much closer to being a pessimist. Psychologists say that people who fall in love instinctively reach out for qualities in the other person that they sense they lack in themselves. I think this may explain why Bess Wallace was attracted to Harry Truman. But it was an attraction that had to overcome deep doubts and hesitations.

  In mid-April 1911, continuing the streak of bad luck that had been haunting the Trumans since his father went bankrupt in 1901, a calf broke Harry’s leg. That, too, was used for Farmer Truman’s pursuit of the athletic Miss Wallace. He joked about the injury, declaring it reminded him of the Irishwoman who mourned her husband after he drowned in the Big Blue River by howling: “To think that Mike should a crossed the great ocean and thin be drowned in a hole like the dirty Blue. Tis a disgrass indeed it is.” Harry said that he felt the same way about having a suckling calf break his leg. In another letter, he casually mentioned that the calf weighed a mere 300 pounds.

  Harry’s broken leg soon healed, but it became apparent that 1911 was not going to be a good year for farmers. It simply refused to rain. Even the Trumans’ vegetable garde
n failed. “We are living on bread and bacon with some canned goods thrown in,” Harry wrote.

  This fact did not prevent Harry from discussing with remarkable candor the probable state of mind of a mutual friend named Minnie Clements, who had just married. Bess remarked that she suspected Minnie wished she could turn back the clock. Harry replied that he thought it took several months for that kind of disillusion to set in.

  They tell me that for the first few months she can burn the biscuits every morning if she chooses and it’s all right, but after that she learns what a good cook her ma-in-law was. And . . . he can be as no-account and good-for-nothing as he wants to be but he soon learns how his pa-in-law made his money. Then it’s ho for Reno or South Dakota [divorce mill capitals in 1911]. It’s certainly awful what pessimists those two places have made of people. I am a Catholic when it comes to divorce. . . .

  Marriage was clearly on Harry’s mind. On June 22, 1911, less than a year after he appeared at the door of 219 Delaware Street with Mrs. Wallace’s cake plate, he proposed. He began obliquely, commenting that the drought was making water as much of a luxury as diamonds. He then took the plunge: “Speaking of diamonds, would you wear a solitaire on your left hand should I get it? Now that is a rather personal or pointed question provided you take it for all it means. 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. I don’t think so now but I can’t keep from telling you what I think of you.”