Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  With a grandmother, three aunts, and nine girlfriends on North Delaware Street, I had, until this point, a lot of other people to distract me from thinking about my mother very much, except when she was telling me what not to do. In Washington, with no one around to spoil me - my father was spending fourteen hours a day learning how to be a senator - her sternness diminished. I was ten years old, not exactly the age of maturity but old enough to appreciate Mother’s wry observations on the foibles of neighbors and politicians. In private, she was as irreverent toward the high and mighty as Dad often was in public. We went sightseeing together at all the standard places, from the Washington Monument to the White House. We shopped at Woodward and Lothrop’s and other stores and feasted at a wonderful old ice-cream parlor on Connecticut Avenue. That year, I think Bess discovered for the first time that a daughter could be a friend as well as a responsibility.

  One of our favorite adventures was the time Mother and I came close to washing the dishes at the Connecticut Avenue soda store. We had ordered two of their huge chocolate sodas and were sitting there, smiling at each other in comradely anticipation when Mother exclaimed: “I don’t think I have any money with me.”

  She peered into her purse and discovered she was right. “Do you have any change?” she asked. I shook my head. I used all my change to go to the movies. Mother dived to the bottom of her purse and began dredging up nickels and dimes that had wandered down there. She finally produced thirty-four cents. The sodas arrived, and we gazed at their foamy, chocolatey, whipped-cream-topped splendor and wondered if we should send them back. We could not remember exactly how much they cost. “Oh let’s take a chance,” Mother said.

  We polished them off and waited breathlessly for the check. It was thirty cents. We got home with four cents between us, feeling like conspirators.

  On another outing, I was wearing a new crepe dress. We got caught in a cloudburst and my dress began to shrink until it was above my knees. Mother understood exactly how I felt. We dashed into Woodward and Lothrop, and she bought a new dress for me so we could go home on the bus without feeling embarrassed. Believe it or not, I was a very shy ten-year-old.

  The Washington into which we Trumans settled in 1935 was a contradictory town. It still had much of its sleepy, southern pace. Traffic was light. It was the depths of the Depression, and few people were getting paid enough to own a car. Everybody rode the trolleys and buses, even such personages as U.S. senators. I remember sitting on the bus one afternoon trying to get a head start on my homework. With no warning, I was whacked on the head by a folded newspaper. I looked around furiously for the culprit. There sat Senator Truman, laughing fiendishly.

  The Washington of 1935 still placed a premium on good manners and the rules of etiquette. I will never forget driving up to the door of the White House with Mother. A butler came out, and I solemnly deposited Mrs. Truman’s engraved calling card on his silver tray. The butler nodded politely, and we drove away. On Thursday, wives of senators were “at home” to pour tea for anyone who chose to visit. Congressmen’s wives were at home on another afternoon, and cabinet wives had their day. Always, on silver trays were little piles of calling cards with their corners turned down.

  Along with this sedate formality, political excitement throbbed through 1935 Washington. It had become the news capital of the nation. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt became president and launched the New Deal to rescue the nation from economic collapse, press associations and metropolitan newspapers had tripled their Washington staffs. The center of the excitement was the president, with his magnetism, his courage, his confidence that Americans could defeat the gray monster, this Depression that was sapping hope and vitality from so many lives. From his electrifying inaugural address, in which he announced that there was “nothing to fear but fear itself,” to the whirlwind of reform and political experimentation he unleashed in his first 100 days, FDR had acquired almost mythic dimensions. He was “the boss, the dynamo, the works,” wrote Arthur Krock in The New York Times. Magazine publisher W. M. Kiplinger declared he had never known any president “as omnipotent as this Roosevelt.”

  FDR’s New Dealers had taken control of the capital. From boardinghouses in old brownstone mansions on G Street, R Street, New Hampshire Avenue, and Twenty-first Street, they trooped to the new government agencies with alphabet-soup names, the NRA (National Recovery Administration), the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). The newspapers were full of stories about these new celebrities, such as Hugh “Ironpants” Johnson, until recently head of the NRA, and Harold “The Old Curmudgeon” Ickes, head of the WPA, and Harry Hopkins, the only New Dealer Senator Truman had met before he came to Washington. An ex-social worker, Hopkins was supposedly closer to Roosevelt than any other member of the White House “brain trust.”

  By 1935, other people in Washington were competing with the president and his New Dealers for headlines. Chief among them was a man who had decided he could go Roosevelt one better - Senator Huey Long of Louisiana. A scary, corrupt demagogue, he had his own program, Share Our Wealth, with its own slogan, “Every Man a King.” He had broken with Roosevelt. He said he did not like the way the president said, “fine, fine, fine,” to the conservative majority leader of the Senate, Joe Robinson of Arkansas, and “fine, fine, fine” to Huey. Senator Long wanted, among other things, to limit the fortunes of the rich to $5 million and give every family in the country a “homestead grant” of $6,000, as well as free radios, cars, and washing machines. The senator held forth on this program to the Senate in speeches that seldom lasted less than four hours.

  At the other end of the political spectrum, the American Liberty League began accusing FDR of planning to “Sovietize” America. After two years of relative quiescence, conservatives were beginning to find a lot wrong with the New Deal. They had a potent ally in Father Charles E. Coughlin, the Royal Oak, Michigan, “radio priest,” who claimed 45 million listeners, and received as many as 1 million letters after a broadcast. Sleek and angry, Father Coughlin headed something called the National Union for Social Justice, which claimed 7.5 million members. He had originally supported FDR, but by 1934, he was starting to attack him, in spite of desperate efforts by Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a future Democratic president, to heal the breach. Father Coughlin had begun to think that two European statesmen, Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy, had better ways of dealing with the world crisis. He particularly admired the way they had banned freedom of speech in their countries. He called for a similar ban in America as a first step to getting rid of the “Jew Deal.”

  Buoyed by Democratic gains in the 1934 election, FDR decided on a bold legislative program to counter these assaults from the left and right. He announced a second New Deal, which would be launched by a second 100 days. On the agenda were social security, unemployment insurance, a federal slum-clearance program, a national labor-relations board, and an inheritance tax. Conservatives in both parties screamed socialism, and the battle was on. Roosevelt had to zig and zag to hold together his precarious coalition of southern Democrats, northern labor, big city political machines, and blacks. One of his climactic zags gave Bess a front row seat at a moment of rare political drama.

  The president decided to veto the bonus bill, which would have paid $2 billion to veterans of World War I. He delivered the veto message in person to a joint session of Congress, and each senator and representative was allowed one gallery ticket. Senator Truman gave his ticket to Bess, and she squeezed into the packed benches to hear FDR argue forcefully against raising the deficit any higher than he was boosting it on his own. Her excitement was intensified by her awareness that her husband disagreed with the president on the issue and had voted for the bill.

  Bess also enjoyed meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, who was beginning to emerge as a power in her own right in 1935. The meeting was not an intimate one. Bess was only one of a swarm of senatorial wives invited to the White House for tea. She and the First
Lady shook hands and exchanged a few words about the problems of getting settled in Washington. Like most Democratic women, Mother admired Eleanor Roosevelt’s energy. She traveled 40,000 miles a year, acting as a roving reporter for her crippled husband. She gave weekly press conferences, wrote a newspaper column, and had a twice-a-week radio show. Bess wondered how she also found time to be a gracious hostess at the White House.

  Although Bess enjoyed most aspects of their new life in the nation’s capital, the pull of home remained strong. She spent at least an hour every day writing letters to her family, above all, to her mother. She even arranged to have a special delivery letter arrive each Sunday so her mother would not be “blue” all day - as Madge Wallace was quick to tell her when a letter did not come.

  On June 7, 1935, a day or two after Gunston Hall’s term ended, Bess and Harry packed me and most of our possessions (the apartment had been rented furnished) into their car and headed for Independence.

  The day after she arrived at 219 North Delaware Street, Bess gave an interview to the Kansas City Star reporter that demonstrated her political astuteness. She said she had found Washington, D.C., “warmly social” and yet “home was best of all.” She praised Eleanor Roosevelt’s “graciousness, her ability to say the right thing at the right time,” and avowed that no one heard a word of criticism of her in Washington social circles. (Conservatives were beginning to zero in on Mrs. Roosevelt as a prime target of opportunity.) Bess had kind words for the cabinet wives and for Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who had “a remarkable memory for names and faces. Then she told of watching FDR deliver his veto of the bonus bill and neatly neutralized her husband’s opposition to the president on the bill by declaring this chance to “see and hear” Mr. Roosevelt had strengthened her faith in him.

  After a week at home mending a few political fences, Senator Truman went back to Washington, where Congress seemed to be in more or less permanent session. Bess and I stayed in Independence. He was miserable, alone there in the capital. Never before, not even in his courting days, were his letters so full of yearning for Bess, and for me, his daughter, who was having a grand reunion with the Henhouse Hicks on North Delaware Street: “Your card was a lifesaver this morning. I have never in my life spent such a lonesome night. I went home at nine-thirty after I’d talked to you [on the telephone] and when I opened the apartment door I thought I heard Margaret say, ‘Hello Dad,’ - and I asked, well where is mother, as usual, and then I walked all around to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, read the Congressional Record, put a sheet on your bed, and turned in. Every time I’d hear that young lady in the next apartment I would be sure my family were coming in. We’ll never do it again. . . .”

  There was no need for us to have returned home so early in June. The lease on the apartment was not due to expire until June 30, when Senator Truman moved to a hotel. There were, as we will soon see, plenty of other apartments that could have been rented on a month-to-month basis. The weather was not the reason. It was hot in Washington in June, but Missouri was not exactly the place to go if you wanted to beat the heat. Congress was supposed to adjourn eventually, but on June 20, reporting a rumor of a finish on July 10, Dad glumly wrote: “Don’t bet on it.” He hinted desperately that he would welcome a return.

  On June 21, reporting a call he made to one of Bess’ friends who had been ill, Dad wrote: “She answered the phone herself and said she was better and that she missed you a lot and wished you were back. I’ll meet the train any day.”

  Bess ignored these hints. Harry Truman was making a painful discovery. There was a limit to how much Bess could give herself to him if it involved separation from her mother. She was a divided woman. Her sense of responsibility for Madge Gates Wallace’s happiness went deeper than either of them could understand. It was simply a fact, a fundamental response that was too embedded in Bess’ feelings to resist.

  Writing more as a biographer than as a daughter, I can see a sort of rough justice at work. There was a part of Harry Truman’s soul - where he spoke in solitude to history and his God - that Bess could not reach. Here we are encountering a part of her soul that neither his love for her nor her love for him could touch - that dark, heartbreaking need to console Madge Gates Wallace for the wound fate had inflicted on her.

  At times, I wonder if it was an even more complex need. As we shall see, Bess was happiest when she could share herself not only with her husband and her mother, but with the rest of the Wallace family. In some primary region of her heart, she endlessly relived their original retreat to 219 North Delaware Street, their drawing together in anguish and grief and consolation after her father’s death.

  Again, I am playing psychologist, stepping outside the circle of love in which I usually view my parents. Love is not synonymous with understanding. Love persisted between Harry and Bess, even while they struggled to cope with their conflicting needs. In June 1935, Bess responded warmly to a letter from her husband on their sixteenth wedding anniversary. He wondered if she was sorry she married a “financial failure.” She told him she did not have a single regret.

  They promptly got into a fight over a number of department-store bills that the senator sent her, asking if they were “all right.” He apologized for “having to talk money and bills and I wouldn’t if I were a millionaire.” Bess found this remark irritating.

  Her wrath was compounded by a rumor she picked up from Emma Griggs, mother of John Griggs, one of the Senate office staff from Missouri. Johnnie had apparently told his mother that the senator was miserable without his wife and daughter and spent almost every evening on the town in search of consolation. Mrs. Griggs seemed to have wondered if this involved chorus girls or lady lobbyists. Bess added to these peeves a fierce rebuke because Harry had gone to the office picnic over the Fourth of July. She did not approve of him fraternizing in a bathing suit with his young secretaries while she was in Independence. She warned him that it could lead to damaging gossip of the sort Mrs. Griggs already was spreading.

  Money was a frequent source of irritation between them at the time. In mid-July, Bess suggested that instead of renting another apartment, they build a house. Harry said he’d “like very much” to build but the cost daunted him. Bess thought they could do it for $8,500, but he thought $10,000 was more likely to be the figure; then there would be another $2,500 for a lot and at least $2,500 for furniture. “You can see how it piles up,” he wrote. There was no need to remind her that his salary was only $10,000 a year.

  Their chronic cash shortage made him feel guilty: “Maybe I can make a gamble [in some investment] next fall and hit a pot of gold.” He tormented himself for failing to take a chance on an investment opportunity that had come his way in the previous fall: “If I’d played my hunch last fall we’d have enough to build two houses.”

  Meanwhile, Congress stayed in session. There was a veritable parade of major bills on the agenda from the Social Security Act to the controversial soak-the-rich Wealth Tax Act, which boosted income taxes for the upper brackets and took a big bite out of inheritances. The brawl over this bill alone made the idea of an early adjournment laughable.

  There was some truth to Mrs. Griggs’ gossip about Senator Truman going out almost every night. It was practically unavoidable. Everyone who knew his bachelor status hurled invitations at him. Somewhat defensively, the senator sent his wife elaborate reports on the outings. One of the more interesting took place at the Virginia home of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph P. Kennedy: “The party last night was a real affair. . . . Bilbo [Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi], Burke [Senator Edward R. Burke of Nebraska], and I were the only new ones [new senators] there. It is the finest home I’ve ever seen. Out west of Washington on the Potomac, a grand big house a half mile from the road in virgin forest with a Brussels carpet lawn of five acres all around it, a swimming pool in the yard, and all the other trimmings. There is a motion picture theater in the sub-basement. It was built by a young Chicago mi
llionaire at a cost of $600,000, then he drank himself to death in two years, and his chorus-girl widow is trying to borrow $40,000 on it and can’t. Kennedy has it leased, furniture and all. . . .”

  Senator Truman seldom enjoyed himself at these parties. Once, in exasperation, he exclaimed that he was “sick and tired of going out to dinner.” He wished they could “get enough ahead to go into business in some quiet country seat and get out of the whirl. But I know that will never happen.”

  If the ordeal was doing nothing for the Truman marriage, it was providing yet another glimpse, this time on a national level, of their intense partnership, even when half the continent separated them. There are hitherto unrevealed glimpses of how Harry Truman was quietly, but steadily acquiring a perspective on the Senate. In the following letter, we also get a look at the supercharged political atmosphere of mid-1935, when Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin cast ominous shadows on America’s future: “The Senate convenes at eleven o’clock today to consider the Banking Bill. Senator Nye of North Dakota spoke for four hours after he’d introduced Father Coughlin’s bill as an amendment. The priest’s campaign manager and the president of the American Bankers Association sat side by side in the gallery. Neither of course knew who the other was. Most of us thought Coughlin wrote Nye’s speech. Nye is one of the good-looking egotistical boys who play to the gallery all the time. . . . He never comes to the Senate except to make a speech or introduce a bill to abolish the army and navy or to get more money for more investigations and more publicity. Several so-called people’s friends in the Senate would be in a hell of a fix if there were not some good old work-horses here who really cause the Senate to function. . . . There isn’t a so-called progressive who does anything but talk.”