Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  In the midst of this upheaval, which dominated the headlines of the nation’s newspapers, Harry wrote Bess an interesting birthday letter. He told her she would be getting a small package from Julius Garfinckel along about Saturday, “your seventy-second birthday or maybe it’s your thirty-second - I haven’t kept very close count on it. It would make no difference if it was your one hundred and fifty-second [it was her fifty-second] - to me you’d still be the prettiest, sweetest, best and all the other adjectives girl on earth - in heaven or in the waters under the earth. You are not only Juno, Venus, Minerva all in one but perhaps Proserpina too. (You’d better look that one up.)”

  Proserpina, for those who don’t have a classical dictionary handy, was a goddess who spent six months of each year with her husband in Hades, separated from her grieving mother. Was the senator suggesting a certain resemblance to their own situation? I can’t be absolutely certain, but he did not ask Bess to look up Juno, Venus, or Minerva.

  Nevertheless, their political partnership continued to deepen. Dad began sending her weekly copies of the Congressional Record so she could follow the debates on the Court bill. As the argument raged in Congress and around the nation, Senator Truman began to think FDR wanted to split both the old parties. “He, you know, reads a lot of history and I think would like to be a Monroe, Jackson and Lincoln all in one - and is probably succeeding. Only history will tell.”

  In the midst of the uproar, Harry Truman quietly began working on his first major task in the Senate. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee, was one of the most violent opponents of the Court bill. Before it appeared on the docket, he had begun an investigation of railroad finances, setting up a subcommittee with himself as chairman and Dad as vice chairman. The Court bill absorbed all Wheeler’s time, and Dad was left to conduct the railroad investigation pretty much on his own.

  Just as he was about to begin work, he learned that the chilblain palace had gotten to Bess. She had been sick in bed for several previous days, she told him in late February. Dad replied that if he had known this he would have come home, “Senate or no Senate, committee or no committee.” Bess had a bad case of the flu. In an earlier letter, Dad noted that flu had been traveling around Washington, but it was not the “fatal kind.” He was remembering the virus that had almost killed Bess in 1918. This memory alone was enough to touch off all the alarm bells in his system. When she did not recover fast enough to suit him, he decided they should retreat to warmer weather in their old haven, Biloxi. They took me out of school and spent ten days there, letting Roosevelt, the Supreme Court, and the committee go hang.

  When the senator returned to Washington, their correspondence had echoes of the first years of their marriage. “I’m glad you missed me,” he wrote in response to one of Bess’ letters. “It is awful to be reaching for you and you’re not there. They have changed my room [in the Carroll Arms Hotel] and have given me a double bed instead of twins so I’ll have the same trouble.”

  On March 31, the senator reported that he and Bess had been invited to dinner at the White House on April 6. Could she come? The answer was no, but there is graphic evidence of a renewed wish to be with her husband. She was alarmed when Dad remarked in a letter two days before the event that he was tempted to call FDR and refuse to go. Bess wanted him to go, and shine. On the day of the dinner, she sent him a telegram, warning him not to wear a blue shirt. The next day, he was telling her that he went in the proper getup and it was a “very spiffy” affair.

  More important, he had found an apartment for only $115 a month. The lease would run until September 1, but that was all right because he was sure Congress was going to be in session all summer. “What do you say?” he asked, in the manner of a man who was pretty sure what the answer would be.

  Before April 1937 was over, Bess and I headed for Washington. A typical thirteen-year-old, I was upset to be transferred from my hometown milieu with so little warning. Now, thanks to that wonderful biographical-historical tool called hindsight, all I can say is: Three cheers for Biloxi. Let’s throw in one for Proserpina, for good measure.

  Shortly before Mother and Dad and I went to Biloxi, Fred Wallace’s wife, Christine, had given birth to a daughter, Marian. In her daily letters to Bess, Madge Wallace reported in detail on how the baby and Christine were doing as well as other matters, such as the antics of Chris’ first child, David, and troubles with the help. She called her regular maids “two of the slowest mortals that walk.” She said they reminded her of the time that her father had pointed to their handyman, Luke, and asked Fred to sight him on a tree to see if he was moving. These plaintive letters probably helped to delay Bess’ departure to Washington for several weeks.

  All her life, Bess felt a responsibility for her brothers. It was a feeling that went beyond the ordinary loyalty of an older sister. She was the acknowledged leader of the family. All her mother’s power over her daughter and her sons came from not leading, from a refusal or inability (take your pick) to accept responsibility, from sweet, pathetic passivity. Fred Wallace was the brother who most evoked Bess’ sense of responsibility for reasons already made clear. Bess transferred it to his wife and children. So it was a great tribute to Biloxi (and Proserpina) that she tore herself away from 219 North Delaware to come to Washington.

  Another young family on North Delaware Street also claimed her sympathy. Sometime in the mid-thirties, Josephine Ragland Southern moved into the home of Dad’s cousins, the Nolands, with her two young sons. She was Ethel and Nellie Noland’s niece. Jodie, as everyone called her, had married James Allen Southern, nephew of the Independence Examiners William Southern. The marriage had not worked out, and the couple had separated. Jodie was a lively, pretty young woman on whom Nellie and Ethel doted. They were even fonder of the two little boys. Early in May, Jodie developed appendicitis, and it was misdiagnosed. The operation was performed too late. She developed peritonitis and died.

  Dad flew out for the funeral. Mother and I remained in Washington, because she did not want me to miss school. But Bess was shaken by the death of someone so young, someone who was so needed by her children. It evoked memories of another baffling death on Delaware Street. Her mother’s letter, describing the tragic scene, seemed almost calculated to evoke such feelings, although I know this was not the case.

  Madge reported that the Nolands were grateful for Dad’s visit. They said “nobody but Harry would have come so far to help them.” She told Bess that Mrs. Noland, Nellie’s aging mother, was shattered by the death, and Nellie was almost as bad. “I keep thinking of the dear little home that Jodie and James Allen [Southern] planned and built and were so happy in it. It is all so hard to understand,” Madge wrote.

  That summer, Bess wrote to Ethel and Nellie, revealing her own anguish. “I have tried three times to write to you but I couldn’t. To me there is no rhyme or reason to Jodie’s going - and I have had such a feeling of bitterness about it. I surely hope with your great faith you have found some measure of comfort somewhere, somehow.”

  I almost wept when I read this letter. It gave me such a flash of insight into the deepest, most hidden part of Bess’ life. The wound inflicted by her father’s suicide was still visible here, thirty-four years later.

  I suddenly understood why it was Dad, not Mother, who insisted I go to Sunday school. “I am sure hoping you get the daughter properly started on her religious education,” he wrote, early in 1937. “I don’t care whether she’s an Episcopalian or a Baptist but she ought to be one or the other and the sooner she starts the better. . . . I’ve tried to give you a free hand in this and I hope you are going to get started.” I had just celebrated my thirteenth birthday when he wrote this letter, so there were some grounds for his sense of urgency.

  Mother had enrolled me in Sunday school when I was seven or eight, but I complained so loudly that she accepted my offer of a compromise. If I went to church with her and sat absolutely still, I could abandon Sunday school. Since s
he seldom went to church (her mother never went), this was tantamount to an escape clause. Now, in response to Dad’s prodding, she enrolled me in the Episcopal choir, which I enjoyed. I was beginning to think I wanted to have a career as a singer. “I hope she’ll get interested in the church end of it,” Bess added in a later letter. This was as far as she could go on my religious education.

  The Trumans had other much more immediate worries in the spring of 1937. Early in April, the intense emotions stirred up by President Roosevelt’s Court-packing bill and Dad’s support of it in the teeth of his constituents’ overwhelming opposition produced a death threat. It arrived at the Senate office, postmarked Independence, on April 19. Addressed to “Dear Rat and Other Rats,” it announced that Senator Truman would be assassinated in Washington on April 22. The assassin seemed to be unaware that the senator had gone home to give a speech on the Court bill.

  Bud Faris, Dad’s administrative assistant, notified the police, who, in turn, notified the Independence police, who promptly stationed guards at 219 North Delaware Street. The Kansas City police gave him an escort when he made his speech that night. You can imagine the consternation this stirred among the highly strung Wallace clan. Dad was furious with Bud for overreacting. He said that if he had seen the letter first, he would have thrown it away. Mother and I were inclined to side with Bud. Having survived those thousands of German shells fired at him in France, Harry Truman was almost too inclined to feel indestructible.

  Dad told a crowded meeting at the Kansas City Music Hall that the Constitution was not in danger. The Supreme Court could not be “packed” by anyone, not even FDR. It was a political - not a constitutional - issue, he insisted. I doubt if he changed many minds in Missouri, which has a conservative streak about as wide as the state. But he made his position clear.

  Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Senator Wheeler, my father’s mentor, had organized a coalition of Western and Southern Democratic senators that was demolishing the president’s bill. They were not all conservatives. Wheeler was a liberal on almost every other issue before the Congress. Many liberals saw the bill as an insult to eighty-year-old Louis D. Brandeis, the great dissenter on the Court. The Republican minority sat on the sidelines, gleefully watching the Democrats destroy themselves.

  Mesmerized by his landslide victory, President Roosevelt had become dangerously arrogant. “The people are with me,” he snapped when advisers such as Vice President Garner told him to settle for two or three extra justices instead of six. As early as February, Dad saw that the president was beaten and the bill would probably never reach a vote. “Some sort of compromise will be reached I think where some of the Court will retire,” he told Bess.

  While the Senate brawled over the Supreme Court, Senator Truman spent most of his days and many of his nights slogging through reams of documents gathered by the staff of his subcommittee investigating the railroads. In 1937, President Roosevelt called the sorry state of the nation’s rail carriers “the most serious problem” his administration faced. In 1926, American railroads had employed 1.8 million men with a payroll of almost $3 billion. Ten years later, 840,000 of these men had lost their jobs, and an incredible 10,000 miles of track had been abandoned, destroying any hope of prosperity in countless small towns and medium-sized cities. Senator Truman was trying to find out why a business that was handling 75 percent of America’s internal freight traffic could go bankrupt on such an appalling scale. Not even the impact of the Great Depression explained it.

  The more he studied the problem, the more convinced he became that the answer lay not in the money squeeze of the Depression, but in the manipulations of a small group of men on Wall Street. To prove this contention and to write legislation preventing a repetition of this financial crime, Senator Truman was taking on some of the biggest bankers and tycoons in the country, and he was determined to know as much as all their high-priced lawyers, accountants, and public-relations men put together. It was hard work, complicated by the mountains of mail he was receiving on the Court bill. When he returned from Biloxi, he told Bess he found 1,000 letters on his desk.

  For Bess, the drama of the Court bill reached a climax with the death of Joe Robinson, the Senate majority leader. Against his better judgment, he had led the fight for the bill after Vice President Garner went home to Texas in disgust. It was widely rumored that FDR had promised Robinson a seat on the Court, which would have fulfilled a lifelong ambition. In the suffocating heat of one of the hottest Washington summers in memory, Robinson continued to exhort and lecture and beg his colleagues to follow the president’s lead. The bill was dead, but he refused to believe it.

  Many of Robinson’s friends became alarmed as they watched him, his face a deep purple, his breath coming in gasps, struggling to repel opposition hecklers. A few days after New York’s Senator Royal S. Copeland, who was a doctor, begged him to get some rest, Robinson was found dead in his apartment, a copy of the Congressional Record in his hand. This event inspired Bess to insist that Senator Truman check into the Bethesda Naval Hospital for a physical examination.

  He obeyed and told her they had found nothing wrong with him, but something about his offhand manner made her suspicious. He continued to work fourteen hours a day. In a letter to his cousin, Ethel Noland, Bess revealed her continuing worry. “The weather here is ghastly and we are most anxious to get out of it. H. is worn out and is not well and will simply have to have a good rest, or he will be really ill. Margaret and I have each lost ten pounds which is a break for me.” As you can steadily conclude by glancing at my picture at this age, it made me almost invisible. It was around this time that Dad invented my least favorite nickname, “Skinny.”

  After burying Joe Robinson, the senators got into an ugly fight about his successor as majority leader of the Senate. FDR wanted Alben Barkley of Kentucky, whom he thought he could manage. The anti-Court-bill people backed a more conservative and independent senator, Pat Harrison of Mississippi. Dad had promised Harrison his vote and refused to change his mind, in spite of a Roosevelt-engineered call from Tom Pendergast. Dad not only voted for Harrison, he sent a message to FDR via his secretary, Steve Early, that he resented being treated like “an office boy.” This earned him a round of applause from his wife, who was beginning to grow disillusioned with Roosevelt. Barkley won by a single vote.

  The exhausted lawmakers finally passed a pathetic echo of the original Court bill, which provided for some modest reforms in lower court procedures, and went home leaving the Supreme Court intact. The same could not be said for the Democratic Party. Probably no president in the history of the country, except perhaps Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, ever dissipated a landslide more rapidly than FDR in 1937.

  Bess persuaded her exhausted husband that he really needed a rest and another checkup. We went home to Independence, and Dad retreated to the U.S. Army hospital at Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was so tired he slept twelve hours a day on the trip down. Bess’ letters reveal the wide range of her worries. She wanted to know everything that the doctors reported about Dad’s heart, lungs, and teeth. She asked if they had discovered a diabetic condition.

  When the senator failed to write (proof of how tired he was), she telephoned the hospital, but they told her no such person as Senator Harry S. Truman was registered there and refused to believe she was Mrs. Truman and not a nosy reporter. She wrote that she was going to “send a searcher” to Hot Springs if she did not get a letter.

  Dad responded with a hasty scrawl in which he casually remarked that the army doctors disagreed with the navy doctors; there was nothing wrong with his heart after all. Bess pounced on this slip. “I’m afraid you have been holding out on me,” she wrote. “The Navy Dr. told you something unpleasant about your heart - and you swore he said it was ok after promising to tell me exactly what the report was! I guess I’ll have to write the hospital to get the correct dope on you this time.” Perhaps wanting to reassure him that she was not really mad, she added: “Here’s hoping it’s
all fine.”

  A sunny spirit pervades Bess’ letters during the early fall of 1937. She had taken up horseback riding again and persuaded me and Natalie and May Wallace to join her. “I feel more limber already,” she told Harry. She wondered if he would be home from Hot Springs in time for a moonlight ride she was planning. In another letter, she wrote that if she had the money she would hop a train and head for Hot Springs to join him. When Dad mentioned that the doctors were giving him a diet, she told him that she hoped it would let him eat as much as he wanted, “even if you develop a senatorial front.”

  Almost as if the doctors were responding to Bess’ hopes, they reported that everything about Senator Truman was A-1. But there was nothing A-1 about the Democratic Party that confronted him when he returned from Arkansas.

  The self-inflicted wounds of the Court fight were visible everywhere in Missouri. But no place was as acrimonious and chaotic as Kansas City. There, Federal Attorney Maurice Milligan had been investigating vote frauds in the 1936 election and was hauling Pendergast Democrats before special grand juries from which Jackson County citizens were barred. He was using a law passed during Reconstruction to protect black voting rights in the South. As far as Harry Truman was concerned, it was lynch-law justice, in which the accused men had not a prayer of defending themselves. More important, it was destroying the Democratic organization in Kansas City. Worse, Governor Stark was cheering Milligan on, and the White House was doing nothing.

  This was a major worry that Bess and Harry discussed and analyzed when they were reunited at 219 North Delaware Street. But it was hard to decide on a course of action in the aftermath of the Court bill turmoil. No one was sure where anyone stood in the hierarchy of aides around Roosevelt. Senator Truman was friendly with Postmaster General Jim Farley, who had managed Roosevelt’s winning campaigns and handled most local political problems. Dad hoped he could persuade the president, with Farley’s help, to put the brakes on Milligan, who was up for reappointment in 1938.