by Roy Jenkins
Western Missouri is obviously a long way from the Hudson Valley and the Hyde Park home of Truman’s predecessor as president, who was born only two years before him. But it is barely 300 miles from Bloomington, Illinois, where Adlai Stevenson, his successor as leader of the Democratic Party and only 16 years his junior, grew up. The Stevensons, while substantially more prosperous than the Young/Trumans, were not rich by grand American turn of the century standards. Yet the chasm between Stevenson life and Truman life was immense. The Stevensons lived in a garrison town of American gentry; the Trumans were part of the countryside around them.
Both the Youngs and the Trumans arrived in Missouri by steamboat. They were part of the second or third wave of settlers, when the state was already more than twenty years old. Within a few years of each other they steamed down the Ohio River to Cairo, Illinois, and from there up first the Mississippi and then the Missouri to Westport Landing, so called because Westport, now a southern suburb of Kansas City, was there before the city itself. They moved back a few miles east and settled around Independence, which was a major staging point to the West and the South West. They each brought with them a few slaves. They established themselves, a little precariously, in ante-bellum Missouri, which was a border state but still, just, a part of the old South and very different from the territories to the west and north of it.
Solomon Young was the dominant figure of the four. He acquired more land and at one time had 5000 acres in Jackson County, as well as the title to much of what later became Sacramento, California. But he sold as well as bought, and did so somewhat haphazardly, so that he built up no great fortune. However, the few hundred acres of Grandview core remained in the family for many decades; it became a neon-lighted shopping centre in the late 1950s. As a younger man Solomon Young had run wagon trains from Independence through Salt Lake City to San Francisco, often being away for a year at a time. As a result he missed the Civil War depredations of the ‘Red Legs’ from across the Kansas border, which remained an abiding memory with Truman’s mother. They slaughtered the hogs, removed the family silver and ruined a lovingly made quilt. Worse still, they tried, although not apparently very seriously, to hang her brother. Although more Missourians fought in the Union than in the Confederate armies, the Truman forbears and their neighbours were firmly for the South.
Solomon Young had an imposing presence, with a great white beard, and lived longer than Truman’s other grandfather, Anderson Shippe Truman. He therefore had a greater impact upon Harry Truman. Anderson Truman lived most of his life as a smaller farmer a hundred or so miles to the south of the Youngs, in Cass County. He had about 200 acres. Of the two grandmothers, Mary Jane Truman died before Harry was born, but Louisa Young lived until 1905, when she was 91. This fortified the greater strength of the Young influence.
Truman’s own parents were married in 1881. His father, John Anderson Truman, had been born in 1851, and survived only until 1914. He was the shortest-lived of the Truman tribe. His height was still more notably short. He was two inches below his wife. Her advantage in longevity was much greater. Born in 1853, she survived until the age of 95, well into Truman’s presidency. She had a strong personality and very determined views. Again, there is an impression of the greater strength of the Young side of the family. But Truman, devoted though he was to his mother, was always determined to controvert any under-estimate of his father. ‘He was just as great as she was,’ he recorded, ‘and had every bit as much influence on me …’2
John Truman, mostly known as ‘Peanuts’, pursued a variety of trades. In different stages or strands of his life he was a farmer, a cattle and horse dealer, a grain speculator, a night watchman, and an elected overseer of roads. Financial success always proved elusive, but he emerged from all these occupations, his son was insistent and uncontradicted, with his honour intact. He was also the first Truman to be an involved political militant. He held no notable offices, but he was a passionate Democrat. In 1892 he was excited by Grover Cleveland’s victory. He had to wait until 1912 for another Democratic president to be elected, but he then welcomed Wilson’s success, even though he would greatly have preferred Champ Clark, the only Missourian other than his son to come within striking distance of the presidency, to have secured the nomination. His politics were based on a simple, instinctive, loyal partisanship which he passed on to his elder son. He also took him to a greater number of political meetings, ensured he was made a page at the Kansas City Democratic Convention of 1900, when William Jennings Bryan was nominated for the second of his three unsuccessful candidatures, and, more surprisingly, introduced him to Plutarch’s Lives, which became a major literary influence.
Harry S. Truman was born, and so registered, at Lamar, Barton County, Missouri on May 8th, 1884. The ‘S’ stood for nothing but ‘S’.2 The choice of form by Truman’s parents stemmed from a desire to balance between the competing claims of Solomon Young and Anderson Shippe Truman. Whether either was satisfied is not recorded. The subsequent two children of the marriage (John Vivian, born 1886, and Mary Jane, born 1889) were more normally named. Vivian passed his life as a moderately successful working farmer, until he retired on the proceeds of the land sale for the shopping centre. Mary remained a spinster, who lived with her mother. Truman remained fairly close to both.
The house in which he was born was more modest than anything in which he subsequently lived. It was not a share-cropper’s shack, nor was it a solid farmhouse; it was between the two. It remained his home for little more than a year. Twice in 1885 his family moved to different houses in Cass County. Then in 1886 they removed themselves to the Young house at Grandview, nominally for ‘Peanuts’ Truman to manage the farm of the ageing Solomon. The management role must have been either nominal or unsuccessful, for in another three years they were off again, to Independence, without any apparent ill-effect upon the farm.
Independence was already a proper town, although with a population of only 6,000. Today it has 110,000 and is effectively a nine-mile-distant satellite of Kansas City. Then, Kansas City was an exploding place of 55,000. The inhabitants of Independence regarded it as a ‘Yankee’ city and themselves, with some residual Southern ways, as quite distinct. However, the presence of Kansas City was immanent. Both it and Independence were part of Jackson County, which was the political unit, and the encompassment of Harry Truman’s life until 1934.
The reason given for this move was that Harry needed ‘graded’ schooling, as opposed to everyone being taught in one class at Grandview. Maybe his father’s desire to escape from too close a Young dependence and to try some of his speculative ventures also had something to do with it. They lived successively in two substantial houses in Independence, each for six years. Then John Anderson Truman had a disastrous year on the grain market and they were forced to sell up and move in straightened circumstances to the relative anonymity of Kansas City.
These twelve years, however, had seen Harry Truman through his schooling in a compact community. He was a boy apart, for his poor eyesight meant that he had to wear spectacles from the age of six, which at that time was regarded as an oddity in the mid-West and was held to preclude him from sports or rough group pastimes. He became a voracious reader but this did not lead to any outstanding brilliance in his school classes. A number of good women teachers made a great impact upon him, but their reminiscences give the impression that his impact upon them, under the stimulus of his subsequent fame, was more retrospective than actual. He learned to be a competent pianist, and for a time went to special lessons in Kansas City, and practised for two hours a day. There was a suggestion that he might aspire to be a concert performer, but this was not pursued. His daughter says straightforwardly that he was not good enough, even though he was once given a private demonstration by Paderewski. He retained a tinkling talent throughout his life.
His more realistic ambition was to become an army officer. He was fascinated by military history, and a military education would have the advantage of being free
, so he was specially taught, with one other boy, for entry to West Point, or possibly the naval academy at Annapolis. The other boy got to Annapolis, but did not complete the course. Truman was turned down because of his eyesight. Additionally, as a result of his father’s débâcle, he could not go to college. Instead he spent the summer of his eighteenth year as a time-keeper for construction workers who were doubling the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé tracks from Chicago to Kansas City. Then he went to work as a clerk in a Kansas City bank. He was always insistent that he had had a happy childhood, and he had more than enough buoyancy to survive this wave of vicissitudes. He was mostly uncomplaining.
He was also a good bank clerk (he got his salary up from $35 to $100 a month), but he had no vocation for banking. This was for the adequate reasons that he was not interested in money and did not like bankers. It was a persistent view. He was against usury. He was also suspicious of the East, where most banking power lay. And he was against pomposity and hypocrisy, which he associated with the power of wealth. ‘High hats’, who prayed too loud, were always in the forefront of his gallery of demonology. He was, I suppose, in favour of American ‘free enterprise’, but in a curious way, for his sympathy and even his respect was always at least as much with the failures as with the successes.
While in Kansas City he joined a new National Guard organization—bank clerks have always been good recruiting material for part-time armies—drilled once a week in the armoury, went to camp for six summers, was given charge of a gun in a troop of artillery, and was proud of a blue uniform with red trimmings.3 He also did part-time work as an usher in a theatre, and saw most of the touring vaudeville acts free. He paid to go to classical concerts.
By 1906 the whole family was back in Grandview. The explanation given is that they were summoned home to run the family farm. But why? There was no obvious change in Young family circumstances. Solomon Young had been dead for thirteen years, and his son Harrison Young (the one the Union Red Legs had tried to hang) was still available and under 60 although probably developing a drink problem. In any event they returned. ‘… I became a real farmer,’ Harry Truman recorded, ‘plowed, sowed, reaped, milked cows, fed hogs, doctored horses, baled hay and did everything there was to do on a 600 acre farm with my father and brother. But we never did catch up with our debts. We always owed the bank something—sometimes more, sometimes less—but we always owed the bank.’4
Truman stayed on the farm until 1917, from the age of 22 to 33. This was the most static period of his life, not only geographically but in other ways too. Quite simply, not very much happened to him, at least until 1916: the farm was hard work. He continued to read, although, to judge from his letters, more novel serials in monthly magazines than political biography or military history. He retained his connection with the National Guard artillery unit, but did not go to summer camps. He was too busy with the harvests. He had some, mainly cousinly, social life. He became an active Mason. And he courted Miss Bess Wallace.
This was one of the slowest courtships in history. It lasted in some form or other for 29 years, and was then followed by 53 years of marriage. It was also one of the most time-consuming. From 1910, when it entered its long home straight, to 1914, when he rather adventurously acquired a Stafford motor car, it involved him in the most appalling Saturday and Sunday journeys. Independence, although little more than 20 miles from Grandview, could not be reached across country. It involved a railroad journey to one of two junctions—Sheffield or the surprisingly named Air Line—in the north of Kansas City and then an eight-mile street-car stage to Independence. Still worse was the late night return. Any idea that the pre-1914 years were the golden age of American railroads is difficult to reconcile with Truman’s experience. The trains started late and arrived later. They were diverted by frequent derailments and frozen in winter by heating breakdowns. Truman often arrived back at Grandview at two in the morning and sometimes at seven.
Miss Bess Wallace, on one side, came of the highest quality of Independence. Her grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, made a good deal of money out of milling and marketing ‘Queen of the Pantry’ flour, which had many years of brand name success throughout the Middle West. His daughter, Madge Gates Wallace, as she was later to be known, played only too large a part in the life of Harry Truman. She married a David W. Wallace, who had some of the qualities of Eleanor Roosevelt’s father. He was handsome, charming, and drank. He shot himself in his bath in 1903. But Independence was not New York City, and David Wallace, unlike Elliott Roosevelt, was not quite the social equal of his wife. (No husband appeared to be in those democratic, open-frontier Missouri days.) And Bess Wallace was certainly no Eleanor Roosevelt. In the first place, so far from being a shy, ‘ugly duckling’ of a child, she was the belle of her Sunday School class, where Truman first met her at the age of six, and of nearly every other class as well. Her ‘golden curls’ were what first struck Truman. Later she developed a considerable athleticism and became a locally outstanding tennis player, and was talented at most other games.
She floated in and out of Truman’s life from the age of six to twenty-six. By the time they were about thirty (she was a year younger than he was) they were unofficially engaged. When he was 33 and she 32 they made it official. Two years later (World War I had intervened) they were actually married. The fact that this Independence belle married ‘below her’ to such a slow suitor was a sign of her outstanding good sense. Apart altogether from the chances of 1944-5, which led to Truman’s propulsion to world fame, he must have been the strongest character of his generation in Jackson County. But she, in a quiet way, was still stronger than he: I think he was always more concerned about her good opinion than vice versa. He was also to prove about the most devoted husband in American presidential history. Not only did he ‘not look at another woman’: he was deeply embarrassed if they looked at him, which they mostly did not.
The question which remains is why others did not press harder to carry off earlier this prize bride. One reason may be that, after 1903, they realized they would have to take her mother with her, and that only Harry Truman had the uncomplaining devotion to accept this. The extent to which he did so turned out to be almost as unparalleled as was the length of his courtship. Mrs Wallace survived nearly 34 years after the marriage and she lived every single one of them as part of the Truman household. Not only was this so in Independence. It was also so in Washington. She removed herself faithfully with the family. At the time of Truman’s accession to the presidency, Margaret Truman was sharing a bedroom with her in a small Connecticut Avenue apartment. She died in the White House a month after Eisenhower’s election. It was no political loyalty which kept her so close: she was constantly critical of her son-in-law, thought it wrong of him to sack such a fine military gentleman as General MacArthur, and would have been a natural Dewey voter in 1948. Harry Truman, for her, always remained one of nature’s ‘dirt farmers’. Perhaps one of the reasons for his joyful return to Independence in January 1953, with the presidency behind him, was that he was at last entering his own house.
Towards the end of his eleven years on the farm Truman became more externally active. He was involved in oil, zinc and lead prospecting, first in Texas and then in south-western Missouri and the adjacent parts of Oklahoma. They were all relatively small-scale enterprises. In one he lost about $7,500. Like all prospectors he nearly struck big. Like most he did not. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t be President if we’d hit’ he wrote to a partner forty years later. In the prospectus for an oil consortium of which he was Treasurer, he described himself a little vaguely as ‘native of Jackson County, Missouri; widely known in Kansas City’. Both he and the investors came out about even. Although he had a touch of his father’s speculative fever, he lacked the essential ingredient for making money, which is simply the overwhelming desire to do so. But he worked hard, dismally, and unsuccessfully to bring a lead and zinc enterprise at Commerce, Oklahoma to fruition throughout the spring and summer of 1916. He ha
d no touch. He had no luck. The result was failure and the impression from his letters is that, while only just escaping his grasp, it was nevertheless almost totally inevitable. In business he snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory as consistently as in elections he was later to do the reverse.
The entry of the United States into World War I in April 1917 aroused his patriotism more than his idealism: ‘… I don’t give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether there’s a League of Nations or whether Russia has a Red government or a purple one …’ he was writing a year or so later. ‘We came out here to help whip the Hun. We helped a little, the Hun yowled for peace and he’s getting it in large doses …’3 Perhaps even more it offered him an honourable escape from the defeats of the preceding twelve months. He became immediately involved with the expansion of his National Guard battery into a regiment of field artillery. As part of the core he expected to become a sergeant, but found himself elected, under the system which prevailed in the early days of World War I recruitment, as in the Civil War, a first lieutenant instead. The regiment, the 129th Field Artillery as it had become, was sent to Camp Donihan in Oklahoma for training. It was the first time that Truman, at the age of 33, had been away from Western Missouri for more than a week or so. He enjoyed army life and was an efficient soldier. He was good with the men, learnt his gunnery proficiently, and ran an exceptionally successful regimental canteen. His assistant in this last was Sergeant Eddie Jacobson, a 26-year-old Kansas City Jew of New York City origin whose family were in the clothing business. Truman and Jacobson paid out vast percentage dividends on a small capital, and were commended for the most efficient canteen in the division. They congratulated each other on their complementary business acumen.