Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  I read a book about Lincoln one time in which the author commented that Lincoln never said a kind word about Mrs. Lincoln in his life. I don’t think that’s true at all. One of the reasons that Lincoln remains an enigma in some ways, one of the reasons you can’t tell a whole lot about what was really in Lincoln’s mind, is because an immense number of his personal papers were destroyed by his son. Nicholas Murray Butler, who was president of Columbia University for a long time - from 1902 to 1945, if I remember correctly - ran up to see Robert Lincoln one time at Lincoln’s summer home in New Hampshire, and there was Lincoln just deliberately throwing his father’s papers into the fire. Butler stopped him, of course, and Lincoln left some papers over in a trunk that was to be opened twenty-five years after he passed on, but there was nothing of interest in the trunk when it was opened. But I think that, if we had the letters and papers and documents that were destroyed by Lincoln’s son, we’d find that that comment in the book was entirely wrong, because Mrs. Lincoln’s character was assassinated after Lincoln died, not before.

  I was still in the Senate when that trunk was opened, and I was mad at the time about the loss of Lincoln’s papers and I’m still mad about it. And the same kind of thing happened to Millard Fillmore; his son burned all his papers, and that’s an outrage. Those papers, presidential papers, are really the property of the people and ought to be turned over to them as soon as a man comes out of the White House. If old Robert Todd Lincoln had done just that, that stuff about his father’s attitude toward his mother would, in my opinion, have been gone forever. I don’t believe a word of it.

  The simple fact is that I’ve never believed most of the stories about Lincoln’s marital problems, because I think Lincoln was the sort of fellow who, when he entered into the most sacred contract that a man can make, the marriage contract, which calls on husband and wife to love and respect each other for the rest of their lives, would have lived up to the letter and spirit of that contract to the end. I’ve read the things which say that Lincoln was not exactly attracted to Mary Todd when he met her at a dance in Springfield in 1839, when she was living with her sister there, and that he didn’t show up at their wedding, and it took a while to bring him back to the marriage. I also know that he was supposed to have written to a friend, “I feel as if I’m being led to slaughter.” (It’s too bad that, when his son was destroying all those papers, he didn’t destroy that one.) I’ve read these things, and I think a lot of it was nothing more than plain old marital jitters.

  That didn’t stop him from having a sense of humor about the marital state, either. I heard another Lincoln story one time that has never been published as far as I know. The Spanish ambassador was having an affair one time with one of the ladies in Washington, and they had a big iron fence around Lafayette Park, and the ambassador got locked in the park. Lincoln went inside the White House and got a ladder and helped him out. As far as I know, that’s a true story, as true as some of the other stories that are told about Lincoln, anyway. It certainly fits in with his sense of humor, because he probably thought the Spanish ambassador’s dilemma was funny.

  Stop and think about the personal life of the Lincolns for a minute. Mary Todd Lincoln was twenty-three when she was married, at which time Lincoln was thirty-three and already a quiet, retiring fellow who was bound to be nervous about getting married. And Mary Todd was no wallflower when he met her at that dance; she was the daughter of a banker, an extremely well-educated and cultured young woman who spoke French fluently and went to the best schools, where she studied music and dance and a lot of other things. And think about some of the things that some biographers list in support of the theory of her mental instability. Her mother died when she was seven, and she didn’t get along with her stepmother, which is why she was living with her sister when Lincoln met her. Well, the world is full of fairy tales and true stories about stepchildren who didn’t get along with their stepmothers and vice versa, and Lincoln had rare good luck that his own stepmother was such a wonderful woman. Mary Todd Lincoln was also a spendthrift, and to an excessive extent, but that doesn’t make her crazy; I’m sure she was spoiled by her rich father and began some of her bad habits that way. She’s also supposed to have yelled at her husband a lot. Well, an awful lot of wives do that, though mine is a happy exception.

  I think a lot of misinformation came about because of that nasty book by Lincoln’s former law partner, and the libel was also carried on by a mean, radical segment of the press that didn’t like Lincoln. Too bad; some of them ought to have been shot, and if old Jackson was still around, he would have shot some of them. (I don’t really mean that.) But as a result of Herndon’s book and that newspaper publicity, I think Mrs. Lincoln became one of the most mistreated and misrepresented women who was ever in the public eye.

  Fortunately, there have been a number of good books published recently that have been both kind and careful in outlining the history of the Lincolns, and I think that, if you’ll read those books, you’ll find that there was nothing wrong with Mrs. Lincoln at all except for that brief period when the world and the sadness in her life got to be too much for her. She was like a lot of other wives. She didn’t really understand what the limelight in the White House was going to be like, but there have been a great many other First Ladies exactly like that, and that’s no real reflection on them at all. I don’t think she had anything to do with urging him and pushing him to seek the presidency, as some books have said, though I think she had a great deal to do with urging him to keep it after he had it, particularly when he became discouraged about the job as all of us have at times, and I think she was very well satisfied and very happy in the White House in spite of what the Chicago Tribune and the New York Tribune and the New York Herald had to say at the time. In those days, the papers run by Horace Greeley and Charles A. Dana and James Gordon Bennett were the influential press of that day, but they were often mean and scurrilous and far from accurate.

  I even read a book once that said that both the Lincolns were lunatics, that Mary Todd Lincoln was paranoid all her life, and Abe Lincoln suffered from melancholia to the point of madness. Well, I don’t believe that Mrs. Lincoln was paranoid all her life, and though I’m sure Lincoln suffered from bouts of melancholy, he controlled them sufficiently so that he didn’t have them in public. He was bound to suffer that way; it goes with the job, especially in his situation where there were thousands of men being killed on both sides. I think his heart was just as strong for the men on the Confederate side as on the Union side, and it must have made his heart very, very sorry and sad when he heard the reports of battles and deaths.

  This same stupid book even tried to hint that Lincoln was a secret drunk because the two men who followed him, Johnson and Grant, were such heavy drinkers. Well, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve never thought much of Grant drunk or sober, but Johnson wasn’t a drunkard at all. His critics accused him of being erratic as a result of drinking because he was slightly tipsy at his inauguration, but that was because he was in poor physical condition when he was inaugurated, and he drank just a little brandy and got that way. He didn’t drink any more at other times than the average fellow does in the White House. And as far as Lincoln is concerned, I don’t know whether Lincoln drank or not, but he was certainly no heavy drinker. I imagine he used some of the good product that came from his home state. I think it’s been said in other books that he didn’t like the stuff. Well, that’s all right if true. It’s a very good thing when a fellow doesn’t like it. I don’t like it, either.

  I’ll end this chapter by saying again that Lincoln was a great and wonderful man in every way. He didn’t believe in putting up a front. He always showed up as plain, decent Abraham Lincoln, and he always showed up as the man who happened to have the job of president of the United States and was, therefore, in charge of things, and that’s the sort of man I admire. There’s nothing in the world I dislike more than a stuffed shirt who tries to put on a front and make people think he’s something
that he isn’t. Stuffed shirts can always have a pin stuck in the shirt, and then the wind comes out and you find that they’re counterfeits. I don’t think it was a pose on Lincoln’s part. I think he was just plain Abraham Lincoln all the time, in public and in private, and that’s just what a man ought to be, just himself, no matter what job he has, even if he’s president of the United States or king of a great country. If he’s himself, he’ll be all right. King George VI was the same sort of man, an honest, straightforward public servant. It doesn’t make any difference what position he may hold; if he’s that kind of man, he won’t have any trouble being a good man in this world of ours.

  IF YOU’RE VERY young, you’ve probably never even heard of a fellow named Champ Clark, but he was a very important man to Missourians and to a lot of other people back in 1912. He was speaker of the House at that time, and he seemed much more certain to become our twenty-eighth president than a relatively obscure former college professor named Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

  I was fairly young myself in June 1912, twenty-eight years of age, and I was helping my father out and cutting wheat in the field at home, on our 160 acres where there’s a big business development now, while the Democratic National Convention was going on in Baltimore. There was a little telegraph station in a field about a quarter of a mile away, and information would come in the form of short little bulletins, and somebody would tell me that a new message was in, and I’d run over there. I’d bring the binder around there and tie the lines around the brake and go over and find out what was going on. My father was for Champ Clark, practically all Missourians were; as you’ve gathered, old Champ was a Missourian himself, and he would have been the first president ever from Missouri, so we all hoped he would be nominated and elected. And we were sort of stunned when we finally learned that the Democratic Party had nominated Wilson instead of Clark.

  In that election, the Republicans were fighting with each other, their official candidate being President William Howard Taft, up for reelection, while Teddy Roosevelt ran as an independent on the Bull Moose ticket, so the Democratic choice was just about certain to get in, and just about the whole country assumed that the Democratic choice would be Champ Clark. Clark was an old war-horse politician who was born in 1850 and served in the House of Representatives from 1893 to 1921, with just a single brief break in 1896. The more progressive members of the Democratic Party considered him just a touch too cautious and slow-moving in most of his policies, but he was a very popular man and seemed certain to get the nomination.

  Among other reasons, there was no one else around as well-known to the voters as he was. Wilson was in the picture, of course, with a growing reputation for intelligence and efficiency as a man who rose from a salary of $1,500 a year as a professor at Bryn Mawr to become president of Princeton University and then governor of New Jersey; but he also had a reputation of being a stiff-necked professorial type, still very much the aristocratic president of a great university, a man who found it hard to get along with people who he was sure didn’t know as much as he did. That’s where his trouble lay: he knew many things better than most people who came in contact with him and couldn’t help but show it, and that doesn’t work too well with congressmen and senators with whom a presidential candidate and president has to get along. And William Jennings Bryan was still around and in many ways was still one of the strongest people in the party, but Bryan had run for president twice and been beaten by McKinley in 1900 and by Taft in 1908 and wasn’t likely to be put up again.

  These days, about the only thing people seem to remember about Bryan is that he was on the wrong side in that nonsense in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925, when young John T. Scopes was put on trial for teaching, in his biology class, the Darwin theory about man’s being descended from apes, and thereby contradicted the biblical explanation of man’s creation. But that was just a bit of silliness that Bryan himself came quickly to regret, and in many other ways Bryan was one of the best people in the country and certainly one of the best men associated with Wilson. I truly think that Bryan might well be one of the most misunderstood and underestimated men in American history. He was in a class by himself from about 1896 on, the man who was in the forefront for the welfare of the common, everyday fellow who didn’t have any real representation of any other kind.

  If it hadn’t been for Bryan, there would have been no truly liberal program continued in the United States; the things Bryan suggested and wanted, financially and in every other way, were the things that came into effect when Wilson was president, and were the stimulant for the even more liberal programs that came into effect with Franklin Roosevelt twelve years later. The idea of the Federal Reserve Board, which was set up under Wilson in 1913, was to arrange things so that there was enough circulating medium to enable the ordinary man to carry on his business and his life, and that’s all Bryan ever wanted in that area, and he was also in the forefront in agricultural reform and labor reform and child labor reform and a lot of other things. These things were mostly the result of influence exerted by William Jennings Bryan. That’s absolutely correct, and in my opinion, history will tell it that way.

  Well, Bryan knew that he didn’t have a chance personally in the 1912 election, and he went to the convention strictly with the idea of supporting Clark. But the situation at that point in our history was that the finances of our country had developed to the point where the bankers were in total control, and Bryan wanted to be sure that that would change if, as seemed certain, the Democrats would get in this time and displace Taft and Teddy Roosevelt and all the other Republicans.

  To understand the question of financial control of our country, and to put it into the simplest terms, you’ve got to keep in mind the fact that the Federal Reserve Board was set up with the plan of increasing the circulating medium, of issuing more currency so that there would be more money around for business loans and for transacting business in general. But you’ve also got to keep in mind the fact that those dollar bills had to be based on something valuable so they wouldn’t just be meaningless pieces of paper, but rather, a sort of promissory note backed by something of value. In those days, the valuable thing backing our currency was gold, with the issuing of currency dependent on the amount of gold in the country, and our finances became a controlled proposition because the New York banks cornered most of the gold in the country and thereby controlled most of the currency in the country, and that made money scarce because the banks kept raising interest rates on loans and only very big firms could afford to borrow money at those rates.

  Eventually, of course, Franklin Roosevelt took us off the gold standard entirely. His point was that gold was artificial backing, too, just a piece of metal in the way that the dollar bill is just a piece of paper and doesn’t mean anything unless it’s backed itself by commodities - corn and wheat and oats and automobiles and factories and everything else that makes up the industrial center of the country. Things were to be handled in a way so that the financial backing of the currency in circulation wouldn’t be gold alone, but gold backed by commodities; thereafter, gold would be used only on a very small percentage basis, and the real backing would be the whole commercial and commodity strength of the whole United States. That would make our currency much sounder than when just backed by gold, and the cornering of the gold market couldn’t in any way affect the currency of the United States. The government would base the issuance of currency on the economic strength of the country, trying to make sure that enough money was around so that it would be available to everybody and not just to the biggest and strongest business organizations.

  But gold was still the backbone of our currency in Wilson’s day, and the idea of the Federal Reserve Board was to increase the circulating medium but with absolutely sound backing, by controlling gold and setting up twelve regional Federal Reserve banks - in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, Richmond, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. These would, in effect, be
banks’ banks, issuing Federal Reserve notes and loaning out money to banks to loan to the public and to business more painlessly and cheaply, the money to be given out more freely when times were tough and loans were really needed and tightened up when it seemed necessary to try to control inflation. As an example, the circulating medium back in the twenties was about $3.5 billion, and I think it’s now up around $30 billion. If the big banks had had their way, they would have kept currency to the point where they could choke off credit whenever they felt like it. The objective of the Wilson administration for the Federal Reserve Bank, in short, was to make credit available in all sections of the country on the basis where it would increase building programs and help industry, and in particular, help the small merchants and small businessmen.

  That was the kind of thing that Bryan wanted, and he set out to talk to Clark about it, but then Clark made a terrible tactical error; he shut himself up and wouldn’t talk to Bryan or anyone else on the subject. (I’m not sure why he behaved in that stupid way; the people who supported Clark never forgave him, and they’re still talking against him to this day. And I don’t blame them.)

  Bryan was a delegate from Nebraska, and the Nebraska delegation was instructed for Clark and voted for him in the early balloting. But Bryan was a particularly important supporter because he was the head of the Democratic Party, and he wanted to be sure that control of the country’s finances didn’t remain in the hands of the bankers; and when Clark wouldn’t see him and talk to him about the matter, he kept thinking about it and thinking about it and finally decided that he just couldn’t support Clark.