Bess Truman (14 page)

Unfortunately, a Democrat with more seniority had claim to the collector’s job. But the Pendergasts offered to back Harry Truman for presiding judge of the county court. The salary was modest - $6,000 a year - but there was a real chance to build a political reputation in this controversial position. After talking to Bess, they decided he should accept the offer. It was an important decision, and they both knew it. Harry Truman was now forty-two years old. He was getting past the time when a man can switch careers.

There was no opposition in the Democratic primary - proof of Pendergast hegemony - and Harry Truman felt free to go off to reserve officers’ training camp in the summer of 1926. Again, he and Bess exchanged daily letters, giving us a look at what she was thinking and feeling about him and her daughter and other matters.

She alternated salutations in these letters between “My dear” and “Honey” and “Dear Husband.” Again and again, she closed with “All my love” or “Loads of love.” She missed him acutely. “Today didn’t seem to have any beginning or any end,” she wrote, early in the first week. “That letter helped a
lot.”
On the other hand, when a letter failed to come, the tone could be acerbic. “I came mighty near not writing this - as I didn’t get a letter today,” she wrote, later in the first week. “Thought I’d give you a dose of your own medicine.”

In these letters, I am a year older and have mastered the art of making a lovable nuisance of myself. My dialogue is still not scintillating, except to my parents and relatives. I kept asking where my Daddy had gone, and Bess finally gave me an elaborate explanation of the role of the army reserve in the nation’s defense. A graduate of West Point might have had trouble digesting it. Only one fact stuck in my small brain: at lunch, I mournfully announced: “My Daddy gone two weeks.” The next morning, even this intelligence had vanished. I awoke and asked, “Where
is
Daddy?” In her letter reporting this exchange, Bess added: “She is chattering just as hard as she can right now. She didn’t wake up [from my nap] until 5:15 so I guess I’m in for a long session.”

She also reported that she gave me “a small paddling for taking her nighty off.” This was my first - but not my last - encounter with Mother as a disciplinarian. As an older sister who had spent a lot of time making unruly brothers obey orders, her first instinct was to reach for the hairbrush when I misbehaved.

These letters also reveal Bess’ sharp eye for human foibles (besides mine) and how well she knew the men with whom her husband was serving. “I am greatly relieved about your morals,” she wrote in another letter. “I am very sure if they are in Mr. Lee’s keeping, [J. M. Lee was a fellow politician and major in the reserve.] they are safe. He couldn’t lead you into temptation if it were staring him straight in his face. Has marriage made him any different? Any more human and like other people?”

In another letter, she told Harry that “Arthur’s stenog called up this morning and wanted your address so I guess you’ll find out soon what it was he had on his mind (?)” All by itself, that question mark demolished Arthur.

Bess remained keenly aware of her husband’s political role. She forwarded him a letter from a Masonic Lodge, remarking that she was “afraid it might be something that should be attended to at once.” In another letter, she called a politician named Buck (Eugene I. Purcell) “as instructed” and reported that “he would see Mr. T. J. [Pendergast] tomorrow sure if he was in town.” But there are also glimpses of her dislike for the political way of life. The next day, she told Harry she had been invited by a friend to go to a dinner for Senator James Reed. “I was really sorry not to go, so didn’t have to fib for once. But I couldn’t leave the child.”

These negative feelings did not alter her fundamental political loyalty. She was furious when she went down to the post office to mail one of her letters and found it locked. “I had to put your letter in the outside box this afternoon,” she wrote. “If it doesn’t get there tomorrow, I’ll surely be peeved. Whoever heard of a P.O. being closed up so tight you couldn’t even get inside to mail a letter? Another example of bum management under this Republican regime.”

She could also get a laugh out of politics. The Kansas City
Star
seldom missed a chance to blast the Democrats. A local politician who had recently been worked over sued the paper for $3 million. Bess found this amusing. “If his standing and reputation are worth 3 what are yours worth?” she asked, apparently suggesting that this might be a way to get out of debt.

Once there was an interesting flashback to the Bess Wallace that Harry Truman scarcely knew, the upper-class girl who spent her weekends playing tennis and horseback riding at the Salisbury farm. Harry remarked that Spencer Salisbury and another expert horseman had been selected to represent the unit in a jumping competition. “Fancy Spencer being chosen for his excellent riding,” Bess remarked, “when he dislikes it so. I remember tho’ that he used to just look like part of the horse and I guess the knack of it must still stick.”

In these letters, there is also the appearance of what would become a long running worry about Harry Truman’s health. Before he left for camp, he had suffered a series of severe headaches. He had had a few of these in the past when he overworked, but these were so persistent and frequent, Bess became alarmed. “Have the head-aches quit?” she asked in one of her early 1926 letters. “I surely hope so.” But that summer, she had a more immediate worry. Lieutenant Colonel Truman (he had just been promoted) was showing an alarming interest in army aviation. “Please promise me you won’t go up with any of those aviators, half baked or otherwise,” she wrote.

In one of his letters, Harry remarked that there were a lot of politicians in camp, and they were having a great time “trying to get our campaign funds out of the poker game.” Bess did not show the slightest hostility to what would soon become her husband’s favorite recreation. “Bet on you, finding the politicians in the outfit,” she replied. “Has your own campaign fund been augmented to any extent? Or depleted? Eh?” She clearly suspected the latter.

These letters also give us a picture of Mother’s day to day life in what might as well be called the Wallace compound on North Delaware Street. She and Natalie and Frank and George and May were constantly together, shopping, going for drives in the country in a new Dodge that all of them seemed to use interchangeably, although I gather it belonged to the Trumans. Scarcely a letter goes by without a comment about Natalie and Frank or George and May taking me on an outing. Once George and May took me golfing with hilarious results. I toddled around the practice tee, picking up everyone’s golf balls and refused to stop until they gave me a club and ball of my own.

In a domestic crisis, however, it was Bess who took charge. Her mother came down with intestinal flu, and the maid failed to show up. Madge Wallace was being visited by her old friend, Bessie Andrews, who was, Bess remarked to Harry, “worse than no help at all.” Bess had to take charge of the kitchen and the nursing, and in this letter, I shrank to a footnote again. “M. is sound asleep and I will be soon.”

At the end of these two weeks of separation, a small political crisis gave Bess a chance to demonstrate just how astute she could be in regard to her husband’s career. Remember Harry Truman was the unopposed Democratic nominee for presiding judge of Jackson County in the upcoming primary. A local attorney named J. Allen Prewitt, a political outsider, asked him to be on a committee he was putting together for the visit of a St. Louis candidate for the U.S. Senate, Henry B. Hawes. “I’m afraid Mr. Hawes won’t get very far under his patronage,” Bess remarked.

She promptly checked with Tom Pendergast through an intermediary and was told that “Mr. Pendergast considered it best for you to keep out of all fights.” (St. Louis politicians were never popular in Jackson County.) Bess coolly telephoned Mr. Prewitt and told him Lieutenant Colonel Truman would not be home for another week - a lie - so he could give him no help on his committee. “He said he wanted your moral support more than anything else and I felt like telling him he needed it,” Bess reported to Harry.

On August 3, 1926, forty-two-year-old Harry Truman won the Democratic nomination for presiding judge and swept to victory in November, leading a tremendous Democratic comeback in Jackson County. Bess Truman had become a professional politician’s wife.

The day after the votes rolled in, dozens of congratulatory telephone calls followed them. Harry Truman was far from Independence, organizing an offshoot of the Kansas City Automobile Club, The National Old Trails Association. Its goal was to encourage auto travel by persuading local officials to set up historic markers and build tourist facilities. Bess pursued him with complaints. She did not seem able to accept his absence as easily as she tolerated his two weeks’ summertime army reserve duty.

Bess reported that Sunday was “poky” without her husband. She had wanted to go to a reception for Queen Marie of Rumania, who visited Kansas City during a world tour. Her majesty was the guest of honor at a musical extravaganza staged on November 5 to raise money to pay for the city’s memorial to the dead of World War I. Bess and Harry had been invited. She declared herself unable to go without him.

Harry had wanted her to come with him on the Old Trails organizing trip. “You sure ought to be along. We’d have the time of our lives,” he wrote from Great Bend, Kansas. “I’ve got a trip all arranged to California for next fall if you want to take it.”

That suggestion was allowed to pass without comment. Instead, there were more complaints about missing the queen and about the deluge of telephone calls from jobseekers. “I am ashamed now that I didn’t stay home and fight the job hunters and take you to see the Queen,” Harry wrote. “I’m afraid I’m not as thoughtful of your pleasure as I ought to be.”

She had succeeded in making him feel guilty. Although I think I have made it clear that I love both my parents, I must confess to a certain prejudice in favor of my father as I read these letters. The man was only trying to make a living for himself and his family. I suspect it was his honesty that got him into trouble. Much as he loved his wife and daughter, Harry Truman also liked to get out and see the rest of the country. He poured out his fascination for places such as Dodge City and the characters he met there and elsewhere along the route: “I met Ham Bell, who was mayor of South Dodge at the same time Bat Masterson was mayor of North Dodge. One lies south of the R.R. and the other north of it. They tell me the Hon. Ham was not so pious in those days as he is now. He’s a pillar of the Methodist Church and places a bouquet on the altar every Sunday now but they tell it on him that in days gone by, when he ran a dance hall in the part of the city of which he was the presiding officer, he was pitched bodily over into his part of town by the invincible Mr. Masterson when he came across the track to meet some ladies from Wichita who were going to work for him. It seems that inhabitants of the two sections were supposed to stay in their own bailiwicks and if they ventured into strange territory, they did so at their own bodily risk. It seems that Mr. Bell thought he could get over to the train and back without attracting attention, but a long scar on his face shows that he failed. . . .”

Bess did not find such pieces of living history as interesting as her husband. More to the point, he was enjoying himself too much - while he was several hundred miles away from her.

It did not seem to matter that he had urged her to come with him. “The child” was her excuse to stay home now, although her two sisters-in-law were ready and willing to substitute for her, and Madge Wallace was in the big house with her and quite healthy, except for a sciatic hip. (Mary Paxton had remarked in 1922 when Madge was sixty that she was the youngest looking woman for her age that she had ever seen.) Madge, of course, was always eager to encourage this reluctance to leave home with her subtle manifestations of need for her “dear little girl.”

Although Harry Truman was still paying off the debts he had acquired when the haberdashery failed, he was now making enough money to build a house. He even had a bank of his own to give him a mortgage. But the subject seems to have become moot. On the contrary, Bess seemed to want him to become part of the Wallace enclave in the indissoluble, all-inclusive way that Natalie Ott, Frank Wallace’s wife, and May Southern, George Wallace’s wife, had joined the family.

One day around this time, May noticed her sister-in-law Natalie passing her house and asked in her cheerful way where she was going. “To Kansas City,” said tiny, frowning Natalie. “But I’m not going to get the streetcar at the corner because if I do, Mother Wallace is going to come out of the house and ask me where I’m going. I’m not planning to do anything wrong. I just want to go someplace without telling her about it!”

Madge Gates Wallace still was largely a recluse who seldom left 219 North Delaware Street except to visit her sister Maud in Platte City and her sister Myra in Kansas City. Inevitably, her family had become her only interest in life, and she devoted almost every waking hour to worrying and fretting over them. Separation from them invariably produced anxiety. Whenever they left the house, she still had to know where they were going and what they were planning to do.

It was difficult for Bess to live day in and day out with such an attitude without absorbing some of it into her own feelings. She could remain independent of her mother on matters that required thoughtful analysis or decisive action, but in matters as indefinite as absence from home or as casual as wanting to see the Queen of Rumania, it was easy to slip into disagreement with her traveling man.

Part of this emotional crosscurrent may have come from the difficult time that Mary Paxton Keeley was having without a husband. Mike Keeley’s mind became affected by his kidney disease, and he was committed to a state asylum in Virginia, where he died. Mary took a job on a country weekly in Missouri and simultaneously tried to raise her child and write a boys’ adventure book. A one-woman band, she spent most of her time driving over mud roads in all kinds of weather and grew more and more exhausted.

Mary showed up in Independence one day early in 1927, looking like a refugee from a famine. She had a deep cough that alarmed everyone who remembered that her mother had died of tuberculosis. Her father put her to bed, and the doctor diagnosed pneumonia. We can be certain that Bess was one of her constant visitors.

In these years, Mother demonstrated an extraordinary devotion to friends when they were struck down by illness or misfortune. Shortly before Mary came home, Bess had received a letter from the mother of one of these friends, thanking her for “the inestimable number of dear things” she had done for her daughter during her fatal illness.

During her convalescence, Mary no doubt discussed with Bess the rise to journalistic eminence of their old classmate Charlie Ross. Charlie had become the Washington, D.C., reporter for the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
and was building a national reputation. We can be fairly certain that he was on Mary’s mind because we know from her letters in the Truman Library that she and Charlie had seen each other around this time, and he had confessed that he still loved her. Since 1913, he had been married to Florence Griffin, a dark-haired beauty from St. Louis, and had two sons. During the year 1926, Mary wrote him a series of passionate letters that she never mailed. “When I think what you have done for me,” she wrote in one of them. “I was growing hard. You have softened me. I thought I must harden my heart against every man.”

In the Independence of 1926, the iron rules of respectability were still in force and Mary could only pour out her yearnings on paper. She could not even bring herself to confide her feelings to Bess. But Mother’s presence, her loving companionship, had a lot to do with Mary’s recovery. When she was well again, Bess joined Mary’s father and stepmother in advising her to quit the newspaper business. She simply did not have the physical stamina to work twelve hours a day and try to raise a son and incidentally write a book.

Mary decided to get a master’s degree in journalism and become a teacher. A year or so later, she was offered a professorship at Christian College in Columbia. It was more than a little ironic that she, who had set out to conquer the newspaper world while Charlie Ross hesitated to leave his teaching job, was now the teacher while Charlie was a big-time reporter.

Meanwhile, Judge Harry Truman was hard at work building his political reputation. He had an all-Democratic county court and the backing of the Democratic organization, but that was only a necessary prelude to accomplishment, as far as he was concerned. Although I was still considerably short (literally) of being an expert observer, I can add a few bits of reminiscence to these days. I remember happy hours in the family Dodge sitting between Mother and Dad while they drove over every mile of road in Jackson County. Again and again, while I lobbied for a stop in Blue Springs, where they made the best ice-cream sodas in the world, Dad would stop the car and get out and stamp on the edge of the road and see it crumble beneath his feet. These “piecrust” roads had been built by previous administrations and were a disgrace as well as a safety hazard. Judge Truman vowed that his administration would build roads that would last. That sounds easy, but in Jackson County, it involved him in all sorts of battles.

He also was determined to cut the swollen county payroll to enable him to pay for the roads without raising taxes. He boldly reduced the number of road overseers from sixty to sixteen and announced that contracts would be given to the lowest bidder, no matter whether the contractor came from Jackson County and was a Democrat or came from Nebraska and voted the straight Republican ticket. Politicians, contractors, and jobholders went howling to Tom Pendergast, demanding that he discipline Truman. But Pendergast liked the aura of honest government Harry Truman was creating in Jackson County, and he refused to interfere.

In some diary notes he made in the early 1930s, Dad paints a gritty picture of his two colleagues on the county court, Howard Vrooman and Robert W. Barr. They were both playboys, in politics for what they could get out of it. Vrooman was a follower of the Rabbit boss, Joe Shannon, who ordered him, Dad recalled, “to treat me for what I am in his estimation - that is the lowest human on earth.” But Vrooman was too much of a backslapper to pursue this feud. He preferred to have a good time, even while the court was in session: “He and Barr used to shoot craps . . . down behind the bench while I transacted the business. Joe [Shannon] finally had to send his emissaries to see me when he wanted anything, because when I wanted something done I’d let Barr & Vrooman start a crap game and then introduce a long and technical order. Neither of them would have time to read it and over it would go. I got a lot of good legislation for Jackson Co. over while they shot craps.”

Working under such conditions, Judge Truman’s headaches soon returned to worry Bess. She herself was affected by the turmoil. She began having what she called “spasms” or “fits” in the middle of the night, particularly after she had a bad dream. On July 14, 1927, she wrote to Harry, who was on reserve duty once more: “Your daughter and I are being extremely lazy while you are gone. It’s just what I need, I guess, because I’m surely feeling better. Haven’t had a spasm since Monday a.m. Had a terrible dream then and it brought on one of those nervous fits. Isn’t that silly?”

With her resolute, willpower approach to life, Bess was trying to dismiss those attacks of nerves, and by and large, she succeeded. But this tight control of her emotions was sometimes experienced by other members of the family - in particular, her daughter - as harsh and uncaring. “Marg is so cross today,” she wrote in another July 1927 letter, when I was three and a half, “We’ve been continuously at war. No doubt you would lay it to a change in the weather. Personally I think it is the heat and original sin.”

Right there is prefigured a pattern that would prevail for most of our family life together. My father unceasingly defended and - in Bess’ opinion - spoiled me. She always was ready to lay down the law, reinforced by the hairbrush if necessary.

Sometimes in her determination to drive original sin out of my system, she was unintentionally cruel to me. She simply did not know when she hurt my feelings. In one of her 1927 letters, she penned a little vignette of how she dealt with me. “I was giving her the very dickens last night about bedtime as usual and she was sitting down here crying and crying and finally she burst forth with ‘When is my daddy coming?’ That settled all the discipline. I just had to howl. It was so ridiculous.”

I’m sure I was amusing, from an adult point of view. But I was too young to understand why my mother was laughing at me.

There is an interesting glimpse in these letters of the way Bess saw the difference between herself and her husband. She was far more inclined to be hard on people who deserved it. On his way to camp in a borrowed car, Harry had had a flat, which was obviously caused by the owner’s failure to repair a slow leak. He was furious and vowed he would cuss out the fellow when he got home. Bess agreed he “ought to hear about it. But you’ll calm down before you get home and he’ll never know anything about it.”

Then she got a fiendish thought. “Maybe it would be a good idea to say nothing and let the same thing happen to him & hope for the worst. That’s a Christian spirit, eh?”