Bess Truman (5 page)

On March 5, 1910, Dr. Hyde went on trial for multiple murder. It was the most sensational event to take place in Independence since Jesse James stopped robbing trains. After a month of wrangling over the evidence, the case went to the jury, which returned a verdict of guilty. But the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict and ordered a new trial. To this day, no one knows why the Supreme Court reversed; under Missouri law, such decisions can be made without stating a reason.

Two more trials, which dragged on through 1912, resulted in hung juries. Mrs. Swope, who had spent more than $250,000 hiring lawyers to prosecute her son-in-law, gave up. The Swopes’ reign as the social leaders of Independence had long since collapsed. The family scattered, most of them moving to California.

For two years, Bess Wallace had watched people whom she considered her friends writhing in the grip of publicity. Day after day, she saw the Swopes and their personal habits and wealth discussed by prying, vulgar strangers. She herself had experienced the anguish that public knowledge of private sorrows can cause. Her mother, the self-sentenced prisoner of shame at 219 North Delaware Street, was living proof of the damage, the pain. Then there was her friend Mary Paxton, once so brilliant, so promising and full of self-confidence, now a wan wraith in Mississippi.

What else could these experiences do but give Bess added reasons to regard the world with wariness and doubt, to wonder again if any man could be trusted, to ask herself if marriage to a husband who piled up money was a promise of happiness any more than marriage to a man who failed? She frequently was tempted to imitate her mother, to choose retirement from this raw, brutal, threatening American world, a retreat to a life of a quiet, dignified mourning.

One night in the summer of 1910, while the gossip and grisly jokes about the Swopes still were reverberating through Independence, the doorbell rang at 219 North Delaware Street. Bess opened it, and there stood someone whom she had not seen or heard from or even thought about in the nine years that had passed since her graduation from Independence High School: Harry Truman. In his hand was an empty cake plate.

Madge Gates Wallace often baked cakes and pies and sent samples to the neighbors. It was the only kind of cooking she enjoyed. Harry’s cousins, the Nolands, now lived at 216 North Delaware, the house across the street. They had recently received one of these gifts and had asked Harry Truman if he would like to return the plate. He had accepted, they later recalled, “with something approaching the speed of light.”

“Aunt Ella told me to thank your mother for the cake,” Harry said. “I guess I ought to thank her, too. I ate a big piece.”

“Come in,” Bess said.

The twenty-six-year-old Harry Truman that twenty-five-year-old Bess Wallace saw in the porch lamplight on that summer night in 1910 had changed in interesting ways from the quiet, scholarly, non-athlete she had mostly ignored in school. This man had gained weight and muscle. There was a solidity to his shoulders, a physical self-confidence in his erect stance. His skin was tanned and wind-burned and glowing with the health that comes from constant exercise. How in the world had Four Eyes turned into this rugged looking specimen of vitality?

Bess Wallace may have heard that Harry had become a bank teller after the family had moved to Kansas City. A perfect job for him, she probably thought. But that wind-burned skin, those calloused hands were not acquired in a bank. Mere curiosity, aside from friendly feelings, no doubt impelled Bess Wallace to invite Harry Truman into the Gates parlor. There, he was greeted by Mrs. Wallace and the Gates family and perhaps by one or two of Bess’ three brothers. After the ritual thanks for the cake, the older and younger folks probably let the ex-schoolmates go out on the porch and catch up with each other.

Harry was no longer working at the Union National Bank in Kansas City, although he had done well there, winning a series of raises and promotions. He was a farmer, helping his father and his brother Vivian run the 600-acre Young farm in Grandview. Harry’s mother and his uncle, Harrison Young, had inherited it from his grandmother, Harriet Louisa Young, when she died in 1909. It was hard work, but he enjoyed it - and it paid a lot better than a bank. In a good year, the farm could clear $7,000, and his share of that would be about $4,000. There also was the prospect of inheriting the whole works, or a good chunk of it, when his Uncle Harrison and his mother died.

He was also a part-time soldier, which helped to explain his square-shouldered stance. In 1905, he had joined Battery B of the Missouri National Guard and spent a few weeks each summer training with them. He had been promoted to corporal, which pleased him. Bess no doubt was surprised to learn that Harry had hoped to become a professional soldier and had taken special tutoring for the entrance examination for West Point the year after they graduated from high school. One day, it occurred to him that he ought to take a preliminary eye test at the Army Recruiting Station in Kansas City. They told him he did not have a chance to get into the U.S. Military Academy. So he decided to get a taste of military life, at least, in Battery B.

Harry may have amused Bess with the story of his grandmother’s reaction when he came out to the farm in his National Guard uniform one day. All Harriet Louisa Young could think about were the gloating Kansans who had burned and looted the farm in the course of executing Order No. 11 in 1863. She told Harry never to wear his uniform home again.

The passions of the Civil War had become quaint, almost amusing, to the younger generation. I don’t know what else Harry and Bess talked about that night, but the visit lasted two hours. When Harry returned to the Noland home, his eyes were aglow. “Well, I saw her,” he said.

There is a glimpse of the awe and longing with which Harry Truman already regarded Bess Wallace in those words. He told the Nolands that he had asked Bess if he could call on her again, and the answer had been an offhand yes. The Nolands were forthwith warned that they were going to see a good deal of Cousin Harry from now on.

But Independence was at least a four-hour trip one way from Grandview in a buggy, and the train connections were bad. Harry had to walk a mile from the farm to Grandview and wait for a Kansas City and Southern train, which was invariably late and did not take him directly to Independence. He had to walk a mile and a half along the tracks to the Kansas City terminal of the streetcars. As an alternative, he could drive the Truman family buggy into nearby Dodson, where he could catch an interurban streetcar, which required a transfer to another streetcar in Kansas City to get to Independence. Either way, the trip seldom took less than two hours. Inevitably – and to our great fortune - Harry and Bess began to communicate through the mails.

The first few letters have been lost, but by the end of December 1910, Bess had begun saving his letters, a good sign, although Harry did not know it. I doubt if he ever found out how many of his letters Bess saved over the years. Everyone, including me, was astonished to discover some 1,600 letters from him, as well as hundreds more from Madge Gates Wallace, Mary Paxton, and other correspondents in the attic at 219 North Delaware Street after Bess Wallace Truman died. Included in this unique historical treasure trove, which is the foundation of this book, are hundreds of letters from Bess to these same correspondents.

Harry’s first surviving letter revealed that they were exchanging favorite novels and that Bess had issued Harry an invitation to visit over the Christmas holidays. But he sadly informed her that it was out of the question.

It is clear that Harry Truman was aware of the challenge he faced in his pursuit of Bess Wallace’s affection. In school, the distance between them had been social. Now the gap had been widened, not only geographically but psychologically. By going back to the farm, he had activated the classic conflict between town and country that was bred into every member of the Independence upper class.

Let there be no misunderstanding about Harry Truman’s status. He was a farmer, as thoroughly and completely as any American who has ever dug a plow into the fertile soil of Missouri. On the Youngs’ 600 acres - a square mile of land - he and his father and brother Vivian were raising corn, wheat, and oats, as well as Black-Angus cattle and Hampshire hogs. As far as John Truman was concerned, it was a seven-day-a-week job, fifty-two weeks a year. He demanded as much work from his sons as he extracted from the hired hands, who frequently quit in exasperation at his sharp tongue and minimal wages. He expected his sons to be out on a gang plow wrestling a four-horse team across the fields each day at 5:00 a.m. If the furrows Harry plowed were not straight, “I heard about it from my father for the next year,” he said. “When it rained and we couldn’t plow or harvest, we’d take down the old scythe - and we had a dozen of them - and cut weeds in the fence corners and along the fences bordering the roads.”

John Truman was a driven man. He had formed a company, J. A. Truman & Son, which took on the responsibility for paying off some $12,500 in debts he still owed from his financial collapse in 1901. By becoming a partner in that company, Harry Truman made himself equally liable for those debts. But he combined this loyalty to his father with a quiet determination to preserve his independence. When the Trumans and the hired hands trooped in from the fields to eat the lunch that Martha Ellen Truman had prepared for them, Harry surprised the hired hands by sitting down at the piano and playing Chopin or Liszt while they waited for the food to be served.

He also continued to be an omnivorous reader, especially of history and biography. Beyond that habit, which went back to his school days, when he read every book in the Independence Library, his chief recreation was the Masonic Order. He founded a lodge in Grandview and traveled miles at night when he should have been resting or sleeping to administer degrees in other lodges. If he found any other consolation in this rural life, it was his mother’s company. He always had been her favorite child, and he reciprocated her affection with wholehearted admiration and gratitude.

It was she who had noticed his bad eyesight when he was five and taken him in a farm wagon to Kansas City for an examination by a specialist. She knew that the thick glasses he had to wear prevented him from participating in sports like other boys his age and encouraged him to become a reader and a pianist. She selected many of the books he read in his early years. She had graduated from the Baptist Female College in Lexington, Missouri, where she majored in music and art. Between Martha Ellen Truman and her oldest son there was an intellectual as well as an emotional bond. He admired her caustic opinions about everything from windy preachers to crooked politicians and the blunt way she stated them.

At first glance, this did not seem a good preparation to win the heart of Bess Wallace, a very different sort of woman. In fact, there seemed to be little in Harry Truman’s world that Bess Wallace would want to hear about. For the first year, the opening words of every letter he wrote her emphasized the distance between them. He addressed her as “My dear Bessie.” He did not know that her close friends, such as Mary Paxton, had abandoned that unwanted name. But Harry Truman had resources that were not apparent. He set out to make himself interesting to Bess Wallace.

From his earliest letters, he never missed a chance to portray himself as a rugged outdoor man. In one letter, he told her that after sowing oats and hauling six tons of hay in a fierce wind, his face was so wind-burned “I look like raw beef or a confirmed booze fighter.” He described his farmer’s rags - “dirty and tattered and torn with hog snoot marks, splashed milk and other things too numerous to mention.” He casually added: “Mamma ropes me in once in a while and makes me exchange for a clean set, but they don’t feel right until I wear them a day or two.” My favorite is his description of wrestling hogs to the ground to vaccinate them. “A 200-pound hog can almost jerk the ribs loose from your backbone when you get him by the hind leg. It is far and away the best exercise in the list. It beats Jack Johnson’s [the heavyweight champion] whole training camp as a muscle toughener.”

At the same time, Harry displayed his taste in literature, music, and art to Bess. During his years as a bank clerk in Kansas City, he had attended the opera for a season and decided he did not like it nearly so much as classical piano music. He also had seen the great tragedians of the day, such as E. H. Sothern and Richard Mansfield, when they came to Kansas City. In an offhand, unpretentious way, Harry made it clear that he was no country bumpkin. But he also was honest enough to admit that he agreed with his Uncle Harrison, who “says he’d rather go to the Orpheum [a vaudeville theater] and laugh all evening than sit and grate the enamel off his false teeth to see Mansfield or Sothern or any other big gun.”

This confession was as shrewd as it was honest. Very early, Harry Truman noticed that Bess Wallace loved a good laugh. He was soon amusing her with vivid glimpses of the comic side of country life. Here are some wry observations on the party line telephone: “When you want to use it you have to take down the receiver and listen while some good sister tells some other good sister who is not so wise how to make butter or how to raise chickens or when it is the right time in the moon to plant onion sets or something else equally important. About the time you think the world is coming to an end or some other direful calamity will certainly overtake you if you don’t get to express your feelings into that phone the good sister will quit and then if you are quick and have a good strong voice you can have your say, but you know confidently that everyone in the neighborhood has heard you.”

His wit was even dryer when it came to farm manners: “They are endeavoring faithfully to better the farmers’ condition . . . all the time. You know our friend Roosevelt [Theodore] appointed a country life commission to spend the extra cash in the U.S. Treasury. Some fellow with a good heart has also invented a soup spoon that won’t rattle. I know he had farmers in mind when he did that. Some other good fellow has invented peas that are cubes instead of spheres so they won’t roll off the knife when you eat them. If I can get the seed I will certainly raise them. . . . Now if someone would invent a fork with a spring, so you could press it and spear a biscuit at arm’s length without having to reach over and incommode your neighbor - well he’d just simply be elected president, that’s all.”

During a visit to Delaware Street, Harry heard Bess and Nellie Noland discuss Ethel Noland’s dislike of emotional excitement in religion. This inspired one of his best letters.