Bess Truman (7 page)

Making some money became almost an obsession with Harry Truman. He dashed to New Mexico in search of prime farmland that he hoped he could buy or lease with his Uncle Harrison’s help. At the farm, he watched his brother Vivian depart to his own farm - he had married in the fall of 1911 - and then let the hired men go, too. He was going to work the entire farm on his own to try to raise the profits. His father was planning to run for road overseer for the town of Grandview, and that was going to take much of John Truman’s time. “Work is the only way I see to arrive at conclusions,” Harry wrote. “This thing of sitting down and waiting for plutocratic relatives to decease [he was referring to his Uncle Harrison] doesn’t go with me.”

Now began a terrific struggle to make the farm profitable and simultaneously keep Bess Wallace’s interest in him alive. Everything seemed to conspire against him. Trains failed to run, and he would lose a whole night’s sleep trying to get back to Grandview. His father became surlier about the time Harry spent in Independence. John Truman began going out of his way to make life difficult for his son.

In this letter, written in the middle of August of 1912, Harry gives Bess (and us) a graphic picture of a particularly bad night and day. It began with the train sitting on the tracks halfway to Grandview until 6:00 a.m.

It might be helpful to note that Harry was twenty-eight years old at this point. He displayed incredible forbearance with his father’s tantrums. But he also stood up to him. “Papa says he’s going to adopt a boy if I don’t stay home on Sundays. I told him to go ahead,” he wrote.

A few weeks later, he excused a disconnected letter, explaining: “I have to write this on the installment plan, as usual Papa keeps wanting something.” Next came a report that his father was “on his ear” because he had come home with two loads of cows and Harry was not there to meet him. His father angrily telephoned Independence and was frustrated by an uncooperative operator. Harry was “glad.” He said that there was “no harm done and I spent the evening where I wanted to.”

His letters are full of references to his exhaustion. One day, he fell asleep shelling corn. But he doggedly continued his visits to Independence. His devotion clearly began to make an impression on Bess Wallace. In the fall of 1912, they went for a walk in the country on which Farmer Truman proved he could more than match Bess’ endurance. He wrote her the next day, cheerfully asking how she felt: “With the exception of a blister, I was as fit as could be this morning.”

A new form of entertainment – motion pictures - was sweeping the country. Harry used them to extend an ingenious invitation. He suggested going to lunch at some Kansas City restaurant and then seeing all the pictures that could be crowded in four hours. He admitted it was a “Twelfth Street stunt” [Twelfth Street was the Broadway of Kansas City], but “if a person don’t have a good time doing what everybody does, he’ll lead a mighty bored life.”

Along with his sophistication, Harry Truman continued to reveal his feelings to Bess about the life he led on the farm. His thoughts now were often more serious than amusing: “Do you know that I did the orneriest thing this morning? I was cutting oats right here close to the house and amputated the left foot of an old hen with five chickens. I felt badly about it too. She was over in the oats where I couldn’t see her till I’d already done it. Mamma says she’ll get all right. I hope so. I’d rather do most anything than to hurt something that can’t tell me what it thinks of me.”

Politics also became an excuse for escorting Miss Wallace. They went to a political rally at which William Jennings Bryan spoke on behalf of the Democratic candidate for president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson. The nominee, a former president of Princeton University who had turned politician and become governor of New Jersey in 1910, was unknown to Missourians. But Bryan was a famous name to every Western farmer. Almost to a man, they had worshipped him ever since he electrified the Democratic Convention of 1896 with his famous speech attacking the gold standard. His call for using silver to back American currency really was a demand for cheaper money, always popular with debt-burdened farmers. Bryan turned it into a crusade by proclaiming: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” and denouncing as Antichrists the railroad barons and Wall-Street tycoons who favored the gold standard. His fervid oratory three times had won him the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

But in 1912, Bryan was disliked by many Missourians. He had double-crossed Missouri’s hero, Champ Clark, speaker of the House of Representatives, who thought he deserved the Democratic Party’s nomination for the progressive legislation he had pushed through Congress. Because Clark was supported by New York’s Tammany Hall bosses, Bryan decided he represented “the predatory interests” and threw his support to the political newcomer, Woodrow Wilson.

Jackson County Democrats were not that fond of Champ Clark, who represented the dominant St. Louis bosses as far as they were concerned. Bryan drew a huge crowd, and Harry Truman enjoyed him immensely. In spite of the way the Nebraskan had led the Democratic Party to disaster in three presidential elections since 1896, Harry was one of his “staunchest admirers.” He liked the idealism that Bryan tried to inject, however ineptly, into American politics.

I don’t know what Bess thought of the aging “Boy Orator of the Platte,” but she undoubtedly was pleased by Harry’s remark that he would not have enjoyed the great man nearly so much if she had not been present. This sounds to me as if she had displayed a certain reluctance to attend this political jamboree. It is easy to see why politics would remain a subject Bess preferred to avoid.

But she could not stop Harry from following the tumultuous campaign of 1912 with passionate interest. Teddy Roosevelt, running as the candidate of the Progressive Party, split the Republican Party, and Woodrow Wilson became the first Democratic president in sixteen years. In the three-cornered melee, the incumbent, President William Howard Taft, suffered one of the worst political humiliations in U.S. history, carrying only two states.

Another issue loose in this campaign was votes for women. The Jackson County
Examiner
carried an editorial in favor of it. It was close to the high tide of the suffragette movement. Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers were making headlines in England with their hunger strikes, and in New York, brigades of militant women were marching up Fifth Avenue. But the movement had few supporters in Missouri, and Harry Truman and Bess Wallace were not among them. In one of his letters, Harry offhandedly remarked that a young farm horse “kicked like a starving suffragette,” and in another letter, he compared Mrs. Pankhurst to one of the farm’s guinea hens, who squalled all night and day.

It may puzzle some people that Bess Wallace, so independent in many ways, and her best friend, Mary Paxton, who was even more independent, did not support the suffragettes. But votes for women was not a popular idea outside the media capital of New York. In Massachusetts, when it was submitted to the people in a referendum with women permitted to vote, it was defeated by almost two to one, and the most shocking part of the story is the fact that only 23,000 women voted in favor of it. In Missouri, the question was put to a vote in 1914 - and lost by five to one, with only men voting.

The installation of a Democratic president in 1913 did not improve the fortunes of Harry Truman. The country, at least the western half, promptly reeled into a slump that sent farm prices plummeting - and with them, Harry’s hopes of making a profit from his backbreaking labors. To worsen life for the Trumans, their right to the farm was menaced by a lawsuit brought by their Young relatives, who resented the way their mother, Harriet Louisa Young, had left her property to Harrison and Martha Ellen and cut the rest of the family off with $5 each.

The brief alleged that Mamma Truman was the villain who persuaded her weak-minded mother to write this will. The accusation made Harry so mad, “I could fight a boilermaker.” Harriet Young was the best businesswoman he had ever seen and a woman of fierce integrity. “If we’d ever mentioned property to her, it would have finished us,” he told Bess. But there was nothing to do except hire a lawyer and slug it out. The legal expenses devoured what little money the farm produced during these painful years.

In spite of his poverty, Harry was gaining ground with Miss Wallace. Early in the summer of 1913, a little more than two years after Bess had turned down his proposal, she paid another of her rare visits to Grandview. Madge Wallace revealed her displeasure - disguised, of course, as concern - by taking it into her head that some sort of accident had happened on the trip out. She tried to call the Trumans, and the operator refused to connect her. This fact convinced her that a major disaster had occurred, and she was frantic until Bess came home. Harry apologized for the awful phone service - he vowed not to pay the bill - and asked anxiously: “Do you suppose she’ll ever let you come again?”

Bess came up with a solution to her mother’s hovering presence - longer and longer walks. Harry cheerfully accepted the opportunity to be alone with her. The expeditions undoubtedly involved picnics, and Harry passed this crucial test, without realizing it. They also took up a sport for which Harry Truman had no enthusiasm whatsoever - fishing. Bess loved it, except for one detail - baiting the hook. She would let Harry handle the worms, and then he would read or talk while she pulled carp and catfish from the Little Blue River or some lesser stream.

On the eve of a fishing expedition in early August 1913, Harry showed how seriously he took his baiting job - while flavoring it with his wry wit.

The walks, meanwhile, stretched into marathons. In the fall of 1913, Harry was asking Bess if she had recovered from their most recent outing. “I am just now up to date,” he admitted. A few weeks later, he was warning her:
“Be ready to walk Sunday.”

So it went through the fall of 1913 until the first Sunday in November. On that day, three years and five months after they had renewed their friendship on the porch of 219 Delaware Street, Bess confided to Harry Truman news that he did not believe at first. She told him that in the two and a half years since she had rejected his proposal, her feelings for him had undergone a profound change. She had begun to think that if she married anyone, he would be the man.

Harry was speechless. He could only sit and look at this golden-haired young woman. Once more, Bess did not know what to make of him. She found herself again wondering what there was about this odd mixture of farmer and thinker and humorist and roughneck who was tempting her to leave the sanctuary of 219 North Delaware Street to risk disappointment and perhaps worse in an uncaring world. “Harry Truman,” she cried, “you’re an enigma!”