Bess Truman (9 page)

Making her unhappiness more acute was the marriage of her brother Frank to Natalie Ott in March 1915. George Wallace was close to repeating the performance with May Southern. Nothing could make an older sister more uneasy than the marriage of younger brothers. It gave Bess the distinct feeling that she was on her way to becoming an old maid. There also was her mother, always there to solicit her companionship, to suggest, however subtly, that maybe it did not matter if Harry Truman failed. Without ever quite saying it, Madge Wallace hinted in her oblique way that it might be better for all concerned if Bess lived out her youth as her mother’s companion, endlessly solacing her grief, wordlessly commemorating the tragedy they shared.

The power of Madge’s influence in the family became visible when Frank and George Wallace married. Madge persuaded her father to divide the garden and give her sons two lots on which he built virtually identical bungalows. There, they began their wedded lives, under their mother’s direct observation. They and their wives soon learned that Madge Wallace never went to bed until all the lights in these two houses were out. She never permitted either wife to walk past 219 North Delaware Street without emerging to ask where she was going. It was not done in a tyrannical way or with a nasty tone of voice. Madge Wallace was still a lady. Words of endearment, a gentle smile accompanied the question. But it was clear to both women that their husbands were never going to be permitted to leave their mother’s presence as long as she lived.

If this was how Madge Wallace regarded her sons, it is not hard to imagine the intensity of her attachment to her only daughter. Nor is it hard for me to imagine - because I saw, in later years, the persistence of the antagonism - her dislike of Harry Truman, the farmer who was threatening to take her daughter away from her. That Bess Wallace was able to resist this steady, subtle, but oh-so-powerful opposition to the man she had come to love after so much hesitation is a tribute to her strength of character - and to the power of Harry Truman’s love.

Early in 1916, after he had been informally engaged to Bess for two and a half years, Harry sent her a cry of the heart, if there ever was one.

He could only beg her “to keep backing me to win through and I will.”

This plea was repeated with varying phrases throughout the rest of 1916. Abandoning Texas and Uncle Harrison, who was rapidly drinking himself into his grave, Harry next tried to strike it rich in a lead-and-zinc mine. His brother Vivian’s father-in-law had made over $100,000 in one of these ventures, and together they talked Harry into investing $11,000 of borrowed money into a mine near Commerce, Oklahoma.

The Truman luck stayed bad. Everything that could possibly go wrong with a mine proceeded to do so. The market price of metals sank, the machinery failed, the workers were unreliable. The men Harry had hired to run the farm in Grandview quit, and he had to rush back and harvest the crops. But Bess refused to lose faith in him. She sent him letters that made him “see rainbows in the darkest kind of sky.” When the mine finally quit for good, he was able to write: “If you still have faith in my poor judgment I can still win.”

Then he added one of those Trumanesque comments on life that had a lot to do with Bess Wallace keeping her faith in him. “You know a man’s judgment is good or bad accordingly as he wins or loses on a proposition. It seems to me that it’s one big guess and the fellow who guesses right is the man of good judgment.”

Absorbed in Harry’s struggle, they still ignored the war in Europe in their letters. By now, it had been raging for almost two years. Even local papers such as the
Examiner
began carrying stories on it. One Independence resident was serving with the British army and sent letters to friends that were published in the paper. The Kansas City
Star
and the other city papers covered it even more extensively. But most Missourians shared the opinion of the state’s congressional delegation: The United States should stay out of it. Missouri’s senior senator, William J. Stone, had grown famous for denouncing Woodrow Wilson’s flirtation with intervention on the allied side. Harry Truman’s political hero, William Jennings Bryan, had resigned as secretary of state to protest Wilson’s policies.

Bess and Harry probably discussed the war. All his life, Harry had been fascinated by military history, and he followed the great battles being fought in France, Russia, and Turkey with intense interest. But they had no special enthusiasm for either side. A glimpse of their typically Missourian neutrality emerges from a letter he wrote Bess about her dog.

While he was mining lead and zinc in Oklahoma, he was also raising a greyhound that Bess had acquired somewhere. When he brought him home from the defunct mine, he was calling him Don Juan of Austria, after the hero of the battle of Lepanto. But he remarked that Bess could easily change his name. “If you are an English sympathizer, you could hardly call him anything Austrian. . . . You could call him Kitchen (short for Kitchener) [the English general]. You could even name him Willy [after William Jennings Bryan] and be Democratically right.”

But the drumbeat of history refused to stay out of their lives, no matter what they thought and felt about it. The war dominated the presidential campaign of 1916 in which Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection against Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson won by carrying California by 3,773 votes. The embittered Republican regulars had refused to give the nomination to Theodore Roosevelt, because of his bolt from the party in 1912. Teddy had been calling the president everything from a coward to a hypocrite for what he considered Wilson’s halfhearted support of the Allies. Roosevelt’s abuse stirred a lukewarm sympathy for Wilson in Missouri. But as Harry Truman’s letter casually demonstrated, it was a long way from enthusiastic support.

Meanwhile, Harry went from lead-and-zinc mining into the oil business. His finances had been improved by a sad but not unexpected event, the death of his Uncle Harrison. The old bachelor left his share of the Young farm to Harry, his mother, and sister. With the farm for collateral, Harry was able to raise enough money to go into business with Kansas City attorney Jerry Culbertson (who had been a partner in the zinc mine) and an oil speculator named David H. Morgan, who was sure there were millions to be made from oil beneath the farmlands of Kansas and Oklahoma.

They formed a company and began selling shares of stock. One of the first investors was Bess Wallace. I do not know how much she invested or where she got the money - she may have borrowed it from her grandfather. But it was another example of her faith in Harry Truman. There were plenty of other investors, thanks to the war-stimulated economy. In January 1917, Harry was excitedly reporting to Bess that “the money is coming in by the basketful.”

They were taking in as much as $1,500 a day, and he proudly informed her that her shares now owned a refinery and leases on some 15,000 acres of promising oil land. “Hope to call you and say we’re over the rocks soon,” he wrote. “Here’s wishing you all the happiness on earth and hoping to share it.”

By March 1917, a few weeks after Bess turned thirty-two, their situation looked sufficiently promising to discuss an engagement announcement in the spring and marriage in the fall. Bess excitedly informed her closest friends of the good news. Louise Gates Wells, who was living in New York, replied with a spritely letter to “Dearest Bess(ie).” She was “delighted to hear that you were thinking of matrimony in a most serious fashion.” In her opinion, “Cousin Harry . . . is about the luckiest chap alive, not because of his investment prospects but the other prospects.” Another friend, Catherine Woodson, sent her congratulations and remarked that if she were a man, Harry would have had her as a rival. Mary Paxton was less ebullient but more intimate. “I was surprised,” she wrote. “I don’t believe your mother will ever be used to doing without you.”

Another comment in Mary’s letter makes it even clearer that Bess was planning to leave 219 North Delaware Street. “I know you will love living on the farm,” Mary wrote. “I expect to have a farm some day, but I don’t know whether I will buy one or marry one.” These words clarify a passing comment that Harry Truman made around this time. He said he yearned “to build me a bungalow.” He was obviously going to build a separate house on the Grandview farm and commute to Kansas City to help run the Morgan Oil Company. This made good sense. A man was needed on the farm to make sure the hired hands did their jobs.

But the drumbeat of history was booming louder in the lives of Harry Truman and Bess Wallace as these joyous hopes were rising. Although Woodrow Wilson had been reelected on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” he took an increasingly confrontational position against the Central Powers, Austria and Germany. He began expanding the army and navy. Shortly before his second inauguration, he made it clear that if Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and sank American merchant ships, the United States would declare war. Germany promptly announced it was going to do exactly that and gamble on bringing the Allies to their knees before America could organize an army large enough to make a difference.

Woodrow Wilson sent a declaration of war to Congress on April 2, 1917. One of Missouri’s senators and four of her congressmen voted against it, but that was irrelevant as far as Harry Truman and Bess Wallace were concerned. Almost instantly, the value of the stock in the Morgan Oil Company sank to zero. There was no manpower available to sink wells on the land they had leased, and the stream of money from investors dried up. Harry Truman was devastated.

Those comments about the war warned Bess Wallace that Harry Truman was finding it difficult to ignore the appeals to patriotism and courage that President Woodrow Wilson was issuing in Washington. Years later, Harry recalled that he was “stirred heart and soul” by these war messages. Bess soon was dismayed to learn that Harry had rejoined the Missouri National Guard. (He had let his original enlistment lapse in 1911.) He threw himself into the local effort to expand Kansas City’s Battery B and Independence’s Battery C into a regiment. As a former member of the guard, he was suited to this task. He recruited so many men that he was elected a first lieutenant of a new Battery, F.

Although Frank and George Wallace were both younger than thirty-three-year-old Harry Truman, neither enlisted. I am certain that their mother was the reason. A woman who would not permit married sons to move off her family’s property could not bear the thought of them going to war in distant France. Bess struggled to support Harry’s decision, but it was hard to accept. Madge Wallace undoubtedly used all her mournful guile to make him look uncaring and indifferent.

For a month, Bess managed to control a dangerous mixture of anger and disappointment. She told herself that there were millions of other women in America going through the same experience, but she had waited so long and marriage had seemed so certain. In six months, she would be thirty-three years old. Many people were predicting the war would last at least four years. She might be too old to have a child when Harry Truman came back - if he came back.

She tried to conceal her feelings from Harry, but they burst out one night in July. A week later he wrote to her, admitting that he had “felt like a dog” for the past seven days. “It seems I have caused you to be unhappy by my overenthusiastic action in getting myself sent to war.” Another woman about whom he cared deeply had had a similar reaction: “Two big tears came in Mamma’s eyes last night when I started off to Lodge in my soldier clothes. You are the two people in the world I would rather see smile and that I like to cause to smile and here I’ve gone done the opposite to both of you. Perhaps I can make you all happier for it. I’ll try my best. Some way I seem to have an ability for getting myself into things by my overzealous conduct or anxiety to see them a success and do not see the consequences for myself or others until the conclusion comes.”