Harry Truman (8 page)

This absorption in the Southern side of our historic quarrel led my father inevitably to an equally strong interest in politics - on the side of the Democratic Party. Democrats were not made by campaign promises and rational debate in Independence. They were born. As for Republicans, Mamma Truman always talked about them as if, at that very moment, somewhere in Kansas they were all collectively dining off her mother’s silver.

My impression of John Anderson Truman is not nearly as sharp as my impression of Mamma Truman, because he died in 1914, ten years before I was born. He exists in my mind as a shadowy figure, lovable and charming in many ways, but without the hard delightful impact that flesh and blood leave on the memory. He was a small man - and very sensitive about it. For years, I was puzzled because, in the few pictures of him that were taken with my grandmother, he was always sitting down while she was standing up. He was two inches shorter than she was, which meant that he must have been only about five foot four.

John Anderson was an energetic, ambitious man, who tried to follow in his father-in-law’s footsteps, and make a career of cattle and livestock trading. The house he purchased on Chrysler Street in Independence had several acres of ground, and there were many cows, goats, and horses in pens in the yard. He was also a born farmer and had a huge garden where he grew vegetables so remarkably large and fine that the family still talks about them fifty years later. Especially remembered are his yellow tomatoes - “peach tomatoes,” he called them. But John Anderson’s ruling passion was politics. When Grover Cleveland won the presidency in 1892, returning the Democrats to power, John climbed to the top of the Chrysler Street house and hammered a flag to the cupola, while his admiring sons watched from the ground.

Politics was where Dad and his father had a meeting of the minds. John Anderson Truman was always ready to defend the honor of the Democratic Party - with his fists, if necessary. He had a famous temper. Again, it is a puzzling phenomenon, remembering how mild-mannered his own father, Anderson Shippe Truman was. My father remembers this pugnacity fondly because he was often the benefactor of it. No one ever pushed John Anderson Truman’s children around without getting some sharp pushing in return. My grandfather was very Southern in his hot-blooded instinct to defend his family at all costs. Dad never forgot the warm feeling his father’s fights on his behalf aroused in him. I suspect it explains not a little of his own hot temper, when he found himself defending his flesh and blood on a more public stage, in later years.

Most of the time, however, my father’s world revolved around his mother. A story my Cousin Ethel liked to tell illustrates this fact as well as Mamma Truman’s strength of character. The boys along Chrysler Street had, it seemed, a habit of bombarding the local chickens with rocks. One woman neighbor repeatedly accused my father of being involved in this mischief, and Mamma Truman steadfastly denied it. Finally, one day the neighbor appeared in a monumental rage.

“Your older boy was in it this time,” she said. “Now don’t say he wasn’t because this time he was.”

Calmly Mamma Truman replied, “Well, just wait, and we’ll see, we’ll find out. If he was, why we’re not going to excuse him, but we won’t blame him unless he’s guilty.”

She promptly summoned all the boys within calling distance and asked each one of them if my father had done any rock throwing. Vivian and all the rest of them confessed their guilt, but they unanimously exonerated my father. “The neighbor went home a little crestfallen,” Cousin Ethel recalled.

I am sure that it was Mamma Truman who sustained Dad’s years of studying the piano, in spite of hoots and sneers from his less artistically minded contemporaries. The fact that he was a very talented pianist helped, of course. Dad’s stringent modesty when describing his own achievements has confused a lot of people about his musical ability. At first, he studied with Miss Florence Burrus, who lived next door. But he soon outgrew her scope, and Mamma Truman sent him to Mrs. E. C. White, a Kansas City teacher who had studied under Theodor Leschetitzky, a very famous European master of the time, the teacher of Paderewski. Twice a week, Dad journeyed to Mrs. White’s house for lessons and practiced at least two hours a day. When Paderewski came through Kansas City on a tour in 1900, Mrs. White took Dad to meet him, and the great man showed Dad how to play the “turn” in his Minuet in G. By this time, Dad was playing Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and he had acquired what was later called “a good foundation.” Mrs. White thought he should aim at a musical career. But when he was seventeen, Dad quit because - he says - “I wasn’t good enough.” There was another reason, though.

My father’s glasses did not entirely separate him from boys his own age. During his first years in Independence, the Truman home was one of the star attractions of the neighborhood, thanks to its extensive animal farm. John Anderson Truman built a little wagon and had harnesses especially made for a pair of goats that he hitched to it, and every boy in town was soon begging my father and his brother for a ride. When the boys grew older and turned to sports, my father would occasionally join them, at least during the baseball season, as umpire.

But my father spent most of his time reading books that Mamma Truman carefully selected for him. His favorite was a red-backed four-volume set of biographies by Charles Francis Home,
Great Men and Famous Women.
These were the books that made him fall in love with history. To this day, he still insists that reading biographies is the best way to learn history. He is also a firm believer in what some cynical historians have called the great man theory. Dad sums it up more positively. “Men make history. History does not make the man.”

My father’s second preference, after Home’s biographies, was the Bible. By the time he was twelve, he had read it end to end twice and was frequently summoned to settle religious disputes between the various branches of the Truman and Young families, who were divided among Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. He also discovered the Independence Public Library, and by the time he had graduated from high school, Dad had devoured all of the books on its shelves that might interest a boy. Included in this diet, of course, were great gobs of history. He remained totally fascinated by all aspects of the past. At one point, he and a group of his friends spent weeks constructing a model of a bridge Julius Caesar built across the Rhine. My Cousin Ethel remembered another season when Dad’s big enthusiasm was fencing.

Studious though he was, my father was not the brightest boy in his class. This title went to Charlie Ross, a gangling, rather shy young man who read at least as many books as Dad, and had a talent for handling words that won him the admiration of the school’s favorite teacher, Miss Tillie Brown. Charlie was editor of the yearbook and the class valedictorian. On graduation day, Miss Tillie gave him a big kiss. Dad was one of several boys who protested this favoritism. But Miss Tillie refused to apologize. “When the rest of you do something worthwhile, you’ll get your reward, too,” she said. As we shall see, Dad never forgot those words.

Charlie was one of my father’s closest friends. But more than friendship attracted him to another member of the class - a very pretty blonde girl named Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, known to her friends as Bess. They had already known each other for a long time. They had attended Sunday school together at the First Presbyterian Church when they were kindergarten age. My father often says it took him another five years to get up the nerve to speak to her, but this can be partly explained by geography. They went to different grammar schools until the Trumans sold their house on Chrysler Street and moved to new quarters on Waldo Street. When Dad transferred to fifth grade in the Columbian School, he found Bess Wallace in his new class. Everyone in the family seems to agree that he was in love with her, even then. “To tell the truth,” my Cousin Ethel said, “there never was but one girl in the world for Harry Truman, from the first time he ever saw her at the Presbyterian kindergarten.” This was the voice of authority speaking. Cousin Ethel went all through school with Dad and Mother. In high school, they used to meet regularly at the Noland house to study Latin with the help of Cousin Ethel’s sister, Nellie, who was a whiz in the language. They apparently spent most of their time fencing, however.

I am sure that Mother was the best female fencer in town, and she was probably better than most of the boys. To this day, I find it hard to listen to stories of my mother’s girlhood without turning an envious green, or collapsing into despair. She was so many things that I am not. She was a marvelous athlete - the best third baseman in Independence, a superb tennis player, a tireless ice skater - and she was pretty besides. Sometimes I think she must have reduced most of the boys in town to stuttering awe. Mother also had just as many strong opinions at eighteen as she has now, and no hesitation about stating them Missouri style - straight from the shoulder. What man could cope with a girl like that - especially when she could also knock down a hot grounder and throw him out at first or wallop him six love at tennis? Sometimes, when someone looks skeptical about my thesis that my father was always an extraordinary man, I’m tempted to give them the best capsule proof I know - he married my mother. Only someone who was very confident that he was no ordinary man would have seen himself as Bess Wallace’s husband.

Although they were frequently together in the big crowd of cousins and friends who picnicked and partied during their high school years, they drifted apart after they graduated. Again, geography was the villain. John Anderson Truman took a terrible beating, speculating on the Kansas City grain market in 1901, and in 1902, the Trumans had to sell their house on Waldo Street and move to Kansas City, Missouri. My father had hoped - in fact, expected - to go to college. But that was out of the question now. He tried for West Point and Annapolis but was turned down because of his bad eyes. So, like most young men his age (seventeen), he went to work. To the great distress of his teacher, Mrs. White, he also abandoned his piano lessons. The long years of preparation necessary for a classical pianist’s career seemed out of the question now.

My father worked for a summer as a timekeeper with the Santa Fe Railroad. Then for several years, he was a bank clerk. He made considerable progress at this job, going from $35 to $120 a month, and handling a million dollars a day in his cage. One of his fellow fledgling bankers was Arthur Eisenhower, whose younger brother Ike was still in high school in Abilene, Kansas. On Saturdays, Dad ushered at the local theaters to make extra money - and enjoy free of charge all the vaudeville acts and traveling drama groups that came to Kansas City.

In 1906, John Anderson Truman asked my father to return to the Young farm and help him run this 600-acre establishment, as well as 300 acres nearby, which belonged to Dad’s uncle, Harrison Young, after whom he was named. It was sometime during these years - no one seems to remember precisely the date - that Dad regained Bess Wallace’s attention, this time permanently.

My Cousin Ethel Noland was the unchallengeable authority on the occasion, because it was from her home that my father returned the famous (in the Truman family, anyway) cake plate, which enabled him to renew the acquaintance. “Mrs. Wallace was very neighborly,” Cousin Ethel explained, “and she loved to send things over to us - a nice dessert or something, just to share it.” As a result, there were often Wallace cake plates sitting around the Noland house, waiting to be returned. One Saturday or Sunday my father was visiting, when Cousin Ethel remarked that it was about time someone got around to returning one of these plates. Dad volunteered with something approaching the speed of light, and the young lady who answered his knock at the Wallace door was the very person he wanted to see.

I believe there really are no explanations that completely explain why two people fall in love with each other. But if you live with them long enough, you can see glimpses of explanations, and I will advance one here that throws some light on my father’s character at the same time. I think the secret of his success with my mother was his absolute refusal to argue with her - a policy he has followed to this day. From his very early years, my father was known as the peacemaker in the Truman-Young families. Even among his Noland cousins, he is still remembered as an expert in resolving arguments. Right straight through his presidential years, he continued to play this role in our highly combative clan. Occasionally, he complained mightily to me in his letters about the prevalence of “prima donnas,” as he called the more difficult members of the family. But he continued to exercise this gift for peacemaking in private - and in public.

Contrary to her public image, my mother is a very combative person. There is nothing vindictive or mean about her. She just likes to argue. I am the same way. To this day, we cannot get together for more than twenty minutes without locking verbal horns. (Whereupon Dad will groan, “Are you two at it again?”) Who else but a young man smart enough
not
to argue with Bess Wallace could have persuaded a girl like that to marry him?

By 1914, when my grandfather, John Anderson Truman, died, it was more or less understood that Mother and Dad were paired. She went to my grandfather’s funeral, and my father was a regular visitor at the Wallace house on North Delaware Street. Contrary to some of the biographical legends, he did not commute by horseback from the farm at Grandview. At first he came by train and streetcar and later in a magnificent 1910 Stafford with a brass-rimmed windshield and Prest-O-Lite lamps.

Some people have claimed that he bought the car to impress his future mother-in-law, Mrs. Wallace, who supposedly did not approve of the match. But no one in the family believes that story. Sometimes the tale is embellished, to make my mother the richest girl in Independence and my father some poor disheveled dirt farmer, desperately attempting to hide his poverty behind a high-powered engine. This is plain nonsense. By now, I trust I have established as undeniable fact that the Trumans were not poor. They had suffered financial reverses, but they still had those 900 acres of prime Missouri topsoil on the Young farms to fall back on. As my Cousin Ethel often said, “There was always a feeling of security there.”