The Yanks Are Coming! (29 page)

HELPING THE MOUNTAINEERS

Sergeant York had learned a lot from the war. He had learned about people very different from himself. He had learned about the devastation of war; and he believed he had skirmished with the perils of Vanity Fair immediately after it. But most of all, he had come to accept his vocation: to devote whatever influence he had as a famous soldier to improve the lot of his people. It wasn't easy, because a grateful community handed him unexpected troubles. The Rotary Club awarded him farmland that neither the club (which did not raise enough money for the project) nor York could afford, let alone stock and run, especially after the postwar agricultural bust. It took him two years (until the end of 1921) of hard work, negotiation, donation campaigns, and frankly embarrassment to dig his way out of the hole that the club had unwittingly sunk for him. As York
said, “I could get used to most any kind of hardship, but I'm not fitted for the hardship of owing money.”
¹⁸

Nevertheless, once his farm was paid for he devoted himself not to it—though it was his main source of income, he regarded it as a sidelight—but to fundraising for a school that would emphasize vocational skills and Christian learning (as well as using his influence for other worthy projects, including roads). His work to build his school, however, rather than leading to immediate sweetness and light, resulted in years of political and legal wrangling. The school, the Alvin C. York Institute,
¹⁹
finally opened in 1929 as a public school, though because the subsequent Great Depression crimped the state budget, York often used his own funds to keep the school running. His governance of the school was frequently criticized, and he finally resigned as the school's president in 1935, though he continued to support the institution that bore his name and harbored his hopes to help his fellow mountaineers.

After the rise of Nazi Germany, York argued for military preparedness, which he thought might keep war from America's shores. He shared some of the isolationism of his countrymen—he had no interest in Americans fighting in another European war—but he also regarded imperial Japan as a direct and Nazi Germany as an indirect threat to the United States that had to be thwarted. By 1941 he ardently supported President Roosevelt's policy of materially supporting Great Britain against Nazi Germany and its allies.

Also in 1941, York became an inadvertent recruiter for Uncle Sam with the Warner Brothers film
Sergeant York
, starring Gary Cooper. Inadvertent, because York had initially, at least, envisioned the film as mostly about life and progress in rural Tennessee, rather than about his experiences in the Great War, and he had agreed to the film—after declining previous offers—in large part because he
was trying to raise money for a Bible school. Nevertheless, by the time the film came out, York was hoping that it would help forge national unity against the threat of the expansive Axis Powers.
²⁰

When war came, York volunteered, and was commissioned a major, though he was found medically unfit for active service and instead served on the local Selective Service Board (which inducted two of his own sons) and threw himself into all the volunteer work he could find to support the war effort. He was appalled that so many of his fellow mountain Tennesseans—crack shots—were being rejected merely because they were illiterate. But he inspired other men, those under the commands of Generals Matthew Ridgway and Omar Bradley, with a lecture on how effective a good marksman can be.

York inevitably took a special interest in soldiers from his region, and particularly in their spiritual and moral welfare. As in World War I, he was a little unsure about Orientals—then mistaking Vietnamese for Chinamen, now advising in favor of interning the Japanese, “whether native or foreign born” because they “all look alike and we can't take any chances.”
²¹
With such insights, it was inevitable that he occasionally toyed with the idea of running for elective office. He was a Democrat, and among the races he considered was running against Tennessee congressman Albert Gore, but alas he never did. He believed, fundamentally, that political problems are actually moral and religious problems (a core conservative insight), but he also believed that the challenge of the Soviet Union was best dealt with not by moral suasion, but swiftly, by means of the atomic bomb. One of York's takeaway lessons from World War II was the folly of letting aggressive dictators grow stronger and bolder. Rather than send American soldiers to fight in Europe again, better to drop a bomb on Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin and be done with him and his gangster crew—or so thought the Tennessee mountain man.

York remained stalwart, though his health was failing him, the IRS was hounding him, and his Bible school came a cropper. He had always been improvidently generous to others and neglectful of his own finances, and toward the end of his life he was bailed out by donations and by Congress's reining in the voracious demands of the IRS. When he died in 1964, eight thousand people turned out for the funeral in rural Pall Mall, Tennessee, and President Lyndon Johnson sent as his emissary General Matthew Ridgway. The old long-rifle huntsman had no interest in being interred in Arlington; he knew his place was, as it always had been, among his kin in Tennessee.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

HARRY S. TRUMAN (1884–1972)

H
arry Truman was the only American president to have seen action in World War I. Franklin Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy, and Dwight Eisenhower was an Army training officer, a brevet lieutenant colonel; but neither saw action overseas. Truman did. He went to war feeling like he was “Galahad after the Grail. . . . I rather felt we owed France something for Lafayette.”
¹

The thirty-three-year-old man who held such notions was born on a farm in southern Missouri. The metropolis to which his family moved when he was six was Independence, a city of unpaved roads and no public water supply or electricity but six thousand people. The Trumans moved there for the schools, as young Harry, though he had weak
eyes and needed glasses, read constantly (the Bible from start to finish twice), and his mother had ambitions for her young son.

As an elder statesman who reveled in his reputation for hard drinking and hard swearing, he confessed, “I was never popular. The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists. I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy.”
²
Actually, his peers thought him more “serious” than a “sissy”—an arbitrator who could straighten out their history when they were playacting as Jesse James or the Dalton brothers; a boy they would trust to umpire a baseball game. He was a good student at a school that taught a traditional, classical curriculum, an avid reader in a home that was well stocked with books,
³
a boy who preferred train-watching or playing the piano to ro ugh-and-tumble sports (where his glasses might get broken) and who kept himself neat and clean. He enjoyed, as he remembered it, a blissful small-town boyhood.

His mother was well read and doted on Harry, the eldest of her three surviving children. His father was industrious, a dealmaker, a successful livestock trader, a respected man—though with an easily ignited, nasty temper—who maintained the family in relative comfort until Harry finished high school. Then some bad land investments put the family in straitened circumstances. The family's heritage was Southern, and Harry's boyhood heroes included Robert E. Lee (venerated by his mother) and Andrew Jackson. He often daydreamed of becoming a general (he hoped to go to West Point until he realized his eyesight disqualified him)—or, given the hours he practiced, a pianist.
⁴

PAYING A DEBT

After high school he took courses at a commercial college, eventually seemed to have found his niche, at least temporarily, as a bank
clerk, and in 1905 found an outlet for his military interests by enlisting in a National Guard artillery unit (memorizing the eye chart so his eyesight would not disqualify him). In 1906, he heeded a call from his father and took up work on a family farm—to which the family had retired—where he spent the next eleven years working the soil, an occupation he did not like, and reading or playing the piano in his few leisure hours. In 1911, after two three-year enlistments with the National Guard, he decided he could not justify the time away from the farm. That changed after April 1917, when he decided it was time to pay his debt to Lafayette.

There were other factors too. He had enjoyed his military service, he was a patriot, and, as an active Democrat who had won a couple of minor political appointments, he knew that spending time in uniform could advance his political career. He reenlisted in the National Guard, sneaking past the eye test again, was elected a first lieutenant, and showed, as he had in all his jobs, that he was a dutiful and dedicated soul. Before his unit had finished its training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he had been recommended for promotion to captain. By April 1918 he was in France and attending Advanced Artillery School. The curriculum's intellectual demands, long hours (seven in the morning to nine-thirty at night), and hard physical training prompted Truman to write, “When I come home I'll be a surveyor, a mathematician, a mechanical draftsman, a horse doctor, a crack shot, and a tough citizen if they keep me here long. We have periods of lectures and exams and everything just like West Point . . . and they sure give us thunder if we are late.”
⁵
He graduated from the school, received his official promotion to captain, and was given command of a notoriously undisciplined artillery battery. “Give 'em hell Harry” got his start here, busting miscreants, promoting high performers, and surprising even himself with his success at managing
and training a difficult lot of men: “Can you imagine me being a hardboiled captain of a tough Irish battery?”
⁶
he wrote his girlfriend (and future wife), Bess Wallace.

Having come to pay his debt to Lafayette, Truman didn't particularly care for France or the French. Typical was his frustration with the dining habits of French officers: “It takes them so long to serve a meal that I'm always hungrier when I get done than I ever was before.”
⁷
He was a diligent tourist when on leave, but flinty in his patriotism and utterly convinced of the superiority of Missouri to La Belle France, Kansas City to the City of Lights, and everything American to everything French.

He saw his first action in August 1918, amid the mud and mire of the Vosges mountain range in Alsace-Lorraine, firing an artillery barrage and being fired on in return. The captain stood his ground. Many of his men did not. He cursed them for it, and won their respect.

Forced marches in cold, bitter rain brought them to the Argonne Forest and the enormous offensive that would end the war. Truman remembered that the opening barrage, to which his battery contributed, belched out “more noise than human ears could stand. Men serving the guns became deaf for weeks after. I was deaf as a post from the noise. It looked as though every gun in France was turned loose and the sky was red from one end to the other from the artillery flashes.”
⁸
The artillery followed the infantry, and at the end of it all, with the armistice in November, only one man in Truman's battery, Battery D, had been killed in action and only two others had been wounded, all of them while detailed to another command. He had performed exceptionally well. The war was the making of him.

With the war over, he wanted to go home, but he joked about his loyalty and affection for his artillery pieces: “If the government would let me have one of them, I'd pay for it and pay the transportation home
just to let it sit in my front yard and rust. Men you know—gunners and section chiefs especially—become very much attached to their guns. . . . It's like parting with old friends who've stood by me through thick and thin.”
⁹
Bess Wallace had stood by him through thick and thin too. She married Captain Truman on 28 June 1919.
¹⁰

POLITICS

He had no interest in returning to farming, so he set up store as a haberdasher. As a small businessman, he could not survive the postwar recession. Politics proved a better outlet for his talents. In 1922, supported by the Democrat political machine of Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast, he was elected a county judge.
¹¹
He was swept away, however, by the Republican electoral coattails of Calvin Coolidge, elected to the White House in 1924. Not only did Truman have to make a living, but he was perilously deep into debt from several failed business enterprises. He managed membership sales for the Kansas City Automobile Club, and was quite good at it, but it hardly satisfied him.

Regarding business as a game of chance where luck was rarely on his side, he decided that he would rather face voters than creditors. He was not without idealism, but to make his way in politics he made himself a wheel of the Pendergast machine. Pendergast himself was not without a certain amount of idealism either. He believed himself to be a realist, he thought men's opinions were easily swayed by newspapers, he denied that laws could make men better, and he believed that politics was a business where the victor handed out patronage and jobs. Yet the machine also served, in its own corrupt way, as a sort of nondenominational Catholic relief service,
¹²
helping not just political friends, but the poor—who were expected to show their gratitude at the polls. In 1926 the machine
returned Truman to office as presiding judge (which meant chief administrator) of Jackson County, a position he held for eight years. He did what he was expected to do as far as patronage was concerned, though he also did what he thought he ought to do to improve public services and run the county efficiently, never pocketing any extra money for himself.