Truman (2 page)

So, one might have thought, the imperial presidency came to an end, within a few years of its beginning. Truman trailed none of Roosevelt's clouds of glory. He had none of his style, none of his prestige, none of his informal, patrician grandeur. A failed Missouri haberdasher had taken over from a Dutchess County country gentleman. Main Street had replaced the Hudson Valley. But the imperial presidency flowered with the change. Indeed in an important sense it developed only under Truman. Roosevelt had been the leader of the free world at war, when, after Pearl Harbor, the commitment of America was relatively easy to sustain, and the acceptance of its leadership automatic. Truman achieved the more difficult feat of being the leader of the free world at peace, or something fairly near to peace. He was the first president to
preside over the
Pax Americana.
It was not immediately apparent that this would be so. There was considerable early faltering. But once he had got into his stride, his capacity for informal decision taking and for doing what he regarded as right, without regard to the personal consequence, became remarkable. ‘…his ego never came between him and his job,' Dean Acheson wrote. Acheson firmly believed that he was a better president than Roosevelt; but Acheson, for his own reasons, neither liked nor admired Roosevelt.

Truman did admire him, though he was instinctively very critical of the prominent. Of his successors in one form or another, he despised Nixon, was unforgiving of Eisenhower for his treatment of General Marshall, thought Stevenson effete, and believed that Kennedy's nomination, to which he was less entitled than Lyndon Johnson, had been bought for him by his father. But he admired Roosevelt as a great leader who was also a consummate politician. He tried to follow in his path without copying him. He would sometimes mock his grand voice and Harvard accent, and it is doubtful how much he liked him. But he was iron in his determination never to complain about the scant notice which Roosevelt had taken of him, and he had little of the resentment against the Eastern sophistication of his predecessor's White House which devoured Lyndon Johnson. ‘I see red every time [the sabotage] press starts a ghoulish attack on the President (I can never think of anyone as the President but Mr Roosevelt)' he was writing, admittedly to Eleanor Roosevelt, nearly six months after he had taken office.

Truman was in some ways the superior of Roosevelt. He did not have his style, his resonance, his confidence, his occasional sweep of innovative imagination, or his tolerance and understanding of diverse human nature. But he was less vain, less devious and better to work for. He was more decisive, and quite apart from Roosevelt's physical disability, he had more sustained energy than the wartime Roosevelt. He could always be up at 6.00 or 6.30 in the morning and be consistently fresh and on the job until however late was required. He was mostly better briefed, and not only in an immediate and superficial sense. He was at least as well read in history and biography as was Roosevelt. He was steeped in the history of the Republic and particularly of the presidency, but he was also a considerable expert on the lives of the Roman emperors and of almost every great military commander in the
history of the world. Yet his knowledge sat less easily on his shoulders. Mr Merle Miller, who published a so-called ‘oral biography' of Truman after the death of his subject, made an interesting comment:

‘He was a self-educated man, and he mispronounced a reasonable number of words, which in the beginning puzzled me. Then I realised that while he had often read them, he had seldom, if ever, spoken them aloud, not even in many cases heard them spoken aloud. It's like that if you are one of the few readers in town.'
²

This gets close to the central paradox of Truman. His manner was that of a Midwestern machine politician, and he was intensely loyal to his background and to those who had helped him on the way up. His friends were mostly ‘regular fellows', and he had many of the values of a member of a Rotary Club. But a few of those he most respected and liked—Dean Acheson and General Marshall—already mentioned—were very different from this and from each other. His affections were heavily concentrated upon his close relations, and he was not much at ease in female company outside his family.

It is tempting to say that he was an intellectual amongst political ‘pros' and a political ‘pro' amongst intellectuals. But that is much too easy an aphorism. As a boy and a young man he was more of a book-worm than an intellectual. He absorbed many facts, and he thought about them a good deal, but his conversation involved no spinning of general theories. He neither possessed nor aspired to intellectual or social sophistication. His speech and his writing—and he wrote a lot of unsent letters and undelivered speeches, even under the pressure of the presidency—were generally splendidly direct, but the choice of words was rarely distinguished, and the sentiments sometimes narrow and intolerant: ‘Sissy' was one which he employed a good deal. He used it frequently, disparagingly and foolishly about Adlai Stevenson. But when once asked at a school question and answer session, after he had been President, whether he had been popular as a boy, he replied:

‘Why no, 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.'
³

This interplay provided part of the formation of his personality and character. He was an ‘anti-sissy' sissy, a puritan from the poker rooms, a backwoods politician who became a world statesman not just because he was President of the United States in the plenitude of its power but because he had an exceptional sense of duty and power of decision, and because he could distinguish big issues from little ones, and was as generally right on the big ones as he was frequently wrong on the small ones.

Truman's early life was wholly contained in the western part of the state of Missouri. There is no evidence that, as a young man, he ever went as far afield as Chicago, let alone to New York or Washington. Yet within this small perimeter his life was mobile. He changed houses, and later jobs, with almost excessive frequency. But there was also a strong undercurrent of stability, which came from the homogeneity of his stock, a close-knit family, and the continued existence of a fair-sized family farm at the impressively named Grandview.

His four grandparents were all Americans of several generations' standing who, coming from Kentucky, had settled in Missouri in the 1840s. The Truman side was of English origin. The origin of the Youngs, his mother's family, was Ulster, with a German infusion. The two families embraced various nonconformist sects: Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists; no Episcopalians, and certainly no Catholics. In the literal meaning of the acronym, Harry Truman was as WASP as could be, although his style and outlook had little in common with the connotation for which the term was later contrived. This was not because of simple questions of geography or even wealth. The families, despite fluctuations and vicissitudes, had a certain underlying prosperity. Margaret Truman, the President's daughter, in no way a pretentious lady, stated in her biography of her father,
¹
that the Youngs at least
were ‘certainly upper-middle class' and that the Grandview farm, even when it had been reduced by one of these fluctuations, regularly earned $15,000 a year in the early 1900s, which would be the equivalent of a good $150,000 today.
¹

Western Missouri is obviously a long way from the Hudson Valley and the Hyde Park home of Truman's predecessor as president, who was born only two years before him. But it is barely 300 miles from Bloomington, Illinois, where Adlai Stevenson, his successor as leader of the Democratic Party and only 16 years his junior, grew up. The Stevensons, while substantially more prosperous than the Young/Trumans, were not rich by grand American turn of the century standards. Yet the chasm between Stevenson life and Truman life was immense. The Stevensons lived in a garrison town of American gentry; the Trumans were part of the countryside around them.

Both the Youngs and the Trumans arrived in Missouri by steamboat. They were part of the second or third wave of settlers, when the state was already more than twenty years old. Within a few years of each other they steamed down the Ohio River to Cairo, Illinois, and from there up first the Mississippi and then the Missouri to Westport Landing, so called because Westport, now a southern suburb of Kansas City, was there before the city itself. They moved back a few miles east and settled around Independence, which was a major staging point to the West and the South West. They each brought with them a few slaves. They established themselves, a little precariously, in ante-bellum Missouri, which was a border state but still, just, a part of the old South and very different from the territories to the west and north of it.

Solomon Young was the dominant figure of the four. He acquired more land and at one time had 5000 acres in Jackson County, as well as the title to much of what later became Sacramento, California. But he sold as well as bought, and did so somewhat haphazardly, so that he built up no great fortune. However, the few hundred acres of Grandview core remained in the family for many decades; it became a neon-lighted shopping centre in the late 1950s. As a younger man Solomon Young had run wagon trains from Independence through Salt Lake City to San Francisco, often being away for a year at a time. As a result he missed the Civil War depredations of the ‘Red Legs' from across
the Kansas border, which remained an abiding memory with Truman's mother. They slaughtered the hogs, removed the family silver and ruined a lovingly made quilt. Worse still, they tried, although not apparently very seriously, to hang her brother. Although more Missourians fought in the Union than in the Confederate armies, the Truman forbears and their neighbours were firmly for the South.

Solomon Young had an imposing presence, with a great white beard, and lived longer than Truman's other grandfather, Anderson Shippe Truman. He therefore had a greater impact upon Harry Truman. Anderson Truman lived most of his life as a smaller farmer a hundred or so miles to the south of the Youngs, in Cass County. He had about 200 acres. Of the two grandmothers, Mary Jane Truman died before Harry was born, but Louisa Young lived until 1905, when she was 91. This fortified the greater strength of the Young influence.

Truman's own parents were married in 1881. His father, John Anderson Truman, had been born in 1851, and survived only until 1914. He was the shortest-lived of the Truman tribe. His height was still more notably short. He was two inches below his wife. Her advantage in longevity was much greater. Born in 1853, she survived until the age of 95, well into Truman's presidency. She had a strong personality and very determined views. Again, there is an impression of the greater strength of the Young side of the family. But Truman, devoted though he was to his mother, was always determined to controvert any under-estimate of his father. ‘He was just as great as she was,' he recorded, ‘and had every bit as much influence on me …'
²

John Truman, mostly known as ‘Peanuts', pursued a variety of trades. In different stages or strands of his life he was a farmer, a cattle and horse dealer, a grain speculator, a night watchman, and an elected overseer of roads. Financial success always proved elusive, but he emerged from all these occupations, his son was insistent and uncontradicted, with his honour intact. He was also the first Truman to be an involved political militant. He held no notable offices, but he was a passionate Democrat. In 1892 he was excited by Grover Cleveland's victory. He had to wait until 1912 for another Democratic president to be elected, but he then welcomed Wilson's success, even though he would greatly have preferred Champ Clark, the only Missourian other than his son to
come within striking distance of the presidency, to have secured the nomination. His politics were based on a simple, instinctive, loyal partisanship which he passed on to his elder son. He also took him to a greater number of political meetings, ensured he was made a page at the Kansas City Democratic Convention of 1900, when William Jennings Bryan was nominated for the second of his three unsuccessful candidatures, and, more surprisingly, introduced him to Plutarch's
Lives,
which became a major literary influence.

Harry S. Truman was born, and so registered, at Lamar, Barton County, Missouri on May 8th, 1884. The ‘S' stood for nothing but ‘S'.
²
The choice of form by Truman's parents stemmed from a desire to balance between the competing claims
of Solomon
Young and Anderson
Shippe
Truman. Whether either was satisfied is not recorded. The subsequent two children of the marriage (John Vivian, born 1886, and Mary Jane, born 1889) were more normally named. Vivian passed his life as a moderately successful working farmer, until he retired on the proceeds of the land sale for the shopping centre. Mary remained a spinster, who lived with her mother. Truman remained fairly close to both.

The house in which he was born was more modest than anything in which he subsequently lived. It was not a share-cropper's shack, nor was it a solid farmhouse; it was between the two. It remained his home for little more than a year. Twice in 1885 his family moved to different houses in Cass County. Then in 1886 they removed themselves to the Young house at Grandview, nominally for ‘Peanuts' Truman to manage the farm of the ageing Solomon. The management role must have been either nominal or unsuccessful, for in another three years they were off again, to Independence, without any apparent ill-effect upon the farm.

Independence was already a proper town, although with a population of only 6,000. Today it has 110,000 and is effectively a nine-mile-distant satellite of Kansas City. Then, Kansas City was an exploding place of 55,000. The inhabitants of Independence regarded it as a ‘Yankee' city and themselves, with some residual Southern ways, as quite distinct. However, the presence of Kansas City was immanent. Both it and Independence were part of Jackson
County, which was the political unit, and the encompassment of Harry Truman's life until 1934.