Truman (3 page)

The reason given for this move was that Harry needed ‘graded' schooling, as opposed to everyone being taught in one class at Grandview. Maybe his father's desire to escape from too close a Young dependence and to try some of his speculative ventures also had something to do with it. They lived successively in two substantial houses in Independence, each for six years. Then John Anderson Truman had a disastrous year on the grain market and they were forced to sell up and move in straightened circumstances to the relative anonymity of Kansas City.

These twelve years, however, had seen Harry Truman through his schooling in a compact community. He was a boy apart, for his poor eyesight meant that he had to wear spectacles from the age of six, which at that time was regarded as an oddity in the mid-West and was held to preclude him from sports or rough group pastimes. He became a voracious reader but this did not lead to any outstanding brilliance in his school classes. A number of good women teachers made a great impact upon him, but their reminiscences give the impression that his impact upon them, under the stimulus of his subsequent fame, was more retrospective than actual. He learned to be a competent pianist, and for a time went to special lessons in Kansas City, and practised for two hours a day. There was a suggestion that he might aspire to be a concert performer, but this was not pursued. His daughter says straightforwardly that he was not good enough, even though he was once given a private demonstration by Paderewski. He retained a tinkling talent throughout his life.

His more realistic ambition was to become an army officer. He was fascinated by military history, and a military education would have the advantage of being free, so he was specially taught, with one other boy, for entry to West Point, or possibly the naval academy at Annapolis. The other boy got to Annapolis, but did not complete the course. Truman was turned down because of his eyesight. Additionally, as a result of his father's
débâcle,
he could not go to college. Instead he spent the summer of his eighteenth year as a time-keeper for construction workers who were doubling the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé tracks from Chicago to Kansas City. Then he went to work as a clerk in a Kansas City bank. He was always insistent that he had had a happy childhood, and he
had more than enough buoyancy to survive this wave of vicissitudes. He was mostly uncomplaining.

He was also a good bank clerk (he got his salary up from $35 to $100 a month), but he had no vocation for banking. This was for the adequate reasons that he was not interested in money and did not like bankers. It was a persistent view. He was against usury. He was also suspicious of the East, where most banking power lay. And he was against pomposity and hypocrisy, which he associated with the power of wealth. ‘High hats', who prayed too loud, were always in the forefront of his gallery of demonology. He was, I suppose, in favour of American ‘free enterprise', but in a curious way, for his sympathy and even his respect was always at least as much with the failures as with the successes.

While in Kansas City he joined a new National Guard organization—bank clerks have always been good recruiting material for part-time armies—drilled once a week in the armoury, went to camp for six summers, was given charge of a gun in a troop of artillery, and was proud of a blue uniform with red trimmings.
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He also did part-time work as an usher in a theatre, and saw most of the touring vaudeville acts free. He paid to go to classical concerts.

By 1906 the whole family was back in Grandview. The explanation given is that they were summoned home to run the family farm. But why? There was no obvious change in Young family circumstances. Solomon Young had been dead for thirteen years, and his son Harrison Young (the one the Union Red Legs had tried to hang) was still available and under 60 although probably developing a drink problem. In any event they returned. ‘… I became a real farmer,' Harry Truman recorded, ‘plowed, sowed, reaped, milked cows, fed hogs, doctored horses, baled hay and did everything there was to do on a 600 acre farm with my father and brother. But we never did catch up with our debts. We always owed the bank something—sometimes more, sometimes less—but we always owed the bank.'
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Truman stayed on the farm until 1917, from the age of 22 to 33. This was the most static period of his life, not only geographically but in other ways too. Quite simply, not very much happened to him, at least until 1916: the farm was hard work. He continued to read, although, to judge from his letters, more novel serials in monthly magazines than political biography or military history. He retained his connection with the National Guard artillery unit, but did not go to summer camps. He was too busy with the harvests. He had some, mainly cousinly, social life. He became an active Mason. And he courted Miss Bess Wallace.

This was one of the slowest courtships in history. It lasted in some form or other for 29 years, and was then followed by 53 years of marriage. It was also one of the most time-consuming. From 1910, when it entered its long home straight, to 1914, when he rather adventurously acquired a Stafford motor car, it involved him in the most appalling Saturday and Sunday journeys. Independence, although little more than 20 miles from Grandview, could not be reached across country. It involved a railroad journey to one of two junctions—Sheffield or the surprisingly named Air Line—in the north of Kansas City and then an eight-mile street-car stage to Independence. Still worse was the late night return. Any idea that the pre-1914 years were the golden age of American railroads is difficult to reconcile with Truman's experience. The trains started late and arrived later. They were diverted by frequent derailments and frozen in winter by heating breakdowns. Truman often arrived back at Grandview at two in the morning and sometimes at seven.

Miss Bess Wallace, on one side, came of the highest quality of Independence. Her grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, made a good deal of money out of milling and marketing ‘Queen of the Pantry' flour, which had many years of brand name success throughout the Middle West. His daughter, Madge Gates Wallace, as she was later to be known, played only too large a part in the life of Harry Truman. She married a David W. Wallace, who had some of the qualities of Eleanor Roosevelt's father. He was handsome, charming, and drank. He shot himself in his bath in 1903. But Independence was not New York City, and David Wallace, unlike Elliott Roosevelt, was not quite the social equal of his wife. (No husband appeared to be in those democratic,
open-frontier Missouri days.) And Bess Wallace was certainly no Eleanor Roosevelt. In the first place, so far from being a shy, ‘ugly duckling' of a child, she was the belle of her Sunday School class, where Truman first met her at the age of six, and of nearly every other class as well. Her ‘golden curls' were what first struck Truman. Later she developed a considerable athleticism and became a locally outstanding tennis player, and was talented at most other games.

She floated in and out of Truman's life from the age of six to twenty-six. By the time they were about thirty (she was a year younger than he was) they were unofficially engaged. When he was 33 and she 32 they made it official. Two years later (World War I had intervened) they were actually married. The fact that this Independence belle married ‘below her' to such a slow suitor was a sign of her outstanding good sense. Apart altogether from the chances of 1944-5, which led to Truman's propulsion to world fame, he must have been the strongest character of his generation in Jackson County. But she, in a quiet way, was still stronger than he: I think he was always more concerned about her good opinion than
vice versa.
He was also to prove about the most devoted husband in American presidential history. Not only did he ‘not look at another woman': he was deeply embarrassed if they looked at him, which they mostly did not.

The question which remains is why others did not press harder to carry off earlier this prize bride. One reason may be that, after 1903, they realized they would have to take her mother with her, and that only Harry Truman had the uncomplaining devotion to accept this. The extent to which he did so turned out to be almost as unparalleled as was the length of his courtship. Mrs Wallace survived nearly 34 years after the marriage and she lived every single one of them as part of the Truman household. Not only was this so in Independence. It was also so in Washington. She removed herself faithfully with the family. At the time of Truman's accession to the presidency, Margaret Truman was sharing a bedroom with her in a small Connecticut Avenue apartment. She died in the White House a month after Eisenhower's election. It was no political loyalty which kept her so close: she was constantly critical of her son-in-law, thought it wrong of him to sack such a fine military gentleman as General MacArthur, and would have been a natural Dewey voter in 1948. Harry Truman, for her,
always remained one of nature's ‘dirt farmers'. Perhaps one of the reasons for his joyful return to Independence in January 1953, with the presidency behind him, was that he was at last entering his own house.

Towards the end of his eleven years on the farm Truman became more externally active. He was involved in oil, zinc and lead prospecting, first in Texas and then in south-western Missouri and the adjacent parts of Oklahoma. They were all relatively small-scale enterprises. In one he lost about $7,500. Like all prospectors he nearly struck big. Like most he did not. ‘Maybe I wouldn't be President if we'd hit' he wrote to a partner forty years later. In the prospectus for an oil consortium of which he was Treasurer, he described himself a little vaguely as ‘native of Jackson County, Missouri; widely known in Kansas City'. Both he and the investors came out about even. Although he had a touch of his father's speculative fever, he lacked the essential ingredient for making money, which is simply the overwhelming desire to do so. But he worked hard, dismally, and unsuccessfully to bring a lead and zinc enterprise at Commerce, Oklahoma to fruition throughout the spring and summer of 1916. He had no touch. He had no luck. The result was failure and the impression from his letters is that, while only just escaping his grasp, it was nevertheless almost totally inevitable. In business he snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory as consistently as in elections he was later to do the reverse.

The entry of the United States into World War I in April 1917 aroused his patriotism more than his idealism: ‘… I don't give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether there's a League of Nations or whether Russia has a Red government or a purple one …' he was writing a year or so later. ‘We came out here to help whip the Hun. We helped a little, the Hun yowled for peace and he's getting it in large doses …'
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Perhaps even more it offered him an honourable escape from the defeats of the preceding twelve months. He became immediately involved with the expansion of his National Guard battery into a regiment of field artillery. As part of the core he expected to become a sergeant, but found himself elected, under the system which prevailed in the early days of World War I recruitment, as in the Civil War, a first lieutenant instead. The regiment, the 129th Field Artillery as it had become, was sent to Camp Donihan in Oklahoma for training. It was the
first time that Truman, at the age of 33, had been away from Western Missouri for more than a week or so. He enjoyed army life and was an efficient soldier. He was good with the men, learnt his gunnery proficiently, and ran an exceptionally successful regimental canteen. His assistant in this last was Sergeant Eddie Jacobson, a 26-year-old Kansas City Jew of New York City origin whose family were in the clothing business. Truman and Jacobson paid out vast percentage dividends on a small capital, and were commended for the most efficient canteen in the division. They congratulated each other on their complementary business acumen.

In the spring of 1918 Truman was sent to France as part of an advance party of the regiment. He saw New York,
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the ocean, and Europe for the first time. So far as Europe was concerned it was also the last time until he became President. He was overseas for almost exactly a year. As soon as he arrived he was promoted captain. He was sent on a command course for six weeks and returned as adjutant of one of the battalions into which the 129th was split. A month or so later he was made commander of Battery D, which had proved obstreperous, and too much for several predecessors. The men almost all came from an Irish Catholic district of Kansas City. Truman claimed that he was one of only six Protestants out of more than 180. He made a success of it. This was the most important achievement until then in Truman's life. It compensated for his inability to play games or get to West Point or strike oil. Thereafter the virtues of Battery D were given an unchallenged status in Truman's folklore.

The Battery's military exploits were respectable rather than remarkable. Between August 20th and November 11th it was three or four times in action near Verdun and in the Vosges. It was subjected to occasional bombardment and stood up well. But it was never in direct contact with the enemy infantry. It never lost a gun or a man. Neither the danger nor the privation was comparable with that suffered by most French or British artillery
units. For Truman it was a short war which forged long-lasting friendships.

After the Armistice he stayed in France for another five months. He had periods of leave in Paris and in Nice and Monte Carlo, but life was mostly a series of poker games in muddy base camps, first behind Verdun and then near Le Mans. He landed in New York in late April 1919, and was discharged in Oklahoma four weeks later.

In June he was married, in an Episcopal church—the Wallace influence—and moved into Mrs Wallace's fourteen-roomed house on North Delaware Street, Independence, which old Porterfield Gates had built in 1867, and which was to remain Truman's Jackson County home for the rest of his life. In July he arranged with his old partner Eddie Jacobson that they should jointly open a men's outfitting business in the centre of Kansas City. They secured a good site on 12th Street, just opposite the new Muehlebach Hotel and close to the older Baltimore, and they paid a high rent. They traded up. With wheat at $2.15 a bushel it was possible to sell $15 shirts. They probably overtraded as well. They soon had $40,000's worth of stock. They had a good first year. Then the post-war boom began to crack. The main lesson Truman claimed to have learned from his retail experience was never to elect a Republican president, and particularly one who appointed such an epitome of an Eastern banker as Andrew Mellon as his Secretary of the Treasury. In any event this early dose of monetarism helped to reduce the price of wheat to 88 cents in 1922, though the Democrats had seen it fall to $1.44 even before the election. It also reduced the demand for silk shirts in Kansas City. The $40,000 stock became worth $10,000. Truman and Jacobson ceased trading in the spring of 1922. Jacobson later became bankrupt, but Truman, who had politics in view, declined to petition, and eventually managed to pay off all his debts. He later gave his total loss in the business at about $28,000. On his return from the war he had estimated that he had $15 to $20,000 in free capital, plus a small amount of land. The failure left him without assets, but in no way close to the breadline. He had too many relations and friends for that.