Bess Truman Read online

  The next day, Captain Truman headed for Tiffany and Company, on the southeast corner of Thirty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, where he bought a beautiful gold wedding ring. Then he strolled down Broadway with two fellow officers and stopped in an ice-cream store for a snack. There, a pretty girl walked up to him and asked if he was with the Thirty-fifth Division. Captain Truman said his artillery regiment was attached to this mostly Missouri and Kansas division, and in response to another question, admitted that many of his battery mates were from Independence.

  “Do you know Bess Wallace?” the girl asked.

  “Yes - I do,” said the astonished Captain.

  “Tell her Stella Swope was asking for her.”

  The former heiress - she was the youngest daughter - strolled out onto Broadway on the arm of a sailor. What memories that encounter stirred, when Harry told Bess the story in a letter from New York. It evoked receptions and dances in the Swope mansion before tragedy devastated that family, a world of rustling silk dresses and casual sophistication and presumed wealth. Now Bess was about to marry a man who had never been part of that elegant world. A man who was not certain what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, except marry her. An ex-soldier who had a remarkably daring spirit concealed behind his modest, smiling demeanor. Who could guess in what unexpected direction he might take her?

  For someone who regarded life with wary distrust, these thoughts were unsettling. But Bess had long since learned to put such thoughts aside, to live a normal life in spite of them. More than most people, she had already experienced the power of fate or destiny in her life. Everything, from her own deep feelings to the fortunes of war, had favored her union with Harry Truman. So, in obedience to the orders from the front lines, there was no delay.

  At 4:00 p.m. on June 28, 1919, seven weeks after thirty-five-year-old Captain Truman was discharged at Camp Funston, almost nine full years since he began his courtship of Bess Wallace and six years since she accepted him, he waited at the altar in tiny Trinity Episcopal Church, a few blocks from 219 North Delaware Street. He was wearing a gray tailor-made suit with small black-and-white checks in the cloth. It had been made by his best man, Ted Marks, who had been a fellow captain in the 129th Field Artillery. Before the war and after it, Ted ran the best gentleman’s tailor shop in Kansas City.

  It was a hot day, but Harry Truman was oblivious to the weather. “Never did we see such a radiant groom,” one friend wrote Bess after the ceremony and added an interesting comment on some feelings that Bess had obviously shared with her. “Methot you did quite nobly, Bessie, now twastn’t such a dreadful ordeal, was it.”

  Bess wore a gown of white georgette and a wide-brimmed picture hat of white faille and carried an armful of Aaron Ward roses. Her bridesmaids were her two favorite cousins, Helen Wallace and Louise Wells. Helen wore blue organdy and carried Sunset roses, Louise wore yellow organdy and carried Sweetheart roses. Tall, handsome Frank Wallace escorted Bess up the aisle and gave her away.

  The church was beautifully decorated with garden flowers in pastel shades. The altar was a mass of daisies, pink hollyhock, and pale blue larkspur. Tall cathedral candles cast a golden glow on this array of color. “Elizabeth Virginia Wallace,” the Reverend John V. Plunkett, rector of Trinity, asked the thirty-four-year-old bride, “Wilt thou have this man for thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him so long as ye both shall live?”

  “I will,” Bess Wallace said.

  In a roadster whose brand name I haven’t been able to identify, the newlyweds headed for Chicago. Ex-Captain Truman cheerfully declined to set a time limit on this long-awaited honeymoon. He announced they would make up their schedule as they went along. This decision did not sit well with his mother-in-law, who wanted to know the day and hour when her daughter would return to her. In Chicago, Bess and Harry stayed at the Hotel Blackstone and enjoyed the Windy City so much they forgot to phone or write anyone.

  On July 5, Bess’ brother Fred wrote to her, reporting there was a brisk traffic in wedding presents at 219 North Delaware. “You seem to be having some time in Chicago and must like it pretty well by the way you are sticking around,” Fred observed. Then he revealed the instigator of his letter. “Mom says if she doesn’t hear from you, she’s going to telegraph the hotel.”

  Bess’ friends pursued her with more amusing letters. One friend told her to see all the sights in Chicago but “don’t get lost in the big city and don’t you dare learn the ‘Shimmie’ [A forerunner of the Charleston, this dance was the rage in 1919]. Methinks you should have taken a chaperone. Cause when little girls leave the quiet little town and have anticipations of life on a tear they’re apt to do anything.”

  From Chicago, the honeymooners motored to Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan. North of that city were (and still are) miles of beaches on vast Lake Huron. The air was free of Missouri’s summertime humidity. For the rest of his life, whenever Harry Truman wanted to regain the radiance of those first days with Bess, he simply wrote: “Port Huron.” For him, it was a code word for happiness.

  Bess had a wonderful time too, but it was she who decided their honeymoon had to end because she could not stop worrying about her mother. So they rumbled home in their roadster and took up residence at 219 North Delaware. It was the logical place for them to stay - for emotional reasons (Madge Wallace’s dependence on her daughter) as well as financial and geographical ones.

  In the seven weeks between his discharge and his wedding, ex-Captain Truman had discovered that the job offered to him by the Morgan Oil Company no longer existed. The company was in financial disarray. Most of their leases had lapsed, and most of the money Harry and Bess had invested in 1917 had vanished. As part of a settlement, David Morgan gave the Trumans title to a large house at 3404 Karnes Boulevard in Kansas City. To sharpen the disappointment, while the Trumans were on their honeymoon, another oil company, drilling on land the Morgan Oil Company had leased and abandoned in Greenwood County, Kansas, reported a gusher. The newcomers had discovered the Teter Pool, one of the largest oil deposits in the United States. In 1918, Morgan had run out of money when he was 1,500 feet down in a well on the same land. It was painful for the Trumans to discover how close they had come to making millions.

  That disappointment had a lot to do with ex-Captain Truman’s decision not to follow a mule up a corn row and build a bungalow in Grandview. In a hurry to make some real money, he sold his equity in the farm to his mother and sister Mary and went into the haberdashery business.

  His partner was Eddie Jacobson, the man with whom he had run the canteen at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma before they sailed to France. They launched a store opposite the Muehlebach Hotel on Twelfth Street.

  Truman and Jacobson opened their doors in November 1919. The national economy was booming along at a war pace. Wheat was selling at a ten-year high. The pockets of the average man were overflowing with cash, and many saw no reason why they should not invest in some of the expensive shirts and silk socks being sold by Truman and Jacobson.

  Both men worked hard. The store was open twelve hours a day, six days a week. They divided the back room chores between them, Eddie handling the buying and Harry keeping the books. He often brought the books home with him, and Bess helped him with the laborious double entries, both of them toiling until long after midnight in the dining room. Business was fantastic. The money poured in the way it had arrived during the heyday of the Morgan Oil Company - by the basketful.

  Bess somehow found time to maintain her correspondence with Mary Paxton and Arry Ellen Mayer, her two closest friends. Mary was distressed to find herself in France when Bess was married. On June 9, 1919, she wrote her an emotional letter.

  “I suppose by now you are married,” she began. “Father wrote me that he was going to send you a wedding present for us both. I will bring you so
mething too. I wanted it to be linen, but that is out of reason here since the war.” She discussed other possible presents, including china, and then confessed she had no money to buy anything. YMCA workers were not well paid. “I only tell you this because I want you to know how much I am thinking of you and trying to find something for you. I surely do regret not being there. It is just a matter of weeks now till I come. I count not being there for your wedding one of the greatest sacrifices of the war for me.

  She continued: “I must go now and entertain some soldiers at 2 a.m.” She closed with: “Dearest love and all the best wishes of every kind.”

  Then, as if words could not express her feelings, she added, on separate lines, “Till we meet - Dearest love.”

  Not long after Bess received this letter, Mary’s father John Paxton, who still lived a few blocks away on Delaware Street, told her astonishing news. Mary had gotten married. It was apparently a sudden decision. The man’s name was Edmund Burke Keeley. He and Mary had worked together in Virginia before she went to France. (He was apparently the man who loved her too much.) He had met her at the ship in New York, and they had been married in the Little Church Around the Corner. They were now living on a farm he was managing near Richmond. You can imagine Bess’ consternation. Mary’s next letter was read, you can be sure, with lightning speed.

  “I surely have a lot to tell you,” she began. [I] “hardly know where to start. My husband is an Irishman but a genius on farming lines.” Then comes a sentence that she inserted after she finished the letter. “He is perfectly dear to me.” She went on to tell Bess that Edmund Burke Keeley (nicknamed Mike) “has a wonderful opportunity for he has this huge place to make into a model farming community with unlimited capital behind this place. (Oh no it is not our capital.) He did not want to wait for me to come home to be married. The wheat was half thrashed. So we came back here for our honeymoon.

  “We have a house that looks like a small summer hotel. . . . I have the job of making it into a home. It surely will be fun.” She hoped to visit Independence in December, and apropos of that, remarked: “This farm is so lovely I never want to leave it except coming to see you all.”

  Bess was more than hurt by Mary’s casual tone and bewildered by her headlong marriage. She wrote to her, asking how she could have gotten married to a man none of her family or friends had ever heard of, much less met. In particular, she asked how Mary could have done this without sharing it with her.

  In her next letter, which was written on stationery topped by “Curies Neck Farm,” Mary tried to explain. “The honest truth is I could not tell anyone in advance I was going to be married because I only knew it twenty-four hours in advance myself. I was too tired to have any fuss over getting married.”

  Mary assured Bess that she had “everything anyone needs to make them happy, a good husband, a farm house, a dog, gold fish, a canary, and will have some chickens next week.” She described some of the lavish wedding presents they had received from the owners of the farm and from the people who worked on it. Mary wished Bess lived closer to Curies Neck Farm, which was on the James River near Richmond. “I am going to bring Mike home in November but I can’t bring the place to show you.”

  On January 8, 1920, Arry Ellen Mayer married a Canadian, Charles Calhoun, in Toronto. I am an amateur in psychology, but it is easy to see a connection in this rush to matrimony with the marriage of Bess and Harry.

  Although their first year together was brightened by Harry’s success as a businessman, there was a sharp disappointment at the end of it. She had a miscarriage. It upset her a great deal. She and Harry both were eager to have a child, and this unhappy accident at the age of thirty-five made her fear she had waited too long. Other events in 1920 were also inauspicious. The Republicans kicked the Democrats out of the White House and elected Warren G. Harding in a landslide. Almost immediately, a sharp deflation in the economy began, much of it caused, Harry Truman maintained, by Republican tight money policies. The price of wheat began to slide, and the pockets of those who frequented Twelfth Street were no longer full. Sales at the Truman and Jacobson Haberdashery dwindled. Red ink began to appear in the books on which Bess and Harry labored.

  This shift in fortunes was a dismaying shock to Bess. In early 1920, when business was good, she had begun to assume her natural role as one of the social leaders of Independence. She invited the Good Samaritan Class of the First Christian Church, to which her sister-in-law, May Wallace, belonged, to 219 North Delaware for a “musical tea.” The house was decorated with spring flowers, and the singers and musicians performed twice, once in the afternoon for young people and again in the evening for adults. Everyone was charmed, and the social pages of the Jackson Examiner credited the occasion to “the courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Truman.”

  Throughout 1921, Truman and Jacobson slid slowly, inevitably toward collapse. It was a bitter disappointment for Harry Truman, too. It wiped out money he had received for his share of the Truman farm - the financial reserve on which he had planned to start married life. But he was not the sort of man who sat still in face of disaster - or took to drink. He had an alternative plan ready - one that stirred considerable anxiety in Bess. Reviving the idea he had mentioned in his letter from France, he was planning to run for eastern judge of Jackson County. He was plunging into the same political milieu that had destroyed her father. I have no recorded evidence of what Madge Wallace thought of this idea - but I do not need any. She undoubtedly expressed profound horror - especially when she was alone with Bess.

  Frank Wallace had loaned Harry some money when the store became short of cash. But Madge Wallace, who had the cash she had inherited from her father, never offered her son-in-law a cent, as far as I know. On the contrary, while Truman and Jacobson were closing their doors for the last time in April, Madge, as oblivious as ever to financial realities, was planning a trip to the East Coast with her son Fred when he finished the school year at the University of Missouri.

  Fred always had been Madge’s pet, but since Bess married, she could not bear to let him out of her sight. She moved to Columbia and kept house for him during his first year away from home. Fred never objected to being spoiled this way. In the opinion of some of the older members of the family, the trip east was probably his idea. “If there was any money around, Freddy could never resist spending it,” one of my aunts once remarked.

  Perhaps this egotism - I can’t bring myself to call it selfishness because I don’t think Madge Wallace was aware of what she was doing - enabled Bess to ignore her mother and back her husband’s decision to become a politician. The best proof of her approval is not in writing but in the actions of the Wallace men on behalf of Harry Truman. At this time, Frank Wallace was the leader of the Fourth Ward in Independence. He began taking Harry around the ward, introducing him to people. One can be certain that he never would have done so if his sister had opposed the candidacy. George Wallace, too, although he professed a disdain for politics and politicians, talked up his brother-in-law’s candidacy.

  But not opposing this plunge into politics and warmly, enthusiastically approving it are two different things. As Bess already had done at many other times in her life, she managed to suppress her feelings and support her husband’s decision. But she paid a price in sleeplessness and tension that soon led to an even heavier toll.

  Another source of emotional stress was her awareness that Mary Paxton Keeley was pregnant and having no difficulty carrying the baby to term. Much as Bess and Mary loved each other, there was competition in their relationship. They had chosen such different paths through life, so I suppose it was inevitable. It must have been exasperating for Bess to see Mary achieving what she yearned for, after making such an impulsive marriage. When you have waited and planned and hoped for so long and life disappoints you, it is doubly difficult to bear.

  At the end of October 1921, just as her husband was launching his campaign for eastern judge, Bess received a triumphant letter from Mary. It is al
so, as are so many of their letters, touching.

  Dear Bess:

  I thought by this time you know I have a precious little son. I never believed I could think anything as sweet. He is tiny but started gaining today. He has brown hair, gray eyes, quite a nose, flat ears, a good head. I believe he is going to be like Father. . . .

  Bess, it was the hardest thing I was ever up against. But such a small price to pay for a treasure. He came a little soon and Mike was away and I entirely among strangers. Mike is so proud of him and proud of himself for being the father of such a fine baby. . . .

  It does not seem right that you and your mother cannot come and tell me what a nice son I have. . . .

  In Independence, the year 1922, the third year of the Truman marriage, began with little joy and a lot of apprehension. Truman and Jacobson collapsed. They had a lease on the store that ran for several more years, but no money to pay the rent. Harry Truman refused to declare bankruptcy. He persuaded Eddie Jacobson to join him, and together they went to their creditors and arranged to begin paying off the debt on the installment plan. To prove his good faith, Dad sold the Karnes Boulevard house and deeded to the bank a 160-acre Kansas farm he had bought as an investment.

  Meanwhile, he plunged into the melee for eastern judge. Jackson County politics had not changed much since the days of David Willock Wallace. The Democrats were still divided into feuding factions. In 1922, the two factions were known as the Goats and the Rabbits. They supposedly got their name from the Democrats’ habit of herding everything living (and occasionally, a few of the dead) to the polls, including the goats and rabbits that their Irish constituents used to maintain around their shanties. The Goats were loyal to the Democratic boss in Kansas City, Tom Pendergast. The Rabbits were led by another Irishman, Joseph Shannon. According to legend, this was the election in which Boss Tom Pendergast and Harry Truman joined forces. In the army, Dad had been friendly with Jim Pendergast, Tom’s nephew, and when the campaign began, Jim had introduced him to Boss Tom, who offered to support him.