Bess Truman Read online

  Harry Truman said he was looking for support anywhere he could find it, but it would have to come with no strings attached. Pendergast assured him that this was the case and then executed a backroom deal with Joe Shannon that would give Shannon the eastern judgeship in return for letting Boss Tom get his man into the western job. But Harry Truman had some backers in the campaign that Boss Tom could not control. One of the most significant was William Southern, editor of the Jackson Examiner, the most widely read paper in the county outside Kansas City, and the father of his wife’s sister-in-law, May Wallace.

  It is fascinating how important Bess Wallace Truman’s family connections were in launching her husband’s political career. I suspect Bess also had a hand in an appeal to a new force in Jackson County’s politics - the woman’s vote. After failing to win referendums in Missouri and other states, the suffragettes had concentrated their efforts on Washington, D.C., and persuaded Congress to pass the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. In the 1922 election, an effective campaign to persuade women to vote for Harry Truman was conducted by Mary Paxton’s stepmother and Mrs. W. L. C. Palmer, one of the favorite teachers of the class of 1901. They canvassed Independence door to door, the way the Liberty Loan soldiers had sold bonds during the war.

  Not to be discounted, of course, was the candidate’s war record and the energy he threw into the campaign. He drove his aging roadster over almost every mile of Jackson County’s atrocious roads. He also terrified his wife by flying to several rallies in an airplane that looked like it had been put together with paper and string. The campaign reached its climax in the blazing heat of the summer of 1922. Between June 1 and August 5, the date of the primary, Harry Truman visited every township and precinct in the county.

  Bess did not go with him. She stayed home for an important reason: She was pregnant again. Not many women in Jackson County went to political rallies anyway, even though they had gotten the vote. But the tension and turmoil of the campaign swirled through Bess’ mind and spirit, nevertheless. In late June or early July, she had another miscarriage.

  There’s no way to know whether the political uproar had anything to do with this second disappointment at the even more discouraging age of thirty-seven. We only know that it left Bess tremendously upset. This time, she thought sure that she was going to have a breakdown. She poured out her woes to the correspondent she favored when she was unhappy, Arry Ellen Mayer Calhoun, who was still in Toronto, and coincidentally, pregnant at this time.

  “Dear Bess,” Arry replied on July 12. “Words simply can’t tell you how distressed I am to know all you have been through. . . . I am so thankful you are all right yourself. Do please get well and strong and don’t raise your finger next time.”

  While Bess was going through this ordeal, her mother toured the East Coast with her son Fred. They stayed at the Copley Plaza in Boston and visited some Gates cousins in Newburyport. They sashayed on to the Belmont in New York, where they did the town from “Fifth Avenue to the slums.” They went on to the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia and from there to the New Willard in Washington, and finally to Richmond, where Mary Paxton Keeley met them and took them out to Curies Neck Farm.

  Throughout this three-week expedition, Madge Wallace wrote letters to Bess, one of which began: “My dear little girl” - the same salutation she had used when Bess was fourteen. Madge frequently told Bess she hoped that she was “feeling fine” or “well” - but not once did Bess mention the miscarriage or her nerves to her. It is equally significant, I suppose, that in the nine or ten letters and postcards from the travelers, there is not one mention of Harry Truman or his political struggle. Madge Wallace seldom expressed her disapproval directly. That was not a lady’s style.

  On August 5, 1922, candidate Truman won his first election, becoming the eastern judge of Jackson County by 500 votes. Most of the voters in that end of the county were Democrats, so the primary was the only election that mattered. Bess’ mental health took a distinct turn for the better, and Arry Ellen soon was writing to her with her usual cheer. “It is surely good to know you are feeling something like yourself again. But do be careful and take good care of yourself until you get your strength back and cease to have any nerves. . . . Congratulate Harry on winning the nomination.”

  Arry added that she was “still making doll clothes. I only hope I finish them in time for the arrival.” She assured Bess, in another letter, that she would wire her “when the eventful day arrives.”

  Alas, when it finally came a few months later, Arry’s baby was born dead. Bess hardly could have been encouraged by that piece of devastating news. Nevertheless, with that courageous determination that was the essence of her character, she resolved to try again.

  Meanwhile, she had become the wife of a politician. A Jackson County judge was really a commissioner of public works, with over 1,000 jobs to dispense to the political faithful. Judge Truman began getting phone calls and visitors at all hours of the day and night. To his mother-in-law’s considerable distaste, he decided to see some of them at 219 North Delaware Street. With her determination to share her husband’s life, Bess backed him in this decision. He, in turn, shared with her the acrimonious disputes on the three-judge court.

  Although Harry Truman owed Pendergast little, he voted with the presiding judge, an all-out Pendergast man named Henry F. McElroy, most of the time, because he had a businesslike approach to the county’s problems. Previous courts had spent Jackson County into near ruinous debt. Judge Truman went to St. Louis and Chicago and found bankers willing to loan them money at far better rates than local bankers were offering. In two years, he and McElroy reduced the county’s debt by $600,000.

  Judge Truman also tried to arrange a truce between the Goats and the Rabbits, but neither side was interested. His armistice did not last more than a day. McElroy insisted on appointing only Goats to county jobs. The Rabbits remained furiously convinced that Pendergast had double-crossed them and elected Truman.

  A cauldron of political bickering boiled around them while jobseekers turned up on the front porch every night. None of this would seem to be ingredients for happiness as the Truman marriage entered its fourth year. One might logically assume that aristocratic Bess Wallace’s feelings for Harry Truman would decline in intensity under such unpleasant stress. Your logic would be perfect, but the facts, which so often ignore logic, would be wrong. In the summer of 1923, Harry Truman went off to Fort Leavenworth for two weeks of active duty with the Missouri National Guard. He had stayed in the reserve when he left the army and had been promoted to major. Bess wrote to him every day while he was away, and these letters, the first connected sequence that has survived, give us a revealing look at her state of mind and heart.

  “Dear Pettie,” she began the first letter, invoking a private nickname I never heard before. “It is now 10:20 and I am in bed. There was a big black bug on my bed when I turned the sheet down and I had to kill it myself - but that wasn’t the first time I had wished for you.” She teased him about a lady to whom he and another part-time soldier had given a ride to a town on the road to Leavenworth and closed with: “Lots and lots of good night kisses. Yours, Bess.”

  The next letter began: “Dear old Sweetness” and told him how glad she was to get his letter, which described the enormous amounts of food the army was feeding him. “You’ll have to be pretty strenuous to keep that front down,” she warned. She told him that two of his army friends, Eddie McKim and Ted Marks (the best man at their wedding) were thinking of going up to Leavenworth to see him. “I’d give my head to go,” she remarked. Then she penned an amusing word picture of some neighbors who loaded their car and departed for Colorado that morning at 5:00 a.m. She sat at the window and watched them, she said, because “I wouldn’t have missed seeing Mrs. Swift in knickers for $100.”

  Finally, she returned to how “awfully darned lonesome” it was without him, but “I know you are going to get lots of good out of the trip. And I’m glad too you are taking it b
y yourself for I am sure you needed to get away from everything and everybody.”

  Another letter began “Sweetie - (Burn this in the kitchen stove).” She told him that she had been sitting at the front window for hours, waiting for his letter. She reported with delight that Eddie Jacobson and his wife and Eddie McKim had invited her to drive up to Leavenworth for a visit. They planned to have dinner in the town of Leavenworth and urged him to join them. “I think we’ll want to visit a hotel by that time and that will solve the question, eh?”

  When she came home from the visit, she told “Dear Harry” that “yesterday seems just a happy dream.” She recalled how she “sure did hate to leave last night. . . . I looked and looked to see you drive off.”

  Bess wrote “Friend Husband” (another salutation) every day, and on one day, she wrote twice. When she did not get a letter from him she was “sick.” Toward the end of the two-week separation, she was telling him how “homesick for you” she was and added “last night was the worst night yet.”

  As Major Truman’s tour of duty ended, she could not help chiding him a little for his infatuation with army life. “I know you are almost sorry your two weeks are up. But I can’t say that I am.” Then she added: “The Examiner last night said you would be home Sat. so I guess there will be a million calls tomorrow.”

  Even in her love letters, Bess interwove an appreciation of her husband’s political responsibilities. While Harry was away, she dealt with callers who wanted to have their roads oiled to keep down the summer dust. She noted that a lot of calls had come from women around Bristol and Maywood, two small townships in the country. “They must have a league [against Truman] out there.”

  She finished the letter with “Lots of love.”

  After reading this chapter, you may not be surprised to learn that when Bess visited her husband at Fort Leavenworth, she was already two months pregnant.

  Throughout the fall of 1923, Bess struggled with a tangle of hope and fear. After two disappointments, she had become so superstitious about expecting a happy ending to her pregnancy that she presumed the opposite. She refused to buy a single item of baby clothes or even a bassinet. Nevertheless, Christmas that year was a time of hope. By then, Bess was almost in her eighth month and feeling fine.

  But she remembered Arry and her dead baby and still feared the worst. She also fretted about whether the baby would be a boy. She said Harry wanted a boy - although he vowed a hundred times that he did not care, as long as she and the new arrival were fine. I suspect that Mary Paxton Keeley’s possession of a son had more influence on Bess’ feelings than she was ready to admit.

  As her time neared, there was a debate about having the baby at the hospital versus home. Mary Paxton Keeley had gone to a hospital. I am not sure what Arry Calhoun did. But Bess decided to have her baby at 219 North Delaware Street. Maybe she was influenced by her mother, who had had all her children at home, or by her grandmother, who had had three children in that comfortable old house.

  Home turned out to be a good decision. On February 17, when Bess went into labor, one of the worst blizzards in memory was burying Independence and most of the Midwest. It would have been a nightmare to try to get to a hospital. The doctor had enough trouble getting to the house, and he was used to dealing with the weather.

  After twelve hours of labor, the author of this book was born, four days after Bess’ thirty-ninth birthday. Bess cried when she learned the baby was a girl, and only extravagant reassurances from the ecstatic father calmed her down. Meanwhile, everyone was scurrying around in search of something in which to clothe me. They finally found a few garments and parked me in an open bureau drawer, by way of a bassinet, until the snowstorm abated and Judge Truman could plow through the drifts to buy a long list of baby clothes and supplies.

  Letters poured in as the good news was spread by newspaper and letter and telephone. Mary Paxton Keeley was one of the first to write. “To say I am glad is putting it mildly,” Mary declared. “Well, you have the time of your life before you the next two years as I know. There is nothing like a baby except maybe two. I wish I could see this precious thing of yours.”

  Then Mary added some dismaying news. “I did not write you about our troubles because I did not desire to have you worry about us. . . . Mike is at Battle Creek but will come back here. What we have is invested in two farms which we don’t want to sacrifice so I will get a job in Richmond or in Kansas City after I have rested. . . . Life is pretty difficult but the only thing you can do with trouble is take it standing. Whatever comes I have this sweet lamb to work for. He complicates things in getting a job and a place to live but he is the best reason I know for making a success.”

  Even when she wrote this, Mary half knew that Mike Keeley had an incurable kidney disease. But she wanted her letter to Bess to “be about you and the little dear whose name I don’t know.” Alas, it was some time before Bess was able to tell Mary the little dear’s name. What to name her (me) became a major issue of contention. Bess wanted to name me Margaret Wallace Truman after her mother. Dad refused to agree. He insisted that the Trumans have equal representation in this matter.

  The argument continued for the better part of four years, which gives you some idea of how stubborn both Harry and Bess could be on matters they cared about. They finally compromised on Mary (after his sister) Margaret Truman. By that time, the argument was irrelevant to everyone but my two godmothers, Mary Paxton Keeley and Arry Calhoun, and the Episcopal priest who performed my much delayed christening. To everyone else, I was Margaret.

  Although I was now on the scene, I was not exactly functioning as a biographer. I still must rely on research and family memories for what happened in this first year of my life, the fifth of their marriage. It would seem that I have no claim whatsoever to being a good luck charm. No sooner was I installed in a bassinet and given enough clothes to let me pose for a picture or two than Bess and her husband found themselves in the ugliest political brawl of their lives.

  Judge Truman’s term as eastern judge lasted only two years, and he was up for reelection in 1924. The Shannon Rabbits still were convinced that he personified the Pendergast double cross, and they made him their target for the primary election. Turning the situation even uglier, if possible, was the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, which offered to support Judge Truman if he promised not to appoint any Catholic or Jew to a county job.

  Without telling Bess or anyone else, Harry Truman drove out to a Klan political rally in Lee’s Summit, alone. He got up on the platform and told them exactly how despicable he thought their ideas were. He praised the fighting spirit of the Irish Catholics he had commanded in Battery D and scornfully implied that most of the Klansmen had been so busy hating their fellow Americans, they had stayed home. “If any Catholic or Jew who’s a good Democrat needs help, I’m going to give him a job,” he said. He walked off the platform and strode through the glaring crowd to his car. There, he discovered a half dozen of his friends, armed with loaded shotguns. They had heard about his act of defiance and had driven out to protect him. Dad always said that he was glad they had not arrived until he finished speaking. The Klansmen had shotguns, too, and gunfire might well have punctuated his blazing speech.

  The national Democratic Party, meanwhile, was committing political suicide in New York. They had convened presuming they were choosing the next president. The Republicans had been caught up in games with oil leases on the Teapot Dome Naval Reserve field in Wyoming, and their candidate was the colorless vice president, Calvin Coolidge. He had succeeded Warren Harding, who had died in 1923, humiliated by the malfeasance of his friends. The Democrats proceeded to quarrel over whether to nominate Al Smith, the Irish Catholic governor of New York, or William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law. After some 103 ballots, they chose a candidate no one wanted, a corporate attorney from Ohio named John W. Davis, who was even more colorless than Coolidge. Worse, the convention came within a quarter of a vote of accepting a resolution to
condemn the Ku Klux Klan, leaving both halves of the party infuriated, disgusted, or both.

  As far as Missouri and Jackson County were concerned, this display of national disunity was fatal. In the November election, the Klan and the Shannon Democrats teamed up to destroy the local Democratic Party. Judge Truman lost, and so did almost every other Democrat.

  At the age of forty, Harry Truman was out of a job again.

  Once more, he declined to panic or even to grow discouraged. Almost as if he wanted to prove how steady his nerves were, he took offices in the Board of Trade Building in Kansas City, where his father had lost everything the Trumans owned twenty-two years before gambling on wheat futures. He had been in the road building business as a judge, and it was logical for him to switch to doing business with the people who were driving on the roads. Detroit was setting records selling automobiles, and people needed advice on how and where to use them. He began selling memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club, directing a staff of salesmen and pitching in to sell 1,500 personally. He cleared $5,000 or $6,000 in his first year.

  Next, he toyed with going back into another business he knew well, banking. Bess’ brother, Frank, and his father-in-law, Albert Ott were both bankers. So there were plenty of good advice-givers in the family. Harry and several friends, including Spencer Salisbury, brother of Bess’ friend Agnes and a fellow captain in the 129th Field Artillery, organized the Community Savings and Loan Association in Independence. People were building houses almost as fast as they were buying cars and needed mortgages, so this move seemed logical, too. Harry Truman sold stock in the bank, and everyone prospered nicely.

  Meanwhile, Bess was learning to be a mother. She got lots of help from friends near and distant. Mary Paxton shipped her instructions on breast feeding, bathing, oiling, and burping me. Pictures were dispatched to her and other friends, and appropriate comments were made about my beauty. There is not a hint of financial or any other kind of anxiety in Bess’ letters to her husband in the summer of 1925, when Major Truman again went off for two weeks of reserve training, this time at Fort Riley, Kansas. Once more, Bess missed him acutely (“like the mischief,” she wrote in one letter). Now she could add: “Your daughter kept asking all day for ‘da-da’ - then ‘bye?’”