Bess Truman Read online

  It was around this time that Bess started calling me “Marg” with a hard “g” while my father preferred “Margie.” While repeating my disclaimer to be a psychologist, I can only say that Marg still resounds in my ears with orders, impatience, and discipline in it. The other name has none of those things. By five, I was a total Daddy’s girl. One night, while out for a ride to Blue Springs for a soda, everyone started improvising lyrics for songs. Harry Truman had been away on reserve duty for nine or ten days. I piped up with a one-line lament: “I saw my Daddy - once he was here.” Bess and everyone else thought it was hilarious.

  In 1930, the year I began school, I gave Mother a scare that she converted into a lifetime worry. A strange man appeared at school one day and told my first-grade teacher he was calling for “Mary Truman, Judge Truman’s daughter.” I was registered under my full name, Mary Margaret Truman, but no one, including my teacher, ever used the first name. She decided to call my father. By the time he arrived with the sheriff, the teacher had also called Mother, who rushed to school fearing the worst. In the meantime, the man had vanished. He was later identified as a political foe who wanted to give Judge Truman a scare. The episode wreaked havoc on Mother’s nerves. Thereafter, she never let me go to school alone, a rule she enforced until I was well into my teens. When it came to worrying, Mother was in a class by herself.

  Meanwhile, Judge Truman was pushing ahead with his road program. It was still a struggle. He had to deal with the hatred of the city manager of Kansas City, Henry McElroy, whose bond issue had been defeated at the polls, and the jealousy and greed of numerous crooked contractors from Kansas City, who had bet on McElroy and now wanted to get a piece of the action from Truman. Nevertheless, Judge Truman was on his way to becoming one of the better-known politicians in Missouri. He was president of The National Old Trails Association, and he was rising steadily in the Masonic Order to the post he was soon to hold, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri. Even the normally critical Kansas City Star called his administration “extraordinarily efficient.”

  Behind the scenes, Bess continued to worry about Harry’s health. The tensions of his job still gave him terrific headaches, and her letters to him make many anxious references to them. In 1928, when he was again on reserve duty at Fort Riley, she asked: “How did your physical examination turn out? Don’t hold anything back!” In 1929, Harry was taking some medicine for his headaches and frazzled nerves. By now, Bess had perceived that these reserve tours really were much-needed escapes from the political pressure cooker in which he worked. “I was awfully glad to hear your nerves were getting back to normal,” she wrote. “Are you still taking your tonic or have you passed the point of needing it? I expect the life you are leading is a better tonic than that green bottle.”

  Although she still signed her letters “lots of love,” they now began with “Dear Harry” or occasionally “Dear Dad.” She wrote straight from the shoulder, the way she talked. “You needn’t get so upstage about our coming out [to Fort Riley]. I’d surely like to - but I’ll take that money [the train fare] and have our daughter’s tonsils out.”

  That last remark would seem to give us a glimpse of Harry Truman’s honesty. He had just spent $7 million in public money, and his wife had to scrimp (the train tickets cost $15) to have a much-needed operation for his daughter. But that is not the whole story. Partly because of her mother’s extravagance, partly because it came naturally to her, Bess was a fierce penny pincher. Her letters in 1929, when she was forty-four, report her doing such money-saving chores as painting the back porch and the front stairs and making a dress for me.

  Bess continued to stay in close touch with all aspects of her husband’s political career. A stream of clippings from the Star went to him when he was away. She smoothly fielded phone calls urging him to attend political funerals or see an importunate jobseeker. In 1929, she calmed Harry’s agitation over a threatened investigation of the county farm, about which the Kansas City Star had made noises. Bess went straight to the newspaperman who could have done them real damage if he took it seriously, her sister-in-law’s father, Colonel Southern, the editor of the Examiner. Southern assured her he had no intention of pursuing the story. Bess told Harry this good news: “I’m glad you’re not here to be bothered with it and don’t let it worry you. There hasn’t been another word in the paper and the Star has probably realized the foolishness of publishing the story.”

  She added that he might call the other judges on the court and tell “them what to say. Mr. Ash says those two fools up there don’t know what to do.”

  Fred Wallace remained a worry for both Bess and her husband. In one of those private memoranda Harry Truman wrote at various times in his life, and which have come into my possession, he gives us a glimpse of how he dealt with Fred. As his first term as presiding judge came to a close, he set down several pages of pithy, poignant details about his struggles with the crooks around Pendergast and some of the compromises he had been forced to make to deal with them. “I’ve got the $6.5 million worth of roads on the ground and at a figure that makes the crooks tear their hair,” he wrote at the end of this narrative. Then he turned to Fred. “The hospital is up at less cost than any similar institution in spite of my problem brother-in-law, whom I’d had to employ on the job to keep peace in the family. I’ve had to run the hospital job myself and pay him for it.”

  Perhaps Bess realized the strain that her brother placed on an already overburdened Harry Truman. Perhaps her intense interest in her husband’s political operations, her worry over his headaches, were a way of saying: “I’m sorry.”

  In that same year, 1929, while Bess and Harry tried to cope with their public and private worries in Jackson County, the United States found itself with a worry that rapidly became a national nervous breakdown. The stock market on Wall Street, which had been soaring up in an ever more dizzying climb, went into a dive steeper than any previous plunge in history. By the time the dazed survivors staggered out of the wreckage in early 1930, the country was in the grip of the Great Depression.

  For a while, it looked like Harry Truman’s bad luck was pursuing him. Not only were he and Bess driven to near distraction with pleas from jobseekers day and night, but the major part of his development program for Jackson County was about to go before the voters in another bond issue - this one for a colossal $7.95 million. He wanted to build new courthouses in Independence and Kansas City, and complete the network of roads he was weaving around and through the county. Could he persuade voters stunned by the economic paralysis gripping the nation to spend more public money?

  Unnoticed except by a few in the mounting turmoil was a political event in Jackson County. On September 3, 1929, a month before the stock market took its historic dive, Mike Pendergast, Boss Tom’s brother, died. The political leadership of eastern Jackson County passed to Harry Truman. With his own organization to back him, he hurled himself into the task of persuading the voters to approve the bond issue. First, however, he had to get reelected himself, which he did, handsomely, in 1930, running far ahead of the other men on the ticket.

  As part of his plan to sell the bond issue to the voters, Judge Truman, like many other local officials, halved the salaries of everyone on the county payroll, including his own. Bess decided that this policy also had to be enforced at 219 North Delaware Street, and my fifty cents a week allowance was slashed to a quarter. My squawks could be heard in Kansas City, but I got nowhere. I had to rely for a steady supply of candy and ice cream on surreptitious quarters slipped to me by Judge Truman. Whenever he got caught doing this, a quarrel erupted. “How am I ever going to teach that child the value of money?” Bess would storm.

  Harry would feign repentance, but after a decent interval, the quarters would start coming again.

  As Harry Truman took his case for the second bond issue to the voters, most people saw a politician who was acquiring a state and national reputation. In 1930, he became a director of the National Conference on
City Planning. Around the same time, he was elected president of the Greater Kansas City Plan Association. But Bess saw a man who drove himself relentlessly to the point of exhaustion and found almost intolerable the barrage of pleas for help that descended on him each day.

  A glimpse of his nervous exhaustion comes from several letters in 1931. Early in February, he found the pressure so unbearable he retreated to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a rest. That he would leave home on the eve of his wife’s birthday - and mine - troubled him, and he tried to explain it. “I don’t know whether you entirely appreciate or not the tremendous amount of strain that’s been on me since November,” he wrote.

  He went on to list the strains. His two fellow judges had been replaced by the voters, and in the last months of their term, they tried to steal as much money as possible. The county’s finances were in deplorable shape, with thousands of people unable to pay their taxes, and Mamma Truman had had to refinance the farm in a way that exposed her to being foreclosed.

  Next came a sentence that may have been a reference to Fred Wallace: “You and I had our own difficulties to look after and with it all I was becoming so keyed up that I either had to run away or go on a big drunk. That latter alternative never did have much appeal, so I’ve taken the other one.”

  He reported that “my head hasn’t ached and I’ve slept like a baby because I know the phone’s not going to ring, and that no one’s going to stop me with a tale of woe when I walk down the street.”

  In July 1931, when he went to reserve camp, Bess was still worried about her forty-seven-year-old husband. “I never did hate so to see you leave for camp as I did this year,” she wrote. “I just felt you weren’t up to scratch physically and needed somebody to go along with you. But I do hope the decided change in environment and work will make you over.”

  That year, Judge Truman had to return in the middle of his two weeks for a special session of the court. It turned out to be a lulu, “with every pest in the county there.” He emerged from it in a state of nerves and went home to find Bess in a sulk. He had spent the entire weekend visit on politics and practically ignored her. They had a first-class fight.

  In a letter from Fort Riley, Harry only semi-apologized. “I was very much surprised at your peeve last evening,” he wrote. He described the chaos in the courtroom and said he was “about ready to blow up when another bellows is turned into the balloon (and it’s really the only puff that can count) [he meant her peevishness].” Then he added a remark that amazed me when I read it. “You tell my daughter that the next time you choose to spoil two days in succession, for her please to remedy the situation.”

  Bess apologized for her “disgruntled spell,” and the unpleasant incident was soon forgotten. The bond issue passed in May 1931, all $7.95 million of it, and Judge Truman was ready to complete his program. A glimpse of his rising political stature comes from two letters he wrote to Bess later in the summer of 1931. One was from St. Louis, where he told of conferring with some of the leading politicians of Missouri, including Champ Clark’s son, Bennett Clark, who was planning to run for the Senate in 1932 and urged Judge Truman to run for governor to bolster the state ticket. “I’m receiving more foolish encouragement to run down here than I have at home,” he wrote.

  From St. Louis, he went on to New York, where he addressed a National Conference on City Planning. He had called Bess just before he left St. Louis and tried to persuade her to take a midnight train from Kansas City and join him. As usual, she said no. Writing from the Biltmore in New York, he continued his report on his conversations with Bennett Clark and the other St. Louis politicos. “You may yet be the first lady of Missouri,” he wrote. “And even a larger position than that isn’t beyond the bounds of your ability and good looks.”

  Alas, the Truman boomlet for governor collapsed when Tom Pendergast announced that he was going to back the man who had run and lost in 1928, Francis Wilson. Judge Truman continued his building and road program in Jackson County. Ever the perfectionist, he decided to erect the best courthouse in the country, which turned him into a traveling man again, to the distress of his wife. In the first six months of 1932, he drove 24,000 miles around the country visiting courthouses and conferring with architects and civic planners to see what sort of buildings other officials had put up. He found the model he was looking for in Shreveport, Louisiana, and hired the architect, Edward F. Neild, to design one for Kansas City.

  The drafting work, the interior decoration, the nuts and bolts aspects of the job were handled by local architectural firms. They also supervised the rebuilding and modernizing of the much smaller Independence courthouse. Against his better judgment, Judge Truman put his brother-in-law, Fred Wallace, on this local architectural payroll.

  In 1930, Fred had married a sweet young woman named Christine Meyer. Like mothers and sisters before and since, Bess and Madge hoped that love and marriage would reform Fred. It did seem to change him for a while. He mostly stopped drinking and tried hard to find work, but Fred had chosen a discouraging time to try to reform. The Depression made it difficult for men with good job records to stay employed. Fred began drifting back to alcohol for consolation. Once more, friends began depositing him on the porch of 219 North Delaware Street after midnight.

  Around this time, George Wallace also began displaying signs of instability. Every so often, he would drink heavily. With him, Bess did not hesitate to unleash her temper. She gave George some lectures that would have turned Falstaff himself into an abstainer. George straightened out, and with some help from Judge Truman, became maintenance superintendent of the Jackson County highway department, a job he held for the rest of his life. But Bess never said a word of reproach to Fred, as far as I know. With him, she followed her mother’s example of suffering in silence. Was it Fred’s resemblance to his father? Perhaps. Fred also was an artist at displaying remorse. He knew exactly how to play on his mother’s and sister’s sympathy.

  I remained oblivious to this emotional turmoil. I was immersed in my eight-year-old world, which consisted of eight or nine other girls my age who lived on the block. We formed a club called The Henhouse Hicks and connected our houses by a complicated web of wires and string over which we sent messages and gifts. In the abandoned henhouse, we staged plays and published a newspaper. Bess watched all this activity with a tolerance that amazed me. Only when I began exploring her childhood did I realize how much we were repeating her girlhood experiences in the Cadiz Club, where she was the stage manager for Mary Paxton’s plays. Now I wonder if there was a kind of catharsis for Bess, watching me grow up as she did in so many ways, but without her burden of sorrow. I find it a consoling thought.

  I say this because I often had the feeling when I was young that I was a disappointment to my mother. As I have noted, there was a hard as well as a soft side to Bess Wallace Truman, and those closest to her were, alas, the ones who often saw the hardness. I have mentioned the hairbrush and her tendency to laugh at me when I least expected it. She also had a gift for devastating comments. One I particularly remember zinged me when I was eight or nine. For some now forgotten reason, my friends and I suddenly began to wonder if any of us were adopted. It became an important question to me, and I rushed into the house and called upstairs. “Mother, am I adopted?”

  “No,” Bess replied. “If you were, we would have done better.”

  One reason for this acerbic tone may have been the way I was rapidly developing into a major worry for both Harry and Bess. In the summer of 1932, Bess wrote to Colonel (another promotion) Truman at Camp Ripley, Minnesota: “Dr. Brick [his full name was Dr. Brickhouse Wilson] was here this morning & said Marg had been doing entirely too much & she would have to quiet down considerably for four or five days & he would be back. [He] said the hot weather alone has a tendency to wear people out. She is so tired today she can hardly move.”

  That was how I reacted to a Missouri summer, but the winters were grimmer. If there was a cold or a flu germ floating anywhere i
n Jackson County, I caught it. My tonsillectomy, paid for by Bess’ refusal to spend the money on railroad tickets to Fort Riley, was a failure. One tonsil grew back, guaranteeing me an annual round of sore throats. A major contributor to my problems was, I now realize, 219 North Delaware Street itself. The house’s heating system was, to put it mildly, antiquated. There was no heat whatsoever on the upper floor. I can remember awakening on some winter mornings in a bedroom that could have been used for an icebox. During the day, the temperature in many of the big rooms seldom rose above 60 degrees. In spells of bitter cold, the library and music rooms were closed to try to concentrate the heat in the other rooms. But the kitchen was the only room I remember as truly warm.

  In 1933, my penchant for the sneezes reached a sort of climax. I went from the flu to pneumonia to rheumatic fever. The weather was atrocious, and Dr. Wilson decided he would not have a patient to worry through the summer if he did not get me out of that chilblain palace on North Delaware Street. He ordered Bess to take me south for the rest of the winter.

  She chose Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico. We rented a cottage on the water, with a big yard for me to play in. My improvement was almost instantaneous. When Bess reported this good news to Harry, he replied that he felt “almost as if a hundred pound weight had been lifted from my head.” I was bored. I missed my friends and displayed no appreciation whatsoever for my return to health and energy. I did not know it, but Bess was not much happier with Biloxi. In one of her letters to Harry, she referred to it as “this burg.” It was not all Biloxi’s fault. Bess missed her husband and mother and other members of the Wallace clan. She had brought along a nurse who complained about everything from the temperature of the water to the character of the local residents.