Bess Truman Read online

  Although it did not occur to me at the time, I now realize this was the first time in my life that I was alone with my mother for an extended period. We got along pretty well, except for one interesting incident. When a local woman came to do the wash, I joined her in the backyard, where she scrubbed the clothes by hand and then fed them through a wringer. I volunteered to feed them and was having a pleasant time when Bess abruptly called me into the house. “We don’t do things like that,” she said.

  Bess remained a Democrat all her life, but unlike Harry Truman, it took her a long time to become one with a small “d.”

  While we basked in the sunshine on the Gulf, Harry Truman split his time between Grandview and Delaware Street. In one revealing exchange, he told Bess that he had “had dinner with your mother who by the way seemed really glad to see me.” After reporting on the health of everyone in the family, Harry got down to the important subject, the politics of Jackson County and his future. He told Bess that Pendergast was still backing him and had assured him that when his term as judge expired he could run for Congress in a district recently created in eastern Jackson County or he would support him for county collector. The salary of this post had shrunk to a Depression size $10,000, but it was still the best paying job in the county. “I don’t have to make a decision until next year. Think about it,” Harry told Bess.

  Tom Pendergast was feeling expansive in 1933. After twelve years of Republican rule, a Democrat had returned to the White House. Boss Tom had helped him get there. The governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a cousin of the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, had won a landslide victory with his pledge of a “new deal for the American people.” To most Missourians, this aristocrat from the Hudson River Valley was a remote figure, whose accent and background seemed as foreign to them as a British prime minister. But Tom Pendergast had had no trouble recognizing a fellow politician.

  Roosevelt’s campaign manager, a genial Irishman named James A. Farley, had come to Kansas City and talked the language Boss Tom understood - a guarantee that a grateful president would reward him for his support. The Pendergast machine had backed Roosevelt down the line, from the nomination to the election, in spite of a sentimental yearning for Al Smith, the Irish-Catholic New Yorker who had stirred a whirlwind of bigotry when he received the Democratic nomination in 1928. When it came to winning elections, sentiment did not play much of a part in Tom Pendergast’s calculations.

  Before Judge Truman reached the happy turn in the political road that Pendergast offered him, he had some difficult bridges to cross. In Washington, FDR had called Congress into special session to deal with the appalling economic situation. Between Mr. Roosevelt’s election and inauguration, the nation had reeled toward collapse. The index of industrial production sank to an all-time low. Banks went bust by the hundreds, taking the savings of millions of middle-class people with them.

  While the president and Congress were grounding out a series of programs to cope with the crisis, Judge Truman had to deal with the immediate realities on the local level, where there simply was not enough money to run the county government. The eastern half of Jackson County, mostly farm country, was penniless. The western half, which included Kansas City, was full of empty factories and offices. Tax collections had dwindled. Judge Truman decided that the county payroll would have to be slashed, and the tax rate raised to keep the government functioning.

  It was not easy to fire a man in 1933. It meant you were putting him on the unemployment rolls. Judge Truman’s letters to Biloxi tell Bess of his agony: “We are discharging some 200 people, and every one of them and all his friends will try to see me. I was sick last night after the [court] session and lost my supper.” In another letter, he warned her: “Please be careful about eating anything that comes in the mail. Someone sent me a cake the other day, and I threw it away. With these discharges coming off, you can’t tell what they’ll do.” The turmoil was so intense, Judge Truman’s next few letters came from the Pickwick Hotel in Kansas City, where he was hiding out from this small army of irate job losers and their friends.

  During this same period, Bess received a number of letters from her mother. With her marvelous ability to ignore unpleasant realities, Madge Wallace never mentioned the political uproar swirling around her son-in-law. In fact, she never even mentioned him. Most of one letter was devoted to more improvements on the house - painting the exterior, the selection of new awnings for the porches. She urged Bess to write George, who had been ill, “often.” Bess apparently took her advice, and when George got a letter one day and her husband did not, Harry Truman sent her a scorching complaint.

  Bess replied with a scorcher of her own, which has, perhaps fortunately, been lost. I must confess that I am hard put to feel sympathetic with either of them about their insistence on writing a letter every day when they were apart. It is a wonderful testimony of their affection, but it was exhausting for those who were expected to imitate them. In these Biloxi-Independence letters, there begins a fatherly complaint that I was to hear for the next forty years. “What’s the matter with my girl? Has she forgotten how to write?”

  Before he left for Biloxi to bring us home, Judge Truman made an important speech to the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce about his new $4 million courthouse. Their support was crucial to its success, and he was enormously relieved to report to Bess that the audience was friendly. “Everyone seemed to go away sold on the idea that the building should be put up,” he wrote. “When I get that job done I can probably retire to a quiet job and enjoy life a little bit with my family.”

  Bess was in a similar frame of mind after this two-month separation. She was so impatient to see him, she disputed how long it would take him to get from St. Louis to Biloxi. He claimed it would take two days, but she noted that “it only took you thirty-six hours to go all the way home.”

  In Biloxi, and in the remaining months of 1933, Bess and Harry discussed the choice that Tom Pendergast seemed to be offering them, between county collector and U.S. congressman. Harry deftly pinpointed the differences between the two jobs the first time he mentioned them in the spring of that year. The congressman’s job paid less, but he would have “an opportunity to be a power in the nation.” The collector’s job had the appeal of more money and one other thing, which he knew was not unimportant to Bess. They could “stay home.”

  Although Bess’ letters for this period have been lost, there are no indications in Harry’s surviving letters that she made any immediate declaration in favor of the collector’s job. But a good deal can be deduced about her preference from an emotional letter that Harry wrote to her on the eve of his forty-ninth birthday: “Tomorrow I’ll be forty-nine and for all the good I’ve done the forty might as well be left off. Take it all together though the experience has been worthwhile; I’d like to do it again. I’ve been in a railroad, bank, farm, war, politics, love (only once and it still sticks), been busted and still am and yet I have stayed an idealist. I still believe that my sweetheart is the ideal woman and that my daughter is her duplicate. I think that for all the horrors of war it still makes a man if he’s one to start with. Politics should make a thief a roué, and a pessimist of anyone, but I don’t believe I’m any of them and if I can get the Kansas City courthouse done without scandal no other judge will have done as much, and then maybe I can retire as collector and you and the young lady can take some European and South American tours when they’ll do you the most good; or maybe go to live in Washington and see all the greats and near greats in action. We’ll see.”

  My nine-year-old opinion was not consulted on this choice, but my reading of this letter convinces me that Harry Truman was leaning strongly toward Washington. After eight years of tremendous achievements as presiding judge, he was not ready to “retire” into the do-nothing collector’s job. As never before, Washington, D.C., was the place where politics was reshaping the nation. It is an index of his awareness of Bess’ inclination to stay home that he could offer the two
choices as more or less equal.

  Meanwhile, Harry Truman concentrated on finishing the Kansas City courthouse with an artistic flourish. He had decided to put an equestrian statue of his (and the Democrats’) hero, Andrew Jackson, in front of it. Once more, he took to the roads, while Bess stayed home in Wallaceville, and soon located the man to do it, sculptor Charles Keck. Judge Truman liked his work so much - Keck had done a magnificent statue of Stonewall Jackson on horseback for Charlottesville, Virginia - he decided to order a second statue for the courthouse in Independence.

  On January 1, 1934, he was writing to Bess from New York, where he visited Keck in his Tenth Street studio and saw how the work was coming along. In addition to the statues, Keck was doing friezes of Law and Justice. Satisfied, Judge Truman journeyed on to Washington, D.C., where he planned to confer with various Missouri politicos and “really make up my mind on what I’m to do.” Chief among these politicos was Bennett Clark, who had been elected to the Senate in the Roosevelt landslide of 1932. Less than two years ago, he had been urging Harry Truman to run for governor.

  Now Clark was cool to Truman running for anything. The new senator had had to fight a bruising primary battle with a Pendergast candidate for his seat, and he was inclined to think Missouri politics would be much better if Boss Tom and his allies and followers were out of the picture. Clark’s loyalty was to the St. Louis bosses who had won him the nomination. The old St. Louis-Kansas City rivalry was once more intruding its ugly snout into Missouri’s democracy.

  All Judge Truman got from his visit to Washington was an opportunity to meet Harry Hopkins, one of President Roosevelt’s key aides, who appointed him Missouri’s reemployment director. He was supposed to handle it along with his duties as county judge. The closer he looked at the job, the less he liked it. “There’ll be almost as many rocks heaved at me as there are now,” he wrote to Bess.

  The year 1934 began badly for Truman, Pendergast, and the nation. In spite of the New Deal’s desperate measures, the economic paralysis continued. Bennett Clark persuaded President Roosevelt to appoint Maurice Milligan U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. He was the brother of Tuck Milligan, war hero and seven-term congressman, an avowed critic of Pendergast. When a fusion ticket tried to contest Boss Tom’s control of Kansas City in March, pitched battles erupted around various polling places, leaving four dead and eleven wounded. The new federal attorney rubbed his hands and began doing some gleeful investigating.

  To some people, it looked as if an endorsement from Pendergast was the equivalent of those get-well pills Dr. Hyde gave the Swopes. In fact, it was the beginning of Boss Tom’s slide from power to the penitentiary. But no one knew that in 1934. He was still Roosevelt’s man in Missouri when it came to dispensing the thousands of jobs the New Deal was creating with its public works programs. More to the point, it was clear that other politicians considered Judge Truman untainted by his connection to Pendergast. Governor Guy B. Park asked him to tour the state to drum up support for a $10 million bond issue to rehabilitate mental hospitals, prisons, and similar institutions. Once more, Harry went on the road while Bess stayed home.

  The more she thought about the future, the more Bess wanted Harry to take the collector’s job. Staying home in the accustomed warmth and closeness of the Wallace enclave was enormously important to her. She found it hard to face the guilt she would feel if she went to Washington and abandoned her mother. In reality, Madge Wallace had a son and daughter-in-law living in the house with her, and in 1934, they presented her with a grandson. But Bess knew, perhaps not in explicit words, that Madge would make her feel that she was abandoned.

  Early in the spring of 1934, Eddie McKim, ex-sergeant in Battery D and later a fellow reserve officer, called Harry Truman at North Delaware Street and asked if he could borrow his car. Eddie was working for a Nebraska insurance company and was trying to track down an agent who had absconded with some company funds. His old captain not only lent him the car, but went along with him to Atchison, Kansas, in search of the malefactor. As they drove, they talked politics. Judge Truman described the two jobs he was being offered and asked Eddie what he thought he should do.

  Eddie said it would be idiocy to take the collector’s job: “When you finish [in eight years] you’re still a young man and you’re through politically. On the other hand, if you take the congressional job you’ll be in the big swim and nobody can tell what will happen.”

  “You’re telling me what I want to hear,” Harry Truman said.

  What he was not hearing from his wife.

  Let me insist - I am only speaking of inclination here - Bess did not try to strong-arm or nag her husband into the decision she wanted. That was never her style. It clashed with her deep conviction that her husband had - and should have - the final say on such a major decision. As a woman, a wife, a mother, I can find ample grounds on which to sympathize with her. She felt a human inclination to cling to the familiar, safe, secure world of Independence, where Bess Wallace was somebody in her own right, in contrast to the unknown, threatening world of Washington, D.C., where she was nobody except Harry Truman’s wife.

  Her mother was not the only person about whom Bess worried. There was also her brother Fred and his drinking bouts. Her fragile daughter also was on her mind. How would she react to leaving her squadron of friends on Delaware Street, to dealing with a different school system, to endless car trips between Independence and Washington, D.C.? As the days drew close to the time when Harry Truman had to make up his mind whether to file for the congressional primary, the tension in the big house on Delaware Street was severe.

  While Bess and Harry debated, other members of the Pendergast political machine were looking out for number one, as usual. The term political machine is misleading. It conveys the image of something static, frozen, like a block of metal. Actually, a political organization is more like a patch of jungle over which the boss presides as long as he remains strongest. Other jungle creatures constantly are testing him, propositioning him, wheedling favors from him. When Harry Truman went to the Jackson County Democratic Party’s caucus in the early spring of 1934, he had made up his mind to choose the congressional seat. He was stunned to discover that Jasper Bell, a Kansas City judge, had talked Boss Tom into giving him the nomination.

  Harry Truman was so furious, he vowed to quit politics and return to the farm. Bess found that idea appalling. She calmed him down and pointed out that there was another choice. He could begin putting the screws to Boss Tom now to pin down the nomination for governor in 1936. This struck her as an excellent compromise between a local and a federal job. Someone was going to run to replace Governor Park. Missouri’s governors were limited to a single term. As for getting through the two years between the end of his judge’s term and that contest, they would manage, somehow.

  The disgruntled, disappointed judge went back to campaigning for Governor Park’s bond issue. During the first week in May, a few days before Harry Truman’s fiftieth birthday, Bess received a telephone call from Sedalia, Missouri. Harry was supposed to be in Warsaw that night. Her puzzlement soon was solved. Judge Truman had been summoned to Sedalia to talk with James Aylward, chairman of Missouri’s Democratic Party, and Jim Pendergast, Mike’s son and Dad’s biggest backer within the organization. They wanted him to run for the U.S. Senate.

  It was astonishing news. Bess could only gasp. Until that moment, she and everyone else in Jackson County had assumed that Aylward would be the Pendergast nominee. But no one gave him much of a chance in the upcoming fight for the seat, because Tuck Milligan, the seven-term congressman and war hero, had announced for it, with Senator Bennett Clark’s wholehearted endorsement. As Aylward explained it, he did not want to give up his lucrative law practice for a $10,000-a-year senator’s salary. But behind that excuse was the unspoken fact that no one thought a Pendergast man could beat Milligan.

  According to the newspapers, Pendergast had already asked two aging warhorses, former Senator
James Reed and Congressman Joseph Shannon, to run, and they had declined. The Kansas City Star crowed that Pendergast was “backed into a corner,” frantically searching for a candidate that would save him from a humiliating political defeat. Harry Truman told Bess that he had tried to resist the idea. He told Aylward and Pendergast that he thought of himself as an executive, not a legislator. He wanted to wait two years and run for governor.

  They had shaken their heads. Speaking for Tom Pendergast, they pounded the furniture and insisted the Jackson County organization needed help now, not two years in the unknown future. If they lost this race, they would be disqualified as the spokesmen for the Democratic Party in Missouri. Those thousands of jobs, those millions of dollars in federal relief money, would be controlled by Bennett Clark and the bosses in St. Louis. They knew Harry Truman could not resist an appeal to his loyalty.

  “I said yes,” Harry told Bess.

  It was a lot like his decision to join the army. When he made one of these rendezvous with history, he acted alone, sensing that it was against Bess’ inclination, that it stirred in her heart old anguish and doubt about the future. But he was certain now that their love would carry them through the difficult feelings.

  On May 14, 1934, alone again, Harry Truman paced the floor in his room in the Pickwick Hotel in Kansas City. He was on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the Senate. He sensed that this was the most important decision he had ever made. He brought with him memorandums to himself that he had written at other times when he retreated to this hotel to escape the political pressure cooker. That night, he added over forty pages to this manuscript, which is known in the Truman Library as the “Pickwick Narrative.”

  Tomorrow, today, rather, it is 4 a.m., I have to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age and I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me. When I was a very young boy, my mother gave me four large books called “Heroes of History.” The volumes were classified as “Soldiers and Sailors,” “Statesmen and Sages” and two others which I forget now. I spent most of my time reading those books, Abbott’s Lives and my mother’s big Bible. . . . I remember that there were a number of stories about Biblical Heroes with what I thought were beautiful illustrations. They impressed me immensely. I also spent a lot of time on the 20th Chapter of Exodus and the 5th, 6th and Seventh chapters of Matthews’ gospel. I am still at fifty of the opinion that there are no other laws to live by, in spite of the professors of psychology.