Bess Truman Read online

  In the fall of 1907, Mary heard the news - perhaps from Bess - that the University of Missouri was about to open a school of journalism. In January 1908, Mary abandoned Hollins and headed for Columbia, although the journalism school was not scheduled to open until the following September. There was an extracurricular reason for this haste. During the preceding summer in Independence, Mary had fallen in love with Charles Ross, the scholar of the class of 1901. Charlie was going to be on the journalism school’s faculty.

  After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1905, Charlie had worked for the local paper, the Columbia Herald, and then switched to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Next, in the manner of young reporters then and now, he switched to the St. Louis Republic, where he was rapidly promoted to the head of the copy desk. When the editor of the Columbia Herald, Walter Williams, was named head of the journalism school, Charlie was the first man he hired.

  Always bright, Mary had by this time developed an almost omnivorous interest in books and ideas. Elmer Twyman, son of one of Independence’s leading physicians and a member of the class of 1901, wooed her for a while by reading the English philosopher Herbert Spencer to her. Spencer was considered daring by most people in 1905 because he downplayed religion and favored the theory of evolution. Mary had attracted Charlie and vice versa even before she went to Hollins, and they had corresponded in somewhat desultory fashion until the summer of 1907, when their feelings became serious. After a moonlit buggy ride, they stood beneath one of the huge trees on the Paxton lawn and exchanged a kiss that said everything.

  Bess’ emotional life also grew more complicated around this time. A young man named Julian Harvey began coming out from Kansas City to call. He soon was on the porch at 219 North Delaware Street two or three nights a week. A great many watching neighbors and friends began to think that Bess took his attentions seriously. There was no doubt that Harvey was serious about her.

  But this romance could not compare in intensity with the flame that began to glow on the campus of the University of Missouri, as Charlie Ross and Mary Paxton saw each other night and day. She was his pupil while the sun was shining, his sweetheart when the stars came out. By the summer of 1909, when Mary returned to Independence, she and Charlie were exchanging two letters a day - and discussing marriage. But there were problems. Mary wanted to put her journalistic training - and herself - to the test.

  Mary got a job on the Kansas City Post, a newspaper that imitated the sensational techniques of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. This bold move put Charlie Ross in a dilemma. He could not deny he was proud that his pupil had become the first woman reporter in Kansas City. But he did not want a fiancée who was working beside the rogues that he visualized in the Kansas City Post’s newsroom. Charlie’s letters to Mary over the next year are a poignant study of a man in torment.

  Mary lived at home and dated other men, notably Pete Harris, which enabled her to be a close observer of Bess Wallace’s romance with Julian Harvey. One day, Bess and Julian and Mary and Pete walked into the country to visit some friends. It turned out to be a six-mile stroll, and their hosts - when they finally got there - fed them nothing but thin cocoa and bread-and-butter sandwiches. They retreated three miles in the other direction to the Salisbury farm, where they were sure of a warmer welcome. There, they dined on fried chicken and ham and chocolate cake and discussed their expedition. Bess offhandedly declared that she thought it was a minor jaunt, at best. Whereupon the men asked her what she considered a real walk.

  “Oh, to Lee’s Summit,” she said.

  To Lee’s Summit and back was a good twenty-five mile hike.

  “You’re on,” said Julian and Pete.

  A few days later, Mary and Bess packed a lunch, to which Mary contributed deviled eggs. Everyone wore clothes that would not be ruined by the dust and mud on the unpaved roads. Off they went to Lee’s Summit, stopping to picnic along the way. An indication of what they were really up to is visible in their dining arrangements. At a bridge over a creek, they split up, and Bess and Julian ate on the upstream side; Mary and Pete enjoyed the downstream view.

  Intimate conversation was interrupted by a strange sight: a flotilla of deviled eggs floating past. “What’s the matter with my eggs?” Mary called.

  “Taste them,” Bess replied.

  One of Mary’s charming younger brothers had filled them with red pepper.

  The point of this story is not culinary. Nor is it aimed at confirming the villainy of younger brothers. Anyone who goes on a twenty-five mile hike with a young man and makes a point of dining alone with him on the bank of a country creek must be enjoying his company quite a lot. Bess Wallace was obviously almost as serious about Julian Harvey as he was about her. In fact, as we shall soon see from a letter she wrote to another man, she was applying one of her own personally designed tests to Mr. Harvey on this jaunt. She had realized it was practically impossible to decide how she felt about a man under her mother’s vigilant eye at 219 North Delaware Street. Nor did dating him in a crowd of people her own age tell her much. But a picnic was a chance to study him at close quarters, in comparative solitude.

  Harvey seems to have failed the picnic test. In later years, he claimed to have liked Bess, but for some reason he could not specify, he never got around to asking the crucial question. Anyone with a little experience in matters of the heart knows that the probable reason for this failure was lack of encouragement. On the other hand, Harvey may have been intimidated by what he saw at 219 North Delaware Street. It was obvious that anyone who married Bess would have to be prepared to spend a great deal of time with Madge Gates Wallace. Those who got to know Bess well soon learned the deep and complex feelings that bound her to her mother. They also learned that Madge Wallace regarded a suitor as someone who was trying to steal her only daughter, the consolation of her tragic life, from her. It took more courage than the average man possessed to face this hostility - with the awareness that he would have to live with it for the rest of Madge’s life.

  Meanwhile, at the University of Missouri, another romance was going sour. Charlie Ross was in a flap about the stories Mary Paxton was writing for the Kansas City Post. Mary was daring in all senses of the word. She took a stroll through the red-light district of Kansas City and wrote a vivid report on it. Then the U.S. Army announced it was testing a contraption that would enable observers to spot enemy troop movements and artillery positions from the air. They had tried balloons in the Spanish-American War, and the enemy had shot them down with dismaying rapidity. This new flying observation post consisted of a collection of giant kites. Mary volunteered to go up in it.

  Before she had time to realize that she was risking her life, Mary was soaring several hundred feet above Kansas City, clutching a few ropes, with nothing between her and annihilation but steady nerves. Her story of the adventure created a sensation, but the reception it got from her father and Charlie Ross was very different.

  Her father was furious. So was her older brother, Frank, who probably only echoed his father when he said: “You’ve disgraced the family.” Charlie’s disapproval was cooler but no less severe. “I don’t want to talk about any such thing as your hanging to the tail of a kite or anything of that sort,” he wrote. Then he hastily added: “You are an angel - most of the time. If you were an angel all of the time, I guess I wouldn’t love you so much.”

  As Mary got story after story on the front page of the Kansas City Post, Charlie’s feelings about her became more and more confused. He was encountering a new kind of woman, and he did not know what to do about it. Then came a crisis that seemed to restore the balance Charlie wanted in their relationship. Mary collapsed with an attack of appendicitis on the streetcar while going to work. Charlie rushed to Independence and helped Mary decide that the operation - serious surgery in 1910 - made an early return to the Post’s hectic city room out of the question. He soon was back in Columbia writing to her: “I certainly do hope we can be married in June.”

/>   Mary convalesced for six months, expecting Charlie to arrive in Independence with a diamond ring in June. She had had her year of success as a reporter and was ready to become the kind of wife Charlie wanted, one who would stay home, have children, and let him support her. But instead of a ring in June, Charlie arrived with a hangdog expression on his face. He told Mary that his mother objected to the wedding. She had lectured him on his responsibility to help send his five sisters to college. Charlie’s father was working in Colorado as a miner but apparently sent home little money.

  It is evident that Mrs. Ross’ objections to the match were influenced by Mary’s career as a journalist. Why did Charlie succumb to this maternal edict? The reason is visible in one of Charlie’s letters. “I love you,” he wrote, “but I find it harder to tell you about it - a woman, than I did to you - a girl.”

  I am convinced that if Mary had burst into tears and told Charlie she could not live without him, he would have gone home and informed his mother that he was getting married the next day. But Mary was so stunned and hurt, she barely reacted. She was a proud, independent young woman. She was not going to beg any man for his love.

  Coolly, almost casually, without betraying a trace of her turmoil, Mary turned slightly away from Charlie and said: “That’s too bad. I understand perfectly.”

  Charlie went back to Columbia convinced that all his fears were true: Mary had changed and no longer really loved him. Mary careened into an emotional and physical collapse that lasted for the next two years.

  Mary’s story is part of the story of Bess not only because they remained friends for the rest of their lives. At a crucial moment in a then unforeseen and unimaginable future, Mary and Charlie would rejoin Bess in an entirely different dimension, when she stepped onto the stage of world and national history. Mary was so hurt, she was never able to reveal what Charlie had done to her for almost fifty years. But Bess undoubtedly knew that some male had deeply disappointed her best friend. Henceforth, Mary’s letters were full of wry, often bitter comments about men.

  By this time, Mary’s father had married again, always a difficult experience for a daughter and especially for an oldest child. Mary lost weight to the point of becoming a virtual skeleton. Everyone was convinced she was developing the tuberculosis that had killed her mother. Finally, her father persuaded her to go to Mississippi, where she lived for two years with cousins who owned a large plantation near Greenville.

  During the same years that Charlie’s romance with Mary flowered and faded, Bess Wallace had another kind of experience in Independence. It did not affect her deepest feelings as directly, but it was difficult, not to say disillusioning, in its own way. As a frequent guest in the Swope home, Bess knew a good deal about its emotional strains and stresses. The oldest daughter, Frances, had fallen in love with a doctor named Bennett Clark Hyde, whom her mother found objectionable. Frances and Dr. Hyde eventually eloped, and Mrs. Swope did not speak to her for a year. Then there was a tearful reconciliation and Dr. Hyde became a frequent guest at the Swope mansion.

  The man who possessed the fortune was Tom Swope, a reclusive bachelor who had more or less adopted Mrs. Swope and her children when her husband, his brother, died. Tom Swope felt embarrassed by his riches, which he often said he did not deserve. He simply had been lucky enough to hold onto the right real estate in Kansas City until it was worth millions. A cousin, Moss Hunton, an amiable fellow, lived with Tom, and to assuage his guilt, used to wander the streets of Independence almost every day, giving away Tom’s money to anyone who asked for it. As for the Swope children, anything they wanted, from trips to Europe to expensive ball gowns, was instantly supplied by Uncle Tom.

  Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde observed all this guilt and generosity with a jaundiced eye. From his point of view, the Swope fortune, a good chunk of which he had expected to inherit, was vanishing day by day. He decided to do something about it. His first step was to order a box of five-grain capsules of cyanide of potassium sent to his office. He brushed aside the druggists’ objections to putting this dangerous poison in capsules. It was never done because it could easily be mistaken for medicine.

  One night, as a number of the children’s friends gathered at the Swope dinner table for a pleasant meal, Cousin Moss Hunton proposed a toast. As he raised his glass, he toppled to the floor. Tom Swope was so upset, he took to his bed. Both men were put under the care of Dr. Hyde, who gave them medicine in capsule form. In three days, both were dead.

  Next, on the pretext that he was performing some experiments on animals, Dr. Hyde obtained from a medical friend a number of cultures for typhoid fever. Soon, four of the younger members of the family were violently ill. Dr. Hyde diagnosed typhoid fever and told his wife, Frances, to stop drinking water from the house cistern. Henceforth, they drank only bottled water. The sick younger Swopes were all put under Dr. Hyde’s care. He gave Chrisman a medicinal capsule, and within an hour, he died in awful convulsions.

  Lest the Swopes seem to have been naive beyond belief, it should be noted that the night after Chrisman died, Dr. Hyde was elected president of the Jackson County Medical Association. He was a highly respected physician. A few days later, Bess’ friend Margaret Swope swallowed one of Dr. Hyde’s medicinal capsules and had a seizure not unlike Chrisman’s, but she did not die.

  At this point in this bizarre tale, the nurses became very upset. They went to Dr. Elmer Twyman, father of Mary Paxton’s beau, and told him what they suspected. Meanwhile, Dr. Hyde had decamped to New York, where he met Lucie Lee Swope, who had rushed back from Europe on hearing of the outbreak of disease and death in her family. On the train to Missouri, Lucie Lee became violently ill. Apparently Dr. Hyde had poisoned her, too. But his career as a mass murderer came to an abrupt end when they reached Independence. John Paxton, Mary Paxton’s father and the Swope family lawyer, had ordered the bodies of Moss Hunton and Tom Swope exhumed. They discovered cyanide in both corpses, as well as strychnine in Tom’s.

  On March 5, 1910, Dr. Hyde went on trial for multiple murder. It was the most sensational event to take place in Independence since Jesse James stopped robbing trains. After a month of wrangling over the evidence, the case went to the jury, which returned a verdict of guilty. But the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict and ordered a new trial. To this day, no one knows why the Supreme Court reversed; under Missouri law, such decisions can be made without stating a reason.

  Two more trials, which dragged on through 1912, resulted in hung juries. Mrs. Swope, who had spent more than $250,000 hiring lawyers to prosecute her son-in-law, gave up. The Swopes’ reign as the social leaders of Independence had long since collapsed. The family scattered, most of them moving to California.

  For two years, Bess Wallace had watched people whom she considered her friends writhing in the grip of publicity. Day after day, she saw the Swopes and their personal habits and wealth discussed by prying, vulgar strangers. She herself had experienced the anguish that public knowledge of private sorrows can cause. Her mother, the self-sentenced prisoner of shame at 219 North Delaware Street, was living proof of the damage, the pain. Then there was her friend Mary Paxton, once so brilliant, so promising and full of self-confidence, now a wan wraith in Mississippi.

  What else could these experiences do but give Bess added reasons to regard the world with wariness and doubt, to wonder again if any man could be trusted, to ask herself if marriage to a husband who piled up money was a promise of happiness any more than marriage to a man who failed? She frequently was tempted to imitate her mother, to choose retirement from this raw, brutal, threatening American world, a retreat to a life of a quiet, dignified mourning.

  One night in the summer of 1910, while the gossip and grisly jokes about the Swopes still were reverberating through Independence, the doorbell rang at 219 North Delaware Street. Bess opened it, and there stood someone whom she had not seen or heard from or even thought about in the nine years that had passed since her graduation from Independence High School:
Harry Truman. In his hand was an empty cake plate.

  Madge Gates Wallace often baked cakes and pies and sent samples to the neighbors. It was the only kind of cooking she enjoyed. Harry’s cousins, the Nolands, now lived at 216 North Delaware, the house across the street. They had recently received one of these gifts and had asked Harry Truman if he would like to return the plate. He had accepted, they later recalled, “with something approaching the speed of light.”

  “Aunt Ella told me to thank your mother for the cake,” Harry said. “I guess I ought to thank her, too. I ate a big piece.”

  “Come in,” Bess said.

  The twenty-six-year-old Harry Truman that twenty-five-year-old Bess Wallace saw in the porch lamplight on that summer night in 1910 had changed in interesting ways from the quiet, scholarly, non-athlete she had mostly ignored in school. This man had gained weight and muscle. There was a solidity to his shoulders, a physical self-confidence in his erect stance. His skin was tanned and wind-burned and glowing with the health that comes from constant exercise. How in the world had Four Eyes turned into this rugged looking specimen of vitality?

  Bess Wallace may have heard that Harry had become a bank teller after the family had moved to Kansas City. A perfect job for him, she probably thought. But that wind-burned skin, those calloused hands were not acquired in a bank. Mere curiosity, aside from friendly feelings, no doubt impelled Bess Wallace to invite Harry Truman into the Gates parlor. There, he was greeted by Mrs. Wallace and the Gates family and perhaps by one or two of Bess’ three brothers. After the ritual thanks for the cake, the older and younger folks probably let the ex-schoolmates go out on the porch and catch up with each other.

  Harry was no longer working at the Union National Bank in Kansas City, although he had done well there, winning a series of raises and promotions. He was a farmer, helping his father and his brother Vivian run the 600-acre Young farm in Grandview. Harry’s mother and his uncle, Harrison Young, had inherited it from his grandmother, Harriet Louisa Young, when she died in 1909. It was hard work, but he enjoyed it - and it paid a lot better than a bank. In a good year, the farm could clear $7,000, and his share of that would be about $4,000. There also was the prospect of inheriting the whole works, or a good chunk of it, when his Uncle Harrison and his mother died.