Bess Truman Read online

  The power of Madge’s influence in the family became visible when Frank and George Wallace married. Madge persuaded her father to divide the garden and give her sons two lots on which he built virtually identical bungalows. There, they began their wedded lives, under their mother’s direct observation. They and their wives soon learned that Madge Wallace never went to bed until all the lights in these two houses were out. She never permitted either wife to walk past 219 North Delaware Street without emerging to ask where she was going. It was not done in a tyrannical way or with a nasty tone of voice. Madge Wallace was still a lady. Words of endearment, a gentle smile accompanied the question. But it was clear to both women that their husbands were never going to be permitted to leave their mother’s presence as long as she lived.

  If this was how Madge Wallace regarded her sons, it is not hard to imagine the intensity of her attachment to her only daughter. Nor is it hard for me to imagine - because I saw, in later years, the persistence of the antagonism - her dislike of Harry Truman, the farmer who was threatening to take her daughter away from her. That Bess Wallace was able to resist this steady, subtle, but oh-so-powerful opposition to the man she had come to love after so much hesitation is a tribute to her strength of character - and to the power of Harry Truman’s love.

  Early in 1916, after he had been informally engaged to Bess for two and a half years, Harry sent her a cry of the heart, if there ever was one.

  Nearly every time I see you I want to urge you to throw prudence to the winds and take me anyway just as things are . . . and then I think of all the debts I am saddled with and of my present inability even to buy you a decent ring and I haven’t the nerve to do it.

  Then I see myself in an ideal country home with everything as it should be and you to run it and me and it’s almost unbearable to wait. Then I wake up and see our old house going to wreck for want of painting and repairs because I must pay interest on a debt I had no hand in making and my dream has to keep waiting.

  He could only beg her “to keep backing me to win through and I will.”

  This plea was repeated with varying phrases throughout the rest of 1916. Abandoning Texas and Uncle Harrison, who was rapidly drinking himself into his grave, Harry next tried to strike it rich in a lead-and-zinc mine. His brother Vivian’s father-in-law had made over $100,000 in one of these ventures, and together they talked Harry into investing $11,000 of borrowed money into a mine near Commerce, Oklahoma.

  The Truman luck stayed bad. Everything that could possibly go wrong with a mine proceeded to do so. The market price of metals sank, the machinery failed, the workers were unreliable. The men Harry had hired to run the farm in Grandview quit, and he had to rush back and harvest the crops. But Bess refused to lose faith in him. She sent him letters that made him “see rainbows in the darkest kind of sky.” When the mine finally quit for good, he was able to write: “If you still have faith in my poor judgment I can still win.”

  Then he added one of those Trumanesque comments on life that had a lot to do with Bess Wallace keeping her faith in him. “You know a man’s judgment is good or bad accordingly as he wins or loses on a proposition. It seems to me that it’s one big guess and the fellow who guesses right is the man of good judgment.”

  Absorbed in Harry’s struggle, they still ignored the war in Europe in their letters. By now, it had been raging for almost two years. Even local papers such as the Examiner began carrying stories on it. One Independence resident was serving with the British army and sent letters to friends that were published in the paper. The Kansas City Star and the other city papers covered it even more extensively. But most Missourians shared the opinion of the state’s congressional delegation: The United States should stay out of it. Missouri’s senior senator, William J. Stone, had grown famous for denouncing Woodrow Wilson’s flirtation with intervention on the allied side. Harry Truman’s political hero, William Jennings Bryan, had resigned as secretary of state to protest Wilson’s policies.

  Bess and Harry probably discussed the war. All his life, Harry had been fascinated by military history, and he followed the great battles being fought in France, Russia, and Turkey with intense interest. But they had no special enthusiasm for either side. A glimpse of their typically Missourian neutrality emerges from a letter he wrote Bess about her dog.

  While he was mining lead and zinc in Oklahoma, he was also raising a greyhound that Bess had acquired somewhere. When he brought him home from the defunct mine, he was calling him Don Juan of Austria, after the hero of the battle of Lepanto. But he remarked that Bess could easily change his name. “If you are an English sympathizer, you could hardly call him anything Austrian. . . . You could call him Kitchen (short for Kitchener) [the English general]. You could even name him Willy [after William Jennings Bryan] and be Democratically right.”

  But the drumbeat of history refused to stay out of their lives, no matter what they thought and felt about it. The war dominated the presidential campaign of 1916 in which Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection against Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson won by carrying California by 3,773 votes. The embittered Republican regulars had refused to give the nomination to Theodore Roosevelt, because of his bolt from the party in 1912. Teddy had been calling the president everything from a coward to a hypocrite for what he considered Wilson’s halfhearted support of the Allies. Roosevelt’s abuse stirred a lukewarm sympathy for Wilson in Missouri. But as Harry Truman’s letter casually demonstrated, it was a long way from enthusiastic support.

  Meanwhile, Harry went from lead-and-zinc mining into the oil business. His finances had been improved by a sad but not unexpected event, the death of his Uncle Harrison. The old bachelor left his share of the Young farm to Harry, his mother, and sister. With the farm for collateral, Harry was able to raise enough money to go into business with Kansas City attorney Jerry Culbertson (who had been a partner in the zinc mine) and an oil speculator named David H. Morgan, who was sure there were millions to be made from oil beneath the farmlands of Kansas and Oklahoma.

  They formed a company and began selling shares of stock. One of the first investors was Bess Wallace. I do not know how much she invested or where she got the money - she may have borrowed it from her grandfather. But it was another example of her faith in Harry Truman. There were plenty of other investors, thanks to the war-stimulated economy. In January 1917, Harry was excitedly reporting to Bess that “the money is coming in by the basketful.”

  They were taking in as much as $1,500 a day, and he proudly informed her that her shares now owned a refinery and leases on some 15,000 acres of promising oil land. “Hope to call you and say we’re over the rocks soon,” he wrote. “Here’s wishing you all the happiness on earth and hoping to share it.”

  By March 1917, a few weeks after Bess turned thirty-two, their situation looked sufficiently promising to discuss an engagement announcement in the spring and marriage in the fall. Bess excitedly informed her closest friends of the good news. Louise Gates Wells, who was living in New York, replied with a spritely letter to “Dearest Bess(ie).” She was “delighted to hear that you were thinking of matrimony in a most serious fashion.” In her opinion, “Cousin Harry . . . is about the luckiest chap alive, not because of his investment prospects but the other prospects.” Another friend, Catherine Woodson, sent her congratulations and remarked that if she were a man, Harry would have had her as a rival. Mary Paxton was less ebullient but more intimate. “I was surprised,” she wrote. “I don’t believe your mother will ever be used to doing without you.”

  Another comment in Mary’s letter makes it even clearer that Bess was planning to leave 219 North Delaware Street. “I know you will love living on the farm,” Mary wrote. “I expect to have a farm some day, but I don’t know whether I will buy one or marry one.” These words clarify a passing comment that Harry Truman made around this time. He said he yearned “to build me a bungalow.” He was obviously going to build a separate house on the Grandview farm and commute to Kansas
City to help run the Morgan Oil Company. This made good sense. A man was needed on the farm to make sure the hired hands did their jobs.

  But the drumbeat of history was booming louder in the lives of Harry Truman and Bess Wallace as these joyous hopes were rising. Although Woodrow Wilson had been reelected on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” he took an increasingly confrontational position against the Central Powers, Austria and Germany. He began expanding the army and navy. Shortly before his second inauguration, he made it clear that if Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and sank American merchant ships, the United States would declare war. Germany promptly announced it was going to do exactly that and gamble on bringing the Allies to their knees before America could organize an army large enough to make a difference.

  Woodrow Wilson sent a declaration of war to Congress on April 2, 1917. One of Missouri’s senators and four of her congressmen voted against it, but that was irrelevant as far as Harry Truman and Bess Wallace were concerned. Almost instantly, the value of the stock in the Morgan Oil Company sank to zero. There was no manpower available to sink wells on the land they had leased, and the stream of money from investors dried up. Harry Truman was devastated.

  I seem to have a grand and admirable ability for calling tails when heads come up. My luck should surely change. Sometime I should win. I have tried to stick. Worked, really did, like thunder for ten years to get that old farm in line for some big production. Have it in shape and have a crop failure every year. Thought I’d change my luck, got a mine, and see what I did get. Tried again in the other long chance, oil. Still have high hopes on that, but then I’m naturally a hopeful happy person, one of the “Books in brooks, Tongues in trees and Good in everything” sort of guy. . . . I was very impressionable when I was a kid and I believed all the Sunday school books and idealist dope we were taught and it’s taken me twenty odd years to find out that Mark [Twain] is right when he says that the boy who stole the jam and lied about it and killed the cat and sassed his ma, grew up and became a highly honored citizen. . . . The poor gink who stands around and waits for someone to find out his real worth just naturally continues to stand, but the gink who toots his horn and tells ‘em how good he is makes ‘em believe it when they know he’s a bluff and would steal from his grandma.

  I don’t believe that. I’m just feeling that way now. If I can’t win straight, I’ll continue to lose. I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have you to love and to know that when I’ve arrived at a sensible solution to these direful financial difficulties I’ve gotten into, that I’ll have the finest, best-looking, and all the other adjectives in the superlative girl in the world to make the happiest home in the world with. Now isn’t that a real heaven on earth to contemplate? I think it is and I know I’ll have just that in the not far off future, unless it is necessary for me to get myself shot in this war - and then I’ll find you somewhere. I dreamt that you and I were living in Rome when togas were the fashion. I am always dreaming of you. I’m never anywhere in a dream or out of it that I don’t imagine you there too. Last night I thought I was in an airplane in France. I fell about 17,000 feet and didn’t get much hurt and I was idiot enough to weep because I couldn’t see you in the hospital. It seemed that you were outside and they wouldn’t let you in. Some dream, what? (I had a cheese omlet for supper.) I’m going to eat one every night.

  Those comments about the war warned Bess Wallace that Harry Truman was finding it difficult to ignore the appeals to patriotism and courage that President Woodrow Wilson was issuing in Washington. Years later, Harry recalled that he was “stirred heart and soul” by these war messages. Bess soon was dismayed to learn that Harry had rejoined the Missouri National Guard. (He had let his original enlistment lapse in 1911.) He threw himself into the local effort to expand Kansas City’s Battery B and Independence’s Battery C into a regiment. As a former member of the guard, he was suited to this task. He recruited so many men that he was elected a first lieutenant of a new Battery, F.

  Although Frank and George Wallace were both younger than thirty-three-year-old Harry Truman, neither enlisted. I am certain that their mother was the reason. A woman who would not permit married sons to move off her family’s property could not bear the thought of them going to war in distant France. Bess struggled to support Harry’s decision, but it was hard to accept. Madge Wallace undoubtedly used all her mournful guile to make him look uncaring and indifferent.

  For a month, Bess managed to control a dangerous mixture of anger and disappointment. She told herself that there were millions of other women in America going through the same experience, but she had waited so long and marriage had seemed so certain. In six months, she would be thirty-three years old. Many people were predicting the war would last at least four years. She might be too old to have a child when Harry Truman came back - if he came back.

  She tried to conceal her feelings from Harry, but they burst out one night in July. A week later he wrote to her, admitting that he had “felt like a dog” for the past seven days. “It seems I have caused you to be unhappy by my overenthusiastic action in getting myself sent to war.” Another woman about whom he cared deeply had had a similar reaction: “Two big tears came in Mamma’s eyes last night when I started off to Lodge in my soldier clothes. You are the two people in the world I would rather see smile and that I like to cause to smile and here I’ve gone done the opposite to both of you. Perhaps I can make you all happier for it. I’ll try my best. Some way I seem to have an ability for getting myself into things by my overzealous conduct or anxiety to see them a success and do not see the consequences for myself or others until the conclusion comes.”

  For a while, Harry tried to disguise the seriousness of his decision. He told Bess that it was not yet certain that all the National Guard units would be incorporated in the new U.S. Army immediately. They might not have room for them and the hundreds of thousands of men the government was drafting. His bad eyes might keep him out of combat. The Russians, who had had a democratic revolution and kicked out the Czar, were launching a massive offensive that might win the war in a month or two.

  Harry must have known he was trying to avoid the moment of truth. He was already in uniform, living in a tent city opposite the Kansas City Convention Hall. On August 11, 1917, he could no longer disguise his commitment. “I have some news for you that perhaps you won’t consider good,” he wrote. “The Federal Mustering Officer passed me into the service of the United States today. I am accepted and have to go. I will have to confess that I am not very sorry, because I have been crazy to be a military man almost since I can remember.”

  It is a sad letter. I found my eyes filling with tears as I read it. I am sure Bess wept far more copious tears. “I wish I was in your backyard,” Lieutenant Truman blurts at one point. Then he writes a whole paragraph full of pride about the way he has learned to drill the battery. Although Harry Truman joked about letting her “run him,” Bess was discovering that she was in love with a man who could insist on doing things his way.

  In spite of her turmoil, Bess remained committed to Harry. Early in that history-filled summer of 1917, she asked her mother to announce her engagement. A long, subterranean struggle came to a climax in this encounter. In many ways, the situation, the nation at war and Harry Truman, still far from a financial success, embroiled in it against her deepest wishes, made Bess more vulnerable. But it also made her decision more formidable, more final. She was not doing this because Harry Truman finally had made some money or had pleased her in some other extraordinary way. She was doing it even though he had displeased her. She was doing it because she loved him.

  Bess handed her mother a piece of paper she had picked up when she went to visit Harry in Kansas City. It was the instruction page for a form that women filled out to register for war service. On the back, the following words were written in Harry Truman’s bold scrawl: “Mrs. David W. Wallace of Independence announces the engagement of her daughter, Elizabeth Virginia, to Lieute
nant Harry S. Truman of the Second Missouri Field Artillery.” Sixty-five years later, I found that piece of paper in the attic at 219 North Delaware Street. Bess knew that it was one of the most important documents in her life.

  By this time, Harry Truman had decided that they could not be married in the fall of 1917. He explained his decision in one of the most emotional letters he ever wrote.

  Bess, I’m dead crazy to ask you to marry me before I leave but I’m not going to because I don’t think it would be right for me to ask you to tie yourself to a prospective cripple - or a sentiment. You, I know, would love me just as much, perhaps more, with one hand as with two, but I don’t think I should cause you to do it. Besides, if the war ends happily and I can steal the Russian or German crown jewels, just think what a grand military wedding you can have, get a major general maybe.

  If you don’t marry me before I go, you may be sure that I’ll be just as loyal to you as if you were my wife, and I’ll not try to exact any promises from you either if you want to go with any other guy, why all right, but I’ll be as jealous as the mischief although not begrudging you the good time.

  Bess, this is a crazy letter but I’m crazy about you and I can’t say all these nutty things to you without making you weep. When you weep, I want to. If you’d looked right closely the other night, you might have discovered it, and a weeping man is an abomination unto the Lord. All I ask is love me always and if I have to be shot I’ll try and not have it in the back or before a stone wall because I’m afraid not to do you honor.