Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip

by Matthew Algeo

  Bess, of course, had made Harry promise that he would drive no faster than fifty-five miles per hour, even though the speed limit on many highways at the time was sixty or sixty-five—and in some places there were no limits at all. (In Missouri, for example, drivers were merely required to maintain a “reasonable and prudent” speed.) But, owing to his lead foot, Harry found it almost impossible to keep that promise. Just a few miles outside Independence, Bess turned to him and said, “What does the speedometer say?”

  “Fifty-five,” Harry answered.

  “Do you think I’m losing my eyesight? Slow down!”

  Harry obeyed, and soon everything else on the road was passing the decelerated Trumans. “Not only that,” Harry remembered, “but since we were going so slowly, they had a chance to look us over. Pretty soon the shouted greetings started: ‘Hi, Harry!’ ‘Where you going, Harry?’ ‘Hey! Wasn’t that Harry Truman?'”

  “Well,” Harry said to Bess, a bit of I-told-you-so in his voice, “there goes our incognito—and I don’t mean a part of the car.”

  Harry and Bess on a trip in 1957. The Trumans were one of those lucky couples who travel well together, though Bess always thought Harry drove too fast.

  About an hour after leaving Independence, they crossed the Missouri River near the town of Waverly. When Harry had first proposed the trip, Bess had had her doubts. But now that they were on the road, those doubts melted away in the withering heat. On the bridge over the Missouri, Bess turned to Harry. “Isn’t it good to be on our own again,” she said, “doing as we please as we did in the old Senate days?”

  “I said that I thought it was grand,” Harry remembered, “and that I hoped we’d do as we pleased from that time on.”

  Driving across Missouri on Highway 24 today, one is struck by how little, not how much, things seem to have changed since 1953—at least in appearance. Once the clutches of Kansas City’s suburban sprawl are escaped a few miles east of Independence, the two-lane road practically turns into a time machine. You can drive it all the way to Moberly—150 miles, over halfway across the state—without encountering a single fast-food restaurant, big-box store, or chain motel. There are no traffic lights either, just a handful of four-way stops at the bigger crossroads. Rolling hay and soybean fields are interrupted by a succession of small towns where American flags flutter from nearly every house. Except for the cell phone towers, satellite dishes, and pro-life billboards, Harry Truman would have no trouble recognizing the place today.

  In one important respect, however, Missouri is much different today than it was in 1953. The Missouri that Harry Truman knew was segregated. Although it never joined the Confederacy, Missouri was a slave state and, in its racial attitudes anyway, very much a Southern state. Schools were segregated by law. All other public facilities—buses, hotels, restaurants, theaters, playgrounds—were segregated by “public consensus.” A state law banned marriages “between white persons and negroes or white persons and Mongolians.”

  Indeed, it would have been all but impossible for African Americans to take a road trip like the one Harry and Bess were taking. In the early 1950s, Senator Lyndon Johnson asked his maid’s husband, Gene Williams, to drive his pet beagle from Texas to Washington. Williams explained to Johnson the perils involved in such a trip. “We drive for hours and hours,” he said. “We get hungry. But there’s no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat…. We keep goin’ ‘til night comes … it takes another hour or so to find a place to sleep. You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.”

  Harry Truman was born into a family with Confederate sympathies less than twenty years after the Civil War ended. (His mother refused to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom when she visited the White House.) He was raised in a rigidly segregated society. It was probably inevitable that he would carry his own prejudices. He was known to use the word nigger casually. Yet, as president, he proved to be heroically enlightened on racial matters. He integrated the armed forces. He was the first president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His support of civil rights infuriated white Southern Democrats, many of whom defected to the Republican Party.

  The civil rights movement was at a turning point in 1953. On June 8, the United States Supreme Court ordered new arguments in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Original arguments had been heard the previous December, but the justices were having trouble reaching a decision. Chief Justice Fred Vinson was reluctant to end school segregation. “We can’t close our eyes to the seriousness of the problem,” he told his colleagues on the court. “We face the complete abolition of the public school system.” Three other justices were leaning the same way as Vinson. That meant the court would overturn segregation—but only by a vote of five to four. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in the majority, knew a ruling by such a narrow margin would be difficult to enforce. He wanted it to be unanimous. To give himself more time to sway his colleagues, Frankfurter requested the new arguments. They were scheduled for the following December. But fate, perhaps, intervened. In September, Chief Justice Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack. “This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God,” said Frankfurter. Eisenhower replaced Vinson with Earl Warren, a liberal Republican. (“He’s a Democrat and doesn’t know it,” Truman once said of Warren.) When it finally issued its ruling on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ended segregation by a vote of nine to zero.

  Meanwhile, at the very moment the Trumans were speeding across Missouri, a less celebrated but still pivotal chapter in the civil rights saga was being written two states to the south. African Americans were boycotting the buses in Baton Rouge. By law, blacks and whites were required to sit in different sections on buses in Louisiana. When African American leaders in Baton Rouge complained to the city council that black people were often forced to stand on buses with empty seats in the white section, the council passed an ordinance allowing blacks to fill buses from the back to the front and whites from the front to the back, on a first-come, first-served basis. The bus drivers—all white, of course—didn’t like the ordinance, because, they claimed, it “created incidents” in which “Negroes seated in the front seats of buses refused to move to make room for white passengers.” On June 15, the drivers went on strike. They ended the strike three days later, when Louisiana Attorney General Fred LeBlanc issued an opinion saying the ordinance conflicted with state law and was invalid. LeBlanc’s ruling angered African Americans in Baton Rouge, and that night a black organization in the city called the United Defense League (UDL) issued a statement urging blacks to boycott the buses.

  The boycott began the next day, June 19, 1953 (the day Harry and Bess left Independence). The UDL organized alternate transportation for blacks, deploying a fleet of 150 vehicles “ranging from 20-year-old jalopies to spanking new Cadillacs,” according to the Baton Rouge State-Times. Practically every black-owned car in the city displayed a small handmade sign in the window reading FREE RIDE. Black churches collected over six thousand dollars in donations to pay for gasoline and other expenses. Compliance with the boycott was nearly total. A local reporter who rode buses for three hours on the first day of the boycott saw just three black passengers.

  On the night of June 20, a cross was burned on the lawn of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a prominent African American church whose minister, T. J. Jemison, was the president of the UDL. A cross was also burned on the lawn of Jemison’s home.

  The privately owned bus company, meanwhile, was reporting daily losses of more than fifteen hundred dollars. “A continuation of this loss will ultimately mean that we will have to cease operations,” the company’s manager warned.

  Behind the scenes, African American leaders, city officials, and the bus company were negotiating an end to the boycott. On June 24, the city council passed a new ordinance. It was a compromise of sorts: The first two seats on buses were reserved fo
r whites, the last two for blacks. The remaining seats would be filled by blacks from the back and whites from the front.

  At a rally attended by more than eight thousand black citizens that night, T. J. Jemison reluctantly announced that the UDL was calling off the boycott. He said the organization had accepted the new ordinance “under strong protest.” “I’m not going to tell you you have to ride the buses,” Jemison said. “And when I say put your cars up, I don’t mean lock them up and throw away the keys. I want you to keep them handy.”

  The Baton Rouge bus boycott received scant attention in the mainstream media, but black newspapers covered it extensively. That’s probably how a young African American minister named Martin Luther King Jr. heard about it. At the time King was newly married and studying for his doctorate in Boston. He would later call T. J. Jemison to discuss the tactics used in Baton Rouge—tactics that King himself would employ in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

  Harry and Bess Truman enjoyed discussing current events, so it is all but certain that, as they cruised along Highway 24 on that hot summer morning in 1953, their conversation turned at some point to the day’s biggest news story: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were scheduled to be executed later that day at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in upstate New York.

  Three years and three days earlier—on June 16, 1950—Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer from New York City, had been arrested and charged with espionage. His wife, Ethel, was arrested a short time later. The couple was accused of giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. That they had communist sympathies is undeniable—after all, they met in New York’s Young Communist League—but the evidence against them was hardly overwhelming. At their trial the prosecution’s star witness was Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Greenglass had already confessed to spying for the Soviets and agreed to testify against his sister and her husband in exchange for a lighter sentence. On the witness stand Greenglass said he had passed secrets to the Rosenbergs, who in turn handed them over to the KGB. Greenglass would recant his testimony more than forty years later, saying he’d lied to protect his wife and children. He served just ten years in prison and now lives in New York under an assumed name. (In 2008, Morton Sobell, a friend of the Rosenbergs who was also convicted of espionage, told the New York Times that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy but that Ethel was not, though she knew what her husband was doing.)

  A jury convicted the Rosenbergs on March 29, 1951. A week later, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced them to die in the electric chair. The punishment struck many as unduly harsh, especially in light of David Greenglass’s comparatively light sentence and the fact that the couple had two small children who would be orphaned by the executions. In late 1952, after their appeals had been exhausted, the Rosenbergs petitioned Harry Truman for clemency. Truman was not unsympathetic. “I’ve never really believed in capital punishment,” he said. Earlier that year he had commuted the death sentence of a Puerto Rican nationalist who had attempted to assassinate him in 1950. But Truman was also sensitive to charges that he was “soft on communism.” He had conspicuously avoided commenting on the Rosenberg case all along, and he had no desire to get mixed up in it at this late date in his presidency. So, this time at least, Harry Truman passed the buck. Rather feebly, he claimed the file was simply too thick to read before he vacated the White House. He left it up to his successor to determine the fate of the Rosenbergs. Dwight Eisenhower would announce his decision that afternoon. Without his intervention, the Rosenbergs would be dead by sundown—in deference to their faith, the executions had been scheduled to take place before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath.

  Around eleven-thirty, the Trumans reached Monroe City, Missouri, where they picked up Highway 36 and continued east toward Hannibal. This stretch of 36 is still a two-lane road—but not for long. The Missouri Department of Transportation is currently expanding the highway. Around the town of Ely, about halfway between Monroe City and Hannibal, I encountered backhoes, bulldozers, and graders readying the earth for three layers of macadam.

  When the hundred-million-dollar project is finished, Highway 36 will be a four-lane road all the way across the state, from St. Joseph to Hannibal—the first four-lane, east–west highway in northern Missouri. It will draw vehicles from Interstate 70, which connects St. Louis and Kansas City, and undoubtedly change the character of this part of the state, as national chains move in to take advantage of the increased traffic. Critics decry such “progress,” but Harry Truman would love it. In fact, if he saw this road being built today, he’d pull over and watch, because roads were in his blood.

  His father, John Truman, was a part-time road overseer, responsible for maintaining the roads in the southern part of Washington Township, Missouri. It was while attempting to move a large boulder from a road one day that John Truman suffered the hernia that ultimately ended his life.

  While serving in France during World War I, Harry Truman was deeply impressed by that country’s roads. “The French know how to build roads and also how to keep them up,” he wrote in a letter to Bess. “They are just like a billiard table.”

  In 1922, Truman made road improvements the central theme of his first campaign for Jackson County judge. He won, and oversaw the most ambitious road-building program ever undertaken in the county. His approach was “hands on.” He personally inspected roads and bridges in the county, and studied various building techniques. He even became a member of the American Road Builders Association. His knowledge deeply impressed Tom Veatch, who oversaw road construction in the county. “He was unusually well informed on the whole subject,” remembered Veatch. “He was a ‘road scholar'—not a ‘Rhodes scholar,’ but a ‘road scholar.’ He really knew roads.”

  The roads were built on time and under budget.

  In 1926, Truman became the president of the National Old Trails Road Association, a group that promoted the construction of a transcontinental road from Baltimore to Los Angeles, mainly along the route of historic trails, including the National Road and the Santa Fe Trail. Two years later, the group decided to erect identical statues honoring pioneer women in each of the twelve states through which the hypothetical road passed. It was a project close to Truman’s heart. Both his grandmothers had made the arduous trek from Kentucky to western Missouri in the 1840s. Said Truman of the female pioneers, “They were just as brave or braver than their men because, in many cases, they went with sad hearts and trembling bodies. They went, however, and endured every hardship that befalls a pioneer.” Known as the “Madonna of the Trail,” each statue stood ten feet tall and weighed five tons. It depicted a bonneted woman holding a baby in her left arm and a rifle in her right hand, a child clinging to her skirt. Truman traveled the country scouting out locations for the statues. “This is almost like campaigning for President,” he wrote Bess from Kansas, “except that the people are making promises to me instead of the other way around.” The twelve statues were dedicated in 1928 and 1929. Truman attended several of the dedication ceremonies. Even after he became president of the United States, Truman’s name was still listed as president of the National Old Trails Road Association on the group’s letterhead.

  A few months after he left the White House, Harry spotted a crew working on a road near his home in Independence one day. He went down to take a look.

  “A shovel (automatic) and a drag line were working as well as some laboring men digging in the old fashioned way,” he wrote in his diary. “The boss or the contractor was looking on and I asked him if he didn’t need a good straw boss. He took a look at me and then watched the work a while and then took another look and broke out in a broad smile and said, ‘Oh yes! You are out of a job, aren’t you.'”

  When he woke up on Friday, June 19, 1953, Sylvester “Bud” Toben had no idea he would meet a former president of the United States that day. He only knew that it was going to be hot out—very hot—which meant business would be brisk at Bud’s Golden Cream, his soft-s
erve ice-cream stand at the junction of Highways 36 and 61 on the western edge of Hannibal. Bud served five-cent cones in three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and the flavor of the day (usually strawberry). His specialty was a giant banana split called the Pig’s Dinner, which he sold for sixty-nine cents. If you finished it, Bud gave you a little yellow and red button that said, “I made a pig of myself at Bud’s.” It was, quite literally, a nickel-and-dime operation, but Toben excelled at it. The stand opened every year on March 19—St. Joseph’s Day; Bud was a good Catholic—and closed on Christmas Eve. After Thanksgiving Toben sold Christmas trees, too.

  To help him out at the stand that hot June day, Toben enlisted the aid of his daughter, Toni. Toni spent much of her summers “waiting on trade” at one of the stand’s two windows, watching cars pull in and out of the tiny parking lot all day. As a result, she knew more about automobiles than the average twelve-year-old girl. So she was suitably impressed when, a little after noon, a shiny black car with chrome-wire wheels pulled up to the stand. “That Chrysler was beautiful,” Toni remembered. “That’s what impressed me when it pulled in, because there were very few people who had a Chrysler like that.”

  When the driver emerged from the car, Toni immediately recognized him as Harry Truman.

  Harry went around to the other side of the car and opened the door for Bess. The couple then began walking to Osborne’s Café, a diner next door to Bud’s. Toni knew her father didn’t like Osborne’s customers using his lot.