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

by Matthew Algeo

  Monroe’s veto stifled the nation’s nascent road-building movement—but it could not quell its wanderlust. Between 1846 and 1866, a “freighter” named Solomon Young ran at least a dozen wagon trains from Missouri to Utah and California. A typical train consisted of forty to eighty wagons, each requiring a team of twelve oxen and two drivers. The merchandise it carried could be worth thirty thousand dollars or more. Once, Young was gone for two years. His wife and children didn’t know if he would return. The work was dangerous but lucrative. By 1860 Solomon Young was worth fifty thousand dollars, though he soon lost his fortune in the Civil War. As an old man, Young’s tales of his travels would spellbind his grandson Harry Truman.

  Outside major cities, where streets might be paved with stone or brick, nineteenth-century roads were little more than rutted dirt paths that turned into quagmires when it rained. In 1896 a popular magazine even gave readers helpful tips on what to do when a horse got stuck in the mud. (“Steady and support the horse’s head, and excite and encourage him, with hand and voice, to rise.”)

  It wasn’t until a new mode of transportation emerged that the so-called “good roads movement” finally took hold in the United States. That new mode was … the bicycle. The invention of the “safety bicycle”—the kind we know today, with equal-sized wheels and pneumatic tires—spurred a bicycle craze in the 1880s. Bicyclists successfully lobbied state and local governments to impose taxes for the construction of paved roads. (Motorists should keep this in mind the next time they get stuck behind a bicycle in traffic.) In 1893 Massachusetts became the first state to organize a highway department, and by 1905 thirteen other states had started one.

  But it was the automobile, of course, that turned that trickle of road building into a torrent.

  In the late spring and early summer of 1903, a doctor named Horatio Nelson Jackson became the first person to cross the country in an automobile. Talk about a road trip. To win a fifty-dollar bet, Jackson and his chauffeur, Sewell K. Crocker, drove a twenty-horsepower Winton touring car from San Francisco to New York in just sixty-three days, in spite of miserable weather and horrendous roads. At one point, the intrepid motorists ran out of spare tires and were forced to wind rope around the wheels to keep going. (Exactly fifty years later, when Harry and Bess made their trip in considerably more favorable conditions, Dr. Jackson was eighty-one and comfortably retired in Vermont.)

  Jackson’s journey inspired a frenzy of cross-country motoring. In 1904, a caravan of seventy cars set out from the East Coast for the World’s Fair in St. Louis. “The logistics for such an expedition at this time were formidable,” wrote a Federal Highway Administration historian.

  There were no through routes, no reliable road maps, no way of knowing the condition of the roads in advance, no road signs or route markers. Between major cities, getting repairs for a breakdown, or even fuel, was an uncertain business.

  Incredibly, fifty-eight of the autos managed to make it to the fair, and their arrival triggered tumultuous celebrations. America’s love affair with the automobile had begun. The St. Louis caravan showed that cars were mechanically capable of making long trips. The only thing holding them back was the woeful condition of the nation’s roads.

  In 1915 Harry Truman took what was probably his first long automobile trip. He, his mother, and his uncle Harrison piled into his Stafford and drove to Monegaw Springs, a resort along the Osage River in western Missouri about eighty miles south of Grandview. Typical of the times, it was an arduous journey, which he described in a letter to Bess:

  We got within a half mile [of the springs] and ran over a stump. I spilled Uncle Harry over the front seat and threw Mamma over my own head. Neither of them were hurt, except Uncle Harry renewed his profane vocabulary. I backed Lizzie off the stump and ran her into town with a badly bent axle. Mamma and I started for home at 6:00 A.M. on Monday. Got within seventy-five miles of it and it began to rain. Had the nicest slipping time you ever saw. What with a crooked axle and a bent steering wheel I could hardly stay in the road. Five miles south of Harrisonville Lizzie took a header for the ditch and got there, smashing a left front wheel into kindling. I phoned to Ferson and he sent me his front wheel. The accident happened within a half mile of a R. R. station, Lone Tree by name. Mamma and I sat there from 1:30 until 8:00 P.M. waiting for the wheel. It arrived all right and I couldn’t get it on. Then it began to rain in real earnest. I got soaked. A good farmer came and took us up to his house and we stayed all night. Next morning he hitched his team to Lizzie and pulled her out of the ditch.

  Harry and Mamma finally made it back to Grandview at 3:00 P.M. on Tuesday. The eighty-mile trek from the springs had required thirty-three hours and incalculable patience.

  Despite such deplorable conditions, the popularity of the automobile only grew. In 1900 there were eight thousand in the United States. By 1915 there were nearly 2.5 million, and they just kept getting better, faster, and cheaper. By 1917 Henry Ford was selling his Model T for six hundred dollars.

  Traffic engineers scrambled to come up with a road surface that could withstand the deluge of horseless carriages. They experimented with roasted clay, oil-earth mixtures, slag from blast furnaces, wooden planks—even steel. But none was deemed practical enough. Then they tried asphalt, a petroleum product that liquefies at temperatures above three hundred degrees Fahrenheit but hardens when it cools. It worked nicely.

  After World War I, the federal government began financing state road-building programs in earnest. Asphalt roads began spreading like tentacles across the country, and by 1925 it was possible to drive from San Francisco to New York—the journey that had taken Horatio Nelson Jackson sixty-three days—in less than a hundred hours. In 1926 federal and state transportation officials organized this patchwork as numbered U.S. Highways, with east–west roads given even numbers from north to south, and north-south roads given odd numbers from east to west (hence Highway 1 runs from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida). The system originally comprised nearly ninety-seven thousand miles of roads, 3.3 percent of the total mileage at the time.

  The numbering system ended the era of named roads. The National Road became Route 40, the Lincoln Highway Route 30, the Dixie Highway Route 25. The passing of the named roads was not unlamented. Ernest McGaffey of the Automobile Club of Southern California complained that the new system substituted “arithmetic for history, mathematics for romance.” But the numbered highways made it much easier to navigate the rapidly expanding road system, and some, like Route 66, even managed to evoke a romance of their own.

  During the Great Depression the road trip took on a new meaning as millions of Americans took to the road in search of a better life—or at least a job. “European immigrants moved inland from coastal ports along roads,” wrote Karl Raitz in A Guide to the National Road.

  African American migrants moved out of the South to Northern cities, many following bus routes; others drove farm vehicles and well-used cars along the road net. Great Plains Dust Bowl migrants moved to the California cornucopia in a similar manner. Appalachian migrants, too, moved out of the mountains by following the roads leading north to hoped-for industrial jobs.

  During World War II, the road trip was put on hold. Only travel deemed essential to the war effort was permitted. To conserve rubber and fuel, the speed limit was reduced to thirty-five miles per hour nationwide, and tires and gasoline were rationed. A mere 139 new cars were manufactured in 1943, and those, of course, were strictly rationed as well.

  After the war, the pent-up demand for automobiles exploded. Production leaped from 69,532 vehicles in 1945 to 2.1 million in 1946, 3.5 million in 1947, and 3.9 million in 1948. (Postwar production would peak at more than seven million in 1955.) It was the golden age of the American automobile.

  The country’s roads had been badly neglected during the war. Truman recognized the problem. “In recent years,” he said in 1948, “our highway construction has not kept pace with the growth in traffic…. By any reasonable standa
rd our highways are inadequate for today’s demands.” But construction materials were scarce, and the demand for housing far exceeded the demand for new highways. Not until 1956 would the Federal-Aid Highway Act be signed—by Dwight Eisenhower—creating the interstate highway system and ushering in the golden age of the American road trip.

  Now you can drive from San Francisco to New York in less than forty-eight hours.

  Considering Harry Truman’s love of roads, it must have bugged him that Eisenhower, not he, came to be known as the father of the interstate highway system.

  Around eleven o’clock on the night of Saturday, June 20, the Trumans reached Wheeling, in West Virginia’s northern panhandle between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Just outside of town, Harry noticed a crumbling statue of Henry Clay in a park. “Wheeling, for some reason, used to be devoted to Henry Clay,” he later observed, though he confessed he hadn’t the foggiest idea why. That’s surprising, since the statue (long since removed) was erected to honor Clay for his role in extending the National Road westward from Wheeling.

  Harry pulled up in front of the McLure House, a hotel in downtown Wheeling. At the front desk, he very much surprised the night clerk, who recognized him immediately and called the manager. “The manager came up and asked why we had not let him know we were coming,” Truman said. “I told them that if I had, the street in front of the hotel would be so full that we would have a hard time getting through. He agreed that I was right.”

  The Trumans checked into a room on the fifth floor and called their daughter, Margaret, who was to meet them in Washington the next day. Margaret had apparently been fielding lots of calls from reporters trying to catch up with her mother and father on the road. America was asking, “Where’s Harry?”

  Harry told Margaret that reporters could meet him around four the next afternoon at the Gulf station in Frederick, Maryland. It was where he always filled up before driving into Washington.

  When it opened in 1852, the McLure House was the largest and grandest hotel in western Virginia. It had an open courtyard with water troughs and hitching posts for horses. The registration desk was on the second floor, since the open lobby on the first floor was a muddy mess. There was a separate entrance for women, marked LADIES, that was wider than the other entrances, to accommodate the cumbersome hoop skirts that were fashionable at the time.

  Over the years, nearly every future, current, or former president who passed through Wheeling spent the night at the McLure House: Grant, Garfield, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson. Harry Truman himself had stayed at the McLure before, back when he was a senator.

  The McLure was also the site of one of the most notorious political speeches in American history. On February 9, 1950, an obscure senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, addressed a meeting of the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club. It was not an event that portended history. McCarthy’s speech, delivered that night in the hotel’s Colonnade Room, contained the usual ad hominem attacks on the Truman administration. Much time was also spent discussing agricultural policy. But it was a single sentence that McCarthy uttered—practically a throwaway line—that immortalized the speech.

  “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” McCarthy said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.”

  Frank Desmond, the reporter covering the event for the Wheeling Intelligencer, included that sentence in his story, though not very prominently: the story jumps from page one to page six in the middle of it. Nonetheless, the Associated Press, cannibalizing Desmond’s story, included the sentence in its own dispatch, which went over the wire that night and appeared in hundreds of papers across the country the next morning.

  Challenged to produce the list at a press conference in Denver the next day, McCarthy said he would be happy to—but it happened to be in his other suit, which he’d left on the plane. McCarthy, of course, had no such list. He never did substantiate the charge. But the witch hunt that was engulfing the nation had a champion, and, soon, a name: McCarthyism.

  That the McLure was the scene of his hated political enemy’s defining moment concerned Harry Truman not a wit. He wasn’t superstitious. He was just tired. He and Bess had driven three hundred miles from Indianapolis. After chatting on the phone with Margaret, they went to bed.

  The McLure House was remodeled, rather disastrously, in the early 1980s. The original red brick exterior was covered with mud-colored concrete panels. A drop ceiling was installed in the lobby, cleverly concealing its vaulted rococo grandeur and rendering it claustrophobic. Harry wouldn’t recognize the place today.

  When I stayed at the McLure, I noticed there was a banquet room directly across the hall from my room. It was the Colonnade Room, the very room in which McCarthyism was birthed. The room was locked, but I could see inside through a window in the door. It was dimly lit. White tablecloths covered large round tables, awaiting the next wedding reception. To think of all the misery that ensued from what was said, almost offhandedly, in that room more than a half-century earlier, how many lives were ruined. Was it outweighed by the joy of all the marriages that had been celebrated in there since then? I witnessed an execution once, by lethal injection, at the state penitentiary in Potosi, Missouri. Looking into the Colonnade Room, I had the same feeling I’d had when the cheap Venetian blinds were raised on the window looking into the execution chamber. I was profoundly disquieted. And every time I looked out the peephole in the door of my room, all I could see was the Colonnade Room.

  Apart from a large and incongruous group of Russian businessmen in the lobby, I didn’t see any other guests at the McLure the night I stayed there. The place felt a bit sad and ghostly. The water coming out of my bathroom faucet was brown when I first turned it on, a sign that I was the room’s first occupant in a long time.

  The next morning I enjoyed a “complimentary continental breakfast” in the Beans 2 Brew Café, the hotel’s coffee shop. This consisted of a prepackaged cinnamon bun and a cup of coffee. Behind the counter was a chatty woman whose every self-amusing sentence ended with a loud, harsh laugh that would mutate into a hacking smoker’s cough. “Would you like me to warm your bun? Ha, ha, ha, hack, hack, cough, cough.” I was afraid she might expel something. I passed on the whole bun-warming thing.

  Harry came down to the lobby around eight o’clock the next morning. Dent Williams, a Wheeling Intelligencer reporter, cornered him. As he had in Indianapolis, Truman sidestepped questions about Eisenhower and Korea, “because any comment I would make would be a half-baked comment, and Lord knows, I’ve had too many of those half-baked comments.”

  But Truman, who had apparently researched local issues in the communities along the route of his trip before leaving Independence, couldn’t resist taking a jab at the Republican-controlled Congress for cutting funding for a floodwall in Wheeling. “Wheeling needs a floodwall badly,” he said, “and I’m sorry to learn that construction funds were stricken from the federal budget.”

  He talked about how well the Chrysler was running, how hot it had been in the Midwest, how happy he and Bess were to be on the road again. His only regret, he said, was that he couldn’t travel incognito. “I’ve found that it’s impossible to travel cross-country unnoticed,” he told Williams. As if on cue, Williams overheard a hotel guest tell his young son, “That’s Mr. Truman over there.”

  The interview was interrupted when the desk clerk told Harry he had a phone call. The call was transferred to a lobby telephone. After a few minutes, Harry hung up the receiver and returned, smiling, to Williams. “Another nut caught up with me,” the former president said, laughing.

  At eight-thirty Bess came down, and the former first couple had breakfast in the hotel’s coffee shop, probably the prec
ursor to the Beans 2 Brew Café.

  After breakfast, the Trumans checked out of the McLure. Before paying, though, Harry checked the bill very carefully. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was being overcharged. In 1941—when he was in his second term as a U.S. senator, mind you—he wrote Bess from a Memphis hotel. “Had breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs and they charged me fifty-five centers for tomato juice, a little dab of oatmeal and milk and toast. I don’t mind losing one hundred dollars on a hoss race or a poker game with friends, but I do hate to pay fifty-five centers for a quarter breakfast.”

  From Wheeling, the Trumans continued east on Highway 40, following the path of the old National Road through the rugged Allegheny Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania and western Maryland. Near Farmington, Pennsylvania, they passed Fort Necessity, where, during the French and Indian War in 1754, George Washington, then a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in the British army, suffered one of the worst defeats in his military career, surrendering the fort to French forces. (Incidentally, Washington had been sent to the area to build a road.)

  Just past the town of Addison, Pennsylvania, they dipped south into Maryland. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. Until then, both colonies claimed the land between the thirty-ninth and fortieth parallels, and in the 1730s they’d even gone to war over it. Mason and Dixon split the difference—their line is about halfway between the two parallels. The Mason-Dixon Line has become the symbolic division between North and South in the United States, though no state that bordered it ever seceded from the Union.