Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Still, we could not help feeling and sharing the satisfaction that we never bothered to put into words - satisfaction we shared with everyone in the White House. Now the whole country knew what we had always known. Harry S. Truman was no “accidental President.” From the moment he took that original oath of office, he was the President of the United States.

  I first met this extraordinary man on February 17, 1924. Naturally, I don’t recall very much of this or subsequent meetings. I later found out that I had given him and Mother their start on gray hair by being a very sickly, squally baby. I continued to maintain an amazing susceptibility to germs into the time when my first memories emerge. But it failed to dim the happiness with which I recall these years. My father is at the center of these memories. With some help from my mother’s brothers, he constantly yielded to the temptation to pet and spoil me, while Mother did her often desperate best to repair the damage. I know now that Dad was going through one of the most difficult periods of his life at this time. But he never allowed the anxiety and political harassment he faced almost every day to cast a shadow in the lovely old house on North Delaware Street, where I grew up.

  My childhood memories are rich in love and laughter. But this book is about my father, not about me, so I won’t burden it with my reminiscences, such as the time he gave me a baby grand piano for Christmas, hoping to speed my recovery from a bout of pneumonia. I had been hoping for electric trains. I burst into tears and refused to touch the piano. Besides, now that I am an adult, I have developed a kind of second memory about Dad that historians may consider more valuable, and I find more interesting. This second memory is composed of answers I have received to innumerable questions I have asked my mother and my father, my grandmothers when they were living, my father’s sister, Aunt Mary, and my Cousin Ethel Noland who was our family historian. From their memories and from not a few yellowed newspaper clippings that I had the Truman Library put on microfilm, lest they crumble away at my touch, I have extended my memories of my father back into the years before Mary Margaret Truman entered his life.

  There is really nothing very surprising about this if you stop to think about it. No one’s memories are limited to his own life. Growing up in a big family as I did, with grandmothers who lived into their nineties, the years before birth are in some ways as vivid as childhood years. In that sense, my memories go all the way back to the Civil War. My father was even more interested in the family’s past than I was, and he often talked to me or prompted my Grandmother Truman - Mamma Truman, as we called her - into talking about her memories of Missouri in those days, when Northern and Southern guerrillas roamed the state, shooting and stealing.

  The dominant theme in these family memories is not woe, but a wonderfully solid happiness rooted in the peaceful rhythms of a slower, more deliberate time. My girlhood was enriched by the presence of two grandmothers. My father’s boyhood was even more profoundly affected by his grandfathers, particularly his mother’s father, Solomon Young. A big, hard-muscled man, Grandfather Young had driven cattle and led wagon trains across the plains to California and Utah more than once between 1840 and 1870 and had also run a profitable business outfitting and advising the thousands of pioneers who made the journey during those years. At that time, America west of Missouri was described as “the Great American desert” - a supposedly impassable, barren wilderness peopled only by savage, very dangerous Indians. A perfect grandfather to awaken in a growing boy the vastness and the drama of a continental nation.

  Interestingly, Grandfather Young was equally taken with young Harry. There is a family tradition, vouched for by my Cousin Ethel, that when my father was only three or four, Grandfather Young could not stop telling people what a remarkable little fellow he was. Dad still remembers with great affection one day when the old man - he was in his seventies when my father’s family moved to the farm - was ill and Dad cautiously approached his bedside to ask how he was feeling. Grandfather Young transfixed him with those bold pioneer eyes of his and said sternly, “How are you feeling? You’re the one I’m worried about.”

  Dad’s paternal grandfather, Anderson Shippe Truman, was a gentle, very quiet, reserved man - almost the opposite of outgoing, aggressive Grandfather Young. In 1887, when my father was three, his parents moved to the Young farm. Anderson Shippe Truman sold his own smaller farm and followed his son and daughter-in-law. “He had a bedroom upstairs in the farmhouse,” Dad says. “He spent a lot of his time there. Believe me, you didn’t go into it without an invitation.” Reminiscing about these two men at the age of eighty-six, Dad told me: “To be honest, I didn’t like either of the old men very much at the time. But when I looked back as an adult, my respect and affection for them grew with every passing year. Half of everything I became I owe to them.” Among more tangible things, Dad owed the middle initial in his name to both grandparents. To placate their touchy elders, his parents added an S, but studiously refrained from deciding whether it stood for Solomon or Shippe.

  Anderson Shippe Truman died the same year that the family moved to the Young farm, and it was Solomon Young who was the stronger influence on Dad’s early years. He took Dad with him to county fairs and for countless rides in his buggy behind one of his superb, high-stepping horses. Their friendship was one of those mysterious gifts which can only be exchanged by a mingling of the generations, a habit lost in contemporary America. Although he died when Dad was only nine, Grandfather Young has in many ways lived on in my father’s spirit.

  Dad was lucky to have had this added presence in his growing years. He had a problem to face, which might have made him a rather unhappy young man - his terrible eyesight. His mother noticed this affliction when he was about five years old. Oddly, she did not notice it when she was teaching him to read. He was able to make out the large letters in the family Bible without difficulty. But when she pointed out objects at a distance - a buggy coming down the road, a cow or a horse at the opposite end of a pasture - her son could not see them. This worried her. Then came a Fourth of July visit to nearby Grandview. The climax of the celebration was a series of rockets that exploded clusters of stars in the sky. Dad jumped when each rocket went off, but he was utterly indifferent to the showers of fizzing stars that were filling the night. He could not see them. Then and there Mamma Truman made up her mind to take her son to an eye doctor.

  Remember this was in 1889 in farm country. Glasses were seldom if ever prescribed for children. Mamma Truman’s husband was away on a business trip, but she decided that immediate action was called for, so she hitched up two horses to the farm wagon, sat her son on the seat beside her, and drove fifteen miles to Kansas City. There she discovered that my father was suffering from a rare malformation of the eye, which can best be described as flat eyeballs. The Kansas City eye doctor prescribed thick, very expensive glasses and sternly warned Dad not to play any of the popular sports, such as baseball or football, or participate in any kind of roughhousing whatsoever, lest he break the glasses.

  This cut my father off from boys his own age. I have never heard Dad complain about this deprivation. As a lover of books, he emphasizes the new world that the glasses opened for him. “I saw things and saw print I’d never seen before,” he says. But his glasses made Mamma Truman feel a little sorry for him. I know the feeling, now that I have four boys of my own. It is not easy to control the impulse to protect and even overprotect the one who needs the most help.

  Dad spent a lot of time helping his mother in the kitchen, caring for his baby sister Mary Jane, even braiding her hair and singing her to sleep at night. Meanwhile, his younger brother Vivian was rapidly becoming his father’s favorite.

  Not that John Anderson Truman ignored his older son. A story Dad likes to tell demonstrates this, as well as an undercurrent of mild disagreement about how to raise young Harry. “I’d ride with my father on my little Shetland and he on his big horse,” Dad says. “He’d lead my pony and I felt perfectly safe, but one day coming down the north road toward the
house I fell off the pony and had to walk about a half mile to the house. My father said that a boy who was not able to stay on a pony at a walk ought to walk himself. Mamma thought I was badly mistreated, but I wasn’t. In spite of my crying all the way to the house, I learned a lesson.”

  There was an enormously strong intellectual-emotional bond between Dad and his mother - the sort of bond which, I have discovered from my delvings into presidential lore, has existed between an astonishing number of presidents and their mothers. No less than twenty-one of the thirty-six American presidents to date have been their mothers’ first boy and almost every one of them were the favorite sons of strong-minded women.

  That brings us to the other side of Dad’s relationship with his mother. Even in her seventies and eighties, when I knew her best, Mamma Truman was a woman with a glint in her eye. She had a mind of her own on almost every subject from politics to plowing. Although she spent most of her long life on a farm, she never milked a cow. “Papa told me that if I never learned, I’d never have to do it,” she explained once to her daughter Mary Jane. Something else I learned from my mother only a year or two ago. Mamma Truman hated to cook, and only made one dish that was praiseworthy - fried chicken. In her early years, she supervised a kitchen that fed as many as twenty field hands, but servants did the real cooking. In her later years, Aunt Mary handled the stove work. Neither she nor anyone else in the family let me in on this secret all during my girlhood years, when we spent almost every Sunday visiting Mamma Truman and dined on her delicious fried chicken. For a while, I was convinced that I was a female dropout because I loathed the idea of cooking from a very early age, and still do it under protest.

  Any boy who spent a lot of time with a mother like Martha Ellen Truman could only emerge from the experience the very opposite of a conventional mamma’s boy. This is one among many reasons why my father always bridled when a writer or reporter tried to pin this image on him. The rest of the family, knowing Mamma Truman, simply guffawed at the notion.

  But Martha Ellen Truman gave her son much else, besides moral fiber. She passed on to him her strong interest in books, music, and art. This may startle some readers. For too many people, particularly in the East, the word “farm” is synonymous with ignorance and poverty. It conjures up images from Tobacco Road or The Grapes of Wrath. Missourians are constantly astonished by this cultural parochialism. Martha Ellen Young Truman came from a family that was, if not aristocratic, certainly upper-middle class. Even in the early 1900s, when her father’s farm was reduced from 2,000 to 600 acres, it regularly earned $15,000 a year - the equivalent of $50,000 to $60,000 today. She had an excellent education, having graduated from the Baptist Female College in Lexington, Missouri, where she majored - if that is not too strong a word - in music and art. I have already noted that she taught my father to read before he was five; she had him playing the piano not much later.

  Mamma Truman was the moving spirit behind the family decision to set up housekeeping in Independence. They had been living on the Young farm for three or four years, but the country schools in nearby Grandview were decidedly inadequate, compared to those in Independence. At this point in time - 1890 - Independence was by no means the quaint little farming community that some of my father’s biographers have imagined. It was a very genteel town, with plenty of what might be called “old money” in it, if we foreshorten the term a little. In its heyday, before the railroad spanned the West, Independence had been the jumping-off point for both the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. There were only about 6,000 people living in the town in 1890, but there was a remarkable number of houses built along spacious Victorian lines.

  The Trumans moved into one of these, on Chrysler Street, formerly owned by a wealthy family named Blitz. Kansas City, only a few miles away at the western end of Jackson County, was a roaring boom town of 55,000. But neither the Trumans nor the Youngs would ever have dreamt of living there. That was the “Yankee town.” Independence was the stronghold of the old original pioneers in Jackson County, most of whom, like the Trumans and the Youngs, came from Kentucky. The atmosphere in Independence was Southern in the best sense of that much-abused word.

  The pace was slow and dignified, the people friendly. The word “family” included numerous cousins, and the bond between “kin” was strong. The past was very important. I am sure my father’s interest in history was born in his numerous discussions of the Civil War with his mother. She always talked as if the Yankee guerrillas from Kansas Territory - “Jayhawkers” as they were called - had appeared at the Young farm only a few weeks ago to slaughter the pigs and cattle, kill the chickens, and steal the family silver and featherbeds. When she recalled these memories for me, she always seemed to reserve a special resentment for the loss of those featherbeds - something that long puzzled me. Only when I was an adult did I realize that it took months of plucking geese to create a featherbed, and they were extremely valuable.

  This absorption in the Southern side of our historic quarrel led my father inevitably to an equally strong interest in politics - on the side of the Democratic Party. Democrats were not made by campaign promises and rational debate in Independence. They were born. As for Republicans, Mamma Truman always talked about them as if, at that very moment, somewhere in Kansas they were all collectively dining off her mother’s silver.

  My impression of John Anderson Truman is not nearly as sharp as my impression of Mamma Truman, because he died in 1914, ten years before I was born. He exists in my mind as a shadowy figure, lovable and charming in many ways, but without the hard delightful impact that flesh and blood leave on the memory. He was a small man - and very sensitive about it. For years, I was puzzled because, in the few pictures of him that were taken with my grandmother, he was always sitting down while she was standing up. He was two inches shorter than she was, which meant that he must have been only about five foot four.

  John Anderson was an energetic, ambitious man, who tried to follow in his father-in-law’s footsteps, and make a career of cattle and livestock trading. The house he purchased on Chrysler Street in Independence had several acres of ground, and there were many cows, goats, and horses in pens in the yard. He was also a born farmer and had a huge garden where he grew vegetables so remarkably large and fine that the family still talks about them fifty years later. Especially remembered are his yellow tomatoes - “peach tomatoes,” he called them. But John Anderson’s ruling passion was politics. When Grover Cleveland won the presidency in 1892, returning the Democrats to power, John climbed to the top of the Chrysler Street house and hammered a flag to the cupola, while his admiring sons watched from the ground.

  Politics was where Dad and his father had a meeting of the minds. John Anderson Truman was always ready to defend the honor of the Democratic Party - with his fists, if necessary. He had a famous temper. Again, it is a puzzling phenomenon, remembering how mild-mannered his own father, Anderson Shippe Truman was. My father remembers this pugnacity fondly because he was often the benefactor of it. No one ever pushed John Anderson Truman’s children around without getting some sharp pushing in return. My grandfather was very Southern in his hot-blooded instinct to defend his family at all costs. Dad never forgot the warm feeling his father’s fights on his behalf aroused in him. I suspect it explains not a little of his own hot temper, when he found himself defending his flesh and blood on a more public stage, in later years.

  Most of the time, however, my father’s world revolved around his mother. A story my Cousin Ethel liked to tell illustrates this fact as well as Mamma Truman’s strength of character. The boys along Chrysler Street had, it seemed, a habit of bombarding the local chickens with rocks. One woman neighbor repeatedly accused my father of being involved in this mischief, and Mamma Truman steadfastly denied it. Finally, one day the neighbor appeared in a monumental rage.

  “Your older boy was in it this time,” she said. “Now don’t say he wasn’t because this time he was.”

  Calmly Mamma Truman replied, “W
ell, just wait, and we’ll see, we’ll find out. If he was, why we’re not going to excuse him, but we won’t blame him unless he’s guilty.”

  She promptly summoned all the boys within calling distance and asked each one of them if my father had done any rock throwing. Vivian and all the rest of them confessed their guilt, but they unanimously exonerated my father. “The neighbor went home a little crestfallen,” Cousin Ethel recalled.

  I am sure that it was Mamma Truman who sustained Dad’s years of studying the piano, in spite of hoots and sneers from his less artistically minded contemporaries. The fact that he was a very talented pianist helped, of course. Dad’s stringent modesty when describing his own achievements has confused a lot of people about his musical ability. At first, he studied with Miss Florence Burrus, who lived next door. But he soon outgrew her scope, and Mamma Truman sent him to Mrs. E. C. White, a Kansas City teacher who had studied under Theodor Leschetitzky, a very famous European master of the time, the teacher of Paderewski. Twice a week, Dad journeyed to Mrs. White’s house for lessons and practiced at least two hours a day. When Paderewski came through Kansas City on a tour in 1900, Mrs. White took Dad to meet him, and the great man showed Dad how to play the “turn” in his Minuet in G. By this time, Dad was playing Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and he had acquired what was later called “a good foundation.” Mrs. White thought he should aim at a musical career. But when he was seventeen, Dad quit because - he says - “I wasn’t good enough.” There was another reason, though.