Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  The movement toward a more independent woman began in 1848, and by 1890, there was a distinct whiff of liberation in the air. The bustle finally had been banished, and women were asking and getting the right to play sports and join clubs and launch careers and speak their minds on an astonishing number of topics from temperance to the vote. In 1901, the year sixteen-year-old Bess Wallace graduated from high school, a woman lawyer, Carey May Carroll, was named attorney to the Jackson County collector.

  For Bess, participation in sports was her first stride toward self-confidence. By the time she was in high school, she was the best tennis player in Independence. She was also an accomplished ice skater and rider. In her younger days, she played third base on her brothers’ sandlot baseball team and was their champion slugger. There is a story in the family of Bess happening by when the boys were losing to a team from a nearby neighborhood by three runs in the last of the ninth. Bess was on her way home from a tennis match. Her brother Frank begged her to get into the game as a pinch hitter. She agreed, and they promptly put three men on base. Frank sent Bess up to bat, and she belted a home run over the center fielder’s head, winning the game.

  Next door to Bess Wallace at 614 North Delaware Street lived her closest friend, Mary Paxton. She was the daughter of a successful attorney, and like Bess Wallace, had a number of obstreperous brothers, who frequently got into fights with the Wallace boys. Both older sisters never hesitated to wade into these brawls, grabbing male arms and legs, swatting ears and backsides. Bess, taller and a year older than Mary, was the acknowledged peacemaker. The rascals were told to behave or else. “They were all afraid of her,” recalled Henry Chiles, a high-school classmate who was probably one of the miscreants.

  Bess also kept the peace and issued commands with her whistle. It was a piercing sound that carried for blocks. Moreover, she did it without putting her fingers near her mouth. “She was the only girl in Independence who could whistle through her teeth,” Henry Chiles recalled. The whistle summoned wandering brothers and struck terror into their male hearts when they were about to do something they shouldn’t. For her girlfriends, Bess had a more pleasing, melodious whistle. On summer evenings, they waited eagerly for it to sound from the Wallace back porch. It was a signal to come over for ice cream.

  The Paxtons and the Wallaces had a good time together. On summer nights, it was so good that some of the neighbors - in particular Colonel William Southern, editor of the local paper - complained of not being able to get any sleep. In retaliation, they called Southern “Sneaky Bill.” A lot of the noise was probably generated by Frank Wallace and his big black dog. Visitors to Delaware Street would ask him what he called the mongrel, and Frank would say, deadpan “U-Know.”

  The disconcerted visitor would say: “I don’t know. I just asked you.”

  “U-Know,” Frank would say.

  And so on, while the visitor got madder and madder and everyone else collapsed with laughter.

  U-Know became such an object of affection he thought he could get away with anything. Matthew Paxton, one of Mary’s brothers, had stolen a handful of sugar lumps from his mother’s kitchen and was enjoying them one day. U-Know watched, licking his chops. George Wallace jarred Matthew’s elbow, and the sugar flew up in the air and down U-Know’s gullet. Matthew was so furious he bit U-Know. “Matthew spit black hair for a week,” Mary Paxton recalled. No one seems to remember whether he inflicted any serious damage on the dog.

  While she hung around with these rowdy males, Bess was not allowed to forget that she was Madge Gates Wallace’s daughter. She was expected to be a lady, most of the time. This idea of the lady who concerned herself only with the genteel aspects of life, with art and culture and spiritual values, was still alive in the 1880s and 1890s. Madge Gates Wallace was a lady from the top of her well-coifed head to the tips of her elegant fingers. Although she tolerated her daughter’s athletic prowess, Madge insisted that Bess acquire the social graces.

  In high school, Bess went to Miss Dunlap’s dancing class on Jackson Square in the center of Independence. Scarcely a Saturday night went by without a hop at that particular ballroom. There were other dances and receptions at the Swope mansion, where Bess was welcomed by Margaret Swope, the daughter closest to her in age. Margaret often asked Bess to join her in the receiving line, a sign of their close friendship as well as Bess’ social status.

  “We all learned the polka and the schottische and the Virginia reel,” her friend Mary Paxton recalled. “But we mostly danced the waltz and two-step. We had much the same kind of party dresses, mull with silk sashes, colored or striped. But Bess always looked more stylish than anyone else in the crowd.” In the summer, they sometimes strung Japanese lanterns on the lawn and had outdoor parties. For refreshments in summer, there was ice cream and cake and mints; in the winter, chicken salad with beaten biscuits and charlotte russe.

  On summer nights after a dance, the party often piled into one or two old surreys for a ride through the moonlit town and countryside. They would sing songs and no doubt do a little surreptitious “spooning,” although this adolescent sport was frowned upon if the girl seemed too willing or too careless. One girl who spooned on a back porch with a comparative stranger from Kansas City was never invited to another party.

  By now, you may be wondering about my omission of a name that eventually became important in Bess Wallace’s life - Harry S. Truman. He was not a native of Independence. He was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, a tiny farm town some 120 miles to the south, where his father, John Anderson Truman, was in business as a horse and cattle trader. About nine months later, the Trumans moved to a farm near Harrisonville, in Cass County, some thirty miles from Independence, but part of Jackson County. There, John Truman helped his wife’s family, the Youngs, run their 600-acre farm. In 1890, when Harry was six years old, his mother, Martha Ellen Young Truman, persuaded her husband to move to Independence, because she wanted her children (a second son, Vivian, and a daughter, Mary, had followed Harry) to get a better education than the rural schools could give them.

  Not long after they came to town, Martha Ellen Truman met the local Presbyterian minister on the street. He invited her to send her children to his Sunday school. Although she was a Baptist by birth, she accepted the invitation. Thus, six-year-old Harry Truman walked into the classroom of the First Presbyterian Church and saw “a little blue-eyed, golden-haired girl" named Bess Wallace. To the end of his life, he insisted that he fell in love with five-year-old Bess on the spot and never stopped loving her throughout his boyhood years. “She sat behind me in the sixth, seventh, and high-school grades,” Harry Truman later recalled, “and I thought she was the most beautiful and the sweetest person on earth.”

  Occasionally, Bess would allow Harry Truman to carry her books home from school. He would be dazed with happiness for the rest of the day. More moments of near ecstasy occurred when Bess joined Harry and several other classmates at the home of his first cousin, Ethel Noland, to be tutored in the intricacies of Latin verbs by her older sister, Nellie. Both Nolands soon noted Harry’s adoration of Bess, and he did not try to conceal it from them.

  One day, he appeared at their house with a broad smile on his face and announced that he wanted to play his first musical composition for them. The Nolands seated themselves in their parlor, expecting something solemn and high-toned. Cousin Harry had been taking piano lessons for years and was playing Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and other European masters. He reeled off a swarm of arpeggios and then played a series of lilting notes that they instantly recognized. “It’s Bessie’s ice cream whistle!” Ethel exclaimed.

  Unfortunately, Bess Wallace had no interest in Harry Truman, nor the least idea that he was in love with her. He was never part of the Delaware Street crowd. Never was he invited to a ball at the Swope mansion. Nor did he participate in those moonlit hayrides. The Trumans were far beneath the social world inhabited by the Wallaces and the Gates, the Waggoners and the Swopes. They were country folk and
newcomers. John Anderson Truman’s profession, horse trading, was considered less than genteel by most people. Also, his income was erratic. During high school, Harry had to work at odd jobs to improve the family’s finances.

  One story, told by Mary Paxton, sums up the gap between Harry Truman and Bess Wallace better than paragraphs of explanation. On one of those moonlit, spooning expeditions, the Delaware Street crowd was riding around Jackson Square, singing merrily. As they paused for breath between songs, someone said: “Oh look, there’s Harry Truman.”

  Harry was sweeping out Clinton’s Drug Store, his last chore for the day. “What a shame he has to work so much,” Bess Wallace said. The words were casual, an observation with little emotional content.

  There was another reason, probably as important as social standing, why Bess Wallace found Harry Truman uninteresting. His bad eyes made him a hopeless athlete. His crueler schoolmates called him “Four Eyes” and also ridiculed him for taking piano lessons. A young man needed more than average athletic ability to win Bess Wallace’s attention in those days. Bill Bostian, the postmaster’s son, adored her and took up tennis to promote his standing. Alas, when they played doubles, he had a habit of yelling, “I’ll get it Bessie,” and then not getting it. Bill’s status plummeted.

  Throughout these grammar and high-school years, another man was the central figure in Bess’ happiness: her father. She adored him as only an only daughter can. (How well I know that.) In her grade-school days, David Willock Wallace was always romping with her and the other children in the neighborhood. Every Fourth of July, he personally set up and fired off a magnificent display of fireworks for Delaware Street. At patriotic parades on the Fourth and other days, he frequently was asked to be grand marshal, and he would lead the strutting show on a great black horse. It is not hard to imagine what effect this must have had on a girl whose imagination had been fed on southern ideals of masculine chivalry. David Wallace was Bess’ Bayard, the knight without stain or reproach. As she grew older, her awareness of his comparative poverty added a heart-wrenching pity to her love.

  Behind his facade of good cheer, David Wallace was an unhappy man. A fifth child, David Frederick, born in 1900, added to his financial problems. He made a stab at starting an importing business in Kansas City, a natural connection to his customs job, but it went nowhere and probably left him even deeper in debt. Like most local politicians, he spent a great deal of time in the Independence courthouse. The hours of his customs job were not demanding. Next door to the courthouse was a political saloon, where he spent even more time. As his debts increased, so did his drinking.

  For Bess and her two older brothers, Frank and George, this time must have been the beginning of their troubles. They knew about their father’s drinking, and so did the neighbors - often he was carried home by friends and deposited on the front porch. Complicating the problem was Madge Gates Wallace’s refusal to recognize it. She never reproached her husband for one of these lapses. That would not have been genteel. She was polite and even sympathetic as he struggled through the following day’s hangover and remorse. She acted as if he had twisted his ankle or caught a bad cold.

  Another shadow that descended on Bess around this time was the illness of Mary Paxton’s mother, a brilliant woman who had been a college teacher and was the leader of one of the most intellectual study clubs in Independence. The doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. A three-year stay in Colorado’s mountain air during Mary’s grammar-school years had done little but make the family miserable over the perpetual separation. Mary Gentry Paxton returned home, and the family and the neighbors could only watch helplessly as she slipped slowly away from them.

  The illness of a mother, the failures of a father saddened but did not disrupt young lives. As far as anyone could see, Bess and Mary continued to enjoy themselves. They eluded the troubled adult world (and troublesome younger brothers) at clandestine meetings of the Cadiz Club. This all-female organization met in a barn behind Grandfather Gates’ house. They soon were staging plays there, written by Mary and performed under her direction. Bess was the manager. She collected admissions and saw that the profits went to charity.

  In high school, Bess was an excellent student. She saved many of the essays she wrote on writers such as James Russell Lowell. Her marks were never less than 90, and there were several 100s. But she was not a scholar. She left that title to Charlie Ross, a handsome young man who had a flair for writing, and Laura Kingsbury, the class’ second-ranking student. Charlie was the editor of their class yearbook, The Gleam. His chief assistant was Harry Truman. The title, drawn from Tennyson’s poem, “Merlin and the Gleam,” blended idealism and ambition for these young men. They were looking forward to participating as leaders - achievers - in the America beyond the boundaries of Independence and even of Kansas City.

  For Bess Wallace, the gleam did not carry such dramatic overtones. She listened to Mary Paxton’s plans for college and a career with wistful longing. (Because of childhood illnesses and time lost with her mother in Colorado, Mary was three years behind Bess in school.) The presence of a new baby in the household made Madge Wallace even more dependent on her daughter. Still, there were several servants on the payroll. As someone who knew her well put it, “Mrs. Wallace never spent much time in the kitchen.”

  Her mother’s health and emotional fragility, exacerbated by her husband’s drinking, were not the real reasons why Bess did not go away to college, as her mother had gone to the Cincinnati Conservatory and her friend Mary Paxton was eventually to depart for Hollins in Virginia, and their mutual friend, Charlie Ross, was to go to the University of Missouri at Columbia. The real explanation was the sad fact that Bess’ father could not afford to send her.

  This failure was the first public acknowledgment of David Wallace’s financial difficulties. His money troubles were already well known within the family. In a box in the basement of 219 North Delaware Street, I found a series of faded letters from him to George Porterfield Gates, thanking his father-in-law again and again for “your many kindnesses to me and my family.” In the American world of the early 1900s - and in the 1980s - an inability to support one’s wife and children was a failing that was humiliating to most men. For David Wallace, it would have been even more painful, since he was being forced to ask for help from a man who had doubted his ability to support his daughter from the first.

  By sad coincidence, Harry Truman’s family also was painfully short of money. In 1901, John Truman lost his life savings and a small farm his wife had inherited speculating on grain futures at the Kansas City Board of Trade. Even their home on West Waldo Street, a few blocks from Delaware Street, had to be sold, and the family moved to modest quarters in Kansas City. Harry abandoned all thoughts of a college education and went to work as a timekeeper for a section gang on the Santa Fe Railroad.

  The Trumans at least coped with their financial straits. David Wallace could not. Worse, as his debts piled up, his political future grew dismal. For Democrats in Missouri and elsewhere, the opening years of the new century were not promising ones. A new, enormously popular Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, had replaced Ohioan William McKinley, who had been assassinated by an anarchist in 1901. A war hero as well as a bold, progressive politician, Teddy was certain to be reelected in 1904, which meant there was little hope of advancement for Democratic appointees. David Wallace’s customs job had been placed under civil service protection during the Cleveland administration, but this fact was not much consolation to a man who desperately needed to make more money. Instead, he only spiraled deeper into alcoholism and debt.

  Thanks to some dedicated researchers at the National Archives, I have obtained another painful glimpse of David Wallace’s financial problems from letters that flowed between Kansas City and Washington, D.C.

  In 1889, his sympathetic boss, Surveyor William L. Kessinger, wrote to the secretary of the treasury asking for “additional compensation” for David Wallace and another deputy surveyor for e
xtra work performed by them. The request was stonily denied by the Republican.

  In 1901, the surveyor asked the Treasury Department to increase David Wallace’s salary to $1,500 a year. The treasury agreed to $1,400. The extra money did not do much good because, in the following year, David Wallace was dunned by the Credit Clearing House for an unpaid debt of $3.50. The debt collection agency sent the complaint to Washington, D.C., and a brisk letter from an assistant secretary of the treasury ordered the surveyor to look into the matter. More letters followed, in which the clearing house claimed “we have seen Mr. Wallace at least half a dozen times and on each occasion he has promised to settle the matter, but when called upon for the money is ready with another excuse, and now we do not believe he has any intention of carrying out his promises.”

  To be unable to pay this debt, and go through the humiliation of being reported to his employers, must have been an excruciating experience for Madge Gates Wallace’s husband. But all he could do was beg the reluctant government for more money. This time, his boss decided to get some backing, and he persuaded two inspectors from the New Orleans District headquarters to issue a report stating that David Wallace “was the most efficient man in the office at this port [Kansas City], yet his salary, $1,400 per annum, is the smallest paid any clerk here.” This endorsement persuaded the Republicans in Washington to approve a $200 a year raise.

  During these same years, David Wallace was borrowing money from his father-in-law to pay his taxes. In 1901, he was two years in arrears and was in a panic that his house was going to be advertised and sold by the county collector. That same year, George Porterfield Gates paid for some badly needed shingling and painting, which cost several hundred dollars. When Grandfather Gates gave eleven-year-old George Wallace $5 for a Christmas present, his mother used it to help pay for an overcoat, which he “needed badly.”