Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  All Harry got in reply was a devastating silence. She obviously did not know what to make of this incredibly honest farmer, who was asking her to marry him and simultaneously admitting that he was probably going to be a financial failure. If Harry Truman had deliberately tried to wreck his chances with Bess Wallace, he could not have chosen a more ruinous remark. Here was a man asking her to repeat her mother’s experience. But there was something about this man that stirred a response in Bess Wallace’s bruised, wary heart. That amazing optimism in the face of experiences that would have discouraged or disillusioned most men. The energy, the vitality he exuded. She could not say yes, but she did not want to say no.

  After three weeks of agony, Harry wrote a wary letter: “I have just about come to the conclusion that I have offended you in some way. . . . Would you object to my coming down this Saturday evening?”

  Although the phone service between Grandview and Independence was erratic at best, this letter must have been answered that way, because two days later, Harry was writing Bess another letter, telling her how he felt about his visit and their talk. She had turned him down, but she had done it in the gentlest, most considerate way. She had said that she hoped they could continue to be friends.

  You turned me down so easy that I am almost happy anyway. I never was fool enough to think that a girl like you could ever care for a fellow like me but I couldn’t help telling you how I felt. . . . I have been so afraid you were not even going to let me be your good friend. To be even in that class is something.

  I never had any desire to say such things to anyone else. All my girl friends think I am a cheerful idiot and a confirmed old bach. . . . I have never met a girl in my life that you were not the first to be compared with her, to see wherein she was lacking and she always was.

  Please don’t think I am talking nonsense or bosh, for if ever I told the truth I am telling it now and I’ll never tell such things to anyone else or bother you with them again. I have always been more idealist than practical anyway, so I really never expected any reward for loving you. I shall always hope, though.

  Here was candor that ought to have melted any woman’s heart, but Bess only agreed to let Harry give her his picture. By the end of July, he had delivered the “cat chaser,” as he called it. Then he launched a campaign to lure the athletic Miss Wallace to Grandview. He undertook to build a tennis court on the family farm.

  For the next month, his letters were full of references to this project. He planned a grass court. “We have a heavy field roller, and I can make it as hard as the road and mow the grass real short,” he told her. “I am going to have it ready by Labor Day.”

  On the eve of Labor Day weekend, he sent Bess a map of the road to Grandview. All day Sunday, Harry toiled on the court. On Monday, instead of Bess and her friends in their tennis outfits, there was only a message that she had decided not to come because it was raining in Independence. Forlornly, Harry reported that the sun had been shining brightly in Grandview.

  Refusing to allow the word discouraged into his vocabulary, Harry persuaded the elusive Miss Wallace to set another date for a visit to Grandview. She declined to do so - and then made an impromptu visit, with virtually no warning. In the meantime, the tennis court had deteriorated from exposure to wind and weather and was pronounced unusable. It was not level enough. Harry was reduced to hoping he could persuade the road overseer to come in with his grader to flatten it out.

  No more was said about the tennis court. Harry began finding an amazing number of excuses to go to Independence and Kansas City. By October 1, 1911, he was inviting Bess to a matinee of H.M.S. Pinafore, which soon was arriving at the Shubert Theater in Kansas City. He added an invitation to the evening’s vaudeville show at the Orpheum and dinner in Kansas City, because “it will take so long to go to Independence and back so many times.” Bess accepted, and Harry abandoned his rural ways to become Miss Wallace’s escort to the metropolis.

  A few weeks later, Harry traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, with friends to file claims for mineral rights in the nearby hills. It was a kind of lottery, with about 400 claims available, worth from $40 to $16,000. Alas, he reported to Bess he did not even draw a $40 claim. “I never could draw anything though. Not even the lady I wanted,” Harry wrote, adding that he was sure he was born under an unlucky star.

  Ignoring this uncharacteristic outburst of pessimism, Miss Wallace replied by asking if “wanted” meant his interest in her had waned. Harry hastily replied that the past tense only meant his grammar was at fault. His feelings for her were “something that will never be past with me.” He spent the rest of the letter bemoaning his lack of a “benzine buggy,” as hoboes called an automobile. If he had one, he would “burn the pike from here to Independence” so often he would “make myself monotonous to you.”

  By the end of 1911, in the eighteenth month of their courtship, Harry had a standing invitation to visit 219 North Delaware Street every Sunday. But he was still far from getting Miss Wallace to consider marriage. On one of these Sundays, which happened to be rainy, Harry asked her if she was getting tired of him hanging around so much. Bess replied that she thought he was the one who would get tired of it.

  “I’ll never get tired,” Harry said.

  Bess looked out the window at the rain and said: “I wish I had some rubber boots.”

  A day or two later, Harry wrote her a letter, recalling the scene. He told her she should not have been afraid “of my getting slushy or proposing until I can urge you to come to as good a home as you have already.” Then, either with great shrewdness or great honesty or both, he added: “Still, if I thought you cared a little, I’d double my efforts to amount to something and maybe would succeed.”

  Bess responded with some thoughts on husbands and money. Harry could not know, at this point, the painful memories this subject stirred in her mind. She told him that she and her friend Mary Paxton had decided that a woman should never get involved with a man who was unable to support her in decent style. Mary, obviously reacting to her bitter experience with Charlie Ross, added that she lately was inclined to wait around for a millionaire.

  Harry replied that he was surprised to find that he agreed with Mary Paxton for once. When they were kids, they never were able to agree on anything. But Mary was not the point here, although he wished her the best of luck in her hunt for a millionaire. “I am going to start in real earnest now . . .,” Harry wrote. “For what you say sounds kind of encouraging, whether you meant it that way or not.”

  After that exchange, money became a frequent topic of discussion between them. When Bess invited Harry to dinner at the Salisbury farm and told him they would walk the three miles from Independence, he protested that he was more than willing to hire a buggy. He obviously was not acquainted with Miss Wallace’s fondness for marathon walks or that this invitation was another favorable sign.

  On February 13, 1912, when Bess turned twenty-seven, Harry apologized for not giving her a birthday present or sending a valentine for the following day because he did not have the money to buy anything “good enough.” Bess replied by giving him a stickpin with her birthstone in it for Valentine’s Day. Harry reported that he had found a fortune teller’s prospectus in a cough-drop box, and it said that people with February birthdays had a quieting effect on the insane. “I suppose that means those they have caused to become dippy. Don’t you?” he asked.

  Three weeks later, on March 4, 1912, ten months after she rejected his proposal, Harry began calling her “Bess.” He had been admitted to the inner circle. Even more encouraging was the way she took him into her confidence about her name. She told him she was not really happy with Bess and was considering several other variations on her baptismal name, Elizabeth. Harry offered some lively comments and observations on the subject.

  My Dear Elizabeth:

  How does that look to you? I just wrote it that way to see how it would look.

  You know we have associations for every name. England’s g
reat Queen always goes to Elizabeth for me. When I was a very small kid I read a history of England and it had a facsimile signature of hers to Queen Mary’s death warrant. I’ll never forget how it looked if I live to be a hundred. But that didn’t put me against her, for I always thought she was a great woman. I never think of you as Elizabeth. Bess or Bessie are you. Aren’t you most awful glad they didn’t call you the middle syllable? It is my pet aversion. There is an old woman out in this neck of the woods who is blest with enough curiosity for a whole suffragette meeting and a marvelous ability for gratifying it, to her own satisfaction. She has a wart on the end of her nose and a face like the Witch of Endor. Her first name is Liz. She is an ideal person to carry the name. I am sure it is not a nickname but her real one as no one of her caliber could possibly be called Elizabeth. I have a very belligerent (spelled right?) cousin whose name is Lizzie. Therefore, I care not for Liz and Lizzie for those two very good reasons. . . . I don’t know what got me started on this line of talk, but I hope you won’t be offended because I don’t like some of the nicknames of your good name. But please remember that I like yours muchly - anyway - as well as the real one.

  Making some money became almost an obsession with Harry Truman. He dashed to New Mexico in search of prime farmland that he hoped he could buy or lease with his Uncle Harrison’s help. At the farm, he watched his brother Vivian depart to his own farm - he had married in the fall of 1911 - and then let the hired men go, too. He was going to work the entire farm on his own to try to raise the profits. His father was planning to run for road overseer for the town of Grandview, and that was going to take much of John Truman’s time. “Work is the only way I see to arrive at conclusions,” Harry wrote. “This thing of sitting down and waiting for plutocratic relatives to decease [he was referring to his Uncle Harrison] doesn’t go with me.”

  Now began a terrific struggle to make the farm profitable and simultaneously keep Bess Wallace’s interest in him alive. Everything seemed to conspire against him. Trains failed to run, and he would lose a whole night’s sleep trying to get back to Grandview. His father became surlier about the time Harry spent in Independence. John Truman began going out of his way to make life difficult for his son.

  In this letter, written in the middle of August of 1912, Harry gives Bess (and us) a graphic picture of a particularly bad night and day. It began with the train sitting on the tracks halfway to Grandview until 6:00 a.m.

  There was a bunch of hoodlums behind me [on the stalled train] . . . and every time we’d get to sleep they’d let out a roar and wake me up. Mr. Galt [a fellow passenger] seemed to sleep placidly on. We both called ourselves some bad names for not going into the Pullman. But I thought every minute would be the last and it would only take them thirty minutes to get to Grandview.

  Well you could put all the sleep I got last night under a postage stamp. I got home at 7 a.m. which by the way is the latest yet for me, and changed my glad rags for my sorry ones and went to loading baled hay into a car. That is the hottest job there is, I think, except shoveling coal for His Majesty [his name for the Devil]. We finally managed to get 289 bales into the car at seven thirty this evening. I came home and put on my clean overalls and a white soft shirt, had supper and was just getting ready to come up and start this letter when Papa came in and said it was lightning around and that we should go over to a haystack some three quarters of a mile away where the baler had been at work and cover up the hay. I almost told him we’d let the hay go hang, for you can imagine how very much I’d feel like going three quarters of a mile across a stubble field with low shoes and silk stockings after being up all night and working all day - at 9 p.m. besides. I went though and handed up thirty two boards a foot wide and fourteen long while Papa placed them on the hay. I’ll bet two dollars to two cents it doesn’t rain now, but it sure would if I’d refused to go.

  It might be helpful to note that Harry was twenty-eight years old at this point. He displayed incredible forbearance with his father’s tantrums. But he also stood up to him. “Papa says he’s going to adopt a boy if I don’t stay home on Sundays. I told him to go ahead,” he wrote.

  A few weeks later, he excused a disconnected letter, explaining: “I have to write this on the installment plan, as usual Papa keeps wanting something.” Next came a report that his father was “on his ear” because he had come home with two loads of cows and Harry was not there to meet him. His father angrily telephoned Independence and was frustrated by an uncooperative operator. Harry was “glad.” He said that there was “no harm done and I spent the evening where I wanted to.”

  His letters are full of references to his exhaustion. One day, he fell asleep shelling corn. But he doggedly continued his visits to Independence. His devotion clearly began to make an impression on Bess Wallace. In the fall of 1912, they went for a walk in the country on which Farmer Truman proved he could more than match Bess’ endurance. He wrote her the next day, cheerfully asking how she felt: “With the exception of a blister, I was as fit as could be this morning.”

  A new form of entertainment – motion pictures - was sweeping the country. Harry used them to extend an ingenious invitation. He suggested going to lunch at some Kansas City restaurant and then seeing all the pictures that could be crowded in four hours. He admitted it was a “Twelfth Street stunt” [Twelfth Street was the Broadway of Kansas City], but “if a person don’t have a good time doing what everybody does, he’ll lead a mighty bored life.”

  Along with his sophistication, Harry Truman continued to reveal his feelings to Bess about the life he led on the farm. His thoughts now were often more serious than amusing: “Do you know that I did the orneriest thing this morning? I was cutting oats right here close to the house and amputated the left foot of an old hen with five chickens. I felt badly about it too. She was over in the oats where I couldn’t see her till I’d already done it. Mamma says she’ll get all right. I hope so. I’d rather do most anything than to hurt something that can’t tell me what it thinks of me.”

  Politics also became an excuse for escorting Miss Wallace. They went to a political rally at which William Jennings Bryan spoke on behalf of the Democratic candidate for president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson. The nominee, a former president of Princeton University who had turned politician and become governor of New Jersey in 1910, was unknown to Missourians. But Bryan was a famous name to every Western farmer. Almost to a man, they had worshipped him ever since he electrified the Democratic Convention of 1896 with his famous speech attacking the gold standard. His call for using silver to back American currency really was a demand for cheaper money, always popular with debt-burdened farmers. Bryan turned it into a crusade by proclaiming: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” and denouncing as Antichrists the railroad barons and Wall-Street tycoons who favored the gold standard. His fervid oratory three times had won him the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

  But in 1912, Bryan was disliked by many Missourians. He had double-crossed Missouri’s hero, Champ Clark, speaker of the House of Representatives, who thought he deserved the Democratic Party’s nomination for the progressive legislation he had pushed through Congress. Because Clark was supported by New York’s Tammany Hall bosses, Bryan decided he represented “the predatory interests” and threw his support to the political newcomer, Woodrow Wilson.

  Jackson County Democrats were not that fond of Champ Clark, who represented the dominant St. Louis bosses as far as they were concerned. Bryan drew a huge crowd, and Harry Truman enjoyed him immensely. In spite of the way the Nebraskan had led the Democratic Party to disaster in three presidential elections since 1896, Harry was one of his “staunchest admirers.” He liked the idealism that Bryan tried to inject, however ineptly, into American politics.

  I don’t know what Bess thought of the aging “Boy Orator of the Platte,” but she undoubtedly was pleased by Harry’s remark that he would not have enjoyed the great man nearly so much if she had not been present. This sounds to me as i
f she had displayed a certain reluctance to attend this political jamboree. It is easy to see why politics would remain a subject Bess preferred to avoid.

  But she could not stop Harry from following the tumultuous campaign of 1912 with passionate interest. Teddy Roosevelt, running as the candidate of the Progressive Party, split the Republican Party, and Woodrow Wilson became the first Democratic president in sixteen years. In the three-cornered melee, the incumbent, President William Howard Taft, suffered one of the worst political humiliations in U.S. history, carrying only two states.

  Another issue loose in this campaign was votes for women. The Jackson County Examiner carried an editorial in favor of it. It was close to the high tide of the suffragette movement. Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers were making headlines in England with their hunger strikes, and in New York, brigades of militant women were marching up Fifth Avenue. But the movement had few supporters in Missouri, and Harry Truman and Bess Wallace were not among them. In one of his letters, Harry offhandedly remarked that a young farm horse “kicked like a starving suffragette,” and in another letter, he compared Mrs. Pankhurst to one of the farm’s guinea hens, who squalled all night and day.

  It may puzzle some people that Bess Wallace, so independent in many ways, and her best friend, Mary Paxton, who was even more independent, did not support the suffragettes. But votes for women was not a popular idea outside the media capital of New York. In Massachusetts, when it was submitted to the people in a referendum with women permitted to vote, it was defeated by almost two to one, and the most shocking part of the story is the fact that only 23,000 women voted in favor of it. In Missouri, the question was put to a vote in 1914 - and lost by five to one, with only men voting.