Vivian, in contrast to his girlish-sounding name, was a sturdy, man’s kind of boy, who was good at games and wished no part of books or piano lessons. Already Vivian had shown such a knack for horse trading that John Truman gave him a checkbook and set him up as a “partner” at the age of twelve. Harry, try as he might, had no heart for trade. As he would later explain to Bessie Wallace, “When I buy a cow for $30 and then sell her to someone for $50 it always seems to me that I am really robbing that person of $20.”
Where Harry and his father found common ground was in the sociability and excitement of politics. Among the happiest of all Harry’s boyhood memories would be the big Democratic picnics every August at Lone Jack. John Truman would have everyone up early. He and the boys would hitch two of the best mules to a spring wagon, and with everything ready, the whole family would set out for the five-mile drive, the wagon filled with fried chicken, cakes, and pies. By noon at Lone Jack there would be thousands of people spreading food on tablecloths on the grass, and visiting back and forth. Then, about two, the speaking would begin. Harry liked particularly a candidate known as Colonel Crisp, “a colonel by agreement,” who ran for Congress time after time but never won and was famous for his annual picnic oration on the Battle of Lone Jack during the Civil War. Challenged once on his accuracy by a veteran who had been in the battle, Crisp responded, “Goddamn an eyewitness anyway. He always spoils a good story.” Another speaker, Congressman William S. Cowherd from Lee’s Summit, told a story that Harry would take pleasure in retelling the rest of his life. Speaking of certain provisions in a pending tariff bill that he found unpalatable, the congressman was reminded of a farmer on a visit to New York, having his first experience in a fancy hotel dining room. First he was served celery, which he ate, then a bowl of consommé, which he drank. But when the waiter placed a lobster before him, the farmer looked up indignantly and said, “I ate your bouquet. I drank your dishwater. But I’ll be darned if I’ll eat your bug.”
Now, in the summer of 1900, Harry went with his father to Kansas City to attend the Democratic National Convention that renominated the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, to run a second time against William McKinley. John Truman sat in a box seat, as the guest of one of Kansas City’s most up-and-coming citizens, William T. Kemper, a friend in “the grain business” and a national committeeman. Harry was consigned to the balcony or ran errands for Kemper, and hugely enjoyed himself. He remembered the immense sweep of the great hall and a crowd of seventeen thousand people, nearly three times the population of Independence, all under one roof. The nominating speech for Bryan touched off a demonstration that lasted half an hour.
Harry and his father declared themselves thorough “Bryan men,” and though Bryan and his running mate, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, went down to defeat in November to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Bryan remained an idol for Harry, as the voice of the common man.
The Democrats made imperialism the issue in the election of 1900, but it was McKinley prosperity that carried the country, the Republicans campaigning on the theme of the “Full Dinner Pail.” How aware the boy may have been of his own family’s unprecedented prosperity at the moment is unknown. But by speculating in grain futures, through such contacts as he had established with “insiders” like William T. Kemper, John Truman was moving rapidly toward his dream of riches.
With his senior year under way that same fall, Harry found himself busier than ever. He, Charlie Ross, Tasker Taylor, and several others launched a first yearbook for the school. Charlie named it The Gleam, after Tennyson’s poem “Merlin and the Gleam.” Tasker did the illustrations. As part of their Latin studies, Harry and Charlie worked on translations of Cicero—Salus populi suprema, est lex, “The people’s good is the highest law.” Charlie, who was class president as well as editor of The Gleam, was also first in scholarship.
With Elmer Twyman, Harry spent weeks building a wooden model of Caesar’s bridge over the Rhine, as described in Caesar’s Commentaries, and met regularly with his cousin Nellie Noland, who was a “whiz” at Latin. The Noland family by this time had moved to 216 North Delaware, a small frame house opposite the Gates mansion. Best of all, Bessie Wallace was now part of the group there.
She was “over a good deal,” Cousin Ethel would remember. “I don’t know whether they got much Latin read or not because there was a lot of fun going on.” Harry had taken up fencing. “He had two foils, or rapiers, or whatever you call them; and so we would sometimes practice fencing, which we knew absolutely nothing about, but it was fun to try, and we had the porch…room here to play and have fun…which we did, with a little Latin intermingled.”
Progress and the new century were popular topics. “ ‘Progress’ is the cry on every hand,” wrote Elmer Twyman in The Gleam; “and invention, reform, and improvement is everywhere—in weapons, heat, light, food, medicine, building, transportation. Truly we are wizards performing miracles. We lack nothing but the airship and the philosopher’s stone, or, perhaps, the ‘fountain of youth.’ ” Harry copied down and saved the lines of a favorite poem by Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” describing all the wonders to come, including airships and air warfare and universal law:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder storm;
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
For the class picture taken outside the school’s main entrance, Harry stood by himself in back of the back row. Elmer Twyman, who stood nearby, proudly holding a man’s hat, had decided to become a doctor like his father. Charlie Ross, who sat on the ground at the near end of the front row, his long legs drawn up so that his socks were showing, was headed for the University of Missouri and a career in journalism. Harry had removed his glasses for the picture. He was not smiling, only paying attention to the photographer, his right hand resting on the shoulder of the slight, wistful-looking boy in front, Will Garrett, the class poet. Harry had decided to try for West Point. He and Fielding Houchens, who wanted to go to Annapolis, were preparing for the examinations by taking extra hours in history with Miss Phelps. Bookish Harry, who fenced with girls, who had never been in a fight in his life and was admittedly afraid of guns, thought he might make a general, if not a concert pianist.
Intentionally or not, his position in the picture put him about as distant as possible from Bessie Wallace, who sat smiling at the far end of the second row.
The night of graduation, it seemed half the town was packed into the high school auditorium. The girls were in white, the boys in dark suits and stiff collars. According to the Jackson Examiner, no finer-looking set had ever gathered on a single platform. Harry was not one of the student speakers, he received no awards or honors. The date was May 30, 1901, Memorial Day-Decoration Day as it was more commonly called—and so there had been band music and flags flying since morning. Harry was seventeen.
3
The Way of the Farmer
Experentia does it—as Papa used to say.
—CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield
I
Within a year of Harry’s graduation from Independence High School, calamity struck the Truman family, changing the course of their lives in ways none of them could have anticipated. For Harry it was as if a curta
in suddenly descended, marking the end of boyhood and the small-town life he loved and that had seemed so secure and suited to him.
John Truman’s run of luck on Wheat futures had ended. He began losing heavily that same summer of 1901, and to recover his losses kept risking more and more until he had gambled away nearly everything he and Matt owned—as much as $40,000 in cash, stocks, and personal property, including 160 acres of prime land on Blue Ridge given to Matt by her father.
The situation could not have been much worse. At age fifty-one, John Truman was wiped out. The Waldo Avenue house had to be sold. For a while the family lived in another part of town, trying to keep up appearances, but eventually they had to pack and leave Independence altogether. They moved to a modest neighborhood in Kansas City, where John took a job for wages, something no Truman had done before. He went to work as a night watchman at a grain elevator. It was the best job he could find, at pay comparable to that of a farmhand. For a man of such fierce pride, and for those who loved him, it could only have been a painful time.
But there were no complaints. The Trumans were never a complaining people. It was not nice to tell your troubles, one must always be cheerful, Ethel Noland would remember. If asked how you were, you were always to respond, “I’m fine. And you?” Keep your troubles to yourself. She knew from experience, for her own father, having “plunged” in railroads, went “very flat indeed.”
Of his father’s catastrophe, Harry would only say in later years, “He got the notion he could get rich. Instead he lost everything at one fell swoop and went completely broke.”
Harry had tried a little gambling himself the summer after graduation, while traveling east by train to visit his favorite Aunt Ada, Matt’s younger sister, in southern Illinois. It was his first time away from home alone, and on the return trip, stopping in St. Louis to see still more of Matt’s people, a great-aunt named Hettie Powell and her family, he was taken to a horse race and urged by a cousin and three other young men to put in one of the five dollars they bet on a long shot called Claude. As Harry learned afterward, Claude was a well-known “mud horse”—the worse the track, the better he ran. Just as the race was to start, rain came in torrents. Not only did Claude finish first, he paid 25 to 1. Harry had never felt so rich in his life, but he was not to bet on a horse again for another forty years.
West Point had turned him down because of his eyes. Now, with his father’s financial troubles, college of any kind was out of the question. Back from St. Louis he signed up for an accounting course at little Spaulding’s Commercial College in downtown Kansas City, but even that had to be abandoned as too costly. To help the family, he went to work in the mailroom at the Kansas City Star. Then, in late summer, after the tragic death of a school friend, a better job came available. Tasker Taylor, the artist of the class, had been working as a construction timekeeper on the Santa Fe Railroad. On a hot evening in August, he was drowned while swimming in the Missouri River just upstream from the Independence pumping station. At John Truman’s urging, Harry took the job, which, for a boy who had seen so little of life, proved a rough initiation.
The Santa Fe was doubling its tracks into Kansas City. Harry worked ten-hour days, six days a week for $30 a month, plus board, which meant living with the labor gangs in their tent camps along the river, eating greasy food, and listening to their talk. On an hourly basis the pay was not much better than at Clinton’s drugstore. The talk included profanity and raw observations on life of a kind he had never imagined.
He kept tabs on everybody’s time—mule drivers, blacksmiths, and the common laborers who were mostly hoboes, four hundred men in total—and saw that they were paid off every two weeks, a transaction customarily performed on Saturday nights in a saloon, so the men would drink up their earnings and thereby guarantee a return to work Monday morning, a strategy that, Harry observed sadly, nearly always worked.
Much about the job he found highly enjoyable. He liked particularly traveling up and down the line from camp to camp, spinning along alone in a handcar. And the longer he was with them, the more he liked the men—“A very down-to-earth education,” he would call it—and they liked him. When the work was completed six months later, and the time came to say goodbye, a foreman, wishing him well, announced to all within earshot that Harry Truman was an “all right” fellow. “He’s all right from his asshole out in every direction.”
It was Harry’s first public commendation.
On Friday, April 24, 1903, looking scrubbed and spruce in a dark suit and high starched collar, every bit the perfect candidate for a bank clerk, he walked up Walnut Street in Kansas City and applied for a job at the stately National Bank of Commerce.
“Are you good at figures?” he was asked on a two-page employment application form. “Fair,” he wrote. Had he ever been fired? No. Did he smoke? Did he use intoxicating spirits? Had he any debts? No to all three, he answered, moving steadily down the page, using a swift dash line to indicate ditto. “Have you ever gambled or played cards for money?” No, again. “Have you ever ‘played the races’ or speculated in any way?”
To what extent the memory of Claude came rushing back can only be guessed, but here he hesitated, as is evident in the surviving document. He began to write something—there is the start of the down stroke of a letter—but thinking better of it apparently, he quickly repeated his ditto line. The answer was no once more, and it is the earliest known sign in his own hand that he was capable of telling less than the truth if the occasion warranted, capable of being quite human.
Asked if he had any extravagant tastes or habits, he answered that he didn’t think so. “In what forms of recreation or amusement do you find pleasure?” Theaters and reading, he wrote. “Where do you spend your evenings and Sundays?” At home. All true.
He had a letter from Dr. Twyman describing him as a “model young man.” Possibly, too, he had help from William T. Kemper, John Truman’s friend from better days, who was a director of the bank. In any event, he was hired as a clerk in the vault starting at $20 a month, which was about what his father was making at his night watchman’s job, and there he stayed for two years. In the view of his employers, his performance was outstanding. His immediate superior, a man named A. D. Flintom, could hardly say enough for him. “He is an exceptionally bright young man and is keeping the work up in the vault better than it has ever been kept,” Flintom wrote in a first report on young Harry Truman.
He is a willing worker, almost always here and tries hard to please everybody. We never had a boy in the vault like him before. He watches everything very closely and by his watchfulness, detects many errors which a careless boy would let slip through. His appearance is good and his habits and character are of the best.
In a later report, “Trueman,” as Flintom spelled it, was again praised for his “excellent character and good habits.” He was accurate. He was “always at his post of duty,” his work was “always up.” Further, he was “very ambitious.” “I do not know of a better young man in the bank than Trueman,” wrote Flintom to vice-president Charles H. Moore. Nor was Flintom one to lavish praise indiscriminately, as is clear from what he said of Vivian Truman, who had also come to work at the bank by this time. Vivian, though “nice appearing,” was “possessed of very little ability,” thought Flintom. “He is a very different boy from his brother….”
The vault where Harry spent his days—“the zoo,” as the clerks called it—was below street level, downstairs from the bank’s cavernous main lobby with its Corinthian columns and brass spittoons. He cleared checks drawn on country banks, sometimes handling as much as a million dollars a day, while keeping all notations in longhand. It was not work calling for much initiative or imagination or that he especially cared for; and Charles H. Moore, the vice-president, appears to have been the first person Harry actually disliked. Moore, said Harry Truman years later, was “never so happy as when he would call some poor inoffensive little clerk up before him in the grand lobby of the biggest
bank west of the Mississippi and tell him how dumb and inefficient he was….” Harry continued to do his best, however, and his pay advanced steadily. In time he was earning $40 a month, which made him the family’s number one breadwinner.
His years at the National Bank of Commerce were 1903 to 1905. Two months after he went to work came the stunning news that Bessie Wallace’s father, David Wallace, one of the best-known men in Independence, had committed suicide. The story was in the papers. At first light the morning of June 17, while his family still slept, he had gotten up from bed, taking care not to disturb his wife, dressed fully, took a revolver from a dresser, and walked down the hall to the bathroom where, standing in the middle of the floor, he placed the muzzle of the gun behind his left ear and fired. He was forty-three years old and had, in the words of the Jackson Examiner, “an attractiveness about him that was natural and spontaneous.” In addition to his wife, Madge Gates Wallace, and Bessie, age eighteen, he was survived by three sons, ranging in age from sixteen to three. He left no note.
“Why should such a man take his own life?” asked the Examiner. “It is a question we who loved him are unable to answer….” Included also in the story was the gruesome detail that the bullet had passed through his head and landed in the bathtub.
Older friends and neighbors in Independence remembered the wedding of Madge Gates to David Wallace twenty years earlier as one of the most elegant occasions in the town’s history. It had been a brilliant moonlit night, the lawn at the Gates mansion ablaze with Chinese lanterns. Wedding presents in the parlor included oil paintings and an after-dinner coffee service in silver and china. David Wallace was the son of one of the old settlers from Kentucky, but until his marriage had had no wealth or social standing to speak of. He was a courthouse politician. Yet the importance of the Gates family more than compensated and David Wallace, many believed, was the hand-somest man in Independence. He was like the elegant small-town figure in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory,” who “fluttered pulses” with his good looks and who also “one calm summer night, /Went home and put a bullet through his head.”