Truman Read online

  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….

  Then, promising to put on no hangdog airs when next he saw her, he changed the subject. Did she know of any way to make it rain?

  They exchanged photographs and Harry had a standing invitation to Sunday dinner at the Gates house. Week after week, with no success, he tried to get her to come to Grandview. In August, he announced he was building a grass tennis court for her on a level place near the house. She could bring her friends, make a day of it. At Montgomery Ward in Kansas City he bought a heavy roller. Since neither he nor anyone else on the farm, or anyone in Grandview, played tennis or knew the requirements for a court, he had her send directions. He hoped to have everything ready by Labor Day. Mamma would cook a chicken dinner, he promised. “Not town dinner but midday meal, see? So be sure and come…. Now be sure and come out on Labor Day.”

  In the flurry of excitement, seeing how intent on success he was, Matt decided to have several rooms papered. With only three days to go, Harry sent Bessie a map with directions. The Sunday before Labor Day he worked the day through on the court and by nightfall had everything ready, including a supply of watermelons.

  But she didn’t come. She sent word it was raining in Independence. He wrote at once of his “disappointment” and asked if she could make it another time, adding that Mamma would still like her to come for dinner and that the weather in Grandview on Labor Day had been fine. When she did at last appear, for an impromptu visit some weeks later, the court was found to be insufficiently level for a proper game.

  Yet, he would not be discouraged. He kept at courtship as he had kept to his piano lessons, with cheerful, willing determination. He told her of his progress in the Masons, he sent her books, commented on stories in his favorite magazines, Everybody’s, Life, and Adventure. “I was reading Plato’s Republic this morning,” he also informed her at one point, “and Socrates was discoursing on the ideal Republic…. You see, I sometimes read something besides Adventure.”

  He knew he had a gift for conversation. He had found he could get most anything he wanted if he could only talk to people. The letters were his way to talk to her as he never could face to face.

  That he particularly liked cake, pie, Mozart, Chopin, and Verdi became clear. She learned also how much there was he did not like: dentists, guns, snobs, hypocrisy in any form, prizefighters, divorce, the Kansas City Star (for its Republican bias), lawyers (now that his grandmother’s will was being contested), and Richard Wagner, who he thought must have been “in cahoots with Pluto.” He regretted much about his looks. He wrote of his “girl mouth” and the fact that he blushed like a girl. He confessed to such other ladylike traits as yelling when he had a tooth pulled and an “inordinate desire to look nice” when having his picture taken. Coming home alone in the dark, he could get “scared to an icicle,” he told her. He was afraid of getting knocked on the head by the hoboes who hung about at the point where he changed trains at Kansas City, fearful of both ghosts and hoboes as he made his way home on foot from the Grandview depot on nights when there was no moon.

  Once approaching the house in the pitch dark, groping his way to the kitchen door, he walked headlong into the pump. The next day, he painted the pump white.

  One man was as good as another, he thought, “so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” His Uncle Will Young, the Confederate veteran, had a theory that “the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.” Apparently Harry thought this would amuse her. “He does hate Chinks and Japs. So do I,” he continued. “It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

  But on an evening when Mary Jane was practicing a Mozart sonata at the piano, he wrote, “Did you ever sit and listen to an orchestra play a fine overture, and imagine that things were as they ought to be and not as they are? Music that I can understand always makes me feel that way.” Had Bessie been the girl in a stage musical of the kind he took her to see, she would have accepted him then and there.

  The fact that he had no money and that he craved money came up repeatedly, more often and more obviously than probably he realized. In Grandview circles, financial wealth was something people seldom talked about or judged one another by. “We never rated a person by the amount of money he had,” remembered Stephen Slaughter. “Always, first and foremost, it was his character, his integrity.” No family, not even the Slaughters, had large bank accounts or costly possessions. Everybody, including the Slaughters, had debts. But Harry wanted more than what sufficed for Grandview; or, in any event, he clearly wanted Bessie Wallace to think he aimed higher.

  He told her of his longing for an automobile. “Just imagine how often I’d burn the pike from here to Independence.” He saw a $75 overcoat in Kansas City that he wanted. If ever he were rich, he too would live in Independence. Writing one cold night before Christmas 1911, he told her also of the secret burden he carried with his father, the “hat-full of debts,” asking only that she keep this to herself since no one knew. Later, he said he had two reasons for wanting to be rich. The first was to pay his debts and build his mother a fine house. The second was to win her.

  If only she cared a little, he would double his efforts “to amount to something.” Bessie replied saying that she and Mary Paxton had concluded that a woman should think seriously only of a man who could support her in style. Harry said he would take this as a sign of encouragement, whether she meant it that way or not.

  He wanted so to live up to expectations, and his own most of all, but he didn’t know what to do with his life, what in the world to be. Like David Copperfield, he longed to know if he would turn out to be the hero of his own story.

  He was pleased to learn that her mother admired his piano playing. (Mrs. Wallace herself was considered an accomplished pianist. In her youth she had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory.) “I really thought once I’d be an ivory tickler but I am glad my money ran out before I got too far,” Harry told Bess honestly. He had dropped out of the National Guard. Military life, too, had lost its pull: “I am like Mark Twain. He says that if fame is to be obtained only by marching to the cannon’s mouth, he’s perfectly willing to go there provided the cannon is empty….”

  He had been offered a job running a small bank in the southern part of the county, but from what he had seen of bankers he had little heart for it. “You know a man has to be real stingy and save every one-cent stamp he can. Then sometimes he has to take advantage of adverse conditions and sell a good man out. That is one reason I like being a farmer. Even if you do have to work like a coon you know that you are not grinding the life out of someone else to live yourself.”

  He admitted he was thinking about politics. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be like a Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday.” Mostly, he was restless.

  With two other men from Grandview he went by train to South Dakota to take part in an Indian land lottery. At stations along the way people on the returning trains had shouted at them, “Sucker! Sucker!” Nothing came of the trip, or of another after it, to look at land in New Mexico, though he traveled some “mighty pretty country.” Approaching Santa Fe by train, up the valley of the Rio Grande, he saw a rainbow that held in the sky ahead for mile after mile. “I wanted to get off,” he wrote to her, “and chase the end of it down, thinking perhaps it really might be on a gold mine out here.”

  She had lately told him Bessie was a name she no longer cared for. So his letters now began “Dear Bess,” though they closed as always, “Sincerely, Harry,” or sometimes, “Most sincerely, Harry.”

  IV

  The y
ears Harry Truman spent on the farm were to be known as the golden age of American agriculture, with farm prices climbing steadily. If ever there was a time to have been a farmer, this was it. Wheat, corn, hay, everything was going higher—wheat was up to 90 cents a bushel in 1912—and for Harry and his father it meant continuously harder, longer days. Once in the summer of 1912 they spent twelve hours loading nearly three hundred bales of hay into a railroad car. It was the hottest work Harry had ever done. By sundown he was ready to collapse. But that night, seeing lightning on the horizon, his father insisted they go back out again and cover the hay that had still to be baled. They worked on in the dark, Harry handing 14-foot boards up to his father, who placed them on the top of the haystack—thirty-two 14-foot boards by Harry’s count.

  John Truman bought more cows, more than doubling their herd, from thirty to eighty-two. “I have been working like Sam Hill this morning sowing wheat,” Harry informed Bess in a letter written in September 1913. “Papa has a fit every time I heave a one-hundred-pound sack of wheat…. Get to lay off the wheat this afternoon and pitch hay while they thresh.” That year they had enough hay for six hundred bales, and his father talked of a wheat crop for the next year of four hundred acres, enough, if all went well, to put them “out of the woods.” At night in the parlor, as Harry sat writing to Bess, his father would fall asleep in his chair.

  It was a killing schedule Harry was keeping, with his work, his travels to Independence and Kansas City, his Lodge nights and letter writing. Though few sons were ever so dutiful, John accused him of losing interest in the farm and many mornings had trouble waking him. Once, when Harry missed his train and arrived home extremely late, he found his father still up and in a “terrible stew,” certain that something awful had happened to him. “He was sure I had been knocked on the head or fallen in the creek. When I told him I’d missed the car he had another fit….”

  But Harry’s main concern was his father, who, he was sure, was working too hard. When he learned that John, through friends at the Independence Courthouse, was going after the job of road overseer for the southern half of Washington Township, which included Grandview, Harry had immediate misgivings. The upkeep and repair of country roads was a task performed by local men with their own teams of horses, either for hire or as a way to work off a six-dollar school tax. The work was never-ending and the job of overseer, an appointed political post, was one that paid two dollars a day and that almost nobody wanted. It was his father’s incurable love of politics that made him go after the job, Harry told Bess. “Politics is all he ever advises me to neglect the farm for.” If Harry could have his way, his father would have no part of it.

  When John Truman got the job of overseer, others in Grandview took it as a sign that the Trumans were “strapped” and needed the money. John was considered a good man and a good neighbor. As Stephen Slaughter would recall, “I don’t think we would have traded him for anybody.” But by contrast to the Slaughters, the Trumans always seemed hardpressed financially. The Slaughter farm was not as large as the Truman farm, their land no better than the Truman land, yet the Slaughters prospered. O. V. Slaughter sent all eight of his children to college. “I never understood,” said Stephen years later. “They raised crops on that farm. We raised crops. They were always broke. We weren’t broke.”

  Nonetheless, the improved quality of work on the roads under John Truman’s supervision was soon apparent. And with his father determined to keep the roads, no less than the farm, in prime condition, Harry thought he’d best help with the roads too. But should his father, on the strength of this job, decide to run for any other political office, Harry told Bess, then he, Harry, would go out and make speeches against him.

  The truth was, Harry went on, warming to his subject, he was torn by his own yearnings. He wanted money, yet he knew it to be a less than satisfactory measure of success, let alone personal value. He saw the seductions and the pitfalls of politics. He knew it to be a dirty business and he scorned the kind of posturing it produced in some men. Yet the fascination remained. It was a remarkable letter:

  Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man. Between hot air and graft he usually loses not only his head but his money and friends as well. Still, if I were real rich I’d just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos. Success seems to me to be merely a point of view anyway. Some men have an idea that if they corner all the loose change they are self-made successful men. Makes no difference to them if they do eat beans off a knife or not know whether Napoleon was a man or a piece of silver.

  Some others have a notion that if they can get high offices and hold up themselves as models of virtue to a gaping public in long-winded, high-sounding speeches that they have reached the highest pinnacle of success. It seems to me that the ability to hand out self-praise makes most men successes in their own minds anyway. Some of the world’s greatest failures are really greater than some of the other kind. To succeed financially a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egoist or a fool or a ward boss tool. To my notion, an ideal condition would be to have to work just enough so if you stopped you’d not go busted at once—but still you’d know if you didn’t work you couldn’t live. And then have your home and friends and pleasures regulated to your income, say a thousand a month. I am sure I’d be satisfied then to let vile ambition, political or monetary, starve at the gate.

  When the newspaper in Belton called John Truman one of the “henchmen” of the Jackson County Court, John took off for Belton to “whip” the editor, but failed to find him, which Harry thought much for the best. “I told him that was a very mild remark and should be accepted as a compliment to a man who has a political job.” It was the first sign of John’s old temper in years and privately Harry appears to have been pleased.

  He himself was known as the “mild-tempered” Truman. Through the furor over Grandma Young’s will, in the crossfire of charges and countercharges in court and out, Harry alone of the family seemed able to get along with everyone. He was the one person they could all talk to, the family peacemaker.

  In September 1913 he made another try in an Indian land lottery, traveling this time farther from home than ever before, nearly to the Canadian border in northeastern Montana, in the company of a half-dozen other Grandview men, including his father. Harry loved these trips, but this one most of all. On a postcard to Ethel Noland mailed from Minneapolis, he said he was “feeling as good as an angel full of pie.”

  Then, at long last, on a Sunday in November 1913, as Harry sat speechless, Bess said that if ever she married anyone it would be him. She wrote a letter to confirm the promise. They agreed they were secretly engaged. Harry was beside himself, “all puffed up and hilarious and happy.” She had made a confirmed optimist of him, he said. She called him an enigma. He said that sounded fine to him and especially coming from her, “for I always labored under the impression that it took smart people to be one.”

  On a date in Kansas City, he took her to see Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian starring in a new show, The Girl from Utah, and held her hand as the handsome dark-haired leading man sang the show’s biggest hit, a song by Jerome Kern, “They’ll Never Believe Me.”

  And when I tell them, and I’m certainly going to tell them,

  That I’m the man whose wife one day you’ll be,

  They’ll never believe me, they’ll never believe me,

  That from this great big world you’ve chosen me.

  There were no bounds now to his horizons. “How does it feel to be engaged to a clodhopper who has ambitions to be Governor of Montana and Chief Executive of the U.S.?” he inquired, the expansive aspirations intended as humor only. To his surprise, she wrote at once to say how much she cared for him. “I know your last letter word for word and then I read it some forty times a day,” he said. “Oh please send me another like it.” He thought perhaps he should put it in a safe deposit vault to keep from wearing it out.

  You re
ally didn’t know I had so much softness and sentimentality in me, did you? I’m full of it. But I’d die if I had to talk it. I can tell you on paper how much I love you and what one grand woman I think you, but to tell it to you I can’t. I’m always afraid I’d do it so clumsily you’d laugh…. I could die happy doing something for you. (Just imagine a guy with spectacles and a girl mouth doing the Sir Lancelot.) Since I can’t rescue you from any monster or carry you from a burning building or save you from a sinking ship—simply because I’d be afraid of the monsters, couldn’t carry you, and can’t swim—I’ll have to go to work and make money enough to pay my debts and then get you to take me for what I am: just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right. You’ll not have any trouble getting along with me for I’m awful good…. Do you suppose your mother’ll care for me well enough to have me in her family?

  This last point was a large question indeed, for Madge Wallace remained, as would be said, a virtual “prisoner of shame” over her husband’s suicide and clung to Bess as a figure of strength greater than her own. She needed Bess quite as much as John Truman needed Harry. As the only daughter of an important family, Bess would have been a guarded “prize” even under normal circumstances. The prospects for a debt-ridden, farm-boy suitor would have been extremely remote, however persistent or well mannered he might be.

  “Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry,” remembered one of the Noland family, all of whom were strongly on Harry’s side. “And she says, ‘You don’t want to marry that farmer boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’ And so she didn’t push it at all. She kind of tried to prevent it….”

  Every call Harry made at 219 North Delaware Street could only have been a reminder of what distances remained between his world and hers. The etched glass in the front door, the plum-colored Brussels carpets, the good china and heavy lace curtains at the long parlor windows, the accepted use of silver dessert forks, the absence of any sign that survival meant hard physical labor day in, day out, the whole air of privacy, of unruffled comfort and stability, reflected a way of life totally apart from anything in his experience. (“We have moved around quite a bit and always the best people are hardest to know,” he once told Bess defensively.) Had he only to overcome the obvious differences in their station, he would have had an uphill haul, as he would have said. But the problem was greatly compounded by how Madge Wallace felt toward anyone or any cause that threatened to take Bess from her.