Harry Truman (9 page)

What good times they had in that cousinly, neighborly crowd. Whether my father was commuting from his bank job in Kansas City, where he lived with his first cousins, the Colgans, or from the farm at Grandview, when he got to Independence, there always seemed to be a party in progress. My Cousin Ethel had a wonderful picture of the crowd enjoying a watermelon feast in the Colgan backyard. My mother and her brothers are there, all, as Cousin Ethel put it, “into watermelon up to our ears.”
Life
magazine once begged her to let them publish it, but they received a frosty no because Cousin Ethel thought Mother looked undignified.

There were practical jokes galore that kept everyone laughing. No one loves a practical joke more than my father, so it doesn’t surprise me that he was deep in most of them. Among the favorites was one Dad helped cook up on his cousin, Fred Colgan, and another friend, Edwin Green. They and the girls in the crowd went picnicking on the banks of the Missouri one day. Fred Colgan and Ed Green decided, just for the fun of it, to put a message in a bottle, toss it in the river, and see if they got an answer. My father and the other young jokers promptly concocted two imaginary girls in Mississippi who wrote deliciously teasing letters to Messrs. Colgan and Green. Pretty soon there was a veritable romance budding, with my father and his fellow jokers fiendishly mailing letters and even phony pictures to friends in Mississippi who remailed them to poor Fred Colgan and Ed Green, who were by now getting desperately lovesick. Finally, one of the older members in the family put a stop to it, lest they have a couple of romantic nervous breakdowns on their hands. Fred Colgan took the news especially hard, and, I have been told, did not speak to my father or the other jokers for months.

With Dad’s ability to play the piano and his love of a good joke, he was often the life of the party. Another story that everyone loves to tell concerns his antics en route to a wedding in 1913. The bridegroom was a highly successful young businessman, and he had a very formal wedding. Dad borrowed a tuxedo from one friend and an opera hat from my mother’s brother, Frank Wallace. The hat was collapsible, and en route to the reception, riding in a horse-drawn cab, Dad tried to put his head out the window to tell the driver the address. His hat hit the top of the window and collapsed. Everyone went into hysterics at “the little fried egg thing sitting on the top of his head,” to quote my Cousin Ethel. Dad let the hat perch there all the way over to the reception while the cab rocked with laughter. When they finally arrived, they had to sit outside the bride’s house for a good five minutes, recovering their senses. “We were carefree and a little irresponsible, I think,” my Cousin Ethel said. Those words are a pretty good paraphrase of the fundamental, almost idyllic happiness that comes through to me in the recollections I have heard and overheard of my father’s youth in pre-World War I Independence.

Happy memories are a priceless asset to a man when he becomes a public servant. They deepen and broaden his vision of his country’s value and make him more generous, I think, more committed to widening the opportunities for happiness for the generations that follow him.

These years also helped to form in my father his deliberate, methodical approach to problems. From his early twenties to his early thirties, he was a farmer - not a gentleman farmer but a working one, toiling most of the time under John Anderson Truman’s stern eye. Off the political platform, when he talked about learning how to plow a straight furrow, he often added, “It had to be straight. If it wasn’t, I heard about it from my father for the next year.” These were the years when Dad also developed that sturdy physique which prompted us to snort with indignation when someone called him “the little man in the White House.” Riding a gang plow across a field behind a team of four horses or four mules took muscle, and added more all the time.

When my father discussed his farming days, the sheer physical labor of it became apparent. “I used to milk cows by hand. I used to plow with a four-horse team, instead of a tractor,” he said once during the White House years. “I have two nephews on the same farm that get much more out of that farm than I ever did. But they do it with machinery. They milk cows by machine, and they plow with a tractor and they plant with a tractor and they bale hay with a tractor. I don’t think that those boys could follow me up a corn row to save their lives, because they ride and I walked.”

But the most important thing about a farmer’s life is the steady, methodical nature of his work. Dad could count the revolutions of a gang-plow’s wheel, and figure out exactly how long it would take him to plow a field half a mile square. Things had to be done on a schedule, but nothing much could be done to hurry the growth of the corn or the wheat. The pace of the farm was reflected in the pace of the era. There was no sense of frantic urgency, no burning need to hurry. As Cousin Ethel said, “Harry was always a deliberate man.”

MY FATHER WAS even deliberate about courting my mother. Sometimes I think that if World War I hadn’t come along, he might not have married her until he was forty or fifty, and I might never have gotten here. He proposed and they became engaged shortly before he left for France. He was thirty-four, she was thirty-three. Mother gave him her picture. On the back, she wrote, “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France - Bess.” Dad carried this picture with him inside his tunic, through training days and in the mud and danger of the Western Front. That same picture sat on his desk in the White House, and still sits on his desk in the Truman Library. I didn’t really know the man who went to France, but I have heard from his own lips the admission that the war changed him enormously. He is still fond of saying that he got his education in the army.

It was quite an education. Among the teachers were the brawling Irishmen of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery. Products of Kansas City’s toughest ward, they had run through three commanding officers before Dad took charge of them. As many would discover in the years to come, no one pushed Harry Truman around. But here, as in so many other areas of his life, his toughness emanated not only from his inborn character but from his knowledge of how the job had to be done. As a student of military history, he had a clear-eyed perception of how an army was supposed to operate. Still, it must have been enormously encouraging to discover that he had the natural ability to make this theoretical knowledge work, with the unruly Irish of Battery D. He came out of the army convinced that if he could lead these wild men, he could lead anyone.

One story I remember from Dad’s army days - I have heard it repeated ad infinitum in the family - concerns one of the many times throughout his life that he lost his glasses. The uncanny luck he has had with his glasses is enough to make one wonder if Martha Ellen Truman did not negotiate some special arrangement with the Deity when she put spectacles on her five-year-old-son. One night, early in the Argonne offensive, Dad was riding his horse toward the German lines to take up his usual position, well in advance of Battery D, and sometimes of the infantry, where he could study the German lines and telephone firing instructions back to the battery. As he rode under a low-hanging tree, the branches swept his glasses off his face. The horse, oblivious to the disaster, kept on going, and the road was jammed with marching men and lumbering cannons. Dad had a reserve pair of glasses in his baggage, but that was in a wagon at the end of the column. There was no time to go back for it. They were moving on a strict to-the-minute schedule. There he was in the middle of the biggest battle in the history of the world, practically blind. He turned around, frantically trying to catch a glimpse of the glasses on the road. A glint of light on the horse’s back - dawn was just beginning to break - caught his eye. There were the glasses, sitting on Dobbin’s rump.

Another of my father’s favorite soldier stories concerns some post-Armistice antics of Battery D. In those days, many Irish-Americans held a grudge against England. Some of them still hold it. One day, Battery D and the rest of the 35th Division assembled for a review by General Pershing and the Prince of Wales - later King Edward VIII. “As we marched off the field, General Pershing and the Prince of Wales and his staff were crossing a little creek not far from me,” Dad says. “And as we marched on the other side of the creek with the General and his staff, one of my disrespectful corporals or sergeants yelled: ‘Oh Capitaine. What did the little so and so say about freeing Ireland?’

“If Pershing had decided to hear that remark, I suppose I would have gone to Leavenworth and stayed there the rest of my life. He didn’t hear it, thank goodness.”

Even before my father came home from France and married Mother, he had made up his mind that he was through with farming. Mother played a role in this decision. She made it clear that she had no desire to be a farmer’s wife. Like her mother-in-law, she had - and still has - a strong disinclination for cooking (although she can cook very well), and I doubt if the English language is adequate to describe her attitude toward the other laborious chores that need doing around a farm. But not even Mother could make up my father’s mind on anything so fundamental if he didn’t want it that way in the first place. Although he had spent eleven of his best years as a working farmer and enjoyed them thoroughly, he was eager to tackle bigger, more challenging opportunities.

Everyone over the age of thirty has heard ad nauseam about my father’s next adventure - his failure as the co-owner of a men’s clothing store in Kansas City. He went into business with Eddie Jacobson, a friend who had helped him run a very successful canteen during their army training days in Oklahoma. His political enemies have endlessly retold the story, as if it was a kind of parable that proved Dad was a gross incompetent. The truth is simple and sad - he got caught in the recession of 1920-21 when business failures tripled overnight. Dad has always insisted it was a Republican recession, engineered by “old Mellon” - Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury under Harding.

More important than the failure, in my opinion, is the way my father handled it. He absolutely refused to go into bankruptcy and spent the next fifteen years trying to pay off some $12,000 in debts. Altogether, he lost about $28,000 in this bitter experience.

According to those who misread his career, my father, having failed as a merchant, now turned in desperation to politics. Those who prefer the worst possible scenario have him going hat in hand to Tom Pendergast, the boss of Kansas City, and humbly accepting his nomination for county judge. This version reveals nothing but a vast ignorance of my father - and of Democratic politics in and around Kansas City in the early 1920s. The Pendergasts were by no means the absolute rulers of Kansas City, or of Jackson County, which included Kansas City, Independence, and smaller farming communities such as Grandview. They were fiercely opposed in primaries by a Democratic faction known as the Rabbits. The Pendergasts were called the Goats. No one that I have found, including my father, can explain satisfactorily the origin of these nicknames.

My grandfather, John Anderson Truman, had been a close friend of one of the Goat leaders in Independence and thus Dad always thought of himself as a Goat - that is, a Pendergast - Democrat. But it was not Tom Pendergast, the boss of Kansas City, who came into his mind when the name was mentioned. It was Mike Pendergast, Tom’s older, far more easy-going brother who led the Goats in eastern Jackson County. As my father explained it somewhat cryptically - “Tom didn’t like the country.”

During the war, my father had become friendly with Mike Pendergast’s son, Jim, who was a fellow officer in the 129th Field Artillery. In Missouri, a county judge is an administrative, not a judicial office. The three-man Board of Judges in Jackson County were responsible for building roads as well as running the courthouse and other county facilities. They had command of a substantial political payroll, and this made control of the three-man board of vital interest to Goats, Rabbits, and Republicans. One judge was elected from the western district, which included Kansas City. The other judge came from the eastern district, and the third, the presiding judge, was elected from the county at large.

My father had toyed with the idea of going into politics even before he returned from France. Half playfully, he had written Cousin Ethel that he intended to run for Congress when he returned home. Jim Pendergast knew this and told his father, Mike, about it. In mid-1921, when Truman and Jacobson’s haberdashery was flourishing, Mike appeared on the customer’s side of the counter one day and asked Dad if he would like to run for judge of the county court for the eastern district. My father politely declined to commit himself. It was obvious to him - and to everyone else - that the Pendergasts needed Harry S. Truman at least as much as he needed them.

On January 9, 1922, the Independence
Examiner
ran a story speculating on who would be the Democratic candidate for judge from the eastern district. This story discussed several men, including Ε. Ε. Montgomery of Blue Springs, a banker, and Charles W. Brady, the postmaster of Independence. “Among the younger men, Harry Truman is talked of,” the reporter wrote. “Mr. Truman was born and reared in Jackson County and lived forty years near Grandview and his vote in Washington Township would be mighty near unanimous if he should run. He now lives in Independence and is in business in Kansas City. . . . Mr. Truman has not said that he is willing to be a candidate.”

The publisher of the
Examiner
was Colonel William M. “Pop” Southern. One of my mother’s brothers had married his daughter. This explains, in part at least, the editor’s kind words. Note, however, that my father was easing himself into the race, not as a Pendergast man, but as an independent. On March 8, 1922, the
Examiner
headlined Dad’s formal announcement of his candidacy. It did not emanate from Mike Pendergast’s Tenth Ward Democratic Club. Instead, it came from “an enthusiastic meeting” attended by 300 war veterans at Lee’s Summit, one of the small farming communities outside Independence. The story told how Major Harry Truman (he had been promoted in the Reserve in 1920) of Grandview was declared the choice of the ex-servicemen as a candidate for county judge from the eastern district. Colonel Ε. M. Stayton, the former commander of the 129th Field Artillery, presented Major Truman to the meeting. He urged his fellow veterans to back him in the forthcoming election.

“It was a new method for starting out a candidate for county judge,” the reporter wrote. “Usually the factions of the Party in Kansas City agree on a man and the word is sent out to the workers in the county and instructions given to support him for the nomination. The Truman announcement is made without any organizational or factional endorsement whatever.” The reporter specified that there were men from Kansas City, Independence, Buckner, Blue Springs, and Oak Grove and they included both Goat and Rabbit Democrats. But we can be certain that there was a solid contingent of old Battery D boys in the crowd, from a description of the entertainment. Mrs. Ethel Lee Buxton of Kansas City, who had sung for the soldiers in France, entertained with songs that included “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and “Mother Machree.”

This appearance also marked my father’s first attempt to become a public speaker. It was a disaster. When Colonel Stayton introduced him, Dad rose and completely forgot the little speech he had intended to make. All he could do was stammer that he was grateful for his fellow veterans’ support, and sit down. Fortunately, the boys from Battery D were not a critical audience. They cheered “Captain Harry” anyway.

On April 21, 1922, another
Examiner
story on the coming election described the ominous three-way fight that was developing among the Democrats. Along with the usual brawl between the Rabbits and the Goats, there was a faction surrounding Judge Miles Bulger, who was presiding judge of the county court. This meant he controlled some sixty road overseers, powerful allies in the sixty districts covering every part of the eastern half of the county. After speculating on Goat and Rabbit candidates, the reporter noted that one candidate, George W. Shaw, had no promise of support from any organization. “Harry S. Truman is another,” he wrote. “He has consulted no political director and has already announced and has received much promise of support. He stands well with the ex-servicemen, being an ex-serviceman himself, and is the youngest man suggested. He is going ahead with his campaign regardless of factional permission.”

On April 26, the
Examiner
reported a visit of Mike Pendergast to Independence. He held a meeting at the Eagles’ Hall, where about 100 of “the faithful,” as the reporter described them, discussed candidates for eastern district judge but came to no conclusion as to whom they would endorse. Meanwhile, my father was campaigning vigorously. In Grandview, on May 4, he filled the local movie house at a rally. On May 12, the Men’s Rural Jackson County Democratic Club endorsed him in a rally at Lee’s Summit. The
Examiner
continued to describe him as “Harry S. Truman of Grandview.” Already he was demonstrating an instinctive strategy that was to be a basic part of his political success - an ability to bridge the gap between city and country Democrats.

By June, Mike Pendergast had seen enough of Harry S. Truman in action to convince him that he was a potential winner. He invited him to a meeting of the Tenth Ward Democratic Club and announced that my father had the organization’s support. Mike gave a speech, describing Dad as “a returned veteran, a captain whose men didn’t want to shoot him” - an interesting comment on army mores in World War I. As my father has said repeatedly, in discussing his relationship with the Pendergasts, he was grateful for this support. He knew he needed every available vote to win the election. There were now no less than five candidates campaigning. But he had already made it clear that he had the backing and ability to run a pretty good race on his own. Thus, there never was and never would be any subservience in his relationship with the Pendergasts. But there was another element, which some of Dad’s critics have mistaken for subservience - party loyalty.