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 curtain 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.

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.”

What the Examiner did not mention, but that everyone knew, was that David Wallace had a drinking problem—often he had to be carried home by friends—and most efforts to fathom the tragedy came back to that. Or to gossip about money troubles, the view being he was badly in debt “and didn’t see any way out.”

If the Trumans had known shame during John’s financial downfall, it was little compared to what the family of a suicide would experience. The Trumans had moved away. Madge Gates, with Bessie and the younger children, left for Colorado Springs, not to return for a year. No one close to the family would ever discuss the subject except in strictest confidence. It was not something “decent people” wished to talk about. Sixty years had to go by before Bessie’s friend Mary Paxton described how her father had awakened her early that morning and told her to go next door at once to be with Bessie, because Mr. Wallace had killed himself. “[Bessie] was walking up and down back of the house with clenched fists, I remember. She wasn’t crying. There wasn’t anything I could say, but I just walked up and down with her….” Harry Truman is not known ever to have said a word on the subject outside the family.

He had seen nothing of Bessie in the time since the Trumans left town. Nor did he now. Even after she was back from Colorado Springs and began commuting to the Barstow School, Kansas City’s finishing school for wealthy young women, they kept to their separate lives. With her grief-stricken mother and her brothers, Bessie moved in permanently with Grandfather and Grandmother Gates at 219 North Delaware. So at a time when the Truman family’s “circumstances” were so greatly reduced, Bessie had become the “family princess” of the Gates mansion. What news Harry had of her came from the Noland sisters, who from their observation post across the street knew as much as anyone.

Since starting at the bank, Harry had been living at home, or what for the time being passed for home in Kansas City, spending little more than carfare and lunch money, which, according to the pocket account book he kept, came to about 50 cents a day. Once, throwing economies to the wind, he spent $11 for “Ties Collar Cuffs Pins, etc.” Later $10 went for “Music,” piano lessons with Mrs. White, which he soon had to drop. He would sometimes say later that he quit because playing the piano was “sissy.” The truth was the lessons had become more than he could afford.

His one indulgence was the theater, which he loved and for which he was willing to splurge, sometimes as much as two dollars. He went to vaudeville at the Orpheum and the Grand. For a while he worked as an usher on Saturday afternoons at the Orpheum, just to see the show for free. He saw the Four Cohans and Sarah Bernhardt. He went to concerts and the opera at Convention Hall. A note from “Horatio” dashed off on National Bank of Commerce stationery, telling his cousins Ethel and Nellie where to meet him for their theater date, ends: “I understand that Mr. Beresford is exceedingly good so don’t fail to come. I’ve already got the seats….” A performance by Richard Mansfield in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde left Harry so shaken he was afraid to go home alone.

With a population of 200,000, Kansas City was still a cow town and a grain town. St. Louis was by contrast old metropolitan and old money. St. Louis looked eastward, Kansas City faced west. They were two entirely different cities. But Kansas City was growing by leaps and bounds and prided itself in offering the latest and best of everything. There was hardly a city in America where an observant youth could have had a better day-to-day sense of the country’s robust energy and confidence at the start of the new century. To Harry it was a place of “things doing.” Once, with the other clerks, he rushed out of the bank and down 10th Street to see President Theodore Roosevelt speak from the back of a railroad car. It was his first chance to see a President, and though a Republican who spoke with a piping voice and who seemed surprisingly short, Roosevelt gave a good speech, Harry thought. The crowd was delighted. “They wanted to see him grin and show his teeth, which he did.”

In May of 1905, Harry signed up with a new National Guard unit. “I was twenty-one years old in May of that year,” he remembered, “and could do as I pleased.” It was a far cry from the dream of West Point, but Private Truman began drilling with Missouri’s Light Artillery, Battery B, First Brigade. (“They needed recruits,” he also said later, in explanation of how, with his poor eyesight, he passed the physical exam.) His first encampment that summer was at Cape Girardeau, in the far-off southeastern corner of Missouri. He went by train as far as St. Louis, then down the Mississippi by steamboat, “quite an experience.” He came home a corporal—“the biggest promotion I ever received”—and for a weekend visit to the Young farm put on his new dark blue dress uniform with its beautiful red piping on the sleeves, expecting to impress his grandmother. But as he stepped through the door, she could think only of Union soldiers. He was never to wear it again in her presence, she said.

Largely he was on his own by now. John Truman, fed up with city life, miserable in his job, had decided to try still another new start. He rented a small farm at Clinton, Missouri, about seventy miles southeast, on Grand River in prosperous farm country. Again Matt had to pack and move, and Harry began boarding out with John’s sister Emma, Mrs. Rochester Colgan, in Kansas City.

It was a wide-open town still, more than living up to its reputation. Sporting houses and saloons far outnumbered churches. “When a bachelor or stale old codger was in sore need of easing himself [with a woman], he looked for a sign in the window which said: Transient Rooms or Light Housekeeping,” remembered the writer Edward Dahlberg, whose mother was proprietor of the Star Lady Barbershop on 8th Street. To Dahlberg, in memory, nearly everything about the Kansas City of 1905, the city of his boyhood, was redolent of sex and temptation. To him it was a “wild, concupiscent city.” Another contemporary, Virgil Thomson, who was to become a foremost composer, wrote of whole blocks where there were nothing but saloons, this in happy contrast, he said, to dry, “moralistic” Kansas across the line. “And just as Memphis and St. Louis had their Blues, we had our Twelfth Street Rag proclaiming joyous low life.” But with such joyous low life Harry appears to have had little or no experience. Long afterward, joking with friends about his music lessons, he would reflect that had things gone differently he might have wound up playing the piano in a whorehouse, but there is no evidence he ever set foot in such a place, or that he “carried on” in Kansas City in any fashion.

After several months with Aunt Emma, he moved to an altogether respectable boardinghouse kept by a Mrs. Trow on Troost Avenue where, for room and board (breakfast and dinner), he paid five dollars a week. Another young boarder was a messenger at the Bank of Commerce named Arthur Eisenhower from Abilene, Kansas, (Arthur’s younger brother, Dwight David, was still at home in high school.) “Harry and I had only a dollar a week left over for riotous living,” Arthur would recall.

Refused another raise at the Bank of Commerce, Harry quit and went to work for the Union National Bank at 9th and Baltimore, in Kansas City’s famous ten-story New York Life Building, with its giant bronze eagle over the main entrance. The pay was better—$75 a month—and the Union National a pleasanter place to work. As an assistant teller, he was soon making $100 a month, truly, as he said, a magnificent salary.

With the new job, the big paycheck, his new friends, his drill sessions with the National Guard, Harry was as busy and happy as he had ever been. Had he gone to college four years earlier, he would only now be looking for his first job. He bought a Panama hat. He had his photograph taken. At the lavish new Willis Wood Hall, he saw Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice.

But any thoughts he may have entertained about a career in banking were shortlived. Beset by more misfortune—his entire corn crop was lost to floods at Clinton—John Truman had agreed to move in with Grandma Young and run the Blue Ridge farm. Uncle Harrison, who had been in charge until now, had found the work more than he could handle and wanted to move to the city. The farm was large and good help ever harder to find.

The new arrangement appeared to suit everybody, and in October 1905 all the Trumans but Harry moved back to Blue Ridge. The problem was John also found the work too much, even with Vivian to help. So some four or five months later, Harry was told to quit his job and come home. The family came first. If Harry harbored any regrets or resentment, he never let on. His friends were sure he wouldn’t last as a farmer.

II

The change from his life in Kansas City was stunning. For five years, until he rediscovered Bessie Wallace, his preoccupations were to be almost exclusively those determined by crops, seasons, weeds, insects, rain and sunshine, livestock, farm machinery, bank loans, and the dictates of an energetic, opinionated father who was determined to succeed at last.

Everything now revolved about the farm. It was the focus of the whole family’s life, its livelihood, its constant responsibility, its sole source, of income. Everyone worked, “and woe to the loafer,” as Harry remembered.

“Well, if you don’t work, you don’t make it,” was the common philosophy as expressed by a neighbor. “You may do a lot of work and not make it, too, but you’ve got to do it or you won’t make it.”

‘“The simple life was not always so simple,” remembered another. “It was a hard life…a life which demanded perseverance…. It demanded first things first.”

The day began for Harry with his father’s call from the bottom of the stairs at five in the morning when it was still dark and cold outside. (That spring of 1906, Harry’s first on the farm, happened to be one of abnormal cold in Jackson County, of mud and heavy rains.) And it was his father who kept at him through the day, showing him what to do, working as hard as two men, and warning Harry time after time not to hurt himself, not to try to lift anything too heavy. A building up of both the farm and the owlish-looking bank clerk was apparently much on John Truman’s mind.

Harry learned to drive an Emerson gang plow, two plows on a three-wheeled frame pulled by four horses. The trick was to see that each horse pulled his part of the load. With an early start, he found, he could do five acres in a ten-hour day. Some mornings, to keep warm, he walked instead of riding. Some mornings, he remembered, not even a sweater, two coats, and an overcoat were enough to keep out the cold.

As spring moved on, he took instructions in driving the corn planter and wheat drill. John Truman would tolerate no crooked rows in the corn, no skipped places in the wheat, the money crop. If bare spots appeared in the corn or wheat, Harry would hear about it all summer. “My father told me to adjust the planter before starting, have the horses well in hand and under control, pick out an object on the other side of the field usually a quarter or a half mile away, point the tongue of the planter at that object and keep it there, letting the horses step out at a lively gait.” It was how Harry would conduct much of his life.

Some of the wheat fields were immense. One horse made such trouble that Harry found himself yelling at him in his sleep.

With its nearly 600 acres, the farm was among the largest in the county, more than four times the size of the average Missouri farm, and required the full-time efforts of John, Harry, Vivian, and several hired men. For John Truman, Harry observed, everything about the life seemed second nature. The small, weatherbeaten man could not understand why anybody would wish to sleep past 5:00 A.M. Nothing about the work daunted him. Harry disliked milking cows, particularly when they flipped their manure-soaked tails in his face. Raking hay was a “cussin’ job.” He hated the whole business of putting rings in hogs’ noses and thought husking corn, with the dirt and dust flying about, was work devised by Satan. Yet John Truman was happier than his children had seen him in years. He would never have left the farm in the first place, he told them, had it not been for their education. Mary Jane would remember knowing where he was almost any time of day because she could hear him singing at his work.

He knew how to make them all “step lively,” but was also quick to single out good work when he saw it. “Yes, and if you did a good job, he would compliment you,” said Gaylon Babcock, a neighbor who from boyhood helped at threshing time. “He made you want to do a good job.” Another man recalled seeing the Trumans planting a cornfield with three teams of horses working at once. A few days later he saw the same three teams cultivating the corn before it was up, to get a head start on the weeds.

Every day was work, never-ending work, and Harry did “everything there was to do”—hoeing corn and potatoes in the burning heat of summer, haying, doctoring horses, repairing equipment, sharpening hoes and scythes, mending fences. Some things he did better than others. Using an ax or saw left-handed, he took a lot of kidding for work that looked left-handed. He learned the song of the meadowlark (it said, “Pretty boy go to work,” according to local tradition) and that wind from the northwest meant rain. By paying attention to what his father had to teach, he became highly knowledgeable about livestock, as proficient nearly as Vivian. They raised registered short-horn cows and bulls, sheep, mules, thoroughbred horses, and Hampshire hogs. John won prizes for his horses. Harry’s “real love” was the hogs, which he gave such names as “Mud,” “Rats,” and “Carrie Nation.” Harry also kept the books, listing which crops were sold to whom and for how much:

Boundary lines for the farm were the same rock fences from Solomon Young’s time, and two of his big square limestone gateposts marked the main entrance from the rock road. The elm trees along the front drive had grown huge by now, so that the whole distance from the road to the house was in deep shade. Beyond the house still, through the orchard, was the old walnut barn, solid as ever and still painted red.

The only neighbors in view were the Slaughters, to the north, with whom the Trumans shared a common boundary of nearly a mile. A large family of eight children, the Slaughters were the most prosperous farmers in the vicinity. O. V. Slaughter and his wife Elizabeth had known Matt since childhood. Theirs were the only lights to be seen after dark. Everything else in view was cropland, trees, and sky.

The big change in community life in the years the Trumans had been away from Blue Ridge was the growth of Grandview, a mile to the south. The little town was the creation of two railroads that cut through corners of the farm, the Kansas City Southern and the St. Louis & San Francisco, or “Frisco,” both built shortly before Solomon Young’s death. Post office, bank, grocery, feed, and hardware stores and the two railroad depots were now only a ten-minute ride down the rock road. On Sunday mornings the bells of Grandview Baptist Church carried clearly.

The whole farm belonged still to Grandma Young. The small, frame farmhouse built for her after the fire was well kept but crowded now with the five Trumans. Painted plain white with dark green trim, it had seven rooms, all very small—kitchen, dining room, front parlor, sitting room, and two bedrooms at the top of the front stairs. Harry and Vivian slept under the eaves over the dining room, in a tiny room with two tiny windows down at floor level, reachable only by a narrow back stairway.

The house was without electricity. There was no running water or plumbing. Matt cooked on a coal stove. In winter, the hand pump often froze solid. In summer, Harry and Vivian’s room under the eaves became a furnace. Except for Matt’s walnut dresser, the furnishings were of the plainest kind. The single modern convenience was a telephone, which hung on the wall beside the front door.

Neighbors remembered the house being scrupulously neat and clean. No one took such pleasure in creating a disturbance with a broom as did his mother, Harry observed. “The coldest day in winter she’ll raise all the windows, get a broom and a dust rag, and just be perfectly blissful while the rest of us freeze,” he wrote. “Whenever the dog and cat see her coming they at once begin hunting means of exit.”

It was all rich land still, some of the most valuable in the state. Harry was satisfied it was the “finest land you’d find anywhere.” To his astonishment, he was taking great interest in “the creation of things that come out of the ground.” He read Cato’s De agri cultura with its advice on planting beans, sowing clover, making compost, curing hams, and the medicinal value of cabbage. He pored through Wallace’s Farmer and, for scientific ideas, reports from the agricultural colleges. In advance of most farmers in the area, the Trumans began rotating crops and some years the results were impressive—from yields of 13 bushels of wheat an acre to 19 bushels. To hold back erosion, Harry dumped bales of spoiled straw into gullies. Once soil had washed over the straw, he sowed timothy seed. It was an idea no one around Grandview had tried before.

Ed Young, the local veterinarian, described Harry as “always bustling around getting things done.” If John Truman was a stickler for doing jobs just so, Harry was, too, the more time passed. Brownie Huber, one of the hired men, recalled that Harry was the only man he ever worked for who had him take all the buckles off the harness before oiling so the oil would get under the buckles.

Harry also had two further attributes, according to Brownie Huber, who was with the Trumans for six years. Harry could “stir up as good a batch of biscuits as any woman” and he could admit a mistake. Thirty years later Huber recalled an incident that occurred one fall when he was plowing for winter wheat:

To more than a few people Harry seemed somehow different. One Grandview resident considered him so neat and polite he was sure Harry must be a preacher. Another, a young woman, remembered how easy he was to talk to. “He was so down-to-earth, yet he was something else, too, even then,” she said.

At threshing time, when neighboring farmers came to help the Trumans, as part of the season’s usual exchange of labor, Harry would work through the morning, but then, just before the big midday meal, while the other men were relaxing, he would clean up quickly and go to the kitchen to help his mother and sister. Stephen Slaughter, youngest of the Slaughter children, would remark that he never saw Harry wearing bib overalls like every other farmer, which seemed to distinguish him. “He always looked neat—not dressed up, but he looked neat. No, no, no, he never wore bib overalls.” Stephen’s first glimpse of Harry was on the morning of a threshing day at the Slaughter farm when Stephen was a small boy. Harry had come swinging into the yard driving one of the wagons, only Harry drove standing up and wore a Panama hat.

His circle was enlarging. After three years on the farm, he joined the Masons. Both grandfathers had been Masons and John Truman, though he never joined, said he always meant to. Harry was elected to receive degrees at the Belton Lodge on January 30, 1909. By March, having become “letter perfect” in the ritual, he passed to Master Mason. He greatly enjoyed the fellowship and took the ritual and spiritual teachings of Freemasonry with extreme seriousness. He felt uplifted by brotherhood in an order claiming great antiquity and to which both Mozart and Andrew Jackson had belonged, as had so many presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt and his recent successor, William Howard Taft. As every Mason knew, George Washington took the oath of office on a Masonic Bible and laid the cornerstone of the Capitol with a Masonic trowel.

In the autumn of 1909, Harry Truman was appointed a deacon. The following year he organized a new lodge at Grandview, in a room over a store on Main Street. By age twenty-six, he was already a figure of importance in the community. “Harry was a very good lodge man,” recalled Gaylon Babcock, a brother Mason, who happened not to be as impressed as were others by Harry’s abilities as a farmer, or by Harry’s personality. To Babcock, Harry seemed more of a “utility man” around the Truman place. Babcock, further, was bothered by the fact that Harry, a grown man, played the piano and still called his mother “Mamma.” Babcock much preferred Vivian or John Truman. Nonetheless, he thought Harry did “a good job in the lodge work—excellent.”

The man primarily responsible for Harry’s involvement in the Masons was Frank Blair, a clerk in the bank at Belton. “Frank Blair got Harry interested…and Harry was, as a bright fellow, ambitious,” Stephen Slaughter remembered. “And he [Harry] had ideas…I’m sure he had ideas…that he might even go into politics.” Stephen’s father, O. V. Slaughter, was president of the Jackson County Farm Bureau, which Harry also joined.

In December of 1909, shortly after her ninety-first birthday, Grandma Young died. Harry, who had been devoted to her, tried to imagine all she had seen in her life. She had been born in 1818. She had once told him of a time when Solomon was away and a band of Indians came to the door saying they wanted honey and hung about sharpening their knives on the grindstone until she turned a big dog loose and sent them flying. In recent years she liked to sit silently in the sunshine in a rocker smoking a corncob pipe. Her death was the first to touch Harry directly. That Christmas without her, he said, was the saddest he had ever known.

By the will of Harriet Louisa Young the farm went to Matt and Harrison, her five other children sharing none of it on the grounds that they had played no part in the work and should consider the money gifts they received over the years as fair compensation. Not surprisingly a storm broke over the will.

Meantime, Harry delighted in the increasingly frequent visits of Uncle Harrison, who came out from Kansas City full of funny stories and eager to beat Harry in a game of double dummy bridge. Uncle Harrison, as Harry came to appreciate, was a “character,” a huge, talkative, profane, generous-spirited man, a kind of Missouri Falstaff who had a splendid time doing—or talking about doing—most of the things one wasn’t supposed to. Certainly he was not like anyone in Grandview. Six feet tall and extremely stout—Harry estimated he weighed 240 pounds—he wore good three-piece suits, a gold watch chain, and always carried lots of cash. He prized the time he spent loafing, loved vaudeville, gambling, and Kansas City women, and thought it time Harry learned a new dance step called the “Pigeon Wing.” He also drank considerably, and asleep on the couch, he could, as Harry noted, set a record for snoring.

All Trumans, Harry decided, were worriers by nature, but Uncle Harrison said he let others do his worrying for him. Uncle Harry was part of Harry’s education, as they both appreciated.

He was filling out, becoming much stronger physically. The time with his father had also brought an important change. Working together in all seasons, they had grown closer than either ever supposed they might. Indeed, John Truman had come to depend on Harry and to respect his judgment. When a horse pulled a beam over on John in the barn, breaking his leg, Harry took charge and ran things for three months, until April of 1911. Then a calf knocked Harry down and broke his left leg below the knee. The attention and kindness showered on him by both parents through the next weeks took him by surprise. “Papa buys me candy and fruit as if I were a two-year-old,” he wrote, “and Mamma spends half her time making me comfortable and making my favorite pies. You really don’t know how much you’re thought of until you get knocked out. I shall try to keep my head though.”

Later in the year, when Vivian was married to Luella Campbell, the daughter of a nearby farmer, and moved off the homeplace, John made Harry a full partner, as once Solomon Young had done for him. If, in a good year, the farm cleared $4,000, then Harry might make as much as $2,000, or twice what he had earned at the bank. But by the same agreement Harry also assumed equal responsibility for John Truman’s debts, which were substantial.

They had new stationery printed for “J. A. Truman and Son, Farmers.” By the standards of the family’s time-honored way of life, not to say the viewpoint of the surrounding community, Harry Truman had arrived. “To be a good farmer in Missouri—that’s tops. That’s the finest thing you can say about a man,” Vivian would declare emphatically a lifetime later. Harry himself, writing in October 1911, summed up generations of bedrock faith in the old Jeffersonian dream of a nation of farmers:

This was in a letter, one of many, designed to inform and influence Bessie Wallace of Independence, who knew nothing of farms or farming. For by now Harry was head over heels in love.

III

“Well, I saw her,” he is said to have exclaimed with a grin to the Noland sisters one summer night in 1910.

Ethel and Nellie Noland, who had both become schoolteachers, were still living in the family house on North Delaware Street. According to Ethel, keeper of family history, Harry had stopped for a visit when someone mentioned a cake plate that should be returned to Mrs. Wallace and Harry volunteered “with something approaching the speed of light.” He crossed the street, went up the walk to the Gates house, up four steps and onto the porch, cranked the bell of the tall, double-leafed front door, then stood waiting. “And Bess came to the door,” remembered Ethel, who must have been watching from her own porch, “and of course nothing could have been a bigger occasion than that, to see her again and talk to her.” He didn’t return for two hours.

From the farm to North Delaware Street was only sixteen miles, but a long ride by horse and buggy—four hours or more round trip—even assuming John Truman would make the horse and buggy available when Harry wished. Nor was going by train much faster or easier. Harry had to walk into Grandview and catch the Frisco to Kansas City, then change to an Independence train. Relatively few trains stopped at Grandview, however, and connections were poor, with long delays even if everything went right. The one other possibility was to hitch a ride by buggy to a point called Dodson on Blue River, where he could take the interurban, the electric streetcar, into Kansas City, then transfer to another streetcar to Independence. Whichever way he chose seemed designed to make life difficult. Yet he made the trip at every opportunity, often spending the night on a couch at the Nolands’. Old friends and relatives in town were greatly impressed by such ardor. To people in Independence, Grandview was “the sticks.”

He was invited to Sunday dinner and sat politely with Bessie and her very formal mother, her brothers, and Grandmother and Grandfather Gates, as a black servant passed dishes. In the parlor afterward he played the piano for them. Bessie also accepted his invitations to concerts and the theater in Kansas City and went with him to meet his former piano teacher, Mrs. White. Harry was sure they would like one another. (“Isn’t she a caution?” he said later of Mrs. White.) Yet Bessie, as others noticed, did not go out to the farm to meet his family.

But it was in letter after letter—hundreds of letters as time passed—that he poured himself out to her, saying what he found he never could in her presence, writing more than he ever had in his life and discovering how much satisfaction there was in writing. He also longed desperately for her to write him, which, as he told her, was the main reason he wrote so often and at such length. Phone calls on a party line were out of the question, with the neighbors listening. He didn’t like the telephone under any circumstances. “I’m always rattled and can never say what I want to,” he explained to her.

What she wrote to him, what tone her correspondence took, can only be imagined, or deduced from what he said in response, since none of her letters from this period has survived.

It was a cheerful, often funny, consistently interesting, extremely alert, straightforward, and irrepressible young man that she came to know in this outpouring of mail from Grandview. And she possessed many of the same qualities. Her vitality and good humor, in particular, had made her quite popular in her own circles. Several young men had found her attractive well before she was rediscovered by Harry Truman. Chrisman Swope, son of one of the wealthiest families in Independence, had come calling frequently. There was a Mr. Young, a Mr. Harris, and a “romance” apparently with a young man named Julian Harvey from Kansas City. As Harry understood from the start, she was used to attention.

He could not spell very well, as he was aware. (“Say, it sure is a grand thing that I have a high school dictionary handy,” he wrote. “I had to look on the back to see how to spell the book itself.”) And clearly he delighted in talking about himself. He was his own favorite subject, yet nearly always with a sense of proportion and a sense of humor. She had never received letters anything like them—and very fortunately she saved them.

“This morning I was helping to dig a grave,” he reported in another letter, attempting to illustrate that farmers “get all kinds of experience in lots of things….”

They were hardly love letters, no “nonsense or bosh.” He told her about Uncle Harry, about the hired men, and while he bragged occasionally of how hard he worked, he in no way romanticized life on the farm for her benefit. If anything, he went to the other extreme. “I have been to the lot and put about a hundred rings in half as many hogs’ noses. You really haven’t any idea what a soul stirring job it is, especially on a day when the mud is knee deep….” He described being stuck in the eye by a blade of corn, and how his face had burned to the color of raw beef after hauling hay all day.

He had strong opinions and no small share of bigotry, though she never saw it that way, never found his use of expressions like “coon,” “nigger,” “bohunk,” “Dago,” or “Chink” objectionable, or she would have let him know and that would have been the end of it, since as he said, “I’m horribly anxious for you to suffer from an excessively good opinion of me!”

In his way he could also become quite philosophical, a word he didn’t like.

“You know when people can get excited over the ordinary things in life, they live,” he said at one point.

“You’ve no idea how experience teaches sympathy,” he observed in another letter, soon after breaking his leg.

Of his religious convictions, a matter he knew to be of great importance to her mother, he said that while he remembered well their Presbyterian Sunday School days together and though he had since joined the Baptist Church, he was only a reasonably good Baptist as the term was understood in Grandview. “I am by religion like everything else. I think there’s more in acting than in talking.” Bessie had invited him to attend an Episcopal service in Independence. (The Wallaces, too, had abandoned the Presbyterian Church.) It was his first time at an Episcopal service, he told her. He knew nothing of “Lent and such things.” Once, on a Sunday in Kansas City, he confessed, “I made a start for church and landed at the Shubert.”

They exchanged views on writers. Mark Twain was his patron saint in literature, Harry said. The year before, as he did not tell her, he had spent $25 of his own money for a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works. She urged him to read the longer novels of Dickens and in a letter written in May 1911, after his accident, he told her that to his surprise he was greatly enjoying David Copperfield:

Then, out of the blue, that June, he proposed to her by mail, mixing affection with a little self-deprecation and caution, fearful she might laugh at him.

Three weeks passed without a word from her. He waited, agonizing, then wrote to ask if he had said anything to offend her. She responded by turning him down, and apparently over the phone. That same day he wrote as follows:

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 years 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:

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.”

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.

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.

“Yes, it is true that Mrs. Wallace did not think Harry was good enough for Bess,” a member of the Wallace circle would comment with a smile sixty years afterward, her memory of it all quite clear. “But then, don’t you see, Mrs. Wallace didn’t think any man was good enough for Bess.”

In March 1914 his own mother suddenly took ill. The local doctor called in a specialist who decided that an operation for hernia must be performed and at once, there in the house. Harry had to stand beside her bed and hold a kerosene lamp while the doctor worked and “parts” were removed from his mother. It was, Harry said afterward, an experience he hoped he would never have to repeat.

Apologetically he told Bess he would be unable to leave home for several days. Mamma, as he had once written, was a person for whom there was no substitute. “I hope she lives to be a hundred and one.”

How direct a connection there was between his steadfast performance during the operation and afterward and the event that followed is not certain. But it was only a few weeks later when Mamma gave him the money to buy an automobile. And it was to be no farmer’s Model T Ford. If anyone had ever rewarded a son with one grand generous gesture, she had. Nothing could have pleased him more or made such an immediate difference in his life. He had never had anything of his own of such value or that drew such attention. He was to love automobiles all his life, but this was the automobile of his life.

It was a big, black, five-passenger 1911-model Stafford, hand-built in Kansas City by a man named Terry Stafford. Only three hundred of the cars were ever made. It had a four-cylinder engine, right-hand drive, a high brass-framed windshield, and Presto-Lite lamps nearly the size of the lamps on locomotives. On a good road, Harry soon demonstrated, it could do 60 miles an hour. It was a rich man’s car. New, it sold for $2,350. Harry paid $650. The house needed paint; payments on loans and the cost of the lawsuit over his grandmother’s will had stretched the family’s finances to the limit. From all practical viewpoints such an automobile was a huge extravagance—$650 would have been more than enough to pay for two hired men for a year—but to Harry $650 for such an automobile was a “bargain.” While not the first in Grandview, it was certainly the fanciest. In Independence, not even George Porterfield Gates had anything like it. With a little work on the engine, Harry found, he could go up Dodson Hill—considered the great test locally—so fast he had to shut off the power before reaching the crest.

He could come and go as he pleased now, and mostly it was go, on Blue Ridge Boulevard to Independence. Rolling through the shaded streets of Independence on a spring Sunday, wearing a sporty new cap, a fresh white shirt and proper Sunday necktie, the top down on the car, its brass all polished, he would never be taken for a hayseed. Bess and three or four others would pile into the “machine,” off with him for an afternoon of fishing on Blue River or a picnic at the waterworks beside the Missouri at Sugar Creek. Or Harry would treat them to “a spin” in the country.

He had a gang again, as he had not since boyhood. Besides Bess and the Noland sisters, there were Bess’s two brothers Frank and George and their best girls, Natalie Ott and May Southern. Harry and his car were the center of attention. They would all pose for pictures with the car, Harry at the wheel. Harry was always good company, said May Southern, who would soon marry Bess’s brother George. Harry, she said a lifetime later, never complained about anything unless there were onions in the potato salad. “Harry didn’t like onions.”

Uncle Harrison also enjoyed “a spin” with the top down, in any weather. One expedition for his benefit was to Monegaw Springs, an old Missouri spa about eighty miles from Grandview. Mamma, too, had insisted on going along for the ride in Lizzie, as Harry was calling the car by this time.

Mary Jane had spoken up, saying she wanted driving lessons—“I guess I’ll have to do it, though,” said Harry reluctantly, “since Mamma paid for the thing.” When Mary Jane crashed into the front gate, Harry was thankful it was only the gate she hit and not the stone post.

In three months he drove 5,000 miles. Not since his first pair of eyeglasses had anything so changed his life, and again it was Mamma who made it happen. Her decision was also, of course, a way of telling him she approved of his reason for wishing to be on the road. If Bess Wallace was what he wanted, she would do what she could to see nothing stood in the way.

In time, Papa, too, declared himself “well pleased” with the purchase and by midsummer would “raise a rumpus” for Harry to drive him out to survey the roads. “Imagine working the roads in a machine,” Harry wrote.

But by midsummer 1914, the summer the Great War began in Europe, it had become apparent that something was seriously the matter with John Truman. He had strained himself sometime earlier, exactly as he had so often warned Harry not to. Trying to move a boulder from one of the roads, the hard, stubborn little man had refused to give up and so had been done in by a stone in the path, like some figure in a parable.

Though the pain persisted, he refused to see the specialists, as Matt had, fearing an operation. By Labor Day an X-ray revealed that a severe hernia was causing an intestinal block. John was told he had to decide between surgery or the grave. He had already lost a great deal of weight and looked dreadful.

“If anyone asks him how he’s feeling,” wrote Harry, “he always says fine, even if he can’t raise up his head.” Fearing the worst, Harry urged the operation as the only choice left.

The automobile now became the means for getting his father to and from the doctor in Kansas City, who was a Chinese, the supposed family hatred of Orientals notwithstanding. Harry worried continually. He didn’t see how he could ever get by without his father, he confessed to Bess. “You know he is sixty-three and an operation at that age is nearly always fatal.”

Harry ran the farm, took over the road work, and drove John to the doctor as often as four times a week. He wondered if the fates were conspiring against him, he told Bess, but her “good letters” helped “put that backbone into me to accomplish what I’ve set out to do in spite of the devil and all his angels.” Some evenings his father could hardly talk and Mamma, as she had never done before, asked Harry to forgo the trips to Independence. Meantime, it was essential that Harry “make things hum” and get in 200 acres of wheat.

The operation on John Truman was performed at the Swedish Hospital in Kansas City in October. Bess sent flowers, which greatly pleased Harry and his father, who refused to let the nurse throw them away until they were entirely gone. John returned home, but Harry knew he could not last long. Word of his condition spread and neighbors began to call.

“I remember the Sunday afternoon Father and Mother drove over to the Truman home to visit him,” wrote Stephen Slaughter. “It was known at the time that Mr. Truman had only a short time to live. And I remember the sadness Father and Mother felt after the visit.” Full of despair, John had said he was a failure in life. “Father had given him what comfort he could,” Stephen remembered. John was told what a good neighbor he had been. He was reminded of the friends he had made, the useful work he had done, the fine family he had raised. Undoubtedly Harry was present as his father talked of his failure, for by this time Harry was rarely away from his father’s side.

John Truman died the morning of Monday, November 2, 1914.

“I was with him,” Harry said years later. “I had been sitting with him and watching a long time. I nodded off. When I woke up he was dead.”

Brownie Huber, the hired man, who was also at the house, recalled: “Harry and I often got up real early and very quietly so as not to awaken his mother and sister. He would make biscuits, cook oatmeal and fry eggs. That is the way it was the morning his father died. I was eating breakfast while Harry went in to stay with the old gentleman, when he appeared at the door and said, ‘Dad just passed away.’ ”

The day of the funeral, schools were closed in Grandview. Friends came to the service at the house from everywhere in the county. Their buggies and horses and Model T’s were drawn up all along the drive beneath the bare trees. A headline in the Independence Examiner reported the loss of “An Upright Citizen Whose Death Will Be a Blow to His Community.” Burial was at the old Forest Hill Cemetery in Kansas City, at the brow of a slope beside the graves of Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young.

To Bess, Harry wrote: “I have quite a job on my hands now…. You know, I’ve been in the habit of running the farm for some time, but Papa always made it go.”

V

If it was sure-enough war, wheat would go higher still, farmers had been saying all summer. And then it had come, in the first week of August, when sixty thousand German troops crossed into Belgium at Liège. The papers were filled with war news and as Willa Gather would write, even to “quiet wheat-growing people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of unforeseeable natural disaster….” By September the German armies had swept through Belgium and into France as far as the Marne River, where the French were making a heroic stand.

To Harry, with his sense of history, his fascination with military heroes, his previous part in the National Guard, all this, presumably, should have been of greatest interest. But the letters he wrote said nothing of the war. Even after his worries and grief over his father had passed, the subject of the world at large received no mention. To judge by what he was writing to Bess Wallace, little beyond his own immediate life ever drew his attention or thoughts from the time he first began corresponding with her in 1910. The only exception was the presidential contest of 1912 that elected Woodrow Wilson, the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland, and to Harry, a great man. If he was at all concerned about what was happening in France, or perceived any connection between the war headlines in the papers and his own fate, he gave no sign of it except once, two years later, when he told Bess he had had a dream. He had fallen from a plane over France and wound up in a hospital crying because he couldn’t see her.

As it was, he had plenty to think about. He felt the responsibility of the farm keenly and “gave it everything he had,” as his sister later said. “I almost got done planting corn this evening…. I was in the field at six o’clock and quit at seven. Nearly a day’s work,” he informed Bess in April 1915. “…I’ve simply got to make things come across this year if I have to work night and day.” He worried about the weather. He worried about his debts. He worried that the men would never work for him as they had for his father.

He kept on as road overseer for another six months, until a rival faction took over at the Independence Courthouse and he was out. From February to August he also served as postmaster in Grandview, though in name only, since he left the work to an assistant, a widow, who he thought needed the money more than he did.

He was up with the sun every morning, still, even with Papa gone. Early morning was the best time for “solid thinking,” he liked to say. He was thirty years old. He had been on the farm eight years, or more than a quarter of his life. He had lost none of his devotion to the family, or his determination to win Bess Wallace, or his good humor. (She must send him another picture of herself soon, he said, so he could have one downstairs as well as up. “It’s right unhandy to chase upstairs every day to see how you look.”) Yet his restlessness was greater than ever. He hated his “slow progress” at home, even with the rise in farm prices. He had reached a point, in fact, where he might have gone off in any of several directions with his life, given the opportunity.

With Uncle Harry in tow, he traveled to Texas hoping to entice him into some land speculation. The trip, like his earlier ones, came to nothing. Involved next in a zinc mine in Oklahoma, he told Bess, “There’s no one wants to win half so badly as I do.” He pictured the two of them in an ideal country house and the thought made the delays nearly unbearable. “Then I wake up and see our old house going to wreck for want of paint and repairs because I must pay interest on a debt I had no hand in making and my dream has to keep waiting.”

When the suit over his grandmother’s will was settled at last, after six years, his mother wound up no better off than before. She won the case and kept the farm, but what money came of it was consumed in lawyers’ fees. Even before John Truman’s death she had been forced to put another mortgage on the land. To pay off doctors’ bills and funeral expenses, Harry had to sell some Black Angus cattle he had only recently acquired. Now, along with Uncle Harry, his mother was advancing him money for his zinc-mine venture, which infuriated Vivian, who thought Harry had already been given quite enough and would be better off paying attention to the farm.

Vivian proved correct. The zinc mine was Harry’s first big experience with failure of his own doing.

The mine was located at a point called Commerce in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, just over the Missouri line, and 192 miles from Grandview. If the weather was right, the roads passable, and provided he had no blowouts and succeeded in fording four river bottoms, he could make it in the Stafford, he claimed, in seven hours. More often he took the train.

“This place down here is certainly one beyond the limit,” he wrote from Commerce early in 1916. “When it rains there is water six inches deep over everything. When it’s dry the dust is as deep over everything.” He was homesick, lonesome, yet expecting to be “on velvet” before long. Someday, he vowed, he would have a Pierce Arrow.

“I don’t suppose I’d ever have been real pleased if I hadn’t tried just once to get rich quickly,” he would tell Bess before it was over.

He had put up several thousand dollars to go into partnership with two brother Masons, Thomas Hughes, a Grandview farmer, and a Kansas City promoter named Jerry Culbertson, neither of whom knew any more about mining than he did. They called themselves the T-H-C Mining Company and bought what was known as the Eureka Mine at Commerce, hoping to cover their start-up expenses with the waste ore that had been left lying about above ground by the previous owner. Their troubles began almost immediately. The superintendent they hired turned out to be a crook. A rival group shut off the water needed for processing the ore. Equipment failed. Meantime, Harry kept shunting back and forth to Grandview, often twice a week, trying to hold things together at both ends.

Jerry Culbertson had no interest in the day-to-day operations of the mine, and when lightning struck Tom Hughes’s barn at Grandview, burning it to the ground, Hughes refused to give any more of his time, leaving the job to Harry, whose outlook swung from “blue-sky” confidence to abject gloom and back again. It was proving a liberal and expensive education, he observed during one of his high points. Of necessity he became a mechanic, mine superintendent, night watchman, and, above all, “official straightener” of mix-ups. He had never worked so hard or worried so much. And he refused to give up. “I can’t possibly lose forever,” he wrote plaintively to Bess. He had put Mary Jane in charge at home, but the hired men resented taking orders from a woman. When two of them quit, Harry had to catch the next train.

He saw his money vanishing. On May 19, 1916, feeling unusually sorry for himself after a trying day at Grandview, he wrote Bess a letter of a kind she had not seen before. He had begun to think his knack for failure was hereditary:

Then, after a good night’s sleep, his first in a long while, he assured her he was as hopeful as ever. He could “continue business as Harry Truman yet.” Frank Blair at the Belton Bank had come to the rescue with a loan, after telling Harry what a mistake he had made ever getting involved with Culbertson. How would Bess like coming in as a partner and help run the mine, Harry wanted to know.

“It’s about 110 degrees in the shade all the time down here,” he wrote from Commerce in July. “We also have a very active brand of mosquitoes. They work all night every night. The flies work in daytime.” It was the summer of the battles of Verdun and the Somme.

“Wish heavy for me to win,” he told her. “Keep wishing me luck because it means everything to me,” he urged again in August.

He wanted to buy an engagement ring but felt he must hold off because buying it with borrowed money would be bad luck. His luck, their luck, the will of the Fates, were all uppermost in his mind. He talked of opening a Ford agency in Commerce, certain now that that was the path to fortune.

The zinc mine closed that September of 1916. By November Harry was in the business of buying and selling oil leases, out of an office in Kansas City. Again he had gone in with Jerry Culbertson, despite Frank Blair’s warning, despite what he must have known himself from the experience at Commerce. But he was after the main chance now, as much as ever John Truman had been. The third partner in this new venture, David Morgan, later said it was actually the gamble of the business—the “hazard”—that appealed to Harry. Morgan, an Oklahoma lawyer and oil man, also knew what he was doing, as Harry appreciated.

Harry put in $5,000—five notes for $1,000 due in ten months, these, according to the contract, to be “signed also by Martha E. Truman, the mother of said Harry S. Truman.” She urged him to keep her father in mind, rather than his father. Grandpa Young, she said, had been wiped out three times that she knew of, but he “came up every time with something else.” Grandpa Young, the family success, the strong, self-made man who had never given up trying, was the example to take heart from.

Morgan was the president of what became the Morgan Oil & Refining Company. Culbertson handled sales and promotion. Harry was treasurer and so listed on the firm’s new stationery. However, a bookkeeper named Brelsford later said Harry’s real specialty was seeing people. “Truman was surrounded by people, people, people. Salesmen, lease men, lease owners, scouts, and what-have-you. Morgan had his duties, but he shoved quite a burden of seeing people over to Mr. Truman.”

Though he appears to have made no sales himself, Harry had become a boomer. “If this venture blows, I’ll know I’m hoodooed,” he told Bess, who was among those who bought stock.

If Harry had no premonitions about American involvement in the European war, Culbertson was banking on it. “In the event this country is unfortunately brought to war,” said a newspaper advertisement written by Culbertson, “the absolute necessity of gasoline and other byproducts of crude petroleum are bound to come to such urgent demand that the price will soar beyond all expectations….”

Morgan was convinced that fortunes were waiting beneath the farmlands of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The company leased thousands of acres in all three states and in Louisiana as well. But then in April 1917 Woodrow Wilson was calling on Congress for a declaration of war and the war, rather than bringing a bonanza to Morgan Oil & Refining, eventually finished it off. There was no manpower to pursue oil, investors disappeared, the company went out of business. Only later was it discovered that one of their leases in southeastern Kansas was part of the famous Teeter Pool, a supply of oil that would have made millions for the company and its officers had they just drilled deeper.

Bess, like other investors in the venture, lost all she had put in, while Harry seems to have come out even. How much he lost altogether in the zinc mine is unclear. He said $11,000 at the time, but later gave a figure of $7,500. Either way it was a lot of money and all of it borrowed money. If his part in his father’s debts was $12,000—the figure he once confided to Bess—then possibly his total indebtedness by this time was $23,000. Perhaps not coincidentally, Matt put another mortgage of $25,000 on the farm in 1917.

Yet as bad as Harry felt about all this—and he could get extremely blue—the farm, mortgages and all, meant security as almost nothing else could have. Good years brought a clear income of maybe $4,000, at a time when the average working family earned less than $1,000. Exceptional years might mean $7,000, and apparently the Trumans had a few such years.

Further, the farm now belonged solely to the Trumans. The previous summer of 1916, Uncle Harrison had died, leaving all of his part to Matt and her children. In plain monetary terms they were sitting on a fortune. The price of wheat in 1916 hit a new high of $1.65 a bushel. Good land in Jackson County by 1917 was selling for $200 an acre. At the least the farm was worth $100,000, but it might have sold for twice that. Matt had no intention of selling any of it. Still, there it was if troubles came, and it was in prime shape still, since, as their neighbors so often said, the Trumans were good farmers.

Ethel Noland, who understood Harry as well as anyone, said she knew all along he was never meant for a farmer. And clearly he knew it, too. Yet he had held on for ten years, doing his share and more. He had also discovered in Commerce, Oklahoma, that between farming and zinc mining, he would take farming.

Much later he would remember the years on the farm as invaluable experience. He would talk of the drudgery, and he would call it the best time he ever had in his life. A farm gave a person time alone to himself, which he liked and needed, for all his enjoyment and need of people. “Riding one of these plows all day, day after day, gives one time to think,” he would say, reminiscing long afterward. “I’ve settled all the ills of mankind in one way or other while riding along….”

As would be said later in newspaper articles, he never lost the farm habits of early rising and hard work. His mother would say the farm was where Harry got his common sense. “It takes pride to run a farm same as anything else,” he would tell her, sounding very like his father.