Missouri to the White House, the White House to Missouri

When the Buck Stops With You: Harry S. Truman on Leadership
by Alan Axelrod

(Page 2 of 3)

At 7:09 in the evening of April 12, 1945, two hours and twenty-four minutes after Franklin Delano Roosevelt succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage while sitting for a portrait at the "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia, his vice president stood in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, right hand raised, left hand on the cover of the only Bible that could be found quickly, a Gideon belonging to Howell Crim, head usher of the White House. Chief Justice Harlan Stone began the oath of office, "I, Harry Shipp Truman," to which the vice president responded, "I Harry S. Truman. . . ."

Sixty-one years earlier, on May 8, 1884, in a tiny bedroom off the parlor of their home in the market hamlet of Lamar, Missouri, a boy was born to John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Young. It would be a month before Dr. W. L. Griffin, the physician who delivered the boy, registered the birth with the county clerk. Even then, he had no name to supply, because the parents were still debating the baby's middle name. It had certainly been decided that he would be called Harry, after his Uncle Harrison, but should his middle name honor John's father, Anderson Shipp Truman, or Martha's, Solomon Young? Ultimately, the parents compromised on the initial S, which honored both grandfathers, and that initial is quite possibly the only thing about Harry S. Truman that even approaches the level of mystery.* In all other respects, from beginning to end, his life was what he wanted it to be: an open book, clearly, simply, and honestly written.

Harry's father was a mule trader and farmer, and when the mule business became sluggish, he moved the family from Lamar to a farm near Harrisonville in 1885 and then to another farm, near Grandview, in 1887. Nearsighted - he would get his first pair of glasses at age nine - and slight of build, Harry Truman was not cut out to be a farmer, so it was just as well that the family, which now included another boy, John Vivian Truman (always called Vivian), moved to Independence in 1890. It was there that a sister, Mary Jane, was born, and it was there that most of Harry's schooling took place.

He was, in fact, a rather bookish child. Unable to see well without his glasses, he always wore them; very much aware that they were expensive, he was fearful of breaking them in rough play. "To tell the truth," the painfully truthful Truman confessed in later life, "I was kind of a sissy." His brother's assessment was far kinder. True, Harry was not a scrapper, but, Vivian insisted, he commanded a "lot of respect" from the other boys, who actually admired the store of knowledge he amassed about such exciting subjects as former Missourians Jesse James and the Dalton gang.

Harry most enjoyed reading and playing the piano, in that order, and, as he grew into adolescence, he thought about a career as a historian or a pianist. However, John Truman was never sufficiently successful as a farmer or a businessman to finance a college education or advanced musical training for Harry, who, after graduating from high school in 1901, briefly attended business college and worked for two weeks in the mail room of the Kansas City Star. Next, he became a timekeeper for a Santa Fe Railroad construction project and, in 1903, found work as a bank clerk and then as a bank bookkeeper in Kansas City. Even in this prosaic employment, he did his very best - his "damnedest" - and received high praise from his supervisors. Doubtless he would have risen in the bank, but, in 1905, he was summoned to the family's new farm at Blue Ridge, near Grandview. Its 600 acres were too much for John Truman and Vivian to handle on their own, and so, like it or not, Harry Truman finally became a farmer. And when his father died in 1914, that vocational destiny seemed sealed as the farm fell to him.

There is not the slightest indication that the more or less enforced return to the farm created any resentment in Harry Truman. Indeed, running a farm gave him the air of sufficient substance to justify, in his own mind, courting Elizabeth - Bess - Wallace in earnest. That courtship began about 1911, but Harry had been sweet on Bess ever since he had first met her in 1890 at the Sunday school of Independence's First Presbyterian Church. Still, it would be November 1913 before the couple became engaged, secretly. By the beginning of 1917, they were about ready to get married at last, but in April the United States entered World War I, and Truman, who did not want to risk making a widow of Bess, postponed the marriage. At thirty-three, he was beyond draft age, and no one expected him to serve, but, bad eyesight and all, he saw his duty, volunteered, and was sent to France in 1918 as the captain of a field artillery unit that engaged in hot and hazardous action at Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne.

Truman never acquired a taste for military life, but, as the officer in charge of a company of men, he did learn what it meant to be a leader, and he found he had an aptitude for leadership as well as an affinity for the responsibility it brought. Nevertheless, when he was mustered out and returned to Missouri in 1919, it was not a leadership position he sought. After marrying Bess Wallace, he opened a haberdashery on Kansas City's 12th Street in partnership with an army buddy, Eddie Jacobson. To a newly married man, it seemed the financially responsible thing to do, and, at first, he and Jacobson did quite well.

Very likely, Harry Truman would have spent his life as a Kansas City businessman had the shop not foundered in the postwar recession of the early 1920s. Out of business, deeply in debt, newly married, and now without a clear direction in life, Truman accepted a friend's introduction to Thomas J. "Boss" Pendergast, Democratic nabob of the Kansas City political machine. No one got very far in Missouri politics without a nod and a boost from Pendergast and his minions, whose machine was at once an economic boon to Kansas City and a municipal source of national disgrace - for it was during the Pendergast years that the town earned its reputation for officially sanctioned vice and racketeering.

Backed by Pendergast, Truman won election as county judge in 1922, lost a reelection bid in 1924, but was elected presiding judge of the county court in 1926. Despite its title, this office was not judicial, but administrative. Truman functioned as county commissioner, effectively chief executive of Jackson County, Missouri. Astounding to all involved, this latest Pendergast protégé, during two four-year terms, built a reputation for scrupulous honesty, selfless public stewardship, and skillful, no-nonsense management that was instantly and impartially responsive to the needs of the people. Under Judge Truman, Jackson County got modern and efficient highways and badly needed public buildings, all contracted for and constructed without the favoritism and corruption customary in Pendergast's Missouri.

Truman was well aware of T. J. Pendergast's reputation, and he was even more aware that most of the bad things said about "TJP" were amply merited; however, throughout his long political career, Truman never repudiated or even criticized his first mentor, and he pointed out that Pendergast never interfered with him or compelled him to do anything to compromise his own integrity. Nevertheless, as it became clear to Boss Pendergast that Harry Truman was hardly a team player, the odds of the machine's backing him for further and higher political office became increasingly remote. Because two terms marked the traditional limit for a presiding county judge, it seemed to Truman, in 1934, that his political career had reached its end. He accurately predicted that Pendergast would tap others to run in the Democratic primary for a seat in the U.S. Senate, but what he had not counted on was that no one else wanted the job. After several turndowns from others, Pendergast finally turned to Truman.

If Truman felt the slightest resentment at having been far from Pendergast's first choice, he showed none of it in his vigorous campaign. He won the Democratic primary, which, in the "Solid South" Missouri of those days, was tantamount to winning the election. It is true that when he entered the Senate in 1935 he did so under the cloud of Pendergast corruption, but his openhanded, plainspoken friendliness, frank integrity, and commitment to his office quickly won respect, trust, and, not least of all, affection from colleagues and public alike. While he compiled a modest but efficient record of achievement during his first Senate term, it was during his second term that he entered the national spotlight by creating and chairing a committee charged with uncovering waste and fraud in the U.S. military and its suppliers.

Copyright © 2004 Alan Axelrod. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Alan Axelrod is a renowned historian and business writer. He is the author of Nothing to Fear: Lessons in Leadership from FDR.