Bess Truman (12 page)

The rest of Independence was not doing much better. As the number of dead and dying mounted, the authorities closed schools and theaters and factories to try to isolate people and break the momentum of the epidemic. At 219 North Delaware, as Bess slowly recovered, she found that she could hear almost nothing in her left ear. The doctor informed her that it was a not an uncommon legacy of this killer flu. But at least she was alive. Everyone knew that Bess was herself again when she announced, early in January, that she was going to take a walk.

Separated by 5,000 miles of water and land, Captain Truman wrote Bess letters about a fabulous leave he was enjoying in Paris and Nice and Monte Carlo. He was horrified when he found out, weeks later, that she had the disease that was killing so many people. “I am so glad you are out of danger from that awful flu. You’ve no idea how uneasy I’ve been since hearing you and Mary had it. We over here can realize somewhat how you must have felt when we were under fire a little. Every day nearly someone of my outfit will hear that his mother, sister or sweetheart is dead, it is heartbreaking almost to think that we are so safe and so well over here and that the ones we’d like to protect more than all the world have been more exposed to death than we.”

While she was recuperating from the flu, Bess received a letter from Mary Paxton that probably did her more good than any of the pills the doctor prescribed. Mary was at a YMCA post trying to give 2,500 homesick soldiers an American Christmas on a limited budget. She had met an Independence man who told her that the 129th Field Artillery had come through the battles with light casualties, and Captain Truman was not among the killed or wounded. When “the boys” come home, she told Bess, “No one can do enough to appreciate what they have been up against - and the trenches are only part. It is impossible for anyone not here to understand the temptations they have. We don’t preach to them but just talk it straight out to them. Don’t worry about Harry though for he is a rock you can build on.”

Now that Bess could consider the future without dread, she told Captain Truman that she did not think getting married in New York was a good idea. She wanted to have the ceremony in Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence, where her family and friends could join in the celebration. The Captain said he was “perfectly willing” to accept that arrangement. “I just couldn’t see how I was going to wait until I could get to Independence,” he explained. But he had now learned that the army planned to discharge units en masse, which meant he would have to wait until the regiment got to Missouri anyway.
“But don’t make any delay,”
he warned.

The wedding and Captain Truman’s growing dissatisfaction with army life mingled in other letters from France.

Captain Truman particularly disliked the harsh West-Point style discipline of the regulars. He was distressed to find himself being forced to imitate them to maintain discipline in his bored soldiers. “If we stay in this place much longer,” he wrote, “I’ll either have a disposition like a hyena or be the dippy one. If there’s one thing I’ve always hated in a man it is to see him take his spite out on someone who couldn’t talk back to him. I’ve done my very best not to jump on someone under me when someone higher up jumps on me, because I hate the higher-up when he does it and I’m sure the next fellow will hate me if I treat him the same way. . . . Justice is an awful tyrant. Just to show how she works I took all the privileges away from a fellow for a small offense and gave him a terrific calling down and I had to do it four times more when I found out that four more were offenders in the same way. One of ‘em was a man I particularly like too and I know he thinks I’m as mean as Kaiser Bill. . . .”

Harry Truman was saying goodbye to his boyhood dream of being a soldier. In this letter, he revealed to Bess the part she played in it: “You know when I was a kid, say about thirteen or fourteen, I was a tremendous reader of heavy literature like Homer, Abbott’s Lives, Leviticus, Isaiah, and the memoirs of Napoleon. Then it was my ambition to make Napoleon look like a sucker and I thirsted for
a
West Point education so I could be one of the oppressors, as the kid said when asked why he wanted to go there. You’d never guess why I had such a wild desire and you’ll laugh when I tell you. It was only so you could be the leading lady of the palace or empire or whatever it was I wanted to build. You may not believe it but my notion as to who is the best girl in the world has never changed and my military ambition has ended by having arrived at the post of centurion. That’s a long way from Caesar, isn’t it? Now I want to be a farmer. Can you beat it? I’m hoping you’ll like the rube just as well as you would have the Napoleon. I’m sure the farmer will be happier.”

But he remained proud of his military accomplishments: “Personally I’d rather be a Battery commander than a brigadier general. I am virtually the dictator of the actions of 194 men and if I succeed in making them work as one, keep them healthy morally and physically and make ‘em write to the mammas and sweethearts, and bring ‘em all home, I shall be as nearly pleased with myself as I ever expect to be - until the one great event of my life is pulled off, which I am fondly hoping will take place immediately on my having delivered that 194 men in U.S.A. You’ll have to take a leading part in that event you know and then for one great future.”

When the Thirty-fifth Division, to which the artillery regiment was attached, staged a review for General John J. Pershing and the Prince of Wales, Battery D led the parade. Harry told Bess about it, but he was far more excited by what General Pershing said to him when he shook hands: The division would soon be on its way home. “Please get ready to march down the aisle with me as soon as you decently can,” he implored. “I haven’t any place to go but home [he meant Grandview] and I’m busted financially but I love you as madly as a man can and I’ll find the other things. We’ll be married anywhere you say at anytime you mention and if you want only one person or the whole town I don’t care. . . . I have some army friends I’d like to ask and my own family and that’s all I care about.” He added that he had enough money to buy a Ford “and we can set sail in that and arrive in Happyland.”

In her answering letter, the earliest that has survived, Bess made it clear that she was just as impatient as Harry, and was not fussing about the details. “You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to,” she wrote. “I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine. I guess we might as well have the church full while we are at it. I rather think it will be anyway whether we invite them or not, judging from a few remarks I’ve heard.”

Her mother was obviously exercising her prerogatives in regard to the wedding.

Bess’ pride in her soldier is visible in the next paragraph. “What an experience the review etc must have been. I’ll bet the Bty looked grand and no wonder they led the Div. . . . Were you overcome at greeting the Prince of Wales? He doesn’t mean any more to me than the
orneriest
doughboy but I know I’d choke if I had to address him. It was splendid that you got to shake hands with Pershing.”

Then she went back to the most important thing on both their minds.

She closed with a comment that compared her picnic test to Harry’s criticisms of some of his fellow officers. “It’s strange that such widely different things as war and picnics will so surely show a man up. I’ve liked lots of people ‘til I went on a picnic jaunt with them and you can say the same thing about several (?) men ‘til you went on a war jaunt with them, eh?”

Then the letters from France were replaced by telegrams:

ARRIVED IN CAMP MILLS EASTER AFTERNOON . . . NEW YORK GAVE US A GRAND WELCOME. GOD’S COUNTRY SURE LOOKS GOOD. HARRY.

The next day, Captain Truman headed for Tiffany and Company, on the southeast corner of Thirty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, where he bought a beautiful gold wedding ring. Then he strolled down Broadway with two fellow officers and stopped in an ice-cream store for a snack. There, a pretty girl walked up to him and asked if he was with the Thirty-fifth Division. Captain Truman said his artillery regiment was attached to this mostly Missouri and Kansas division, and in response to another question, admitted that many of his battery mates were from Independence.

“Do you know Bess Wallace?” the girl asked.

“Yes - I do,” said the astonished Captain.

“Tell her Stella Swope was asking for her.”

The former heiress - she was the youngest daughter - strolled out onto Broadway on the arm of a sailor. What memories that encounter stirred, when Harry told Bess the story in a letter from New York. It evoked receptions and dances in the Swope mansion before tragedy devastated that family, a world of rustling silk dresses and casual sophistication and presumed wealth. Now Bess was about to marry a man who had never been part of that elegant world. A man who was not certain what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, except marry her. An ex-soldier who had a remarkably daring spirit concealed behind his modest, smiling demeanor. Who could guess in what unexpected direction he might take her?

For someone who regarded life with wary distrust, these thoughts were unsettling. But Bess had long since learned to put such thoughts aside, to live a normal life in spite of them. More than most people, she had already experienced the power of fate or destiny in her life. Everything, from her own deep feelings to the fortunes of war, had favored her union with Harry Truman. So, in obedience to the orders from the front lines, there was no delay.

At 4:00 p.m. on June 28, 1919, seven weeks after thirty-five-year-old Captain Truman was discharged at Camp Funston, almost nine full years since he began his courtship of Bess Wallace and six years since she accepted him, he waited at the altar in tiny Trinity Episcopal Church, a few blocks from 219 North Delaware Street. He was wearing a gray tailor-made suit with small black-and-white checks in the cloth. It had been made by his best man, Ted Marks, who had been a fellow captain in the 129th Field Artillery. Before the war and after it, Ted ran the best gentleman’s tailor shop in Kansas City.

It was a hot day, but Harry Truman was oblivious to the weather. “Never did we see such a radiant groom,” one friend wrote Bess after the ceremony and added an interesting comment on some feelings that Bess had obviously shared with her. “Methot you did quite nobly, Bessie, now twastn’t such a dreadful ordeal, was it.”

Bess wore a gown of white georgette and a wide-brimmed picture hat of white faille and carried an armful of Aaron Ward roses. Her bridesmaids were her two favorite cousins, Helen Wallace and Louise Wells. Helen wore blue organdy and carried Sunset roses, Louise wore yellow organdy and carried Sweetheart roses. Tall, handsome Frank Wallace escorted Bess up the aisle and gave her away.

The church was beautifully decorated with garden flowers in pastel shades. The altar was a mass of daisies, pink hollyhock, and pale blue larkspur. Tall cathedral candles cast a golden glow on this array of color. “Elizabeth Virginia Wallace,” the Reverend John V. Plunkett, rector of Trinity, asked the thirty-four-year-old bride, “Wilt thou have this man for thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will,” Bess Wallace said.

In a roadster whose brand name I haven’t been able to identify, the newlyweds headed for Chicago. Ex-Captain Truman cheerfully declined to set a time limit on this long-awaited honeymoon. He announced they would make up their schedule as they went along. This decision did not sit well with his mother-in-law, who wanted to know the day and hour when her daughter would return to her. In Chicago, Bess and Harry stayed at the Hotel Blackstone and enjoyed the Windy City so much they forgot to phone or write anyone.

On July 5, Bess’ brother Fred wrote to her, reporting there was a brisk traffic in wedding presents at 219 North Delaware. “You seem to be having some time in Chicago and must like it pretty well by the way you are sticking around,” Fred observed. Then he revealed the instigator of his letter. “Mom says if she doesn’t hear from you, she’s going to telegraph the hotel.”

Bess’ friends pursued her with more amusing letters. One friend told her to see all the sights in Chicago but “don’t get lost in the big city and don’t you dare learn the ‘Shimmie’ [A forerunner of the Charleston, this dance was the rage in 1919]. Methinks you should have taken a chaperone. Cause when little girls leave the quiet little town and have anticipations of life on a tear they’re apt to do anything.”

From Chicago, the honeymooners motored to Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan. North of that city were (and still are) miles of beaches on vast Lake Huron. The air was free of Missouri’s summertime humidity. For the rest of his life, whenever Harry Truman wanted to regain the radiance of those first days with Bess, he simply wrote: “Port Huron.” For him, it was a code word for happiness.

Bess had a wonderful time too, but it was she who decided their honeymoon had to end because she could not stop worrying about her mother. So they rumbled home in their roadster and took up residence at 219 North Delaware. It was the logical place for them to stay - for emotional reasons (Madge Wallace’s dependence on her daughter) as well as financial and geographical ones.

In the seven weeks between his discharge and his wedding, ex-Captain Truman had discovered that the job offered to him by the Morgan Oil Company no longer existed. The company was in financial disarray. Most of their leases had lapsed, and most of the money Harry and Bess had invested in 1917 had vanished. As part of a settlement, David Morgan gave the Trumans title to a large house at 3404 Karnes Boulevard in Kansas City. To sharpen the disappointment, while the Trumans were on their honeymoon, another oil company, drilling on land the Morgan Oil Company had leased and abandoned in Greenwood County, Kansas, reported a gusher. The newcomers had discovered the Teter Pool, one of the largest oil deposits in the United States. In 1918, Morgan had run out of money when he was 1,500 feet down in a well on the same land. It was painful for the Trumans to discover how close they had come to making millions.

That disappointment had a lot to do with ex-Captain Truman’s decision not to follow a mule up a corn row and build a bungalow in Grandview. In a hurry to make some real money, he sold his equity in the farm to his mother and sister Mary and went into the haberdashery business.

His partner was Eddie Jacobson, the man with whom he had run the canteen at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma before they sailed to France. They launched a store opposite the Muehlebach Hotel on Twelfth Street.

Truman and Jacobson opened their doors in November 1919. The national economy was booming along at a war pace. Wheat was selling at a ten-year high. The pockets of the average man were overflowing with cash, and many saw no reason why they should not invest in some of the expensive shirts and silk socks being sold by Truman and Jacobson.

Both men worked hard. The store was open twelve hours a day, six days a week. They divided the back room chores between them, Eddie handling the buying and Harry keeping the books. He often brought the books home with him, and Bess helped him with the laborious double entries, both of them toiling until long after midnight in the dining room. Business was fantastic. The money poured in the way it had arrived during the heyday of the Morgan Oil Company - by the basketful.

Bess somehow found time to maintain her correspondence with Mary Paxton and Arry Ellen Mayer, her two closest friends. Mary was distressed to find herself in France when Bess was married. On June 9, 1919, she wrote her an emotional letter.

“I suppose by now you are married,” she began. “Father wrote me that he was going to send you a wedding present for us both. I will bring you something too. I wanted it to be linen, but that is out of reason here since the war.” She discussed other possible presents, including china, and then confessed she had no money to buy anything. YMCA workers were not well paid. “I only tell you this because I want you to know how much I am thinking of you and trying to find something for you. I surely do regret not being there. It is just a matter of weeks now till I come. I count not being there for your wedding one of the greatest sacrifices of the war for me.

She continued: “I must go now and entertain some soldiers at 2 a.m.” She closed with: “Dearest love and all the best wishes of every kind.”

Then, as if words could not express her feelings, she added, on separate lines, “Till we meet - Dearest love.”

Not long after Bess received this letter, Mary’s father John Paxton, who still lived a few blocks away on Delaware Street, told her astonishing news. Mary had gotten married. It was apparently a sudden decision. The man’s name was Edmund Burke Keeley. He and Mary had worked together in Virginia before she went to France. (He was apparently the man who loved her too much.) He had met her at the ship in New York, and they had been married in the Little Church Around the Corner. They were now living on a farm he was managing near Richmond. You can imagine Bess’ consternation. Mary’s next letter was read, you can be sure, with lightning speed.

“I surely have a lot to tell you,” she began. [I] “hardly know where to start. My husband is an Irishman but a genius on farming lines.” Then comes a sentence that she inserted after she finished the letter. “He is perfectly dear to me.” She went on to tell Bess that Edmund Burke Keeley (nicknamed Mike) “has a wonderful opportunity for he has this huge place to make into a model farming community with unlimited capital behind this place. (Oh no it is not our capital.) He did not want to wait for me to come home to be married. The wheat was half thrashed. So we came back here for our honeymoon.

“We have a house that looks like a small summer hotel. . . . I have the job of making it into a home. It surely will be fun.” She hoped to visit Independence in December, and apropos of that, remarked: “This farm is so lovely I never want to leave it except coming to see you all.”

Bess was more than hurt by Mary’s casual tone and bewildered by her headlong marriage. She wrote to her, asking how she could have gotten married to a man none of her family or friends had ever heard of, much less met. In particular, she asked how Mary could have done this without sharing it with her.

In her next letter, which was written on stationery topped by “Curies Neck Farm,” Mary tried to explain. “The honest truth is I could not tell anyone in advance I was going to be married because I only knew it twenty-four hours in advance myself. I was too tired to have any fuss over getting married.”

Mary assured Bess that she had “everything anyone needs to make them happy, a good husband, a farm house, a dog, gold fish, a canary, and will have some chickens next week.” She described some of the lavish wedding presents they had received from the owners of the farm and from the people who worked on it. Mary wished Bess lived closer to Curies Neck Farm, which was on the James River near Richmond. “I am going to bring Mike home in November but I can’t bring the place to show you.”

On January 8, 1920, Arry Ellen Mayer married a Canadian, Charles Calhoun, in Toronto. I am an amateur in psychology, but it is easy to see a connection in this rush to matrimony with the marriage of Bess and Harry.

Although their first year together was brightened by Harry’s success as a businessman, there was a sharp disappointment at the end of it. She had a miscarriage. It upset her a great deal. She and Harry both were eager to have a child, and this unhappy accident at the age of thirty-five made her fear she had waited too long. Other events in 1920 were also inauspicious. The Republicans kicked the Democrats out of the White House and elected Warren G. Harding in a landslide. Almost immediately, a sharp deflation in the economy began, much of it caused, Harry Truman maintained, by Republican tight money policies. The price of wheat began to slide, and the pockets of those who frequented Twelfth Street were no longer full. Sales at the Truman and Jacobson Haberdashery dwindled. Red ink began to appear in the books on which Bess and Harry labored.

This shift in fortunes was a dismaying shock to Bess. In early 1920, when business was good, she had begun to assume her natural role as one of the social leaders of Independence. She invited the Good Samaritan Class of the First Christian Church, to which her sister-in-law, May Wallace, belonged, to 219 North Delaware for a “musical tea.” The house was decorated with spring flowers, and the singers and musicians performed twice, once in the afternoon for young people and again in the evening for adults. Everyone was charmed, and the social pages of the Jackson
Examiner
credited the occasion to “the courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Truman.”

Throughout 1921, Truman and Jacobson slid slowly, inevitably toward collapse. It was a bitter disappointment for Harry Truman, too. It wiped out money he had received for his share of the Truman farm - the financial reserve on which he had planned to start married life. But he was not the sort of man who sat still in face of disaster - or took to drink. He had an alternative plan ready - one that stirred considerable anxiety in Bess. Reviving the idea he had mentioned in his letter from France, he was planning to run for eastern judge of Jackson County. He was plunging into the same political milieu that had destroyed her father. I have no recorded evidence of what Madge Wallace thought of this idea - but I do not need any. She undoubtedly expressed profound horror - especially when she was alone with Bess.

Frank Wallace had loaned Harry some money when the store became short of cash. But Madge Wallace, who had the cash she had inherited from her father, never offered her son-in-law a cent, as far as I know. On the contrary, while Truman and Jacobson were closing their doors for the last time in April, Madge, as oblivious as ever to financial realities, was planning a trip to the East Coast with her son Fred when he finished the school year at the University of Missouri.

Fred always had been Madge’s pet, but since Bess married, she could not bear to let him out of her sight. She moved to Columbia and kept house for him during his first year away from home. Fred never objected to being spoiled this way. In the opinion of some of the older members of the family, the trip east was probably his idea. “If there was any money around, Freddy could never resist spending it,” one of my aunts once remarked.

Perhaps this egotism - I can’t bring myself to call it selfishness because I don’t think Madge Wallace was aware of what she was doing - enabled Bess to ignore her mother and back her husband’s decision to become a politician. The best proof of her approval is not in writing but in the actions of the Wallace men on behalf of Harry Truman. At this time, Frank Wallace was the leader of the Fourth Ward in Independence. He began taking Harry around the ward, introducing him to people. One can be certain that he never would have done so if his sister had opposed the candidacy. George Wallace, too, although he professed a disdain for politics and politicians, talked up his brother-in-law’s candidacy.

But not opposing this plunge into politics and warmly, enthusiastically approving it are two different things. As Bess already had done at many other times in her life, she managed to suppress her feelings and support her husband’s decision. But she paid a price in sleeplessness and tension that soon led to an even heavier toll.

Another source of emotional stress was her awareness that Mary Paxton Keeley was pregnant and having no difficulty carrying the baby to term. Much as Bess and Mary loved each other, there was competition in their relationship. They had chosen such different paths through life, so I suppose it was inevitable. It must have been exasperating for Bess to see Mary achieving what she yearned for, after making such an impulsive marriage. When you have waited and planned and hoped for so long and life disappoints you, it is doubly difficult to bear.

At the end of October 1921, just as her husband was launching his campaign for eastern judge, Bess received a triumphant letter from Mary. It is also, as are so many of their letters, touching.