Bess Truman (3 page)

In high school, Bess was an excellent student. She saved many of the essays she wrote on writers such as James Russell Lowell. Her marks were never less than 90, and there were several 100s. But she was not a scholar. She left that title to Charlie Ross, a handsome young man who had a flair for writing, and Laura Kingsbury, the class’ second-ranking student. Charlie was the editor of their class yearbook,
The Gleam.
His chief assistant was Harry Truman. The title, drawn from Tennyson’s poem, “Merlin and the Gleam,” blended idealism and ambition for these young men. They were looking forward to participating as leaders - achievers - in the America beyond the boundaries of Independence and even of Kansas City.

For Bess Wallace, the gleam did not carry such dramatic overtones. She listened to Mary Paxton’s plans for college and a career with wistful longing. (Because of childhood illnesses and time lost with her mother in Colorado, Mary was three years behind Bess in school.) The presence of a new baby in the household made Madge Wallace even more dependent on her daughter. Still, there were several servants on the payroll. As someone who knew her well put it, “Mrs. Wallace never spent much time in the kitchen.”

Her mother’s health and emotional fragility, exacerbated by her husband’s drinking, were not the real reasons why Bess did not go away to college, as her mother had gone to the Cincinnati Conservatory and her friend Mary Paxton was eventually to depart for Hollins in Virginia, and their mutual friend, Charlie Ross, was to go to the University of Missouri at Columbia. The real explanation was the sad fact that Bess’ father could not afford to send her.

This failure was the first public acknowledgment of David Wallace’s financial difficulties. His money troubles were already well known within the family. In a box in the basement of 219 North Delaware Street, I found a series of faded letters from him to George Porterfield Gates, thanking his father-in-law again and again for “your many kindnesses to me and my family.” In the American world of the early 1900s - and in the 1980s - an inability to support one’s wife and children was a failing that was humiliating to most men. For David Wallace, it would have been even more painful, since he was being forced to ask for help from a man who had doubted his ability to support his daughter from the first.

By sad coincidence, Harry Truman’s family also was painfully short of money. In 1901, John Truman lost his life savings and a small farm his wife had inherited speculating on grain futures at the Kansas City Board of Trade. Even their home on West Waldo Street, a few blocks from Delaware Street, had to be sold, and the family moved to modest quarters in Kansas City. Harry abandoned all thoughts of a college education and went to work as a timekeeper for a section gang on the Santa Fe Railroad.

The Trumans at least coped with their financial straits. David Wallace could not. Worse, as his debts piled up, his political future grew dismal. For Democrats in Missouri and elsewhere, the opening years of the new century were not promising ones. A new, enormously popular Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, had replaced Ohioan William McKinley, who had been assassinated by an anarchist in 1901. A war hero as well as a bold, progressive politician, Teddy was certain to be reelected in 1904, which meant there was little hope of advancement for Democratic appointees. David Wallace’s customs job had been placed under civil service protection during the Cleveland administration, but this fact was not much consolation to a man who desperately needed to make more money. Instead, he only spiraled deeper into alcoholism and debt.

Thanks to some dedicated researchers at the National Archives, I have obtained another painful glimpse of David Wallace’s financial problems from letters that flowed between Kansas City and Washington, D.C.

In 1889, his sympathetic boss, Surveyor William L. Kessinger, wrote to the secretary of the treasury asking for “additional compensation” for David Wallace and another deputy surveyor for extra work performed by them. The request was stonily denied by the Republican.

In 1901, the surveyor asked the Treasury Department to increase David Wallace’s salary to $1,500 a year. The treasury agreed to $1,400. The extra money did not do much good because, in the following year, David Wallace was dunned by the Credit Clearing House for an unpaid debt of $3.50. The debt collection agency sent the complaint to Washington, D.C., and a brisk letter from an assistant secretary of the treasury ordered the surveyor to look into the matter. More letters followed, in which the clearing house claimed “we have seen Mr. Wallace at least half a dozen times and on each occasion he has promised to settle the matter, but when called upon for the money is ready with another excuse, and now we do not believe he has any intention of carrying out his promises.”

To be unable to pay this debt, and go through the humiliation of being reported to his employers, must have been an excruciating experience for Madge Gates Wallace’s husband. But all he could do was beg the reluctant government for more money. This time, his boss decided to get some backing, and he persuaded two inspectors from the New Orleans District headquarters to issue a report stating that David Wallace “was the most efficient man in the office at this port [Kansas City], yet his salary, $1,400 per annum, is the smallest paid any clerk here.” This endorsement persuaded the Republicans in Washington to approve a $200 a year raise.

During these same years, David Wallace was borrowing money from his father-in-law to pay his taxes. In 1901, he was two years in arrears and was in a panic that his house was going to be advertised and sold by the county collector. That same year, George Porterfield Gates paid for some badly needed shingling and painting, which cost several hundred dollars. When Grandfather Gates gave eleven-year-old George Wallace $5 for a Christmas present, his mother used it to help pay for an overcoat, which he “needed badly.”

His double life as cheerful hail-fellow politician and debt-haunted failure became more and more unbearable to David Wallace. At home, he received little consolation or support from his wife. Madge Gates Wallace had been raised as a lady, shielded from the harsh economic realities of life. Like most women of her era, she believed there was a “woman’s sphere” and a “man’s sphere,” and what happened in the man’s sphere was none of a wife’s business, especially if she was a lady. Her two sisters had married successful men. She could not understand - and probably could not love - a man who was a failure.

Complicating matters during these years was the illness of Madge Gates Wallace’s brother Frank. He contracted tuberculosis, and his parents took him to Colorado, to Texas, and finally to Mexico in a desperate attempt to cure him. Madge missed her mother and father acutely and became “homesick,” David Wallace told George Gates, every time she got a letter from them. In several letters, David Wallace remarked how “lonesome” 219 North Delaware looked, standing dark and empty. David Wallace struck an even gloomier note when he discussed his finances. “To be frank with you, I get pretty
blue
[his italics] over matters. I do the very best that I can, but it seems that little good results.” In another letter, he wrote: “I try to look on the bright side of things, but even then it is dark.”

In the summer of 1902, Madge Wallace and her four children vacationed in Colorado Springs at the home of a Gates relative, possibly her uncle Walter Gates, leaving her husband alone in Independence. Mary Paxton, already a shrewd observer of people, wrote Bess a letter full of cheerful gossip about who was falling in and out of love with whom. She then told how one night “I sat over in your yard with your father, so he didn’t have time to be lonely. “There is more than a hint in those words that Bess had confided to Mary her fear that her father would gravitate to the courthouse saloon.

When his family returned from their vacation in Colorado, David Wallace seems to have made an attempt to control his drinking. He avoided his cronies at the courthouse saloon and even eschewed local meetings of the Masons, where he, like most Missouri politicians, had been a popular figure. He divided his time between home and office. When Mary Paxton’s mother died of tuberculosis on May 15, 1903, David was on hand to help his neighbors with the funeral arrangements. Mary long remembered his kindness and sympathy; she even recalled the way he had come over to the house on the morning of the funeral to set up chairs in their parlor for the mourners. But his good intentions, his innate good nature, did not prevent Bess Wallace’s father from sinking deeper and deeper into debt - and depression.

Mary Gentry Paxton had, among her many gifts, a talent for poetry. On May 22, 1903, a week after her death, the Jackson
Examiner
prefaced her obituary with one of her poems.

That was a lovely poem for a woman dying of tuberculosis to write. But some of those thoughts may have had sinister implications for David Wallace. He also had struggled with pain and dread and weakness and longings vain. He also yearned to be restored, whole, rested, and strong.

On June 17, 1903, four days after his twentieth wedding anniversary, David Wallace went to bed early. But he did not sleep well. He awoke in the dawn, not uncommon for people suffering from depression. He lay there listening to the first twittering birds in the elms around his house. His wife slept soundly beside him. David Wallace got up and tiptoed to a writing desk in the bedroom. Slowly, carefully, he opened a drawer. In the semidarkness, his eyes found the blue-black gleam of a revolver.

It was not unusual for a man to have a gun in his house in those days. Missouri was a Western state. Police forces were small and burglaries surprisingly frequent, even on fashionable Delaware Street. David Wallace picked up the revolver and walked softly, steadily down the hall to a bathroom in the rear of the house. Perhaps he paused there to stare at himself in the mirror, to tell himself one last time that it was all a bad dream, that somehow, somewhere, he could find a way to make his wife happy, his children proud of him. Then he placed the muzzle behind his left ear and pulled the trigger.

The gun crashed in the dawn. The harsh sound reverberated through the house. In her bedroom, eighteen-year-old Bess Wallace sat up, trembling. She heard her brother Frank running down the hall to the bathroom. There was a cry of anguish. “Papa! Papa’s shot himself!”

Next door, Mary Paxton was awakened by her father. “Mr. Wallace just shot himself,” he said. “Go see what you can do for Bessie.”

Mary flung on her clothes and rushed into the dawn. She found Bess walking back and forth behind the house, her head down, her hands clenched. Police, a doctor, other neighbors pounded up and down the stairs inside the house. For a half hour, there was a faint hope that David Wallace might live. Then Madge Gates Wallace began screaming and sobbing. The two young women, already best friends, and now united by a searing bond of sorrow, walked back and forth together, saying nothing. What was there to say?

Those first hours were only the beginning of the Wallaces’ agony. Two days later, the Jackson
Examiner
published a graphic account of the suicide on the front page. It contained a moving tribute to the “sweetness” of David Wallace’s nature, his “natural and spontaneous” attractiveness. It also included such grisly lines as: “The ball passed through his head and out at the right temple and fell into the bath tub.” The story ended on an emotional note that could only have been heart-wrenching for the family to read: “Why should such a man take his own life? It is a question we who loved him are unable to answer and one which has been asked many times from hearts torn in rebellion against the things that are.”

Meanwhile, David Wallace’s fellow Masons had taken charge of the funeral. He recently had been elected the presiding officer of the Knights Templars in the state of Missouri. They attempted to console the family by giving the dead man what some people have called the most elaborate funeral ever held in Independence. Hundreds of plumed and beribboned knights escorted the body from the First Presbyterian Church to the Wallace plot in Woodlawn Cemetery. A fellow Knight Templar from Kansas City gave a sonorous oration at the grave. He, too, paid tribute to David Wallace’s gift for friendship and closed with the claim that his “genial smile and warm heart” would “shine with greater glory and refulgence in the beautiful but unexplored beyond.”

No one among these well-intentioned people seemed to have realized that they were only worsening the family’s agony with all this public attention. Even today, most families will try to persuade a
newspaper not to publish that a loved one has committed suicide. In 1903, it was considered a far worse stigma. For Madge Gates Wallace, it was mortifying beyond belief. It flung her from the top of Independence’s social hierarchy to the bottom. She could not bear the disgrace. “She just went to pieces,” was the way one member of the family described it years later.

Complicating her collapse was the discovery that David Wallace was heavily in debt and had left no will. The ever sympathetic surveyor of the port of Kansas City, William Kessinger, wrote to Washington suggesting that his deputy’s salary for the month of June be paid in full. The Republican at the Treasury informed him that there was “no authority of law” to pay a nickel beyond the day of David Wallace’s death.

It is frightening to think about what might have happened to Bess and her three younger brothers if her grandparents were not alive and willing and able to rescue them. George Gates and his wife rushed back to Independence by the fastest available trains to comfort their shattered daughter and her children. Nana’s tall, bearded presence not only guaranteed economic security; he was a crucial, steadying influence. His gentle wife Elizabeth played an equally vital role in offering their shattered daughter and grandchildren a loving refuge. Elizabeth Gates knew from firsthand experience the blows that fate could deliver. When she was a child of eight in England, her entire family had died of some epidemic disease and she had been sent to America to live with her sister.

The four young Wallaces and their mother were welcomed into the big house on North Delaware Street. But Madge Wallace’s grief and shame could not be assuaged by this retreat. Her parents decided it might be better if they all retreated from Independence for a while. They had left their ailing son, Frank, in Colorado Springs, probably with the same Gates relative whom Madge and the children had visited during the previous summer. Telegraphs whizzed to this sympathetic man. In twenty-four hours, the grief-stricken refugees were aboard the Missouri Pacific’s crack flyer,
The Santa Fe,
which deposited them in Colorado Springs the following day.

They stayed a full year. A year that is a blank in young Bess Wallace’s life - a year from which not a single letter survives. But it is not an unimportant year. In those twelve months in Colorado Springs’ clear air, with Pike’s Peak and the other majestic crags of the Rockies towering above her, Bess struggled to understand her father’s suicide. A terrible wound had been inflicted on her spirit. Never again could she regard the world with the serene self-confidence, the blithe optimism, of her girlhood. In sleepless nights and on lonely walks, she had to cope with agonizing questions of guilt and responsibility.

When a woman loves someone as intensely as Bess had loved her father, and he turns his back on her and that love in such an absolute, devastating way, inevitably she questions her own ability to love. As an intelligent, observant young woman, she also had to question the nature of her mother’s love. Something fundamental had failed. She could not bring herself to place all the blame on her father, on ideas such as moral weakness. He had been a loving man, a generous one. Why had his wife’s love failed to sustain him? Was it the cruelty, the callousness of politics that had destroyed him?

No one, above all not an eighteen-year-old girl, could answer these tormenting questions. They settled into Bess Wallace’s mind and soul as doubts, voices that whispered to her in the night. But in this year in Colorado, Bess was able to reach certain conclusions. She saw that her mother’s way of loving her father, the passive, tender but more or less mindless love of the genteel lady, was a mistake. It failed to share the bruises, the fears, the defeats a man experienced in his world. It left him exposed to spiritual loneliness. If she ever found a man she could trust - and that must have seemed a dubious proposition during that first sorrowful year - Bess Wallace vowed she would share his whole life, no matter how much pain it cost her. She rejected absolutely and totally the idea of a woman’s sphere and a man’s sphere.

Bess did not blame her mother for her father’s death. She loved Madge Wallace, also too. To love was added the pity she felt when she saw how shattered her mother was by the catastrophe. Blame was not a word Bess could ever use. But a kind of judgment, an emotional separation took place between mother and daughter during that year in Colorado or soon after their return to Independence in 1904.

Bess saw that she had to become a different woman from her mother. Her success as an athlete and her role as an older sister probably prepared her for this change. But the primary force was sheer necessity. Someone had to take charge of their family, and Madge Wallace was incapable of it. At nineteen, Bess became the parent of her three brothers - and the semi-parent of her mother. Even then, it was obvious that Madge Wallace would never resume a normal life.

I am speaking here of leadership, of a person as a spiritual and psychological force in others’ lives. Grandfather Gates’ money paid for servants and food and clothing. Although he was sixty-nine and his wife was sixty-three, they should not be underestimated as forces in their own right. But they had four other children, all of whom had produced grandchildren. Their feelings for the Wallaces, however poignant, were inevitably diluted by these other descendants.

The Wallaces were acutely aware of these other relatives. Although there was little overt hostility, there must have been some rumblings of discontent about the possibility that the Wallaces would devour all Grandfather Gates’ money and leave nothing for the rest of the heirs. At any rate, soon after the return to Independence, Frank Wallace decided to quit high school and get a job because he did not want to take any more help from his grandfather. Only someone who knows the importance Bess Wallace attached to a college education can appreciate the pain this decision must have caused her.

In 1905, twenty-year-old Bess enrolled in the Barstow School in Kansas City. Founded by Wellesley graduate Mary Barstow in 1884, the school’s chief purpose was the preparation of young women for admission to the leading Eastern colleges - Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar - whose requirements were printed in the back of the Barstow catalog. Well-to-do people in Independence and Kansas City also sent their daughters to Barstow for the academic course, which offered a “broad and thorough” education to those who did not plan to attend college. Barstow was a finishing school, but a tough one. Mary Barstow believed that “to educate women was to educate a nation.”

A glimpse at Barstow’s approach emerges from an account of their first basketball game with Kansas City’s Manual Training High School. As the Manual team came out on the floor, its supporters shouted: “I yell, you yell, all yell, Manual!” To which Barstow replied: “Ho oi, yo ho! Ho oi, yoho! Barstow!” an adaptation of the warrior maidens’ cry in Wagner’s
Die Walk
ü
re.
Adding injury to this elitist insult, Barstow won, 12-10.

Bess enjoyed her year at Barstow. As usual, her marks were excellent, an A in Rhetoric, an A+ in Literature, an A in French. She made new friends, in particular Agnes and Laura Salisbury, whose father owned a 600-acre stock farm outside Independence. She came in touch with the larger world of Kansas City. She used her athletic ability to become the star forward on the basketball team and in a spring track meet she won the shot put.

For Bess, one of the high points of the year was the challenge match with Independence High School. Barstow was used to playing basketball outdoors, and the game was their first under a roof. The girls had to become used to the “inconveniences of the ceiling,” which suggests it was a rather low one. But they were soon playing, according to the reporter in the
Weathercock,
the Barstow paper, as though they always had practiced under a roof amid cheers. Bess and her fellow Barstow warrior maidens trounced poor Independence, 22-10.

During this same year, Bess resumed her social life in Independence. Her name appeared as a guest at various receptions, in particular at the Swope mansion. But there was no mention of Madge Gates Wallace’s name in the social notices. That year was the beginning of a lifelong retreat from the world around her. Other Independence women busied themselves in charitable activities, such as The Needlework Guild, which made clothes for the poor, pursued culture in study clubs, and enjoyed themselves at weekly bridge club meetings. Sadly, Madge Wallace remained behind the substantial walls of her parents’ house, a virtual recluse.

It is not hard to imagine the pain this caused her children, especially her daughter. At the end of her year at Barstow, Bess did not go to college like many of her classmates. She went home and resumed her role as head of the Wallace family and her mother’s companion. But she did not become a recluse. With that interesting blend of pity and objective judgment that colored her relationship with her mother, Bess continued to enjoy the world around her.

She helped organize a bridge club among friends from high school as well as from Barstow. She became active in The Needlework Guild, which in spite of its Dickensian name, was an effective charity. She continued to enjoy sports, particularly tennis and horseback riding. Her Barstow friends, Agnes and Laura Salisbury, usually had enough horses on their farm to mount a cavalry troop, which was what the Delaware Street crowd looked like, sometimes, trotting down the narrow dirt roads in the spring and summer, throwing up clouds of dust.

Young men from Independence and Kansas City began to call on twenty-one-year-old Bess Wallace. One of these callers was Chrisman Swope, the second son of that wealthy clan. It must have been a little exciting to be wooed by one of the richest young men in town. He was often at the door of 219 North Delaware Street to take Bess for rides in his buggy. But Chrisman’s money seems to have been his only recommendation. He was, like other members of his family, a little odd. One evening as Bess climbed into the buggy, she heard a strange quacking sound. “I hope you won’t mind a stop at the market, Bessie,” Chrisman said. “I want to sell a few of my ducks.”

Raising fowl was a hobby that many people practiced in Independence. But Bess took an exceedingly dim view of sharing Chrisman’s buggy with a dozen noisy ducks. She was not inclined to tolerate that much eccentricity, even for a slice of the Swope fortune. Chrisman’s buggy was seen no more on Delaware Street.

Around this time, Bess announced she did not want to be called Bessie, which she had never liked, although she had signed it on her high-school papers. “Bess” was what her close friends called her from now on.

Like her father, Bess had a remarkable capacity for friendship. “She set the styles; she was always the leader of our crowd,” her friend, Mary Paxton recalled. When people married or moved away, they could not seem to let Bess go. They wrote her letter after letter, continuing to share their lives with her. But no friend was as close as Mary Paxton. Although most of their letters are lost, we can be sure that they continued to correspond throughout Mary’s year at Hollins College in Virginia.