Truman (7 page)

There had been considerable building since the war. The coming of the railroads, the pellmell growth of Kansas City, the rise of several new local enterprises had had an effect. North Delaware Street, which ran north-south, four blocks west of the Square, was a perfect example of the changed look. The large Bullene house, the Sawyer house with its Tiffany glass windows, the big Gates place were all new since the war, like the money that built them. The Bullenes belonged to the family that founded Kansas City’s most popular dry goods firm, Emery, Bird, Thayer. Aaron Sawyer was head of the Bank of Independence, which had been organized since the war. George Porterfield Gates was partner in the Waggoner-Gates Milling Company of Independence, founded in 1866, which hit a bonanza with “Queen of the Pantry Flour,” a product known throughout the Midwest.

Gates himself was part of a postwar Yankee influx. He had come from Vermont by way of Illinois, joined William Waggoner in the milling business in 1883, and two years later greatly remodeled and expanded his relatively modest house at the corner of North Delaware and Blue Avenue, spending in all, according to the Independence
Sentinel,
a fabulous $8,000. Painted gray with black trim at the windows, the finished clapboard “mansion” had fourteen rooms, verandas front and rear, fancy fretwork, tinted (“flashed”) glass in the front bay windows, slate roof, gas illumination, and hot and cold running water.

Gates’s partner, William Waggoner, lived in even grander style, across from the mill on Pacific Street, in the house George Caleb Bingham once occupied, but that Waggoner had done over sparing no expense. It sat on a knoll, in a leafy, parklike setting of 20 acres.

The Swope place on South Pleasant Street had a ballroom on the top floor. (The Swope fortune came from land in Kansas City.) The Vaile house on North Liberty, the showiest house in Independence, was a towering stone-trimmed, red-brick Victorian wedding cake, with thirty-one rooms and Carrara marble fireplaces. The Vaile stable had mahogany-paneled stalls. There was a greenhouse and four full-time gardeners. If Harvey Vaile, who made his money in “pure water” and contract mail delivery, was not the richest man in town, he certainly lived as though he were.

Overall it was quite a handsome community. The primary streets were paved, clean, and shaded by large old elms and cottonwoods. People took pride in their gardens. On summer evenings, after dark, families sat visiting on front porches, their voices part of the night for anybody crossing the lawns between houses.

National holidays and politics provided what little excitement occurred from one year to another. Most memorable for young Harry Truman was the day of Grover Cleveland’s second victory, in 1892, when the family was still in the house on Crysler Avenue. John Truman had scrambled to the top of the roof to tie a flag to the gilded weathervane, and that night, looking extremely proud, he rode a gray horse in a torchlight parade. Bessie Wallace’s friend Mary Paxton, a latter-day chronicler of town life, remembered how the men with their blazing torches came swinging down North Delaware leaving a trail of light under the dark trees. She, Harry, all their generation would remember it as a night-of-nights, since twenty years went by before Democrats, with the election of Wilson, could celebrate another presidential victory.

In lots of ways it was a country town still. Roosters crowed at dawn. Dinner remained a midday meal in many households. The standard Sunday dinner after church was fried chicken, buttered peas, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, and beaten biscuits, which, being made of Queen of the Pantry Flour, a “soft wheat” flour, were understood to be the world’s best. Mud-spattered buggies and farm wagons clogged the Square on Saturday nights when the farmers came to town for haircuts and supplies. Town boys grew up with farmer’s chores as part of the daily routine. Harry and Vivian had cows to milk, horses to curry, water, and feed, wood to split for the kitchen stove.

On clear winter nights, with the trees bare and the soft glow of gas and oil lamps still the only light in the windows of town, stars in the black sky overhead blazed with a clarity that residents of a later, “electrified” era would never experience.

Local boosters insisted on calling it a city and bragged about the new electric plant under construction at a cost of $30,000, or the new high school, which had cost still more. Local merchants were described as unexcelled “in regard to integrity, uprightness and faithfulness in business affairs and cordiality and good nature in social life.”

Yet for all this there was an air of great understated gentility, even sophistication. There were those in town, among the old moneyed families, who talked of travels in Europe, or summers in Colorado Springs. “Study groups” met to discuss literature and poetry, and with a degree of appreciation and vitality that could take visitors by surprise.

The teaching in the schools Harry attended was superb. In addition to Woodland College for Women, there was Presbyterian College, also for women, and St. Mary’s Academy for girls. These, to be sure, were only tiny, struggling institutions—the usual graduating class at Woodland numbered just a dozen or so—but they were well regarded and cause for much local pride. Independence, remembered Ethel Noland years later, “stood for culture,” a claim easy for outsiders to scoff at, she knew, but that she and others like her took very much to heart.

“There was conversation,” she said. “I mean by that talk about what was going on in the world, talk about ideas.”

The town supported two bookstores and most of the leading families took the Kansas City papers, in addition to the
Sentinel
or the Jackson
Examiner.
Kansas City, furthermore, was only a ten-mile ride by trolley or on the new train known as the Airline. So there was little sense of being cut off from the wide world, if the wide world was what you wished.

And with so much history attached to the town, no one with a feeling for the past could find it uninteresting. “No town in the west is richer in historical interest than the beautiful city of Independence,” declared a new guide to Independence. At the point south of town where the wagon trains had crossed Blue River, crevices worn by their wheels were still plainly evident. George Caleb Bingham had painted his
Order No. 11
in one of the old outbuildings at the Waggoner estate. The brick walls of the Chrisman-Sawyer Bank, on the northwest corner of the courthouse square, showed the scars still of Civil War battles, and on pleasant mornings in the years of Harry Truman’s boyhood, old Marshal Peacock could often be seen walking stiffly about town, a spare, erect figure with a white beard and cane, who, as everyone knew, still carried the bullet fired by Jim Crow Chiles lodged in his spine.

George Porterfield Gates, Bessie Wallace’s grandfather, liked to frighten and delight Bessie and her friends with his tale of a late-night drive home in a buggy from a long-ago country wedding. A mysterious rider had appeared out of the dark, put a gun to Gates’s neck, and held it there all the way into town. It was Jim Crow Chiles, who, Gates was sure, had only murder in his heart. But, as they turned down North Delaware Street, Jim Crow “laughed his fiendish laugh” and vanished in the night, as suddenly as he had appeared.

The atmosphere remained pervadingly southern—antebellum Old South, unreconstructed. Handkerchiefs were waved whenever the band played “Dixie.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy thrived, and such formal parties as attended by genteel young folk like Bessie Wallace and her friends were hardly different from those put on in Macon or Tuscaloosa, from the floral decorations entwining stair rails to the refreshments of chicken salad and charlotte russe. The biggest memorial in Woodland Cemetery was the Confederate monument. Portraits of Lee and Jackson were displayed prominently in many front parlors, and in summer Quantrill’s “boys”—grizzled, tobacco-chewing, Border War veterans dressed as if for church—gathered for daylong outdoor reunions, a portrait of Quantrill draped in crepe as their centerpiece. Often Jesse James’s brother Frank appeared for such occasions, causing great excitement.

At school, one of Harry’s favorite teachers, Ardelia Hardin, who taught Latin, would describe for the class how her father had been hit three times during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and left for dead until discovered by Catholic sisters and taken to a Baltimore hospital, where, once recovered, he refused to swear allegiance to the United States and for this was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. “Harry always wanted to know about that,” Miss Hardin would remember half a century later, very pleased.

Virtually the entire town was American-born, though nearly every black resident past the age of forty had been born in slavery. Immigrant Irish, Italians, Croatians, and other foreign, impoverished people of the kind crowding into the vile West Bottoms of Kansas City were rarely ever seen in Independence.

Black residents lived in what was called “Nigger Neck,” a cluster of makeshift houses and shacks in a persimmon grove northwest of the Square. Blacks were unwelcome at most stores and were denied use of the town library. Black children went to a separate school—the Young School, named for the free-black wagonmaker of pioneer days, Hiram Young—and while white families like the Trumans might feel great, lifelong affection for their own black servants, words like “nigger” and “coon” were used as a matter of course in so-called “polite society.” And below the surface always lay a threat of violence, should any blacks forget their “place.” News of lynchings in the South were given lurid play by both local papers, invariably in the spirit that the victim only got what he had coming to him. The summer of 1901, the year Harry finished high school, the Jackson
Examiner
declared on its editorial page:

There were also in town, the editors were careful to add, many law-abiding Negroes “who are good citizens and who understand the truth of what we say as well as anyone.”

Certain precepts and bywords were articles of faith in such a place, in such times, and nearly everybody growing up there was imbued with them, in principle at least:

Honesty was the best policy. It saved time and worry, because if you always told the truth you never had to keep track of what you said.

Make yourself useful.

Anything worthwhile required effort.

If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. “Never, never give up,” Harry’s father would say.

Children were a reflection of their parents. “Now Harry, you be good,” his mother would tell him time after time as he went out the door.

He appears never to have questioned such dictates, any more than he questioned the established inequality of black people. “In those days,” he would remember, “right was right and wrong was wrong, and you didn’t have to
talk
about it.”

Many of the most familiar guidelines came directly from the Bible: “Honor thy father and mother.” “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.” “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.” “Be of good cheer.”

From Sunday School and his own reading of the Bible, Harry knew many passages by heart—particularly Matthew 5, 6, and 7, the Sermon on the Mount. “Ye are the salt of the earth…. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works….”

He memorized a prayer, one he would say through much of his life:

Say what you mean, mean what you say, he was taught at home. Keep your word. Never get too big for your britches. Never forget a friend.

They were more than words-to-the-wise, they were bedrock, as clearly established, as integral to the way of life, it seemed, as were the very landmarks of the community, its schools, church steeples, and courthouse. Not everyone lived up to them, of course, but to Harry it seemed everyone ought to try.

The Square was the center of the world if the town was the limit of your experience and at age fourteen, while still in high school, Harry went to work on the Square at J. H. Clinton’s drugstore. It was his first paying job.

Clinton’s drugstore stood at the northeast corner of the Square. Proprietor Clinton lived upstairs. Harry’s job was to come in each weekday morning at 6:30 to open up the place, sweep the sidewalk, mop the floor, wipe the counters, and do as much overall dusting and cleaning as possible before seven o’clock when Mr. Clinton came down and it was time for Harry to leave for school. More than half a century later, he could remember it all in detail:

Two large glass vases in the front windows had to be cleaned and dusted, as well as a surrounding display of patent medicines. The windows were to be washed once a week, the prescription cases dusted “very, very carefully.” Saturdays and Sundays the boy worked from four in the afternoon until ten at night by the courthouse clock, when Mr. Clinton would lock up and Harry would head off in the dark, the lights in other shop windows along the Square going out one by one. Hurrying, he could make it home in twelve minutes.