Truman(3)

‘He was a self-educated man, and he mispronounced a reasonable number of words, which in the beginning puzzled me. Then I realised that while he had often read them, he had seldom, if ever, spoken them aloud, not even in many cases heard them spoken aloud. It’s like that if you are one of the few readers in town.’2

This gets close to the central paradox of Truman. His manner was that of a Midwestern machine politician, and he was intensely loyal to his background and to those who had helped him on the way up. His friends were mostly ‘regular fellows’, and he had many of the values of a member of a Rotary Club. But a few of those he most respected and liked—Dean Acheson and General Marshall—already mentioned—were very different from this and from each other. His affections were heavily concentrated upon his close relations, and he was not much at ease in female company outside his family.

It is tempting to say that he was an intellectual amongst political ‘pros’ and a political ‘pro’ amongst intellectuals. But that is much too easy an aphorism. As a boy and a young man he was more of a book-worm than an intellectual. He absorbed many facts, and he thought about them a good deal, but his conversation involved no spinning of general theories. He neither possessed nor aspired to intellectual or social sophistication. His speech and his writing—and he wrote a lot of unsent letters and undelivered speeches, even under the pressure of the presidency—were generally splendidly direct, but the choice of words was rarely distinguished, and the sentiments sometimes narrow and intolerant: ‘Sissy’ was one which he employed a good deal. He used it frequently, disparagingly and foolishly about Adlai Stevenson. But when once asked at a school question and answer session, after he had been President, whether he had been popular as a boy, he replied:

‘Why no, I was never popular. The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists. I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy.’3

This interplay provided part of the formation of his personality and character. He was an ‘anti-sissy’ sissy, a puritan from the poker rooms, a backwoods politician who became a world statesman not just because he was President of the United States in the plenitude of its power but because he had an exceptional sense of duty and power of decision, and because he could distinguish big issues from little ones, and was as generally right on the big ones as he was frequently wrong on the small ones.





2

JACKSON COUNTY


Truman’s early life was wholly contained in the western part of the state of Missouri. There is no evidence that, as a young man, he ever went as far afield as Chicago, let alone to New York or Washington. Yet within this small perimeter his life was mobile. He changed houses, and later jobs, with almost excessive frequency. But there was also a strong undercurrent of stability, which came from the homogeneity of his stock, a close-knit family, and the continued existence of a fair-sized family farm at the impressively named Grandview.

His four grandparents were all Americans of several generations’ standing who, coming from Kentucky, had settled in Missouri in the 1840s. The Truman side was of English origin. The origin of the Youngs, his mother’s family, was Ulster, with a German infusion. The two families embraced various nonconformist sects: Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists; no Episcopalians, and certainly no Catholics. In the literal meaning of the acronym, Harry Truman was as WASP as could be, although his style and outlook had little in common with the connotation for which the term was later contrived. This was not because of simple questions of geography or even wealth. The families, despite fluctuations and vicissitudes, had a certain underlying prosperity. Margaret Truman, the President’s daughter, in no way a pretentious lady, stated in her biography of her father,1 that the Youngs at least were ‘certainly upper-middle class’ and that the Grandview farm, even when it had been reduced by one of these fluctuations, regularly earned $15,000 a year in the early 1900s, which would be the equivalent of a good $150,000 today.1

Western Missouri is obviously a long way from the Hudson Valley and the Hyde Park home of Truman’s predecessor as president, who was born only two years before him. But it is barely 300 miles from Bloomington, Illinois, where Adlai Stevenson, his successor as leader of the Democratic Party and only 16 years his junior, grew up. The Stevensons, while substantially more prosperous than the Young/Trumans, were not rich by grand American turn of the century standards. Yet the chasm between Stevenson life and Truman life was immense. The Stevensons lived in a garrison town of American gentry; the Trumans were part of the countryside around them.