Truman(5)

The house in which he was born was more modest than anything in which he subsequently lived. It was not a share-cropper’s shack, nor was it a solid farmhouse; it was between the two. It remained his home for little more than a year. Twice in 1885 his family moved to different houses in Cass County. Then in 1886 they removed themselves to the Young house at Grandview, nominally for ‘Peanuts’ Truman to manage the farm of the ageing Solomon. The management role must have been either nominal or unsuccessful, for in another three years they were off again, to Independence, without any apparent ill-effect upon the farm.

Independence was already a proper town, although with a population of only 6,000. Today it has 110,000 and is effectively a nine-mile-distant satellite of Kansas City. Then, Kansas City was an exploding place of 55,000. The inhabitants of Independence regarded it as a ‘Yankee’ city and themselves, with some residual Southern ways, as quite distinct. However, the presence of Kansas City was immanent. Both it and Independence were part of Jackson County, which was the political unit, and the encompassment of Harry Truman’s life until 1934.

The reason given for this move was that Harry needed ‘graded’ schooling, as opposed to everyone being taught in one class at Grandview. Maybe his father’s desire to escape from too close a Young dependence and to try some of his speculative ventures also had something to do with it. They lived successively in two substantial houses in Independence, each for six years. Then John Anderson Truman had a disastrous year on the grain market and they were forced to sell up and move in straightened circumstances to the relative anonymity of Kansas City.

These twelve years, however, had seen Harry Truman through his schooling in a compact community. He was a boy apart, for his poor eyesight meant that he had to wear spectacles from the age of six, which at that time was regarded as an oddity in the mid-West and was held to preclude him from sports or rough group pastimes. He became a voracious reader but this did not lead to any outstanding brilliance in his school classes. A number of good women teachers made a great impact upon him, but their reminiscences give the impression that his impact upon them, under the stimulus of his subsequent fame, was more retrospective than actual. He learned to be a competent pianist, and for a time went to special lessons in Kansas City, and practised for two hours a day. There was a suggestion that he might aspire to be a concert performer, but this was not pursued. His daughter says straightforwardly that he was not good enough, even though he was once given a private demonstration by Paderewski. He retained a tinkling talent throughout his life.

His more realistic ambition was to become an army officer. He was fascinated by military history, and a military education would have the advantage of being free, so he was specially taught, with one other boy, for entry to West Point, or possibly the naval academy at Annapolis. The other boy got to Annapolis, but did not complete the course. Truman was turned down because of his eyesight. Additionally, as a result of his father’s débâcle, he could not go to college. Instead he spent the summer of his eighteenth year as a time-keeper for construction workers who were doubling the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé tracks from Chicago to Kansas City. Then he went to work as a clerk in a Kansas City bank. He was always insistent that he had had a happy childhood, and he had more than enough buoyancy to survive this wave of vicissitudes. He was mostly uncomplaining.

He was also a good bank clerk (he got his salary up from $35 to $100 a month), but he had no vocation for banking. This was for the adequate reasons that he was not interested in money and did not like bankers. It was a persistent view. He was against usury. He was also suspicious of the East, where most banking power lay. And he was against pomposity and hypocrisy, which he associated with the power of wealth. ‘High hats’, who prayed too loud, were always in the forefront of his gallery of demonology. He was, I suppose, in favour of American ‘free enterprise’, but in a curious way, for his sympathy and even his respect was always at least as much with the failures as with the successes.

While in Kansas City he joined a new National Guard organization—bank clerks have always been good recruiting material for part-time armies—drilled once a week in the armoury, went to camp for six summers, was given charge of a gun in a troop of artillery, and was proud of a blue uniform with red trimmings.3 He also did part-time work as an usher in a theatre, and saw most of the touring vaudeville acts free. He paid to go to classical concerts.

By 1906 the whole family was back in Grandview. The explanation given is that they were summoned home to run the family farm. But why? There was no obvious change in Young family circumstances. Solomon Young had been dead for thirteen years, and his son Harrison Young (the one the union   Red Legs had tried to hang) was still available and under 60 although probably developing a drink problem. In any event they returned. ‘… I became a real farmer,’ Harry Truman recorded, ‘plowed, sowed, reaped, milked cows, fed hogs, doctored horses, baled hay and did everything there was to do on a 600 acre farm with my father and brother. But we never did catch up with our debts. We always owed the bank something—sometimes more, sometimes less—but we always owed the bank.’4