Truman(7)

Towards the end of his eleven years on the farm Truman became more externally active. He was involved in oil, zinc and lead prospecting, first in Texas and then in south-western Missouri and the adjacent parts of Oklahoma. They were all relatively small-scale enterprises. In one he lost about $7,500. Like all prospectors he nearly struck big. Like most he did not. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t be President if we’d hit’ he wrote to a partner forty years later. In the prospectus for an oil consortium of which he was Treasurer, he described himself a little vaguely as ‘native of Jackson County, Missouri; widely known in Kansas City’. Both he and the investors came out about even. Although he had a touch of his father’s speculative fever, he lacked the essential ingredient for making money, which is simply the overwhelming desire to do so. But he worked hard, dismally, and unsuccessfully to bring a lead and zinc enterprise at Commerce, Oklahoma to fruition throughout the spring and summer of 1916. He had no touch. He had no luck. The result was failure and the impression from his letters is that, while only just escaping his grasp, it was nevertheless almost totally inevitable. In business he snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory as consistently as in elections he was later to do the reverse.

The entry of the United States into World War I in April 1917 aroused his patriotism more than his idealism: ‘… I don’t give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether there’s a League of Nations or whether Russia has a Red government or a purple one …’ he was writing a year or so later. ‘We came out here to help whip the Hun. We helped a little, the Hun yowled for peace and he’s getting it in large doses …’3 Perhaps even more it offered him an honourable escape from the defeats of the preceding twelve months. He became immediately involved with the expansion of his National Guard battery into a regiment of field artillery. As part of the core he expected to become a sergeant, but found himself elected, under the system which prevailed in the early days of World War I recruitment, as in the Civil War, a first lieutenant instead. The regiment, the 129th Field Artillery as it had become, was sent to Camp Donihan in Oklahoma for training. It was the first time that Truman, at the age of 33, had been away from Western Missouri for more than a week or so. He enjoyed army life and was an efficient soldier. He was good with the men, learnt his gunnery proficiently, and ran an exceptionally successful regimental canteen. His assistant in this last was Sergeant Eddie Jacobson, a 26-year-old Kansas City Jew of New York City origin whose family were in the clothing business. Truman and Jacobson paid out vast percentage dividends on a small capital, and were commended for the most efficient canteen in the division. They congratulated each other on their complementary business acumen.

In the spring of 1918 Truman was sent to France as part of an advance party of the regiment. He saw New York,5 the ocean, and Europe for the first time. So far as Europe was concerned it was also the last time until he became President. He was overseas for almost exactly a year. As soon as he arrived he was promoted captain. He was sent on a command course for six weeks and returned as adjutant of one of the battalions into which the 129th was split. A month or so later he was made commander of Battery D, which had proved obstreperous, and too much for several predecessors. The men almost all came from an Irish Catholic district of Kansas City. Truman claimed that he was one of only six Protestants out of more than 180. He made a success of it. This was the most important achievement until then in Truman’s life. It compensated for his inability to play games or get to West Point or strike oil. Thereafter the virtues of Battery D were given an unchallenged status in Truman’s folklore.

The Battery’s military exploits were respectable rather than remarkable. Between August 20th and November 11th it was three or four times in action near Verdun and in the Vosges. It was subjected to occasional bombardment and stood up well. But it was never in direct contact with the enemy infantry. It never lost a gun or a man. Neither the danger nor the privation was comparable with that suffered by most French or British artillery units. For Truman it was a short war which forged long-lasting friendships.

After the Armistice he stayed in France for another five months. He had periods of leave in Paris and in Nice and Monte Carlo, but life was mostly a series of poker games in muddy base camps, first behind Verdun and then near Le Mans. He landed in New York in late April 1919, and was discharged in Oklahoma four weeks later.

In June he was married, in an Episcopal church—the Wallace influence—and moved into Mrs Wallace’s fourteen-roomed house on North Delaware Street, Independence, which old Porterfield Gates had built in 1867, and which was to remain Truman’s Jackson County home for the rest of his life. In July he arranged with his old partner Eddie Jacobson that they should jointly open a men’s outfitting business in the centre of Kansas City. They secured a good site on 12th Street, just opposite the new Muehlebach Hotel and close to the older Baltimore, and they paid a high rent. They traded up. With wheat at $2.15 a bushel it was possible to sell $15 shirts. They probably overtraded as well. They soon had $40,000’s worth of stock. They had a good first year. Then the post-war boom began to crack. The main lesson Truman claimed to have learned from his retail experience was never to elect a Republican president, and particularly one who appointed such an epitome of an Eastern banker as Andrew Mellon as his Secretary of the Treasury. In any event this early dose of monetarism helped to reduce the price of wheat to 88 cents in 1922, though the Democrats had seen it fall to $1.44 even before the election. It also reduced the demand for silk shirts in Kansas City. The $40,000 stock became worth $10,000. Truman and Jacobson ceased trading in the spring of 1922. Jacobson later became bankrupt, but Truman, who had politics in view, declined to petition, and eventually managed to pay off all his debts. He later gave his total loss in the business at about $28,000. On his return from the war he had estimated that he had $15 to $20,000 in free capital, plus a small amount of land. The failure left him without assets, but in no way close to the breadline. He had too many relations and friends for that.