Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (3 page)

As president, Harry often took walks around Washington. Here he is in 1950, walking from his temporary home in the Blair House to the White House, accompanied by Secret Service agents. (The White House was being renovated at the time.)

The Trumans would ride home in the presidential railcar, the
Ferdinand Magellan,
which was attached to the end of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s regular National Limited. Truman had undertaken his historic whistle-stop campaign on board the
Ferdinand Magellan
in 1948. The car was now at Eisenhower’s disposal, of course, but the new president had offered it to the Trumans in an effort to mend fences. Truman appreciated the gesture, but for the time being, anyway, he kept the hatchet very much unburied.

Unexpectedly, a crowd of over three thousand had gathered at Union Station to see the Trumans off: senators, members of Congress, supreme court justices, generals, admirals, old friends, foreign diplomats, ordinary Washingtonians. They sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Auld Lang Syne.” “Good-bye, Mr. President,” they shouted. “Good-bye, Harry!” Many wept. Said prim Dean Acheson with uncharacteristic folksiness, “We’re saying good-bye to the greatest guy that ever was.” The Trumans were deeply moved by the impromptu going away party. “I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing,” Harry told the crowd from the rear platform of the
Ferdinand Magellan.
“I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred—and that’s just what I intend to do!” At six-thirty, the valves underneath the train hissed and the conductor called out, “All aboard.” As the train slowly pulled out of the station, Harry and Bess stood waving from the back platform. They seemed reluctant for the moment to end. They kept waving as the train disappeared into the Washington night. “They’ve gone back to Missouri,” a porter said wistfully as he watched the couple fade into darkness.

The twenty-six-hour ride home was reminiscent of the whistle-stop campaign. At each stop along the way, great crowds came out to say farewell to their erstwhile president. “Crowd at Silver Spring, Md., some three or four hundred,” wrote Truman in his diary. “Crowd at Harpers Ferry, Grafton, and it was reported to me at every stop all night long. Same way across Indiana and Illinois.” The outpouring was touching. It was also surprising, because Harry Truman was not very popular when he left the White House, mainly due to the stalemate in Korea. In 1952 his approval rating in a Gallup Poll had sunk to 22 percent—a record low unmatched until 2008. On the eve of his departure, newspaper columnist Walter Trohan called Truman “one of the most mediocre men ever to inherit power…. Our Harry has rattled around in the White House like a peanut in a ball room and has floundered in the president’s chair.” Yet, as the outpouring of affection on the trip home attested, many Americans were beginning to realize just what they were losing.

Several times on the ride home Truman left the
Ferdinand Magellan
to stroll through the rest of the train, stopping frequently to chat with passengers. It was something he hadn’t been able to do in eight years, to move about as he wished, unencumbered by Secret Service agents. When he walked into one car and the passengers began to rise in deference, Truman stopped them. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’m no longer president.”

At 7:15 on the morning after the inauguration—Truman’s first full day as ex-president—the train stopped for a fifteen-minute layover in Cincinnati. Truman disembarked with the other passengers and waited patiently in line to buy the morning papers at the station’s newsstand. A photographer spotted him and called out, “Look this way, Mr. President.” “I’m not ‘Mr. President’ anymore,” Truman answered with a smile. “I’m just plain Harry Truman.” This was a point of etiquette unresolved at the time. America still didn’t know what to call its former chief executives. “I don’t care what people call me,” Truman said when asked how he should be addressed. “I’ve been called everything.” But Truman made it clear that he always called Herbert Hoover “Mr. President.” “Like a five-star general or admiral,” Truman explained, “[a president] doesn’t have his former rank taken away on retirement.” In time, it would become customary to address Truman and all other ex-presidents as “Mr. President.”

The train reached Independence at 8:05 that night. The reception was positively tumultuous. More than eight thousand people swarmed the town’s tiny depot to welcome Harry and Bess home. As they stepped from the
Ferdinand Magellan
for the last time and began making their way through the massive crowd, an American Legion band struck up “The Missouri Waltz” (never mind that Truman hated the song). The Trumans were overwhelmed with emotion. Standing behind a forest of microphones planted on the platform, Harry addressed the crowd. He joked about being in the “army of the unemployed”—though he was quick to add that it was a “small army.”

“I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this reception,” he said. “It’s magnificent—much more than we anticipated. It’s a good feeling to be back home.” Bess could barely speak. “I’m just delighted to be home,” she said. “This is certainly a wonderful welcome.” When they finally reached their house at 219 North Delaware Street, another fifteen hundred people were waiting to greet them. “Mrs. T. and I were overcome,” Truman later wrote of that night. “It was the payoff for thirty years of hell and hard work.”

Harry and Bess walked hand in hand into the house. The next morning Harry was asked what he planned to do. “Take the grips up to the attic,” he said, using the old-fashioned word for suitcases.

Retirement, as it has come to be known, is a relatively recent concept. The first edition of Noah Webster’s
American Dictionary of the English Language,
published in 1828, lists four meanings for the word, none of which mention age. You worked until you couldn’t work anymore, in which case your family, probably large, provided for you. Or you worked until you died. No gold watches, no pensions, no Social Security.

But older workers had no place in the Industrial Revolution. They couldn’t operate the newfangled machinery as nimbly as younger workers. And assembly lines were only as efficient as their weakest link, which was usually an older worker. The aged were simply in the way, and many employers began wondering how best to get rid of them.

The answer, suggested a Johns Hopkins professor named William Osler in a 1905 lecture, was “a peaceful departure by chloroform.” Osler was being facetious (one hopes), but his point was serious. Osler believed men over forty contributed little to society. “Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty and … we would practically be where we are today.”

As for men over sixty, Osler thought them completely useless. His proposal, short of chloroform, was mandatory retirement. There would be an “incalculable benefit … if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.” (Osler, who was fifty-five at the time, would live another fifteen years—and never retire.)

But older workers couldn’t afford to stop working. They needed the money. In response, some employers began offering pensions—in the name of efficiency, not altruism. Funded by younger, lower-paid employees, pensions gave older workers the means to retire—sometimes involuntarily. A foreman in a Connecticut textile mill recalled how one worker was “retired” in 1916:

But by 1932, just 15 percent of American workers were eligible for private pensions. Not until the Social Security Act was signed by FDR in 1935 were most workers guaranteed at least some income after retirement.

As a government employee, however, Harry Truman did not qualify for Social Security. And he’d left the Senate too soon to qualify for a congressional pension.

His only income was that army pension.

Independence, Missouri,
Winter and Spring, 1953

N
o twentieth-century president retired to more humble surroundings than Harry Truman. When not traveling the world, Teddy Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill, his estate on Long Island. Woodrow Wilson retreated to a fashionable townhouse in Washington, the only ex-president to stay in the capital. Herbert Hoover eventually settled into a plush suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Gerald Ford would retire to the pristine golf courses of Palm Desert, California. Bill Clinton would choose tony Westchester County, New York (mainly so his wife could run for the Senate).

But when Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, he returned to the same rambling, slightly ramshackle, two-and-a-half-story Victorian that he and Bess had lived in since their marriage thirty-four years earlier. It had been painted white when he became president in 1945, and hadn’t been painted again since. There was no air-conditioning. The only indication that it was the home of a luminary was the iron fence that surrounded the property. It had been erected in 1949 at the behest of Herbert Hoover, who had warned Truman that souvenir hunters would “tear the place down” otherwise. (Hoover said the doorknobs had been stolen off his childhood home in Iowa. Presumably he suffered no such thievery at the Waldorf.)

Known locally as the Gates-Wallace home, the house on Delaware Street was built, in fits and spurts, by George Porterfield Gates, Bess’s maternal grandfather, between 1867 and 1895. Bess, her three brothers, and her mother, Madge Gates Wallace, moved into the house in 1904 after Bess’s father committed suicide. After he married Bess, Harry moved into the already-crowded house as well. It was in their second-floor bedroom that their only child, Margaret, was born during a snowstorm on February 17, 1924. After Madge Gates Wallace died at age ninety in 1952, Harry and Bess bought out her brothers’ shares of the property, and, for the first time in their lives, the Trumans owned their own home. They would never own another.

Today the Truman home is managed by the National Park Service as part of the Harry S Truman National Historic Site in Independence. (Truman had no middle name—the “S” was meant to honor both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young—so the period after his middle initial is optional. The Park Service does not use one, unlike the National Archives and Records Administration, which runs the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Truman himself claimed to be neutral on the matter, though he usually used a period when signing his name.)

More than thirty thousand people visit the Truman home every year, but on my tour there were just two other people, a thirteen-year-old girl and her grandfather. The girl claimed her favorite subject was history, but thought the Germans had bombed Pearl Harbor and was unable to name Truman’s predecessor in the White House. Her grandfather seemed unusually interested in the home’s bathroom fixtures. Maybe he was a plumber. Our guide was a friendly ranger named Norton, who looked exactly like Santa Claus with a ponytail and a Smokey Bear hat. The house looks much as it did when Harry and Bess returned from Washington in 1953. The kitchen is painted a bright apple green with cherry red accents. Against the wall is a small red Formica table where Harry and Bess took most of their meals, a Proctor-Silex toaster standing sentinel on top. The furnishings throughout the house are simple, almost Spartan. A small reading room is lined with bookshelves sagging under the weight of history tomes and murder mysteries. There are two well-worn upholstered chairs—his and hers. On the end table next to hers lies a Dorothy L. Sayers novel. In the front parlor, a massive black-and-white television set is parked incongruously against one wall, near a piano. Norton, our guide, explained that Bess liked to watch baseball games. (Bess was a good athlete in her own right. Harry liked to brag that she was “the best shortstop they ever had in Independence.”)