Elizabeth Virginia Wallace was born on February 13, 1885, in a comfortable house on Ruby Street in Independence, Missouri. She grew up in a world that seemed, at first glance, as stable and full of love as any child could wish. Her father, David Willock Wallace, was a tall, handsome man with a curling blond mustache and golden sideburns. Her mother, Margaret Gates Wallace, whom everyone called Madge, was a dark, petite beauty. She called the baby “Bessie” after her closest friend, New Yorker Bessie Madge Andrews, whom she had met while attending the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

In 1885, Independence was a peaceful country town of about 3,500 people. A St. Louis reporter visiting it in the 1870s called it “an orchard city,” because the trees were so numerous and leafy it was difficult to see the houses. Almost everyone was on a first-name basis, and a great many families had become intricately connected in the fifty-eight years that had passed since the first settlers arrived. Some wit remarked that if a Woodson married a McCoy, everyone in Independence would be related to everyone else.

When Bess was two years old, her father sold the house on Ruby Street and moved to a larger house at 608 North Delaware, one of the most fashionable addresses in Independence. There is not much doubt that Bess’ mother had a lot to say about their choice of a new home. She was now living only two blocks away from an imposing two-and-one-half-story mansion that Bess’ grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, had built on the corner of North Delaware and Blue Avenue (since renamed Van Horn Road) in the year of her birth.

That house became almost a second home for Bess. Her mother’s pretty sisters, Maud and Myra, fussed over her, and two younger uncles, Walter and Frank Gates, did their best to spoil her, an avuncular habit that I would rediscover to my delight in my own childhood. A frequent visitor was granduncle Edward P. Gates, a prominent attorney, soon to be a judge. But the central person in the house was tall (six feet four inches), bearded George Porterfield Gates, who bounced her on his knee and talked amusing nonsense to her. She was his first grandchild - a guarantee of special affection from him and his deeply religious wife, Elizabeth. Little Bess nicknamed them “Nana” and “Mama” - names she used when she was learning to talk.

Her younger uncle, Frank Gates, was so fond of Bess that he corresponded regularly with her when he went off to college in 1889. Three of his letters to “my dear little Bessie” have survived the years. He wrote in the third person, cheerfully describing how “Uncle Frank” was the laughingstock of his boardinghouse because his eyes were swollen “about the size of a watermelon,” telling her that “Uncle Frank” was going to stay in Chicago for his spring vacation and expected to have a good time “but not as good as he would if he could come home and see you.”

It was virtually impossible for anyone not to love little Bess. She had her father’s golden hair and the brightest blue eyes the family had ever seen. She was amazingly good-humored and outgoing, traits she inherited from her father.

The Wallaces were not entirely absent from Bess’ life. Her middle name, Virginia, came from her Wallace grandmother. As Bess grew past the toddling stage, Virginia Willock Wallace gave her a stream of beautiful silk dresses. She was a gifted, amateur seamstress. There were numerous Wallace cousins living in Independence. The Wallaces were among the first settlers of the town, arriving from Kentucky in 1833. But her father’s immediate family were far outnumbered by the Gates tribe. Her Wallace grandfather had died eight years before she was born, and “Dommie,” as Bess called Virginia Willock Wallace, lived a considerable distance from North Delaware Street.

At her own home, there were new arrivals that competed for the attention of Bess’ grandparents and uncles and aunts. Frank Gates Wallace was born on March 4, 1887, and George Porterfield Wallace arrived on May 1, 1892. The reader will notice the prevalence of the Gates family in the names. By the time her brother George was born, seven-year-old Bess undoubtedly was aware that the Gates side of her family tree was more important than the Wallace side. Dominating the town’s skyline was the twelve-story grain elevator of the Waggoner-Gates Milling Company, where Queen of the Pantry flour was manufactured by the millions of pounds for homemakers throughout the Midwest. It was pointed out to Bess as “Nana’s mill.” At Christmas and on her birthdays, except for a silk dress from Dommie, all the best presents came from Nana and Mama. Gradually, the growing Bess perceived that her handsome, genial father did not have much money.

When Madge Gates, at age twenty-one, fell in love with David Wallace, age twenty-three, George Gates had taken a dim view of the match. Like most American fathers, he could not quite bring himself to forbid it. But he made ominous noises and did everything in his power to delay it until the young couple threatened to elope. George Gates capitulated, and the wedding took place in the First Presbyterian Church on June 13, 1883. It was front-page news in the local paper.

George Gates did not think that David Wallace could support his oldest daughter in the style to which she was accustomed. The young husband had no training or interest in business. He was going to rely for an income on the perilous path of politics. David’s father, Benjamin Wallace, had been elected mayor of Independence in 1869. Thereafter, he had represented a Jackson County district in the state legislature. With his political pull, he had David appointed to a clerkship in the state senate when he was fourteen. At the age of eighteen, the year after his father died, David was appointed deputy recorder of marriage licenses in Independence.

I doubt that David ever did a day’s work at either job. The newspapers regularly inveighed against the political bosses for their habit of appointing assistants and deputies whose only task was to get out the vote on Election Day. But these youthful appointments probably gave David Wallace the illusion that politics was an easy way to make a living. That might have been true if he had remained a bachelor. But few political jobs paid enough to support a wife with the expensive tastes of Madge Gates.

In the first year of their marriage, there was an ominous sign of financial strain. The bridegroom had to mortgage their Ruby Street house to secure a $700 loan. Two years later, David Willock Wallace wrote to President Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to get into the White House in twenty-five years. Addressing him as “Dear Sir and Friend,” he reminded the president that he had supported him at the Democratic Convention and had once met him in Buffalo. Whereupon he asked him for a job in the customs house in Kansas City. Although David Wallace said the appointment was of “vast importance” to him (another sign of financial strain), Cleveland turned him down in a brief note from his secretary, who claimed the president “declined all requests of this character.”

Fortunately, in 1887, David Wallace was able to sell the house on Ruby Street for much more than he had paid for it and move to North Delaware Street. Independence was enjoying a real-estate boom. The year of Bess Wallace’s birth, 1885, was the last year of Independence’s long career as a sleepy little country town.

In the first half of the 1880s, the twelve miles that separated Kansas City and Independence might as well have been 1,200 for most people. The only connecting link was a dirt road full of ruts and impossible grades. In 1885, the big city came closer when the road was smoothed into a boulevard, and in 1887, the march of progress brought it practically next door when the Independence, Kansas City, and Park Railway opened for business. You suddenly could live in Independence and shop or work in Kansas City. Independence became a suburb of Kansas City.

Real-estate values soared, and over the next ten years the population doubled to about 6,000. To some old families in Independence, this new reality was disconcerting, even a little threatening. Independence had been a thriving town - “the Queen City of the Trails” - when Kansas City was a gaggle of riverboat men and outlaws huddled along the Missouri’s banks. For almost three decades before the Civil War, Independence had been the point of departure for the wagon trains that trekked west.

After the war, the Missouri Pacific and half a dozen other railroads made Kansas City their headquarters. Its population had leaped tenfold, leaving Independence far behind in size, wealth, and political power. But Independence continued to look down its genteel nose at raucous Kansas City, with its gambling parlors and corrupt politics. The metropolis retained a fascination, nevertheless, particularly at its Board of Trade, where men bet fortunes on the future price of wheat.

Independence saw itself as more interested in books, ideas, and culture. In the 1890s, the girlhood years of Bess Wallace, the town abounded in study clubs, where women reported on the latest novels by their fellow Missourian, Mark Twain, or the notions of that wild man from Minnesota, Ignatius Donnelly, who attacked the American tendency to think too highly of money.

For women, life in Independence revolved around culture, the family, and the church. By and large, the churches reflected the social scale. The so-called best people were Presbyterians. Next in quality were the Campbellites, now known as the Christian Church. Further down the scale were the Baptists, the Mormons, and the Catholics. The Episcopalians were so few in number they were scarcely noticed.

Outside Independence was the countryside - a very different place. There, mostly Baptist farmers tilled some of the most fertile soil in America. Many of them were far wealthier than the genteel citizens of Independence, but they were regarded as largely uneducated, uncultured bumpkins. To be from town was a mark of distinction, from the country an invitation to mild disdain.

The people at the top of Independence’s social ladder built houses that no farmer ever dreamt of inhabiting. In 1881, Colonel E. T. Vaile, who had made a fortune operating western mail routes for the federal government, put up a red-brick, Second-Empire mansion, with a four-story tower and yards of gingerbread. Still standing on North Liberty Street, the Vaile mansion is the equal of any built by the money barons of Chicago and San Francisco. The Swopes, who made their fortune in Kansas City real estate, built an equally imposing house with a full ballroom on the third floor. As other wealthy newcomers from Kansas City imitated these examples, Independence became known as “the Royal Suburb.”

Social life in Independence was as elegant, if not as grand, as it was in Chicago and other large cities where wealth had accumulated. No one tried to equal Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s 1883 ball in her New York mansion, where women showed up wearing skirts quilted with diamonds. But dancing schools did a brisk business, and the newspapers constantly reported balls and receptions and dinners. Independence ladies kept dressmakers busy turning out the latest styles, which in 1885 featured a return to the bustle in its final, most outrageous form. For everything from fine furniture to furs, there was Bullene’s in Kansas City, the largest department store west of Chicago.

Independence men were interested in politics - national, state, and local. That was another reason to look askance at Kansas City. The people there tended to vote Republican – the party of Abraham Lincoln - while old Independence, the city that David Willock Wallace knew as a boy, was unswervingly, wholeheartedly, passionately Democratic. As Democratic as Mississippi and South Carolina and Virginia. On some streets in Independence - North Delaware was one of them - a visitor without a map would find it hard to tell that he was not in the Deep South.

The Civil War still was a bitter memory in old Independence. One of the most savage battles for control of Missouri, a border state that never seceded, was fought in and around the town. To snuff out the guerrilla war that raged after the rebels lost that battle, a Union general issued the infamous Order No. II, which required everyone to abandon farms and crops in a three-county tier - thirty miles deep and 100 miles long, on the Kansas border. Everything within that zone was forthwith burned, leaving 20,000 people homeless and destitute. It broke the back of Confederate resistance in Missouri, but it left a legacy of political bitterness that old Independence never forgot.

It also spawned a legacy of lawlessness in Jackson County. Former Confederate guerrillas – including Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers - could not adjust to peace. As late as 1879, only six years before Bess Wallace was born, they were still robbing Yankee banks and trains - to the embarrassment of many people in Independence who were related to them.

In new Independence, the royal suburb, with its steady influx of newcomers from Kansas City, this heritage of violence and hatred became more and more irrelevant. So did the wing of the Democratic Party to which David Willock Wallace belonged. The passions of the Civil War, the endless waving of “the bloody shirt” by the Republicans, the invoking of Order No. 11 by the Democrats, were fading fast.

David Wallace ran for Jackson County treasurer in 1888 and 1890, winning both times. But when his second term expired in 1892, the feuding, factionalized Democrats of Jackson County did not offer him another office. For almost a full year, he was unemployed. Late in 1893, after Grover Cleveland became president for a second time - the only man the Democrats were able to get into the White House between 1856 and 1912 - David Wallace finally wangled an appointment as deputy United States surveyor of customs for the port of Kansas City and abandoned elective politics.

This job sounds important, but the full title was “deputy surveyor and clerk.” The salary was $1,200 a year. That pay was good in 1894, when the average worker was lucky to get $1 a day, but it was not the sort of salary a man needed to support three children and a wife with expensive tastes.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Virginia Wallace was growing up. Surviving letters from her mother indicate that Bess was already assuming a surprising amount of responsibility for the care of her two younger brothers by the time she reached high school. For a while, there was a fourth child in the house, a little sister named Madeline, born in the mid-1890s. She died when she was about three years old. Giving birth to four children in ten years - and losing one - strained Madge Wallace’s health and nerves. She always had been considered “delicate” - a word that suggested both physical and emotional fragility in this era. Madge took vacations at nearby Platte City, where her sister Maud had married a wealthy banker, William Strother Wells, and left her fourteen-year-old daughter in charge of the house.

One letter, somewhat incongruously addressed to “my dear little daughter,” told Bess not to let her brother Frank out of the house after dark because he had a cold and to make sure Frank took citrate of magnesia every night and did not forget his Listerine. She also was told to “order what you need and want at the grocery and meat shop.”

If this responsibility troubled Bess Wallace, there is no evidence of it in the happy gaze she gave the world in her youthful photographs. She looks as contented and self-confident as it was possible for a young woman to be, so far as I can see. And why not? The years of her girlhood were a good time to be a woman in America.

The movement toward a more independent woman began in 1848, and by 1890, there was a distinct whiff of liberation in the air. The bustle finally had been banished, and women were asking and getting the right to play sports and join clubs and launch careers and speak their minds on an astonishing number of topics from temperance to the vote. In 1901, the year sixteen-year-old Bess Wallace graduated from high school, a woman lawyer, Carey May Carroll, was named attorney to the Jackson County collector.

For Bess, participation in sports was her first stride toward self-confidence. By the time she was in high school, she was the best tennis player in Independence. She was also an accomplished ice skater and rider. In her younger days, she played third base on her brothers’ sandlot baseball team and was their champion slugger. There is a story in the family of Bess happening by when the boys were losing to a team from a nearby neighborhood by three runs in the last of the ninth. Bess was on her way home from a tennis match. Her brother Frank begged her to get into the game as a pinch hitter. She agreed, and they promptly put three men on base. Frank sent Bess up to bat, and she belted a home run over the center fielder’s head, winning the game.

Next door to Bess Wallace at 614 North Delaware Street lived her closest friend, Mary Paxton. She was the daughter of a successful attorney, and like Bess Wallace, had a number of obstreperous brothers, who frequently got into fights with the Wallace boys. Both older sisters never hesitated to wade into these brawls, grabbing male arms and legs, swatting ears and backsides. Bess, taller and a year older than Mary, was the acknowledged peacemaker. The rascals were told to behave or else. “They were all afraid of her,” recalled Henry Chiles, a high-school classmate who was probably one of the miscreants.

Bess also kept the peace and issued commands with her whistle. It was a piercing sound that carried for blocks. Moreover, she did it without putting her fingers near her mouth. “She was the only girl in Independence who could whistle through her teeth,” Henry Chiles recalled. The whistle summoned wandering brothers and struck terror into their male hearts when they were about to do something they shouldn’t. For her girlfriends, Bess had a more pleasing, melodious whistle. On summer evenings, they waited eagerly for it to sound from the Wallace back porch. It was a signal to come over for ice cream.

The Paxtons and the Wallaces had a good time together. On summer nights, it was so good that some of the neighbors - in particular Colonel William Southern, editor of the local paper - complained of not being able to get any sleep. In retaliation, they called Southern “Sneaky Bill.” A lot of the noise was probably generated by Frank Wallace and his big black dog. Visitors to Delaware Street would ask him what he called the mongrel, and Frank would say, deadpan “U-Know.”

The disconcerted visitor would say: “I don’t know. I just asked you.”

“U-Know,” Frank would say.

And so on, while the visitor got madder and madder and everyone else collapsed with laughter.

U-Know became such an object of affection he thought he could get away with anything. Matthew Paxton, one of Mary’s brothers, had stolen a handful of sugar lumps from his mother’s kitchen and was enjoying them one day. U-Know watched, licking his chops. George Wallace jarred Matthew’s elbow, and the sugar flew up in the air and down U-Know’s gullet. Matthew was so furious he bit U-Know. “Matthew spit black hair for a week,” Mary Paxton recalled. No one seems to remember whether he inflicted any serious damage on the dog.

While she hung around with these rowdy males, Bess was not allowed to forget that she was Madge Gates Wallace’s daughter. She was expected to be a lady, most of the time. This idea of the lady who concerned herself only with the genteel aspects of life, with art and culture and spiritual values, was still alive in the 1880s and 1890s. Madge Gates Wallace was a lady from the top of her well-coifed head to the tips of her elegant fingers. Although she tolerated her daughter’s athletic prowess, Madge insisted that Bess acquire the social graces.

In high school, Bess went to Miss Dunlap’s dancing class on Jackson Square in the center of Independence. Scarcely a Saturday night went by without a hop at that particular ballroom. There were other dances and receptions at the Swope mansion, where Bess was welcomed by Margaret Swope, the daughter closest to her in age. Margaret often asked Bess to join her in the receiving line, a sign of their close friendship as well as Bess’ social status.

“We all learned the polka and the schottische and the Virginia reel,” her friend Mary Paxton recalled. “But we mostly danced the waltz and two-step. We had much the same kind of party dresses, mull with silk sashes, colored or striped. But Bess always looked more stylish than anyone else in the crowd.” In the summer, they sometimes strung Japanese lanterns on the lawn and had outdoor parties. For refreshments in summer, there was ice cream and cake and mints; in the winter, chicken salad with beaten biscuits and charlotte russe.

On summer nights after a dance, the party often piled into one or two old surreys for a ride through the moonlit town and countryside. They would sing songs and no doubt do a little surreptitious “spooning,” although this adolescent sport was frowned upon if the girl seemed too willing or too careless. One girl who spooned on a back porch with a comparative stranger from Kansas City was never invited to another party.

By now, you may be wondering about my omission of a name that eventually became important in Bess Wallace’s life - Harry S. Truman. He was not a native of Independence. He was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, a tiny farm town some 120 miles to the south, where his father, John Anderson Truman, was in business as a horse and cattle trader. About nine months later, the Trumans moved to a farm near Harrisonville, in Cass County, some thirty miles from Independence, but part of Jackson County. There, John Truman helped his wife’s family, the Youngs, run their 600-acre farm. In 1890, when Harry was six years old, his mother, Martha Ellen Young Truman, persuaded her husband to move to Independence, because she wanted her children (a second son, Vivian, and a daughter, Mary, had followed Harry) to get a better education than the rural schools could give them.

Not long after they came to town, Martha Ellen Truman met the local Presbyterian minister on the street. He invited her to send her children to his Sunday school. Although she was a Baptist by birth, she accepted the invitation. Thus, six-year-old Harry Truman walked into the classroom of the First Presbyterian Church and saw “a little blue-eyed, golden-haired girl" named Bess Wallace. To the end of his life, he insisted that he fell in love with five-year-old Bess on the spot and never stopped loving her throughout his boyhood years. “She sat behind me in the sixth, seventh, and high-school grades,” Harry Truman later recalled, “and I thought she was the most beautiful and the sweetest person on earth.”

Occasionally, Bess would allow Harry Truman to carry her books home from school. He would be dazed with happiness for the rest of the day. More moments of near ecstasy occurred when Bess joined Harry and several other classmates at the home of his first cousin, Ethel Noland, to be tutored in the intricacies of Latin verbs by her older sister, Nellie. Both Nolands soon noted Harry’s adoration of Bess, and he did not try to conceal it from them.

One day, he appeared at their house with a broad smile on his face and announced that he wanted to play his first musical composition for them. The Nolands seated themselves in their parlor, expecting something solemn and high-toned. Cousin Harry had been taking piano lessons for years and was playing Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and other European masters. He reeled off a swarm of arpeggios and then played a series of lilting notes that they instantly recognized. “It’s Bessie’s ice cream whistle!” Ethel exclaimed.

Unfortunately, Bess Wallace had no interest in Harry Truman, nor the least idea that he was in love with her. He was never part of the Delaware Street crowd. Never was he invited to a ball at the Swope mansion. Nor did he participate in those moonlit hayrides. The Trumans were far beneath the social world inhabited by the Wallaces and the Gates, the Waggoners and the Swopes. They were country folk and newcomers. John Anderson Truman’s profession, horse trading, was considered less than genteel by most people. Also, his income was erratic. During high school, Harry had to work at odd jobs to improve the family’s finances.

One story, told by Mary Paxton, sums up the gap between Harry Truman and Bess Wallace better than paragraphs of explanation. On one of those moonlit, spooning expeditions, the Delaware Street crowd was riding around Jackson Square, singing merrily. As they paused for breath between songs, someone said: “Oh look, there’s Harry Truman.”

Harry was sweeping out Clinton’s Drug Store, his last chore for the day. “What a shame he has to work so much,” Bess Wallace said. The words were casual, an observation with little emotional content.

There was another reason, probably as important as social standing, why Bess Wallace found Harry Truman uninteresting. His bad eyes made him a hopeless athlete. His crueler schoolmates called him “Four Eyes” and also ridiculed him for taking piano lessons. A young man needed more than average athletic ability to win Bess Wallace’s attention in those days. Bill Bostian, the postmaster’s son, adored her and took up tennis to promote his standing. Alas, when they played doubles, he had a habit of yelling, “I’ll get it Bessie,” and then not getting it. Bill’s status plummeted.

Throughout these grammar and high-school years, another man was the central figure in Bess’ happiness: her father. She adored him as only an only daughter can. (How well I know that.) In her grade-school days, David Willock Wallace was always romping with her and the other children in the neighborhood. Every Fourth of July, he personally set up and fired off a magnificent display of fireworks for Delaware Street. At patriotic parades on the Fourth and other days, he frequently was asked to be grand marshal, and he would lead the strutting show on a great black horse. It is not hard to imagine what effect this must have had on a girl whose imagination had been fed on southern ideals of masculine chivalry. David Wallace was Bess’ Bayard, the knight without stain or reproach. As she grew older, her awareness of his comparative poverty added a heart-wrenching pity to her love.

Behind his facade of good cheer, David Wallace was an unhappy man. A fifth child, David Frederick, born in 1900, added to his financial problems. He made a stab at starting an importing business in Kansas City, a natural connection to his customs job, but it went nowhere and probably left him even deeper in debt. Like most local politicians, he spent a great deal of time in the Independence courthouse. The hours of his customs job were not demanding. Next door to the courthouse was a political saloon, where he spent even more time. As his debts increased, so did his drinking.

For Bess and her two older brothers, Frank and George, this time must have been the beginning of their troubles. They knew about their father’s drinking, and so did the neighbors - often he was carried home by friends and deposited on the front porch. Complicating the problem was Madge Gates Wallace’s refusal to recognize it. She never reproached her husband for one of these lapses. That would not have been genteel. She was polite and even sympathetic as he struggled through the following day’s hangover and remorse. She acted as if he had twisted his ankle or caught a bad cold.

Another shadow that descended on Bess around this time was the illness of Mary Paxton’s mother, a brilliant woman who had been a college teacher and was the leader of one of the most intellectual study clubs in Independence. The doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. A three-year stay in Colorado’s mountain air during Mary’s grammar-school years had done little but make the family miserable over the perpetual separation. Mary Gentry Paxton returned home, and the family and the neighbors could only watch helplessly as she slipped slowly away from them.

The illness of a mother, the failures of a father saddened but did not disrupt young lives. As far as anyone could see, Bess and Mary continued to enjoy themselves. They eluded the troubled adult world (and troublesome younger brothers) at clandestine meetings of the Cadiz Club. This all-female organization met in a barn behind Grandfather Gates’ house. They soon were staging plays there, written by Mary and performed under her direction. Bess was the manager. She collected admissions and saw that the profits went to charity.

In high school, Bess was an excellent student. She saved many of the essays she wrote on writers such as James Russell Lowell. Her marks were never less than 90, and there were several 100s. But she was not a scholar. She left that title to Charlie Ross, a handsome young man who had a flair for writing, and Laura Kingsbury, the class’ second-ranking student. Charlie was the editor of their class yearbook, The Gleam. His chief assistant was Harry Truman. The title, drawn from Tennyson’s poem, “Merlin and the Gleam,” blended idealism and ambition for these young men. They were looking forward to participating as leaders - achievers - in the America beyond the boundaries of Independence and even of Kansas City.

For Bess Wallace, the gleam did not carry such dramatic overtones. She listened to Mary Paxton’s plans for college and a career with wistful longing. (Because of childhood illnesses and time lost with her mother in Colorado, Mary was three years behind Bess in school.) The presence of a new baby in the household made Madge Wallace even more dependent on her daughter. Still, there were several servants on the payroll. As someone who knew her well put it, “Mrs. Wallace never spent much time in the kitchen.”

Her mother’s health and emotional fragility, exacerbated by her husband’s drinking, were not the real reasons why Bess did not go away to college, as her mother had gone to the Cincinnati Conservatory and her friend Mary Paxton was eventually to depart for Hollins in Virginia, and their mutual friend, Charlie Ross, was to go to the University of Missouri at Columbia. The real explanation was the sad fact that Bess’ father could not afford to send her.

This failure was the first public acknowledgment of David Wallace’s financial difficulties. His money troubles were already well known within the family. In a box in the basement of 219 North Delaware Street, I found a series of faded letters from him to George Porterfield Gates, thanking his father-in-law again and again for “your many kindnesses to me and my family.” In the American world of the early 1900s - and in the 1980s - an inability to support one’s wife and children was a failing that was humiliating to most men. For David Wallace, it would have been even more painful, since he was being forced to ask for help from a man who had doubted his ability to support his daughter from the first.

By sad coincidence, Harry Truman’s family also was painfully short of money. In 1901, John Truman lost his life savings and a small farm his wife had inherited speculating on grain futures at the Kansas City Board of Trade. Even their home on West Waldo Street, a few blocks from Delaware Street, had to be sold, and the family moved to modest quarters in Kansas City. Harry abandoned all thoughts of a college education and went to work as a timekeeper for a section gang on the Santa Fe Railroad.

The Trumans at least coped with their financial straits. David Wallace could not. Worse, as his debts piled up, his political future grew dismal. For Democrats in Missouri and elsewhere, the opening years of the new century were not promising ones. A new, enormously popular Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, had replaced Ohioan William McKinley, who had been assassinated by an anarchist in 1901. A war hero as well as a bold, progressive politician, Teddy was certain to be reelected in 1904, which meant there was little hope of advancement for Democratic appointees. David Wallace’s customs job had been placed under civil service protection during the Cleveland administration, but this fact was not much consolation to a man who desperately needed to make more money. Instead, he only spiraled deeper into alcoholism and debt.

Thanks to some dedicated researchers at the National Archives, I have obtained another painful glimpse of David Wallace’s financial problems from letters that flowed between Kansas City and Washington, D.C.

In 1889, his sympathetic boss, Surveyor William L. Kessinger, wrote to the secretary of the treasury asking for “additional compensation” for David Wallace and another deputy surveyor for extra work performed by them. The request was stonily denied by the Republican.

In 1901, the surveyor asked the Treasury Department to increase David Wallace’s salary to $1,500 a year. The treasury agreed to $1,400. The extra money did not do much good because, in the following year, David Wallace was dunned by the Credit Clearing House for an unpaid debt of $3.50. The debt collection agency sent the complaint to Washington, D.C., and a brisk letter from an assistant secretary of the treasury ordered the surveyor to look into the matter. More letters followed, in which the clearing house claimed “we have seen Mr. Wallace at least half a dozen times and on each occasion he has promised to settle the matter, but when called upon for the money is ready with another excuse, and now we do not believe he has any intention of carrying out his promises.”

To be unable to pay this debt, and go through the humiliation of being reported to his employers, must have been an excruciating experience for Madge Gates Wallace’s husband. But all he could do was beg the reluctant government for more money. This time, his boss decided to get some backing, and he persuaded two inspectors from the New Orleans District headquarters to issue a report stating that David Wallace “was the most efficient man in the office at this port [Kansas City], yet his salary, $1,400 per annum, is the smallest paid any clerk here.” This endorsement persuaded the Republicans in Washington to approve a $200 a year raise.

During these same years, David Wallace was borrowing money from his father-in-law to pay his taxes. In 1901, he was two years in arrears and was in a panic that his house was going to be advertised and sold by the county collector. That same year, George Porterfield Gates paid for some badly needed shingling and painting, which cost several hundred dollars. When Grandfather Gates gave eleven-year-old George Wallace $5 for a Christmas present, his mother used it to help pay for an overcoat, which he “needed badly.”

His double life as cheerful hail-fellow politician and debt-haunted failure became more and more unbearable to David Wallace. At home, he received little consolation or support from his wife. Madge Gates Wallace had been raised as a lady, shielded from the harsh economic realities of life. Like most women of her era, she believed there was a “woman’s sphere” and a “man’s sphere,” and what happened in the man’s sphere was none of a wife’s business, especially if she was a lady. Her two sisters had married successful men. She could not understand - and probably could not love - a man who was a failure.

Complicating matters during these years was the illness of Madge Gates Wallace’s brother Frank. He contracted tuberculosis, and his parents took him to Colorado, to Texas, and finally to Mexico in a desperate attempt to cure him. Madge missed her mother and father acutely and became “homesick,” David Wallace told George Gates, every time she got a letter from them. In several letters, David Wallace remarked how “lonesome” 219 North Delaware looked, standing dark and empty. David Wallace struck an even gloomier note when he discussed his finances. “To be frank with you, I get pretty blue [his italics] over matters. I do the very best that I can, but it seems that little good results.” In another letter, he wrote: “I try to look on the bright side of things, but even then it is dark.”

In the summer of 1902, Madge Wallace and her four children vacationed in Colorado Springs at the home of a Gates relative, possibly her uncle Walter Gates, leaving her husband alone in Independence. Mary Paxton, already a shrewd observer of people, wrote Bess a letter full of cheerful gossip about who was falling in and out of love with whom. She then told how one night “I sat over in your yard with your father, so he didn’t have time to be lonely. “There is more than a hint in those words that Bess had confided to Mary her fear that her father would gravitate to the courthouse saloon.

When his family returned from their vacation in Colorado, David Wallace seems to have made an attempt to control his drinking. He avoided his cronies at the courthouse saloon and even eschewed local meetings of the Masons, where he, like most Missouri politicians, had been a popular figure. He divided his time between home and office. When Mary Paxton’s mother died of tuberculosis on May 15, 1903, David was on hand to help his neighbors with the funeral arrangements. Mary long remembered his kindness and sympathy; she even recalled the way he had come over to the house on the morning of the funeral to set up chairs in their parlor for the mourners. But his good intentions, his innate good nature, did not prevent Bess Wallace’s father from sinking deeper and deeper into debt - and depression.

Mary Gentry Paxton had, among her many gifts, a talent for poetry. On May 22, 1903, a week after her death, the Jackson Examiner prefaced her obituary with one of her poems.

This morning I heard that one I loved is dead.
The house is still, her friends in whispers speak
Move here and there, sad faced, with tear stained cheek.
I sat beside her watching there a space
And thought, Is’t death, this change from strife to rest?
Would not her nearest friend say it is best
Beholding her and so be comforted?
Is dying to cease struggling to be free
From pain and dread, from weakness, longings vain?
To feel himself restored, once more to be
Whole, rested, strong, without a sense of pain?
Then hasten Death, come thou to visit me,
Give me rest and immortality.

That was a lovely poem for a woman dying of tuberculosis to write. But some of those thoughts may have had sinister implications for David Wallace. He also had struggled with pain and dread and weakness and longings vain. He also yearned to be restored, whole, rested, and strong.

On June 17, 1903, four days after his twentieth wedding anniversary, David Wallace went to bed early. But he did not sleep well. He awoke in the dawn, not uncommon for people suffering from depression. He lay there listening to the first twittering birds in the elms around his house. His wife slept soundly beside him. David Wallace got up and tiptoed to a writing desk in the bedroom. Slowly, carefully, he opened a drawer. In the semidarkness, his eyes found the blue-black gleam of a revolver.

It was not unusual for a man to have a gun in his house in those days. Missouri was a Western state. Police forces were small and burglaries surprisingly frequent, even on fashionable Delaware Street. David Wallace picked up the revolver and walked softly, steadily down the hall to a bathroom in the rear of the house. Perhaps he paused there to stare at himself in the mirror, to tell himself one last time that it was all a bad dream, that somehow, somewhere, he could find a way to make his wife happy, his children proud of him. Then he placed the muzzle behind his left ear and pulled the trigger.

The gun crashed in the dawn. The harsh sound reverberated through the house. In her bedroom, eighteen-year-old Bess Wallace sat up, trembling. She heard her brother Frank running down the hall to the bathroom. There was a cry of anguish. “Papa! Papa’s shot himself!”