The twenty-six-year-old Harry Truman that twenty-five-year-old Bess Wallace saw in the porch lamplight on that summer night in 1910 had changed in interesting ways from the quiet, scholarly, non-athlete she had mostly ignored in school. This man had gained weight and muscle. There was a solidity to his shoulders, a physical self-confidence in his erect stance. His skin was tanned and wind-burned and glowing with the health that comes from constant exercise. How in the world had Four Eyes turned into this rugged looking specimen of vitality?

Bess Wallace may have heard that Harry had become a bank teller after the family had moved to Kansas City. A perfect job for him, she probably thought. But that wind-burned skin, those calloused hands were not acquired in a bank. Mere curiosity, aside from friendly feelings, no doubt impelled Bess Wallace to invite Harry Truman into the Gates parlor. There, he was greeted by Mrs. Wallace and the Gates family and perhaps by one or two of Bess’ three brothers. After the ritual thanks for the cake, the older and younger folks probably let the ex-schoolmates go out on the porch and catch up with each other.

Harry was no longer working at the Union National Bank in Kansas City, although he had done well there, winning a series of raises and promotions. He was a farmer, helping his father and his brother Vivian run the 600-acre Young farm in Grandview. Harry’s mother and his uncle, Harrison Young, had inherited it from his grandmother, Harriet Louisa Young, when she died in 1909. It was hard work, but he enjoyed it - and it paid a lot better than a bank. In a good year, the farm could clear $7,000, and his share of that would be about $4,000. There also was the prospect of inheriting the whole works, or a good chunk of it, when his Uncle Harrison and his mother died.

He was also a part-time soldier, which helped to explain his square-shouldered stance. In 1905, he had joined Battery B of the Missouri National Guard and spent a few weeks each summer training with them. He had been promoted to corporal, which pleased him. Bess no doubt was surprised to learn that Harry had hoped to become a professional soldier and had taken special tutoring for the entrance examination for West Point the year after they graduated from high school. One day, it occurred to him that he ought to take a preliminary eye test at the Army Recruiting Station in Kansas City. They told him he did not have a chance to get into the U.S. Military Academy. So he decided to get a taste of military life, at least, in Battery B.

Harry may have amused Bess with the story of his grandmother’s reaction when he came out to the farm in his National Guard uniform one day. All Harriet Louisa Young could think about were the gloating Kansans who had burned and looted the farm in the course of executing Order No. 11 in 1863. She told Harry never to wear his uniform home again.

The passions of the Civil War had become quaint, almost amusing, to the younger generation. I don’t know what else Harry and Bess talked about that night, but the visit lasted two hours. When Harry returned to the Noland home, his eyes were aglow. “Well, I saw her,” he said.

There is a glimpse of the awe and longing with which Harry Truman already regarded Bess Wallace in those words. He told the Nolands that he had asked Bess if he could call on her again, and the answer had been an offhand yes. The Nolands were forthwith warned that they were going to see a good deal of Cousin Harry from now on.

But Independence was at least a four-hour trip one way from Grandview in a buggy, and the train connections were bad. Harry had to walk a mile from the farm to Grandview and wait for a Kansas City and Southern train, which was invariably late and did not take him directly to Independence. He had to walk a mile and a half along the tracks to the Kansas City terminal of the streetcars. As an alternative, he could drive the Truman family buggy into nearby Dodson, where he could catch an interurban streetcar, which required a transfer to another streetcar in Kansas City to get to Independence. Either way, the trip seldom took less than two hours. Inevitably – and to our great fortune - Harry and Bess began to communicate through the mails.

The first few letters have been lost, but by the end of December 1910, Bess had begun saving his letters, a good sign, although Harry did not know it. I doubt if he ever found out how many of his letters Bess saved over the years. Everyone, including me, was astonished to discover some 1,600 letters from him, as well as hundreds more from Madge Gates Wallace, Mary Paxton, and other correspondents in the attic at 219 North Delaware Street after Bess Wallace Truman died. Included in this unique historical treasure trove, which is the foundation of this book, are hundreds of letters from Bess to these same correspondents.

Harry’s first surviving letter revealed that they were exchanging favorite novels and that Bess had issued Harry an invitation to visit over the Christmas holidays. But he sadly informed her that it was out of the question.

Nothing would please me better than to come to see you during the holidays or any other time for the matter of that, but Papa broke his leg the other day and I am chief nurse, next to my mother, besides being farm boss now. So you see I’ll be somewhat closely confined for some time to come. I hope you’ll let the invitation be a standing one though and I shall avail myself of it at the very first opportunity. . . .

We haven’t quite got over the excitement yet. A horse pulled a big beam over on him in the barn. We were so glad he wasn’t killed we didn’t know what to do.

If you see fit to let me hear from you sometimes, I shall certainly appreciate it. Farm life as an everyday affair is not generally exciting. Wishing you and all of you the very happiest New Year, I am

Very Sincerely

Harry S. Truman

It is clear that Harry Truman was aware of the challenge he faced in his pursuit of Bess Wallace’s affection. In school, the distance between them had been social. Now the gap had been widened, not only geographically but psychologically. By going back to the farm, he had activated the classic conflict between town and country that was bred into every member of the Independence upper class.

Let there be no misunderstanding about Harry Truman’s status. He was a farmer, as thoroughly and completely as any American who has ever dug a plow into the fertile soil of Missouri. On the Youngs’ 600 acres - a square mile of land - he and his father and brother Vivian were raising corn, wheat, and oats, as well as Black-Angus cattle and Hampshire hogs. As far as John Truman was concerned, it was a seven-day-a-week job, fifty-two weeks a year. He demanded as much work from his sons as he extracted from the hired hands, who frequently quit in exasperation at his sharp tongue and minimal wages. He expected his sons to be out on a gang plow wrestling a four-horse team across the fields each day at 5:00 a.m. If the furrows Harry plowed were not straight, “I heard about it from my father for the next year,” he said. “When it rained and we couldn’t plow or harvest, we’d take down the old scythe - and we had a dozen of them - and cut weeds in the fence corners and along the fences bordering the roads.”

John Truman was a driven man. He had formed a company, J. A. Truman & Son, which took on the responsibility for paying off some $12,500 in debts he still owed from his financial collapse in 1901. By becoming a partner in that company, Harry Truman made himself equally liable for those debts. But he combined this loyalty to his father with a quiet determination to preserve his independence. When the Trumans and the hired hands trooped in from the fields to eat the lunch that Martha Ellen Truman had prepared for them, Harry surprised the hired hands by sitting down at the piano and playing Chopin or Liszt while they waited for the food to be served.

He also continued to be an omnivorous reader, especially of history and biography. Beyond that habit, which went back to his school days, when he read every book in the Independence Library, his chief recreation was the Masonic Order. He founded a lodge in Grandview and traveled miles at night when he should have been resting or sleeping to administer degrees in other lodges. If he found any other consolation in this rural life, it was his mother’s company. He always had been her favorite child, and he reciprocated her affection with wholehearted admiration and gratitude.

It was she who had noticed his bad eyesight when he was five and taken him in a farm wagon to Kansas City for an examination by a specialist. She knew that the thick glasses he had to wear prevented him from participating in sports like other boys his age and encouraged him to become a reader and a pianist. She selected many of the books he read in his early years. She had graduated from the Baptist Female College in Lexington, Missouri, where she majored in music and art. Between Martha Ellen Truman and her oldest son there was an intellectual as well as an emotional bond. He admired her caustic opinions about everything from windy preachers to crooked politicians and the blunt way she stated them.

At first glance, this did not seem a good preparation to win the heart of Bess Wallace, a very different sort of woman. In fact, there seemed to be little in Harry Truman’s world that Bess Wallace would want to hear about. For the first year, the opening words of every letter he wrote her emphasized the distance between them. He addressed her as “My dear Bessie.” He did not know that her close friends, such as Mary Paxton, had abandoned that unwanted name. But Harry Truman had resources that were not apparent. He set out to make himself interesting to Bess Wallace.

From his earliest letters, he never missed a chance to portray himself as a rugged outdoor man. In one letter, he told her that after sowing oats and hauling six tons of hay in a fierce wind, his face was so wind-burned “I look like raw beef or a confirmed booze fighter.” He described his farmer’s rags - “dirty and tattered and torn with hog snoot marks, splashed milk and other things too numerous to mention.” He casually added: “Mamma ropes me in once in a while and makes me exchange for a clean set, but they don’t feel right until I wear them a day or two.” My favorite is his description of wrestling hogs to the ground to vaccinate them. “A 200-pound hog can almost jerk the ribs loose from your backbone when you get him by the hind leg. It is far and away the best exercise in the list. It beats Jack Johnson’s [the heavyweight champion] whole training camp as a muscle toughener.”

At the same time, Harry displayed his taste in literature, music, and art to Bess. During his years as a bank clerk in Kansas City, he had attended the opera for a season and decided he did not like it nearly so much as classical piano music. He also had seen the great tragedians of the day, such as E. H. Sothern and Richard Mansfield, when they came to Kansas City. In an offhand, unpretentious way, Harry made it clear that he was no country bumpkin. But he also was honest enough to admit that he agreed with his Uncle Harrison, who “says he’d rather go to the Orpheum [a vaudeville theater] and laugh all evening than sit and grate the enamel off his false teeth to see Mansfield or Sothern or any other big gun.”

This confession was as shrewd as it was honest. Very early, Harry Truman noticed that Bess Wallace loved a good laugh. He was soon amusing her with vivid glimpses of the comic side of country life. Here are some wry observations on the party line telephone: “When you want to use it you have to take down the receiver and listen while some good sister tells some other good sister who is not so wise how to make butter or how to raise chickens or when it is the right time in the moon to plant onion sets or something else equally important. About the time you think the world is coming to an end or some other direful calamity will certainly overtake you if you don’t get to express your feelings into that phone the good sister will quit and then if you are quick and have a good strong voice you can have your say, but you know confidently that everyone in the neighborhood has heard you.”

His wit was even dryer when it came to farm manners: “They are endeavoring faithfully to better the farmers’ condition . . . all the time. You know our friend Roosevelt [Theodore] appointed a country life commission to spend the extra cash in the U.S. Treasury. Some fellow with a good heart has also invented a soup spoon that won’t rattle. I know he had farmers in mind when he did that. Some other good fellow has invented peas that are cubes instead of spheres so they won’t roll off the knife when you eat them. If I can get the seed I will certainly raise them. . . . Now if someone would invent a fork with a spring, so you could press it and spear a biscuit at arm’s length without having to reach over and incommode your neighbor - well he’d just simply be elected president, that’s all.”

During a visit to Delaware Street, Harry heard Bess and Nellie Noland discuss Ethel Noland’s dislike of emotional excitement in religion. This inspired one of his best letters.

I think you and Nellie could probably get up some religious excitement on Ethel’s part if you would do as a certain woman did Aunt Susan [his mother’s sister] was telling me about.

You know they used to hold outdoor meetings when the weather was good and everyone for miles around attended and stayed sometimes for weeks. Along in the fifties they were holding a meeting not far from here and the preacher had exhorted and ranted and done everything else they usually do when they try to get something started, as they call it, but it was no use. He wasn’t a quitter though. Finally down one of the aisles one of the good sisters jumped out and began screaming and dancing up and down as they usually do when they get religion. The preacher made a dive for her with his hand extended, saying, “Oh, Sister I am so glad to see you come out and say you have religion.” Her answer between screams was, “I haven’t got it. I haven’t got it. There’s a lizard on my dress,” and she kept on dancing until Aunt Sue and someone else took her outside and one of those little lizards fell off her dress. Try it on Ethel. It will work I think.

Like Bess, who had become an Episcopalian, Harry had “strayed from the Presbyterian fold,” although he still remembered his Sunday school days “very well.” He had become a member of the Baptist Church in Grandview, but he had very independent ideas about religion.

I am by religion like everything else. I think there is more in acting than in talking. . . . We had a neighbor out here who could pray louder and talk more fervently in meetin’ than anyone I ever heard. He’d say in every prayer, “O Lord help this congregation to stop and think where they’s a going at.” We finally found that he beat his wife and did everything else that’s “ornery.”

I think religion is something one should have on Wednesday and Thursday as well as Sunday. Therefore, I don’t believe that these protracted meetings do any real good. They are mostly excitement and when the excitement wears off people are as they always were.

I like to play cards and dance as far as I know how and go to shows and do all the things they [the Baptists] said I shouldn’t but I don’t feel badly about it. I go when I feel like it and the good church members are glad to hear what it’s like. You see I’m a member but not a strenuous one.

Another colorful aspect of farm life, horse trading (his father’s profession), inspired a lively letter and some significant thoughts about men and morals.

A fellow traded me a horse yesterday. That is, he parted me from a hundred dollars and I have a horse. You know horse trading is the cause of the death of truth in America. When you go to buy they’ll tell you anything on earth to get your money. You simply have to use your own judgment if you have any. I haven’t much but I think I got my money’s worth. Can’t tell though until I work him a few days.

A neighbor of ours once had a sale of his furniture and stock. He had a great many horses and some that were no good. He had one that was probably an octogenarian in the horse world. He was very aged anyway. This horse he wanted to sell to a poor lame man who had tried to buy it before the sale. So he took a quart of bad whiskey and soaked the poor lame one and then told him he wasn’t going to put the horse up. Well that fellow begged so hard that the horse was sold to him for $170. Just about $100 more than he was worth. The owner had a “buy bidder” to run him up. So that between the booze and the bidder he was mulcted for $100. O he the honest farmer. I have found that they sell gold bricks now. That is what rural delivery and party-line phones have done for our uplift.

I am not a pessimist though. There are some honest ones and they are always well thought of even by crooks. They are always the last ones you get acquainted with too.

We have moved around quite a bit and always the best people are hardest to know. I don’t know why that is, either. . . . It’s all a matter of viewpoint. A man’s mighty lucky if he has two.

In this letter, Bess Wallace encountered one of Harry Truman’s most remarkable gifts, the ability to look at himself and other people, including his father, and see their shortcomings with a clear and steady gaze without relapsing into cynicism. He remained an optimist about himself, his fellow Americans, the future. Her father’s suicide had left Bess with a different attitude toward life. She was much closer to being a pessimist. Psychologists say that people who fall in love instinctively reach out for qualities in the other person that they sense they lack in themselves. I think this may explain why Bess Wallace was attracted to Harry Truman. But it was an attraction that had to overcome deep doubts and hesitations.

In mid-April 1911, continuing the streak of bad luck that had been haunting the Trumans since his father went bankrupt in 1901, a calf broke Harry’s leg. That, too, was used for Farmer Truman’s pursuit of the athletic Miss Wallace. He joked about the injury, declaring it reminded him of the Irishwoman who mourned her husband after he drowned in the Big Blue River by howling: “To think that Mike should a crossed the great ocean and thin be drowned in a hole like the dirty Blue. Tis a disgrass indeed it is.” Harry said that he felt the same way about having a suckling calf break his leg. In another letter, he casually mentioned that the calf weighed a mere 300 pounds.

Harry’s broken leg soon healed, but it became apparent that 1911 was not going to be a good year for farmers. It simply refused to rain. Even the Trumans’ vegetable garden failed. “We are living on bread and bacon with some canned goods thrown in,” Harry wrote.

This fact did not prevent Harry from discussing with remarkable candor the probable state of mind of a mutual friend named Minnie Clements, who had just married. Bess remarked that she suspected Minnie wished she could turn back the clock. Harry replied that he thought it took several months for that kind of disillusion to set in.

They tell me that for the first few months she can burn the biscuits every morning if she chooses and it’s all right, but after that she learns what a good cook her ma-in-law was. And . . . he can be as no-account and good-for-nothing as he wants to be but he soon learns how his pa-in-law made his money. Then it’s ho for Reno or South Dakota [divorce mill capitals in 1911]. It’s certainly awful what pessimists those two places have made of people. I am a Catholic when it comes to divorce. . . .

Marriage was clearly on Harry’s mind. On June 22, 1911, less than a year after he appeared at the door of 219 Delaware Street with Mrs. Wallace’s cake plate, he proposed. He began obliquely, commenting that the drought was making water as much of a luxury as diamonds. He then took the plunge: “Speaking of diamonds, would you wear a solitaire on your left hand should I get it? Now that is a rather personal or pointed question provided you take it for all it means. You know, were I an Italian or a poet I would commence and use all the luscious language of two continents. I am not either but only a kind of good-for-nothing American farmer. I’ve always had a sneakin’ notion that some day maybe I’d amount to something. I doubt it now though like everything. It is a family failing of ours to be poor financiers. I am blest that way. Still that doesn’t keep me from having always thought that you were all that a girl could be possibly and impossibly. You may not have guessed it but I’ve been crazy about you ever since we went to Sunday school together. But I never had the nerve to think you’d even look at me. I don’t think so now but I can’t keep from telling you what I think of you.”

All Harry got in reply was a devastating silence. She obviously did not know what to make of this incredibly honest farmer, who was asking her to marry him and simultaneously admitting that he was probably going to be a financial failure. If Harry Truman had deliberately tried to wreck his chances with Bess Wallace, he could not have chosen a more ruinous remark. Here was a man asking her to repeat her mother’s experience. But there was something about this man that stirred a response in Bess Wallace’s bruised, wary heart. That amazing optimism in the face of experiences that would have discouraged or disillusioned most men. The energy, the vitality he exuded. She could not say yes, but she did not want to say no.

After three weeks of agony, Harry wrote a wary letter: “I have just about come to the conclusion that I have offended you in some way. . . . Would you object to my coming down this Saturday evening?”

Although the phone service between Grandview and Independence was erratic at best, this letter must have been answered that way, because two days later, Harry was writing Bess another letter, telling her how he felt about his visit and their talk. She had turned him down, but she had done it in the gentlest, most considerate way. She had said that she hoped they could continue to be friends.

You turned me down so easy that I am almost happy anyway. I never was fool enough to think that a girl like you could ever care for a fellow like me but I couldn’t help telling you how I felt. . . . I have been so afraid you were not even going to let me be your good friend. To be even in that class is something.

I never had any desire to say such things to anyone else. All my girl friends think I am a cheerful idiot and a confirmed old bach. . . . I have never met a girl in my life that you were not the first to be compared with her, to see wherein she was lacking and she always was.

Please don’t think I am talking nonsense or bosh, for if ever I told the truth I am telling it now and I’ll never tell such things to anyone else or bother you with them again. I have always been more idealist than practical anyway, so I really never expected any reward for loving you. I shall always hope, though.

Here was candor that ought to have melted any woman’s heart, but Bess only agreed to let Harry give her his picture. By the end of July, he had delivered the “cat chaser,” as he called it. Then he launched a campaign to lure the athletic Miss Wallace to Grandview. He undertook to build a tennis court on the family farm.

For the next month, his letters were full of references to this project. He planned a grass court. “We have a heavy field roller, and I can make it as hard as the road and mow the grass real short,” he told her. “I am going to have it ready by Labor Day.”

On the eve of Labor Day weekend, he sent Bess a map of the road to Grandview. All day Sunday, Harry toiled on the court. On Monday, instead of Bess and her friends in their tennis outfits, there was only a message that she had decided not to come because it was raining in Independence. Forlornly, Harry reported that the sun had been shining brightly in Grandview.

Refusing to allow the word discouraged into his vocabulary, Harry persuaded the elusive Miss Wallace to set another date for a visit to Grandview. She declined to do so - and then made an impromptu visit, with virtually no warning. In the meantime, the tennis court had deteriorated from exposure to wind and weather and was pronounced unusable. It was not level enough. Harry was reduced to hoping he could persuade the road overseer to come in with his grader to flatten it out.

No more was said about the tennis court. Harry began finding an amazing number of excuses to go to Independence and Kansas City. By October 1, 1911, he was inviting Bess to a matinee of H.M.S. Pinafore, which soon was arriving at the Shubert Theater in Kansas City. He added an invitation to the evening’s vaudeville show at the Orpheum and dinner in Kansas City, because “it will take so long to go to Independence and back so many times.” Bess accepted, and Harry abandoned his rural ways to become Miss Wallace’s escort to the metropolis.

A few weeks later, Harry traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, with friends to file claims for mineral rights in the nearby hills. It was a kind of lottery, with about 400 claims available, worth from $40 to $16,000. Alas, he reported to Bess he did not even draw a $40 claim. “I never could draw anything though. Not even the lady I wanted,” Harry wrote, adding that he was sure he was born under an unlucky star.

Ignoring this uncharacteristic outburst of pessimism, Miss Wallace replied by asking if “wanted” meant his interest in her had waned. Harry hastily replied that the past tense only meant his grammar was at fault. His feelings for her were “something that will never be past with me.” He spent the rest of the letter bemoaning his lack of a “benzine buggy,” as hoboes called an automobile. If he had one, he would “burn the pike from here to Independence” so often he would “make myself monotonous to you.”

By the end of 1911, in the eighteenth month of their courtship, Harry had a standing invitation to visit 219 North Delaware Street every Sunday. But he was still far from getting Miss Wallace to consider marriage. On one of these Sundays, which happened to be rainy, Harry asked her if she was getting tired of him hanging around so much. Bess replied that she thought he was the one who would get tired of it.

“I’ll never get tired,” Harry said.

Bess looked out the window at the rain and said: “I wish I had some rubber boots.”

A day or two later, Harry wrote her a letter, recalling the scene. He told her she should not have been afraid “of my getting slushy or proposing until I can urge you to come to as good a home as you have already.” Then, either with great shrewdness or great honesty or both, he added: “Still, if I thought you cared a little, I’d double my efforts to amount to something and maybe would succeed.”

Bess responded with some thoughts on husbands and money. Harry could not know, at this point, the painful memories this subject stirred in her mind. She told him that she and her friend Mary Paxton had decided that a woman should never get involved with a man who was unable to support her in decent style. Mary, obviously reacting to her bitter experience with Charlie Ross, added that she lately was inclined to wait around for a millionaire.

Harry replied that he was surprised to find that he agreed with Mary Paxton for once. When they were kids, they never were able to agree on anything. But Mary was not the point here, although he wished her the best of luck in her hunt for a millionaire. “I am going to start in real earnest now . . .,” Harry wrote. “For what you say sounds kind of encouraging, whether you meant it that way or not.”

After that exchange, money became a frequent topic of discussion between them. When Bess invited Harry to dinner at the Salisbury farm and told him they would walk the three miles from Independence, he protested that he was more than willing to hire a buggy. He obviously was not acquainted with Miss Wallace’s fondness for marathon walks or that this invitation was another favorable sign.

On February 13, 1912, when Bess turned twenty-seven, Harry apologized for not giving her a birthday present or sending a valentine for the following day because he did not have the money to buy anything “good enough.” Bess replied by giving him a stickpin with her birthstone in it for Valentine’s Day. Harry reported that he had found a fortune teller’s prospectus in a cough-drop box, and it said that people with February birthdays had a quieting effect on the insane. “I suppose that means those they have caused to become dippy. Don’t you?” he asked.

Three weeks later, on March 4, 1912, ten months after she rejected his proposal, Harry began calling her “Bess.” He had been admitted to the inner circle. Even more encouraging was the way she took him into her confidence about her name. She told him she was not really happy with Bess and was considering several other variations on her baptismal name, Elizabeth. Harry offered some lively comments and observations on the subject.

My Dear Elizabeth:

How does that look to you? I just wrote it that way to see how it would look.

You know we have associations for every name. England’s great Queen always goes to Elizabeth for me. When I was a very small kid I read a history of England and it had a facsimile signature of hers to Queen Mary’s death warrant. I’ll never forget how it looked if I live to be a hundred. But that didn’t put me against her, for I always thought she was a great woman. I never think of you as Elizabeth. Bess or Bessie are you. Aren’t you most awful glad they didn’t call you the middle syllable? It is my pet aversion. There is an old woman out in this neck of the woods who is blest with enough curiosity for a whole suffragette meeting and a marvelous ability for gratifying it, to her own satisfaction. She has a wart on the end of her nose and a face like the Witch of Endor. Her first name is Liz. She is an ideal person to carry the name. I am sure it is not a nickname but her real one as no one of her caliber could possibly be called Elizabeth. I have a very belligerent (spelled right?) cousin whose name is Lizzie. Therefore, I care not for Liz and Lizzie for those two very good reasons. . . . I don’t know what got me started on this line of talk, but I hope you won’t be offended because I don’t like some of the nicknames of your good name. But please remember that I like yours muchly - anyway - as well as the real one.

Making some money became almost an obsession with Harry Truman. He dashed to New Mexico in search of prime farmland that he hoped he could buy or lease with his Uncle Harrison’s help. At the farm, he watched his brother Vivian depart to his own farm - he had married in the fall of 1911 - and then let the hired men go, too. He was going to work the entire farm on his own to try to raise the profits. His father was planning to run for road overseer for the town of Grandview, and that was going to take much of John Truman’s time. “Work is the only way I see to arrive at conclusions,” Harry wrote. “This thing of sitting down and waiting for plutocratic relatives to decease [he was referring to his Uncle Harrison] doesn’t go with me.”

Now began a terrific struggle to make the farm profitable and simultaneously keep Bess Wallace’s interest in him alive. Everything seemed to conspire against him. Trains failed to run, and he would lose a whole night’s sleep trying to get back to Grandview. His father became surlier about the time Harry spent in Independence. John Truman began going out of his way to make life difficult for his son.

In this letter, written in the middle of August of 1912, Harry gives Bess (and us) a graphic picture of a particularly bad night and day. It began with the train sitting on the tracks halfway to Grandview until 6:00 a.m.

There was a bunch of hoodlums behind me [on the stalled train] . . . and every time we’d get to sleep they’d let out a roar and wake me up. Mr. Galt [a fellow passenger] seemed to sleep placidly on. We both called ourselves some bad names for not going into the Pullman. But I thought every minute would be the last and it would only take them thirty minutes to get to Grandview.

Well you could put all the sleep I got last night under a postage stamp. I got home at 7 a.m. which by the way is the latest yet for me, and changed my glad rags for my sorry ones and went to loading baled hay into a car. That is the hottest job there is, I think, except shoveling coal for His Majesty [his name for the Devil]. We finally managed to get 289 bales into the car at seven thirty this evening. I came home and put on my clean overalls and a white soft shirt, had supper and was just getting ready to come up and start this letter when Papa came in and said it was lightning around and that we should go over to a haystack some three quarters of a mile away where the baler had been at work and cover up the hay. I almost told him we’d let the hay go hang, for you can imagine how very much I’d feel like going three quarters of a mile across a stubble field with low shoes and silk stockings after being up all night and working all day - at 9 p.m. besides. I went though and handed up thirty two boards a foot wide and fourteen long while Papa placed them on the hay. I’ll bet two dollars to two cents it doesn’t rain now, but it sure would if I’d refused to go.

It might be helpful to note that Harry was twenty-eight years old at this point. He displayed incredible forbearance with his father’s tantrums. But he also stood up to him. “Papa says he’s going to adopt a boy if I don’t stay home on Sundays. I told him to go ahead,” he wrote.

A few weeks later, he excused a disconnected letter, explaining: “I have to write this on the installment plan, as usual Papa keeps wanting something.” Next came a report that his father was “on his ear” because he had come home with two loads of cows and Harry was not there to meet him. His father angrily telephoned Independence and was frustrated by an uncooperative operator. Harry was “glad.” He said that there was “no harm done and I spent the evening where I wanted to.”

His letters are full of references to his exhaustion. One day, he fell asleep shelling corn. But he doggedly continued his visits to Independence. His devotion clearly began to make an impression on Bess Wallace. In the fall of 1912, they went for a walk in the country on which Farmer Truman proved he could more than match Bess’ endurance. He wrote her the next day, cheerfully asking how she felt: “With the exception of a blister, I was as fit as could be this morning.”

A new form of entertainment – motion pictures - was sweeping the country. Harry used them to extend an ingenious invitation. He suggested going to lunch at some Kansas City restaurant and then seeing all the pictures that could be crowded in four hours. He admitted it was a “Twelfth Street stunt” [Twelfth Street was the Broadway of Kansas City], but “if a person don’t have a good time doing what everybody does, he’ll lead a mighty bored life.”

Along with his sophistication, Harry Truman continued to reveal his feelings to Bess about the life he led on the farm. His thoughts now were often more serious than amusing: “Do you know that I did the orneriest thing this morning? I was cutting oats right here close to the house and amputated the left foot of an old hen with five chickens. I felt badly about it too. She was over in the oats where I couldn’t see her till I’d already done it. Mamma says she’ll get all right. I hope so. I’d rather do most anything than to hurt something that can’t tell me what it thinks of me.”

Politics also became an excuse for escorting Miss Wallace. They went to a political rally at which William Jennings Bryan spoke on behalf of the Democratic candidate for president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson. The nominee, a former president of Princeton University who had turned politician and become governor of New Jersey in 1910, was unknown to Missourians. But Bryan was a famous name to every Western farmer. Almost to a man, they had worshipped him ever since he electrified the Democratic Convention of 1896 with his famous speech attacking the gold standard. His call for using silver to back American currency really was a demand for cheaper money, always popular with debt-burdened farmers. Bryan turned it into a crusade by proclaiming: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” and denouncing as Antichrists the railroad barons and Wall-Street tycoons who favored the gold standard. His fervid oratory three times had won him the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

But in 1912, Bryan was disliked by many Missourians. He had double-crossed Missouri’s hero, Champ Clark, speaker of the House of Representatives, who thought he deserved the Democratic Party’s nomination for the progressive legislation he had pushed through Congress. Because Clark was supported by New York’s Tammany Hall bosses, Bryan decided he represented “the predatory interests” and threw his support to the political newcomer, Woodrow Wilson.

Jackson County Democrats were not that fond of Champ Clark, who represented the dominant St. Louis bosses as far as they were concerned. Bryan drew a huge crowd, and Harry Truman enjoyed him immensely. In spite of the way the Nebraskan had led the Democratic Party to disaster in three presidential elections since 1896, Harry was one of his “staunchest admirers.” He liked the idealism that Bryan tried to inject, however ineptly, into American politics.

I don’t know what Bess thought of the aging “Boy Orator of the Platte,” but she undoubtedly was pleased by Harry’s remark that he would not have enjoyed the great man nearly so much if she had not been present. This sounds to me as if she had displayed a certain reluctance to attend this political jamboree. It is easy to see why politics would remain a subject Bess preferred to avoid.

But she could not stop Harry from following the tumultuous campaign of 1912 with passionate interest. Teddy Roosevelt, running as the candidate of the Progressive Party, split the Republican Party, and Woodrow Wilson became the first Democratic president in sixteen years. In the three-cornered melee, the incumbent, President William Howard Taft, suffered one of the worst political humiliations in U.S. history, carrying only two states.

Another issue loose in this campaign was votes for women. The Jackson County Examiner carried an editorial in favor of it. It was close to the high tide of the suffragette movement. Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers were making headlines in England with their hunger strikes, and in New York, brigades of militant women were marching up Fifth Avenue. But the movement had few supporters in Missouri, and Harry Truman and Bess Wallace were not among them. In one of his letters, Harry offhandedly remarked that a young farm horse “kicked like a starving suffragette,” and in another letter, he compared Mrs. Pankhurst to one of the farm’s guinea hens, who squalled all night and day.

It may puzzle some people that Bess Wallace, so independent in many ways, and her best friend, Mary Paxton, who was even more independent, did not support the suffragettes. But votes for women was not a popular idea outside the media capital of New York. In Massachusetts, when it was submitted to the people in a referendum with women permitted to vote, it was defeated by almost two to one, and the most shocking part of the story is the fact that only 23,000 women voted in favor of it. In Missouri, the question was put to a vote in 1914 - and lost by five to one, with only men voting.

The installation of a Democratic president in 1913 did not improve the fortunes of Harry Truman. The country, at least the western half, promptly reeled into a slump that sent farm prices plummeting - and with them, Harry’s hopes of making a profit from his backbreaking labors. To worsen life for the Trumans, their right to the farm was menaced by a lawsuit brought by their Young relatives, who resented the way their mother, Harriet Louisa Young, had left her property to Harrison and Martha Ellen and cut the rest of the family off with $5 each.

The brief alleged that Mamma Truman was the villain who persuaded her weak-minded mother to write this will. The accusation made Harry so mad, “I could fight a boilermaker.” Harriet Young was the best businesswoman he had ever seen and a woman of fierce integrity. “If we’d ever mentioned property to her, it would have finished us,” he told Bess. But there was nothing to do except hire a lawyer and slug it out. The legal expenses devoured what little money the farm produced during these painful years.

In spite of his poverty, Harry was gaining ground with Miss Wallace. Early in the summer of 1913, a little more than two years after Bess had turned down his proposal, she paid another of her rare visits to Grandview. Madge Wallace revealed her displeasure - disguised, of course, as concern - by taking it into her head that some sort of accident had happened on the trip out. She tried to call the Trumans, and the operator refused to connect her. This fact convinced her that a major disaster had occurred, and she was frantic until Bess came home. Harry apologized for the awful phone service - he vowed not to pay the bill - and asked anxiously: “Do you suppose she’ll ever let you come again?”

Bess came up with a solution to her mother’s hovering presence - longer and longer walks. Harry cheerfully accepted the opportunity to be alone with her. The expeditions undoubtedly involved picnics, and Harry passed this crucial test, without realizing it. They also took up a sport for which Harry Truman had no enthusiasm whatsoever - fishing. Bess loved it, except for one detail - baiting the hook. She would let Harry handle the worms, and then he would read or talk while she pulled carp and catfish from the Little Blue River or some lesser stream.

On the eve of a fishing expedition in early August 1913, Harry showed how seriously he took his baiting job - while flavoring it with his wry wit.

It looks as if it might rain this morning. I hope it does. That’s what we need . . . it’ll make the fish bite better. They say that liver is the best bait. Perhaps you wouldn’t object to baiting your hook with liver. It is necessary to bury it for three days. That might cause it to be as objectionable as worms. There’s an old man by the name of Moore living at Hickman Mills who is an expert in the fishing line and he says liver is the best bait on earth. I don’t know what effect the burying has on it but I suppose it adds to the flavor. English are said to have buried their deer meat to make it good. I’d prefer mine to stay on top of the ground.

We can come home by way of Missouri River and buy a few fish if we don’t catch any in the Blue. I think that is the usual mode of procedure anyway. . . .

The walks, meanwhile, stretched into marathons. In the fall of 1913, Harry was asking Bess if she had recovered from their most recent outing. “I am just now up to date,” he admitted. A few weeks later, he was warning her: “Be ready to walk Sunday.”

So it went through the fall of 1913 until the first Sunday in November. On that day, three years and five months after they had renewed their friendship on the porch of 219 Delaware Street, Bess confided to Harry Truman news that he did not believe at first. She told him that in the two and a half years since she had rejected his proposal, her feelings for him had undergone a profound change. She had begun to think that if she married anyone, he would be the man.

Harry was speechless. He could only sit and look at this golden-haired young woman. Once more, Bess did not know what to make of him. She found herself again wondering what there was about this odd mixture of farmer and thinker and humorist and roughneck who was tempting her to leave the sanctuary of 219 North Delaware Street to risk disappointment and perhaps worse in an uncaring world. “Harry Truman,” she cried, “you’re an enigma!”