Truman Read Free Page B

always proved elusive, but he emerged from all these occupations, his son was insistent and uncontradicted, with his honour intact. He was also the first Truman to be an involved political militant. He held no notable offices, but he was a passionate Democrat. In 1892 he was excited by Grover Cleveland’s victory. He had to wait until 1912 for another Democratic president to be elected, but he then welcomed Wilson’s success, even though he would greatly have preferred Champ Clark, the only Missourian other than his son tocome within striking distance of the presidency, to have secured the nomination. His politics were based on a simple, instinctive, loyal partisanship which he passed on to his elder son. He also took him to a greater number of political meetings, ensured he was made a page at the Kansas City Democratic Convention of 1900, when William Jennings Bryan was nominated for the second of his three unsuccessful candidatures, and, more surprisingly, introduced him to Plutarch’s
Lives,
which became a major literary influence.
    Harry S. Truman was born, and so registered, at Lamar, Barton County, Missouri on May 8th, 1884. The ‘S’ stood for nothing but ‘S’. 2 The choice of form by Truman’s parents stemmed from a desire to balance between the competing claims
of Solomon
Young and Anderson
Shippe
Truman. Whether either was satisfied is not recorded. The subsequent two children of the marriage (John Vivian, born 1886, and Mary Jane, born 1889) were more normally named. Vivian passed his life as a moderately successful working farmer, until he retired on the proceeds of the land sale for the shopping centre. Mary remained a spinster, who lived with her mother. Truman remained fairly close to both.
    The house in which he was born was more modest than anything in which he subsequently lived. It was not a share-cropper’s shack, nor was it a solid farmhouse; it was between the two. It remained his home for little more than a year. Twice in 1885 his family moved to different houses in Cass County. Then in 1886 they removed themselves to the Young house at Grandview, nominally for ‘Peanuts’ Truman to manage the farm of the ageing Solomon. The management role must have been either nominal or unsuccessful, for in another three years they were off again, to Independence, without any apparent ill-effect upon the farm.
    Independence was already a proper town, although with a population of only 6,000. Today it has 110,000 and is effectively a nine-mile-distant satellite of Kansas City. Then, Kansas City was an exploding place of 55,000. The inhabitants of Independence regarded it as a ‘Yankee’ city and themselves, with some residual Southern ways, as quite distinct. However, the presence of Kansas City was immanent. Both it and Independence were part of JacksonCounty, which was the political unit, and the encompassment of Harry Truman’s life until 1934.
    The reason given for this move was that Harry needed ‘graded’ schooling, as opposed to everyone being taught in one class at Grandview. Maybe his father’s desire to escape from too close a Young dependence and to try some of his speculative ventures also had something to do with it. They lived successively in two substantial houses in Independence, each for six years. Then John Anderson Truman had a disastrous year on the grain market and they were forced to sell up and move in straightened circumstances to the relative anonymity of Kansas City.
    These twelve years, however, had seen Harry Truman through his schooling in a compact community. He was a boy apart, for his poor eyesight meant that he had to wear spectacles from the age of six, which at that time was regarded as an oddity in the mid-West and was held to preclude him from sports or rough group pastimes. He became a voracious reader but this did not lead to any outstanding brilliance in his school classes. A number of good women teachers made a