Free Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo

Douglas’s presidency would have been inconsequential. He contracted typhoid fever and died on June 3, 1861—less than three months after Lincoln took office. He was forty-eight.
    In all probability, it was not Stephen A. Douglas but rather a different failed Democratic presidential candidate who was on Harry Truman’s mind as he drove through Springfield that day. Less than a year earlier, Democrats had nominated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson for president. It was a choice that Truman supported. “You are a brave man,” he wrote Stevenson shortly after the convention. “If it is worth anything, you have my wholehearted support and cooperation.”
    But almost from the moment he was nominated, Stevenson did everything he could to distance himself from Truman, whose popularity was at rock bottom. Stevenson replaced Truman’s head of the Democratic National Committee, Frank McKinney, with his own man, and he moved the party’s headquarters from Washington to Springfield, where he lived in the governor’s mansion. He wanted to “disown any connection with the Truman administration,” according to Matthew Connelly, one of Truman’s aides. “Stevenson actually was running against Truman. He did not want to get involved with any aspect of the Truman administration.”
    Naturally, this irritated Truman. In another longhand spasm, a letter he wrote to Stevenson but never sent, Truman said he had “come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner.” In another unsent letter to Stevenson, Truman wrote, “Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than you have.”
    Still, Truman was nothing if not a loyal Democrat, and he campaigned hard for Stevenson, even harder, some said, than he’d campaigned for himself four years earlier. It was another exhausting whistle-stop campaign, with Truman crisscrossing the country in the
Ferdinand Magellan.
(Stevenson campaigned by airplane.) “He … put everything he had into trying to help Stevenson,” said Matthew Connelly. But it was for naught. Eisenhower carried thirty-nine of the forty-eight states. He even won Illinois and Missouri.
    Springfield held no special place in Harry Truman’s heart.
    The Trumans didn’t stop in Springfield, but I did. I wanted to visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a ninety-million-dollar complex in downtown Springfield that opened in 2005. Unlike most other presidential libraries, it is not run by the National Archives. Instead, the state of Illinois runs it.
    With Harry’s library, the museum component was practically an afterthought. The original design included just two main exhibit rooms. When it was proposed that one of the rooms be dedicated to telling the story of Truman’s life, the former president vetoed the idea. As Wayne Grover, the head of the National Archives, explained at the time, “Mr. Truman … would be offended by anything that looked too much like an advertisement for him.” In fact, the museum would not include a comprehensive exhibit on Truman’s life until the late 1990s.
    The Lincoln Library, on the other hand, suffers no shortage of exhibits dedicated to its namesake. The museum, which was designed by HOK, the same architectural firm that designs “retro” ballparks like Baltimore’s Camden Yards, has been described as “cutting edge” and “state of the art.” It features life-size replicas of Lincoln’s boyhood home (a log cabin, of course), his law office in Springfield (which is kind of superfluous, since the real thing is just a few blocks away), his White House cabinet room, his box at Ford’s Theater, even his funeral cortege. Each of these replicas is inhabited by mannequins that are very lifelike (except when deathlike is more appropriate) and a little creepy. Gathered around the table in the cabinet room were Lincoln, seven members of his cabinet—and one real live human being dressed in period