Free Truman by David McCullough

backwater, churchgoing, conservative, rooted to the past, exactly as most residents preferred. Kansas City was a brassy Yankee town, “money-wise” and full of “new people.” Independence was southern in both spirit and pace—really more southern than midwestern—and very set in its ways.
    There had been considerable building since the war. The coming of the railroads, the pellmell growth of Kansas City, the rise of several new local enterprises had had an effect. North Delaware Street, which ran north-south, four blocks west of the Square, was a perfect example of the changed look. The large Bullene house, the Sawyer house with its Tiffany glass windows, the big Gates place were all new since the war, like the money that built them. The Bullenes belonged to the family that founded Kansas City’s most popular dry goods firm, Emery, Bird, Thayer. Aaron Sawyer was head of the Bank of Independence, which had been organized since the war. George Porterfield Gates was partner in the Waggoner-Gates Milling Company of Independence, founded in 1866, which hit a bonanza with “Queen of the Pantry Flour,” a product known throughout the Midwest.
    Gates himself was part of a postwar Yankee influx. He had come from Vermont by way of Illinois, joined William Waggoner in the milling business in 1883, and two years later greatly remodeled and expanded his relatively modest house at the corner of North Delaware and Blue Avenue, spending in all, according to the Independence Sentinel, a fabulous $8,000. Painted gray with black trim at the windows, the finished clapboard “mansion” had fourteen rooms, verandas front and rear, fancy fretwork, tinted (“flashed”) glass in the front bay windows, slate roof, gas illumination, and hot and cold running water.
    Gates’s partner, William Waggoner, lived in even grander style, across from the mill on Pacific Street, in the house George Caleb Bingham once occupied, but that Waggoner had done over sparing no expense. It sat on a knoll, in a leafy, parklike setting of 20 acres.
    The Swope place on South Pleasant Street had a ballroom on the top floor. (The Swope fortune came from land in Kansas City.) The Vaile house on North Liberty, the showiest house in Independence, was a towering stone-trimmed, red-brick Victorian wedding cake, with thirty-one rooms and Carrara marble fireplaces. The Vaile stable had mahogany-paneled stalls. There was a greenhouse and four full-time gardeners. If Harvey Vaile, who made his money in “pure water” and contract mail delivery, was not the richest man in town, he certainly lived as though he were.
    Overall it was quite a handsome community. The primary streets were paved, clean, and shaded by large old elms and cottonwoods. People took pride in their gardens. On summer evenings, after dark, families sat visiting on front porches, their voices part of the night for anybody crossing the lawns between houses.
    National holidays and politics provided what little excitement occurred from one year to another. Most memorable for young Harry Truman was the day of Grover Cleveland’s second victory, in 1892, when the family was still in the house on Crysler Avenue. John Truman had scrambled to the top of the roof to tie a flag to the gilded weathervane, and that night, looking extremely proud, he rode a gray horse in a torchlight parade. Bessie Wallace’s friend Mary Paxton, a latter-day chronicler of town life, remembered how the men with their blazing torches came swinging down North Delaware leaving a trail of light under the dark trees. She, Harry, all their generation would remember it as a night-of-nights, since twenty years went by before Democrats, with the election of Wilson, could celebrate another presidential victory.
    In lots of ways it was a country town still. Roosters crowed at dawn. Dinner remained a midday meal in many households. The standard Sunday dinner after church was fried chicken, buttered peas, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, and