Free Truman by David McCullough Page A

beaten biscuits, which, being made of Queen of the Pantry Flour, a “soft wheat” flour, were understood to be the world’s best. Mud-spattered buggies and farm wagons clogged the Square on Saturday nights when the farmers came to town for haircuts and supplies. Town boys grew up with farmer’s chores as part of the daily routine. Harry and Vivian had cows to milk, horses to curry, water, and feed, wood to split for the kitchen stove.
    On clear winter nights, with the trees bare and the soft glow of gas and oil lamps still the only light in the windows of town, stars in the black sky overhead blazed with a clarity that residents of a later, “electrified” era would never experience.
    Local boosters insisted on calling it a city and bragged about the new electric plant under construction at a cost of $30,000, or the new high school, which had cost still more. Local merchants were described as unexcelled “in regard to integrity, uprightness and faithfulness in business affairs and cordiality and good nature in social life.”
    Yet for all this there was an air of great understated gentility, even sophistication. There were those in town, among the old moneyed families, who talked of travels in Europe, or summers in Colorado Springs. “Study groups” met to discuss literature and poetry, and with a degree of appreciation and vitality that could take visitors by surprise.
    The teaching in the schools Harry attended was superb. In addition to Woodland College for Women, there was Presbyterian College, also for women, and St. Mary’s Academy for girls. These, to be sure, were only tiny, struggling institutions—the usual graduating class at Woodland numbered just a dozen or so—but they were well regarded and cause for much local pride. Independence, remembered Ethel Noland years later, “stood for culture,” a claim easy for outsiders to scoff at, she knew, but that she and others like her took very much to heart.
    “There was conversation,” she said. “I mean by that talk about what was going on in the world, talk about ideas.”
    The town supported two bookstores and most of the leading families took the Kansas City papers, in addition to the Sentinel or the Jackson Examiner. Kansas City, furthermore, was only a ten-mile ride by trolley or on the new train known as the Airline. So there was little sense of being cut off from the wide world, if the wide world was what you wished.
    And with so much history attached to the town, no one with a feeling for the past could find it uninteresting. “No town in the west is richer in historical interest than the beautiful city of Independence,” declared a new guide to Independence. At the point south of town where the wagon trains had crossed Blue River, crevices worn by their wheels were still plainly evident. George Caleb Bingham had painted his Order No. 11 in one of the old outbuildings at the Waggoner estate. The brick walls of the Chrisman-Sawyer Bank, on the northwest corner of the courthouse square, showed the scars still of Civil War battles, and on pleasant mornings in the years of Harry Truman’s boyhood, old Marshal Peacock could often be seen walking stiffly about town, a spare, erect figure with a white beard and cane, who, as everyone knew, still carried the bullet fired by Jim Crow Chiles lodged in his spine.
    George Porterfield Gates, Bessie Wallace’s grandfather, liked to frighten and delight Bessie and her friends with his tale of a late-night drive home in a buggy from a long-ago country wedding. A mysterious rider had appeared out of the dark, put a gun to Gates’s neck, and held it there all the way into town. It was Jim Crow Chiles, who, Gates was sure, had only murder in his heart. But, as they turned down North Delaware Street, Jim Crow “laughed his fiendish laugh” and vanished in the night, as suddenly as he had appeared.
    The atmosphere remained pervadingly southern—antebellum Old South, unreconstructed. Handkerchiefs were waved