Free Bess Truman by Margaret Truman Page B

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