Truman Read Online Free PDF Page A

sent on a command course for six weeks and returned as adjutant of one of the battalions into which the 129th was split. A month or so later he was made commander of Battery D, which had proved obstreperous, and too much for several predecessors. The men almost all came from an Irish Catholic district of Kansas City. Truman claimed that he was one of only six Protestants out of more than 180. He made a success of it. This was the most important achievement until then in Truman’s life. It compensated for his inability to play games or get to West Point or strike oil. Thereafter the virtues of Battery D were given an unchallenged status in Truman’s folklore.
    The Battery’s military exploits were respectable rather than remarkable. Between August 20th and November 11th it was three or four times in action near Verdun and in the Vosges. It was subjected to occasional bombardment and stood up well. But it was never in direct contact with the enemy infantry. It never lost a gun or a man. Neither the danger nor the privation was comparable with that suffered by most French or British artilleryunits. For Truman it was a short war which forged long-lasting friendships.
    After the Armistice he stayed in France for another five months. He had periods of leave in Paris and in Nice and Monte Carlo, but life was mostly a series of poker games in muddy base camps, first behind Verdun and then near Le Mans. He landed in New York in late April 1919, and was discharged in Oklahoma four weeks later.
    In June he was married, in an Episcopal church—the Wallace influence—and moved into Mrs Wallace’s fourteen-roomed house on North Delaware Street, Independence, which old Porterfield Gates had built in 1867, and which was to remain Truman’s Jackson County home for the rest of his life. In July he arranged with his old partner Eddie Jacobson that they should jointly open a men’s outfitting business in the centre of Kansas City. They secured a good site on 12th Street, just opposite the new Muehlebach Hotel and close to the older Baltimore, and they paid a high rent. They traded up. With wheat at $2.15 a bushel it was possible to sell $15 shirts. They probably overtraded as well. They soon had $40,000’s worth of stock. They had a good first year. Then the post-war boom began to crack. The main lesson Truman claimed to have learned from his retail experience was never to elect a Republican president, and particularly one who appointed such an epitome of an Eastern banker as Andrew Mellon as his Secretary of the Treasury. In any event this early dose of monetarism helped to reduce the price of wheat to 88 cents in 1922, though the Democrats had seen it fall to $1.44 even before the election. It also reduced the demand for silk shirts in Kansas City. The $40,000 stock became worth $10,000. Truman and Jacobson ceased trading in the spring of 1922. Jacobson later became bankrupt, but Truman, who had politics in view, declined to petition, and eventually managed to pay off all his debts. He later gave his total loss in the business at about $28,000. On his return from the war he had estimated that he had $15 to $20,000 in free capital, plus a small amount of land. The failure left him without assets, but in no way close to the breadline. He had too many relations and friends for that.
    He also had fairly immediate political prospects. The outfitters had not only been a fluctuatingly successful sales outlet. It had in addition been a great political talking shop, particularly fordemobilized veterans. Truman loved veterans. ‘My whole political career is based on my war service and war associates,’ he said with a little exaggeration 25 years later. Of course he could not love them all, not even those from Battery D, or the 129th Field Artillery. Some of them were Republicans, and this produced an awkward conflict of loyalties. But in 1920, for the only time in his life he crossed over party lines and voted