TRUMAN INAUGURATED, MOTHER-IN-LAW NOT IMPRESSED

STILL THINKS HE’S A FAILURE

 

April 12, 1945

7:09 P.M.

The Cabinet Room of the White House

Washington, D.C.

 

Harry Truman was sworn in as the 33rd President of the United States today, after the death of President Roosevelt.

Congratulations poured in from all over the world.

He has big shoes to fill.

And one person believes he’s not up to the job.

That would be his mother-in-law.

She never thought he was good enough for her daughter Bess, and she still doesn’t.

She was heard muttering outside the White House:

“Sure, he’s the president, but he wasn’t elected president. And he may be commander-in-chief, but he never got above captain in the army.”

So, as a nation looks to the future with hopeful hearts, one woman will continue to look backward:

At the scrawny poor kid with no prospects, who “married up.”

Poor Harry can’t do anything right.

For some undisclosed reason, his mother-in-law wasn’t invited to the swearing-in ceremony.

 

But seriously…

 

December 30^th, 2022

 

Harry Truman was the ultimate overachiever.

He didn’t seem to have much at all going for him.

He was physically unprepossessing. Small of stature (his father was only 5’4” tall), and timid looking.

His eyes were so bad he was turned down at West Point and Annapolis.

He was born poor, and lived in debt for much of his adult life.

He failed in his one business venture.

He didn’t own a house until after he retired.

And yet…

He was a successful artillery captain in World War One.

He was elected County Judge, and pushed through an ambitious roads and building program.

He was elected twice as United States Senator, his reelection a stunning upset.

He chaired a committee on military spending, saving the government millions on expenditures. This success got him noticed by President Roosevelt, who tapped him to be his next vice-president.

He took over for the president who was practically an icon.

He met with Churchill and Stalin as an equal, and wasn’t intimidated by either.

He won reelection as president, in another stunning upset.

And he was the only man in history ever to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in war.

Still, after all this, he couldn’t impress his mother-in-law.

 

Madge

Truman claimed he never laughed at a mother-in-law joke.

If that’s true, he deserved a medal, because his wife’s mother was unmerciful in her disdain for him.

Madge Wallace was brought up in comparative luxury, one of the wealthy citizens of a small town.

She looked down on her future son-in-law immediately because of his modest background.

His status in her eyes didn’t improve when, after the marriage, the new couple moved in with mom.

Truman was a doting son-in-law, inviting Madge to live with his family in Washington before he was president, and then in the White House. She died there, shortly before the end of his second term. To the very end, as he took time out from his heavy duties to care for her, she maintained he couldn’t do anything right.

 

The Bomb

Truman wanted to fight in WWII as he had in WWI. When war broke out, he approached Chief of Staff George Marshall, asking to be sent overseas as an artillery colonel. Marshall told him he was too old. He would eventually get his chance to serve- not as colonel but as commander-in-chief. He would make history through a series of surprises.

The first surprise was being chosen as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944.

As vice president he was kept out of the loop, spending his time with his old Senate buddies, continuing a tradition of drinking Kentucky bourbon in an anteroom of the Senate they called “the dog house.”

The second surprise came on April 12, 1945, when he was rushed into the White House to take the oath of office as the 33rd president. His wife Bess, at his side, cried through the entire ceremony.

The third surprise was perhaps the most shocking. The secretary of war pulled the new president aside and told him of the existence of a nuclear bomb.

hen a shocked As vice president, he was kept out.

Less than four months later, Truman made the decision to use that weapon- the most powerful ever invented- against Imperial Japan.

 

Tough Guy

Truman showed again and again that he was not a man to be trifled with.

When Tom Pendergast, the political boss of Kansas City (and his political benefactor), urged him to give construction contracts to his corrupt friends, Truman refused.

When construction unions building the Jackson County courthouse went on strike, Truman threatened to fire them.

When President Roosevelt tried to use Senator Truman for his own political ends, he was terse:

“I’ve got a message for the president. Tell him to stop treating me like an office boy.”

He stared down Stalin, fired MacArthur, and defied anyone who underestimated him.

So why didn’t he stand up to his mother-in-law?

The fact was, Madge’s dissatisfaction went deeper than Harry’s poverty.

She carried a terrible secret.

Early one June morning in 1903, Madge’s husband put a revolver to his head in the family bathroom.

The shame of the suicide caused Madge and her four children to move away for a year. Her oldest child, Elizabeth, known as Bess, was eighteen years old.

This may answer how Madge could remain disappointed in Harry even after he attained the presidency. Maybe it wasn’t really him she was disappointed in. What feelings of disappointment, regret, and anger did she hold toward her husband, that she wouldn’t allow herself to acknowledge?

We’ll never know. The matter was not talked about.

Truman’s daughter Margaret saw firsthand how Harry shielded Bess from any talk of the suicide. Margaret was twenty years old when she learned about her grandfather’s cause of death. When she told her father what she had heard, he reacted sharply:

“He seized my arm in a grip that he must have learned when he was wrestling calves and hogs around the farmyard.

‘Don’t you ever mention that to your mother’ he commanded.”

It was the only time he ever spoke angrily to her.

Margaret never did bring up the subject with her mother.

As president, Truman had to fire his Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, who was mentally unbalanced. After firing Forrestal, Truman sent him to Bethesda Naval Hospital to be looked after. At Bethesda, Forrestal tied one end of the sash from his bathrobe to a radiator and the other around his neck, and jumped from a sixteenth story window.

Bess was terribly shaken by this suicide. There was much finger-pointing in the press; again Harry did his best to shield her. No wonder Bess avoided reporters.

 

Out of the Shadow

Truman seemed to spend his adult life in someone’s shadow. First it was Tom Pendergast. Then it was Franklin Roosevelt. Even after becoming president, Truman was seen as filling out FDR’s fourth term.

So, in 1948, he had a chance to step out of Roosevelt’s shadow, and win the presidency for himself. But by 1948 the country had soured on Truman, and his bid for reelection looked hopeless. His challenger, Thomas Dewey, was widely expected to be the next president. His election was so sure, the Chicago Tribune printed the headline before the results were in: Dewey Defeats Truman.

When Truman won, he held up a copy of the Tribune, in what became one of the most famous photos of the time.

Truman had overcome the odds once more. He had been counted out, underestimated. But he had believed in himself, he had made his case, and he had prevailed. His supporters had also believed in him.

But not Madge Wallace.

She believed Dewey would win.

 

Standing Strong

Throughout his life, from amid the din of artillery shells in France, to the burden of debt, to the shouldering of presidential responsibility, to the decision to use nuclear weapons, Harry Truman stood strong. But nothing speaks more eloquently of his character than the fact that he never spoke an unkind word- serious or joking, explicit or implied-  against Madge Wallace.

Instead, he was magnanimous in his accustomed simplicity.

Of his mother-in-law, he said plainly,

“She was a grand lady.”

 

Sources

The Accidental President, A. J. Baime

Harry S. Truman, Margaret Truman

Truman, David McCullough