Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [18]
Bess, of course, had made Harry promise that he would drive no faster than fifty-five miles per hour, even though the speed limit on many highways at the time was sixty or sixty-five—and in some places there were no limits at all. (In Missouri, for example, drivers were merely required to maintain a “reasonable and prudent” speed.) But, owing to his lead foot, Harry found it almost impossible to keep that promise. Just a few miles outside Independence, Bess turned to him and said, “What does the speedometer say?”
“Fifty-five,” Harry answered.
“Do you think I’m losing my eyesight? Slow down!”
Harry obeyed, and soon everything else on the road was passing the decelerated Trumans. “Not only that,” Harry remembered, “but since we were going so slowly, they had a chance to look us over. Pretty soon the shouted greetings started: ‘Hi, Harry!’ ‘Where you going, Harry?’ ‘Hey! Wasn’t that Harry Truman?'”
“Well,” Harry said to Bess, a bit of I-told-you-so in his voice, “there goes our incognito—and I don’t mean a part of the car.”
Harry and Bess on a trip in 1957. The Trumans were one of those lucky couples who travel well together, though Bess always thought Harry drove too fast.
About an hour after leaving Independence, they crossed the Missouri River near the town of Waverly. When Harry had first proposed the trip, Bess had had her doubts. But now that they were on the road, those doubts melted away in the withering heat. On the bridge over the Missouri, Bess turned to Harry. “Isn’t it good to be on our own again,” she said, “doing as we please as we did in the old Senate days?”
“I said that I thought it was grand,” Harry remembered, “and that I hoped we’d do as we pleased from that time on.”
Driving across Missouri on Highway 24 today, one is struck by how little, not how much, things seem to have changed since 1953—at least in appearance. Once the clutches of Kansas City’s suburban sprawl are escaped a few miles east of Independence, the two-lane road practically turns into a time machine. You can drive it all the way to Moberly—150 miles, over halfway across the state—without encountering a single fast-food restaurant, big-box store, or chain motel. There are no traffic lights either, just a handful of four-way stops at the bigger crossroads. Rolling hay and soybean fields are interrupted by a succession of small towns where American flags flutter from nearly every house. Except for the cell phone towers, satellite dishes, and pro-life billboards, Harry Truman would have no trouble recognizing the place today.
In one important respect, however, Missouri is much different today than it was in 1953. The Missouri that Harry Truman knew was segregated. Although it never joined the Confederacy, Missouri was a slave state and, in its racial attitudes anyway, very much a Southern state. Schools were segregated by law. All other public facilities—buses, hotels, restaurants, theaters, playgrounds—were segregated by “public consensus.” A state law banned marriages “between white persons and negroes or white persons and Mongolians.”
Indeed, it would have been all but impossible for African Americans to take a road trip like the one Harry and Bess were taking. In the early 1950s, Senator Lyndon Johnson asked his maid’s husband, Gene Williams, to drive his pet beagle from Texas to Washington. Williams explained to Johnson the perils involved in such a trip. “We drive for hours and hours,” he said. “We get hungry. But there’s no