Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [7]
The train reached Independence at 8:05 that night. The reception was positively tumultuous. More than eight thousand people swarmed the town’s tiny depot to welcome Harry and Bess home. As they stepped from the Ferdinand Magellan for the last time and began making their way through the massive crowd, an American Legion band struck up “The Missouri Waltz” (never mind that Truman hated the song). The Trumans were overwhelmed with emotion. Standing behind a forest of microphones planted on the platform, Harry addressed the crowd. He joked about being in the “army of the unemployed”—though he was quick to add that it was a “small army.”
“I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this reception,” he said. “It’s magnificent—much more than we anticipated. It’s a good feeling to be back home.” Bess could barely speak. “I’m just delighted to be home,” she said. “This is certainly a wonderful welcome.” When they finally reached their house at 219 North Delaware Street, another fifteen hundred people were waiting to greet them. “Mrs. T. and I were overcome,” Truman later wrote of that night. “It was the payoff for thirty years of hell and hard work.”
Harry and Bess walked hand in hand into the house. The next morning Harry was asked what he planned to do. “Take the grips up to the attic,” he said, using the old-fashioned word for suitcases.
Retirement, as it has come to be known, is a relatively recent concept. The first edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828, lists four meanings for the word, none of which mention age. You worked until you couldn’t work anymore, in which case your family, probably large, provided for you. Or you worked until you died. No gold watches, no pensions, no Social Security.
But older workers had no place in the Industrial Revolution. They couldn’t operate the newfangled machinery as nimbly as younger workers. And assembly lines were only as efficient as their weakest link, which was usually an older worker. The aged were simply in the way, and many employers began wondering how best to get rid of them.
The answer, suggested a Johns Hopkins professor named William Osler in a 1905 lecture, was “a peaceful departure by chloroform.” Osler was being facetious (one hopes), but his point was serious. Osler believed men over forty contributed little to society. “Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty and … we would practically be where we are today.”
As for men over sixty, Osler thought them completely useless. His proposal, short of chloroform, was mandatory retirement. There would be an “incalculable benefit … if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.” (Osler, who was fifty-five at the time, would live another fifteen years—and never retire.)
But older workers couldn’t afford to stop working. They needed the money. In response, some employers began offering pensions—in the name of efficiency, not altruism. Funded by younger, lower-paid employees, pensions gave older workers the means to retire—sometimes involuntarily. A foreman in a Connecticut textile mill recalled how one worker was “retired