Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [8]
Old Mr. McGuire, Jim McGuire’s father, used to make spools, and he was getting to be a pretty old man. He’d go over to the storage bin, and sometimes he’d only bring one spool at a time…. Well, finally, I spoke to [a supervisor], and I guess he mentioned it in the office because Mr. Shields come out. He got me and Mr. McGuire together, and he said, “We have decided that you have worked long and hard. And you always done good work too. And we think it is time you had a rest. So we have decided to pension you, and we will give you $55 a month, and you can have your house free as long as you live. But that doesn’t mean your wife can have it free after that.” … So the old man was pensioned off. You know, it’s a funny thing about them pensions. Practically everybody that gets one dies pretty soon after.
But by 1932, just 15 percent of American workers were eligible for private pensions. Not until the Social Security Act was signed by FDR in 1935 were most workers guaranteed at least some income after retirement.
As a government employee, however, Harry Truman did not qualify for Social Security. And he’d left the Senate too soon to qualify for a congressional pension.
His only income was that army pension.
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2
Independence, Missouri,
Winter and Spring, 1953
No twentieth-century president retired to more humble surroundings than Harry Truman. When not traveling the world, Teddy Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill, his estate on Long Island. Woodrow Wilson retreated to a fashionable townhouse in Washington, the only ex-president to stay in the capital. Herbert Hoover eventually settled into a plush suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Gerald Ford would retire to the pristine golf courses of Palm Desert, California. Bill Clinton would choose tony Westchester County, New York (mainly so his wife could run for the Senate).
But when Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, he returned to the same rambling, slightly ramshackle, two-and-a-half-story Victorian that he and Bess had lived in since their marriage thirty-four years earlier. It had been painted white when he became president in 1945, and hadn’t been painted again since. There was no air-conditioning. The only indication that it was the home of a luminary was the iron fence that surrounded the property. It had been erected in 1949 at the behest of Herbert Hoover, who had warned Truman that souvenir hunters would “tear the place down” otherwise. (Hoover said the doorknobs had been stolen off his childhood home in Iowa. Presumably he suffered no such thievery at the Waldorf.)
Known locally as the Gates-Wallace home, the house on Delaware Street was built, in fits and spurts, by George Porterfield Gates, Bess’s maternal grandfather, between 1867 and 1895. Bess, her three brothers, and her mother, Madge Gates Wallace, moved into the house in 1904 after Bess’s father committed suicide. After he married Bess, Harry moved into the already-crowded house as well. It was in their second-floor bedroom that their only child, Margaret, was born during a snowstorm on February 17, 1924. After Madge Gates Wallace died at age ninety in 1952, Harry and Bess bought out her brothers’ shares of the property, and, for the first time in their lives, the Trumans owned their own home. They would never own another.
Today the Truman home is managed by the National Park Service as part of the Harry S Truman National Historic Site in Independence. (Truman had no middle name—the “S” was meant to honor both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young—so the period after his middle initial is optional. The Park Service does not use one, unlike the National Archives and Records Administration, which runs the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Truman himself claimed to be neutral on the matter, though he usually used a period when signing his name.)
More than thirty thousand people visit the Truman home every year, but on my tour there were just two other people, a thirteen-year-old girl and her grandfather. The girl claimed her favorite subject