Up from independence: Harry Truman was a classic American striver, and a failure, until war and politics intervened.

• Author: Hamby, Alonzo
• Position: Citizen Soldier: A Life of Harry S. Truman - Book review

Citizen Soldier: A Life of Harry S. Truman

by Aida D. Donald

Basic Books, 288 pp.

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"He was one of our great presidents, wasn't he?"

So remarked a leading local attorney I know--a longtime pillar of the Republican Party. He was talking about Harry S. Truman, reflecting what has become a widespread consensus, one that few could have imagined when Truman left the presidency in 1953.

Born in 1884, Truman, in many respects, exemplified the American experience of the late nineteenth century as the nation made a transition to the more structured world of the twentieth. His father, John Truman, scion of a poor Kentucky family, had made his way to Missouri before the Civil War and managed a living as a farmer and livestock trader. John was known for his short temper and readiness to use his fists to settle disputes. He eventually went flat broke speculating in grain futures.

Truman's mother, Martha Young, one of several offspring of a prosperous freight hauler and landowner, was a notch or two higher socially than her husband. She had graduated from the Baptist College for Women, likely more a residential secondary school than an institution of higher education. She was the one who provided the culture in her family and encouraged her son to take up the piano. Both the Trumans and the Youngs had sympathized with the Confederacy during the Civil War, and both were staunch Baptists. (Indeed, Harry's younger brother, John Vivian, was named for one of the founders of the Baptist Church in Kentucky.) And both families were Democratic partisans.

Harry grew to manhood in a rough-and-ready neo-frontier environment. But he did so as an effeminate boy wearing thick eyeglasses, taking piano lessons, and prohibited from contact sports for fear he would break his expensive spectacles. From adolescence on, he sought a manly identity, aspiring first to a military career, then entrepreneurial success, then, finally, politics. After a promising start as a clerk at Commerce Bank in Kansas City and a National Guard enlistee, Truman was pulled away to help his impecunious father manage a family farm owned by Grandmother Young and her son, Truman's uncle Harrison. He spent a decade toiling there, joining local organizations, dabbling in politics, and courting Bess Wallace, a girl he had known and loved since they were small children in Independence. He also managed to lose what money he had managed to save or raise in ill-considered mining and oil...