Alonzo Fields

Alonzo Fields, the White House head butler, emerges in his recollections as both a skilled professional and an unusually perceptive witness to the household’s relationships. His accounts of a disputed cocktail recipe and of Harry S. Truman’s regard for staff make everyday service a measure of the new President’s approach to people: competence mattered, but so did treating a worker as a man rather than merely as a servant.

White House Service and Professional Pride

Fields was a tall, handsome Black man and, in J. B. West’s description, a proudly accomplished bartender. His craft came into view when Bess Wallace Truman ordered old-fashioneds. At first Fields made them according to his usual recipe, with chilled glasses, bourbon, orange, sugar, and bitters. After Bess asked for a less sweet drink, he tried another recipe; when she complained the next morning that it was the worst old-fashioned she had tasted and that neither she nor the President cared for fruit punch, West relayed the criticism to him.

Fields responded on the third evening with a double bourbon over ice, then waited beside Bess as she tried it. Her approving response settled the matter. The episode shows his professional pride without making the disagreement into a serious breach: he took the criticism personally, adjusted his work, and watched for the result. It also gives the Trumans’ preferences a concrete, domestic setting, far removed from the formal business of the presidency.

Regard for the Staff

Fields later recalled that he felt Truman understood him as a man, not as a servant to be tolerated, and that Truman expected him to act as a man in return. He contrasted that experience with Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he remembered as genial and warm but whose manner, in Fields’s view, retained the distance associated with aristocrats. The distinction was not simply between friendliness and coldness; it concerned whether the relationship allowed a staff member to be recognized as a person.

Another small incident reinforced that impression. On the night Germany surrendered, May 8, which was also Truman’s birthday, head cook Elizabeth Moore baked him a cake. After dinner, Truman went to the kitchen to thank her. Fields noted that no president had visited the White House kitchen since Calvin Coolidge. In Fields’s account, a presidential gesture toward a worker stood out precisely because it crossed the usual boundary between the household’s public hierarchy and its working life.

Character and Recollection

Fields’s judgment of Bess also emphasized standards over ceremony. He described her as someone who would tolerate no fakers, shirkers, or flatterers, and said that doing one’s job well was the way to earn her approval. Once that standard was met, he found her understanding to work for. The old-fashioned episode gives this assessment a revealing everyday form: she stated plainly what was wrong, while Fields’s response was to return with a drink that suited her.

Together, Fields’s observations portray a household in which the Trumans’ dealings with staff were marked by directness and personal recognition. His recollections are especially valuable for the contrast they draw between presidential warmth as a manner and respect as a relationship: Truman’s visit to the kitchen and Fields’s sense of being treated as a man made respect visible in ordinary acts.