Great Man theory

Great Man theory treats exceptional individuals as forces that make history rather than merely products of it. The book presents Harry S. Truman’s early attraction to this view through his reading of heroic biographies and his conviction that human beings make history. It also sets that conviction against a world shaped by inherited family memories, local commemoration, and social circumstance, showing both the appeal and the limits of a history centered on singular figures.

Early formation

In the spring of 1894, after a severe bout of diphtheria had left Harry temporarily paralyzed and kept him out of school, he recovered, caught up through summer tutoring, and skipped third grade. For his tenth birthday, his mother gave him four illustrated volumes titled Great Men and Famous Women. The collection, assembled from essays in leading American and English magazines, ranged across Soldiers and Sailors, Statesmen and Sages, Workmen and Heroes, and Artists and Authors. It was not a children’s set, and Harry eventually read all four volumes. Their scale and range made the lives of notable people a sustained object of study rather than a passing childhood interest.

The biographies suggested a particular kind of historical agency. Harry especially liked the Soldiers and Sailors volume and dreamed of becoming a great general. Hannibal, who had one eye, was a favorite; among American figures, he admired Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Lee also mattered within the family: Harry’s mother revered him, and Harry later told a friend that studying the careers of great men was one way he hoped to be worthy of her. The ideal therefore joined personal ambition to family loyalty. Heroic history offered models of achievement, but its meaning was also shaped by the people whose approval mattered to him.

History made by individuals

As a student, Harry extended his reading beyond the birthday collection. In the town library, he and Charlie Ross set themselves the ambitious task of reading all its roughly two thousand books, including the encyclopedias. Harry worked through standard histories of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and described his aim as learning facts and instruction rather than pursuing a romantic adventure. His interest lay in history as the record of people’s lives and actions, not as a remote sequence of dates.

His understanding of that record was explicitly centered on human agency: he concluded that men make history, since otherwise there would be no history, and rejected the idea that history makes the man. His pantheon expanded from Hannibal, Andrew Jackson, and Robert E. Lee to include Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cyrus the Great, and Gustavus Adolphus. The pattern remained strikingly martial. Jefferson, Lincoln, Leonardo, and the industrial figures admired by other boys were not yet among his heroes. Greatness, as he then imagined it, belonged above all to commanders and rulers whose individual capacity could overcome formidable odds.

A past held in common

The book complicates this individual-centered outlook by showing how Truman’s historical imagination arose within a community that continually retold its past. In his family, memories of the Civil War carried force even when the details were uncertain. A formal claim by his grandmother’s family itemized livestock, provisions, wagons, and fence rails taken during the war, but did not list the family silver or buildings destroyed. Later stories nevertheless dwelt on silver allegedly taken and on a child watching soldiers depart amid the aftermath of burning barns. The narrative emphasizes that the remembered stories, rather than the claim alone, helped a family become firm in its feelings. Historical identity was thus formed collectively through the transmission of memory, including accounts whose particulars could not be confirmed.

That process was visible in the landscape and social rituals of Independence as well. Wagon-wheel ruts remained at an old crossing of the Blue River; a bank bore marks of Civil War fighting; and George Caleb Bingham had painted his work on General Order No. 11 in an old outbuilding. Residents also encountered the past through stories about figures such as Marshal Peacock, who still carried a bullet in his spine, and through a strongly Confederate civic culture that honored Lee and Jackson and gathered to remember Quantrill’s veterans. These were not simply illustrations of famous individuals. They were the settings, scars, ceremonies, and stories through which a community organized its understanding of history.

Individual achievement and historical circumstance

The later narrative retains the force of Truman’s belief in individual action while widening its frame. On April 12, 1945, he took the presidential oath in the White House Cabinet Room after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. The change in leadership made one person’s actions newly consequential, but the public response also reflected relationships and expectations beyond the officeholder himself. In Grandview, Truman’s mother distinguished her sorrow over Roosevelt’s death from any celebration of her son’s succession, while expressing confidence that he would manage. Truman prized her response, seeing its plainness as more effective than polished public-relations advice.

This juxtaposition gives Great Man theory a double significance in the book. Truman’s reading encouraged him to imagine history as the work of capable individuals, and his later ascent placed him in a position where personal judgment mattered greatly. But neither his early formation nor his public meaning can be separated from the histories handed down by his family, the commemorative culture of his town, or the political moment into which he entered. The narrative does not erase individual agency; it shows that the very people who appear to make history are also formed and interpreted within a larger inheritance.