Harry S. Truman–Thomas Hart Benton friendship

The friendship between Harry S. Truman and Thomas Hart Benton began in resistance: Truman disliked Benton’s style and objected to his earlier treatment of Tom Pendergast in a mural. Yet a meeting arranged in 1957 turned that opposition into a close bond. Their collaboration on the Independence and the Opening of the West mural gave their friendship a public form, while small private rituals—bourbon in Truman’s office, and Truman’s insistence on protecting Benton from a second drink before driving—made its personal warmth visible.

Initial Opposition and First Meeting

David Lloyd and Wayne Grover wanted a mural in the library’s main lobby, one that would enliven the space and give visitors an appropriate historical theme as they entered. They recommended Benton, a Missouri painter whose great-uncle and namesake had been one of Missouri’s first two U.S. senators. Truman bluntly rejected the proposal. He believed Benton had mocked Pendergast in a mural at the Capitol in Jefferson City in 1936, and he disliked Benton’s style. Looking at Benton’s painting The Kentuckian, Truman noted that both his grandfathers were from Kentucky and neither resembled “that long-necked monstrosity.”

Lloyd and Grover nevertheless arranged for the two men to meet, confident that each would recognize what they shared. In the spring of 1957, Truman went with them to Benton’s studio in Kansas City, Missouri. Benton, like Truman, had been born in southwestern Missouri; he was from Neosho, where he was born in 1889, and had grown up around politics. His father had served several terms in Congress. The meeting quickly changed the relationship: the men became fast friends, and Truman came to take pleasure in Benton’s company and pride in their friendship. The encounter did not require Truman to abandon his earlier judgment about Benton’s work; it opened a separate, personal connection that their collaboration would deepen.

A Friendship in Small Gestures

Their first office encounter over a drink revealed how differently they initially understood one another. Truman pulled a bottle of bourbon from his desk and said, “I hear you like this,” which Benton took as a calculated provocation, a test. The gesture embarrassed Benton because Truman remained, to him, surrounded by “an aura of power….” What Truman may have meant as ordinary hospitality could not initially feel ordinary to the artist receiving it from a president.

As the visits continued, the drink became a familiar ritual, but Truman’s friendliness included practical solicitude rather than mere hospitality. When Benton asked for a second bourbon, Truman refused: “Tom, you’re driving a car. You can’t have another because you’ve got some work to do around here and I’m not going to take any risks with you.” Benton understood the refusal as a declaration of care: “I was now, in effect, his man,” he wrote, “and he was going to protect me. And he did.” The friendship thus took shape not only in shared opinions or public praise, but in a repeated exchange where Truman’s bluntness became a form of protection.

Negotiating the Mural

The mural’s subject emerged through disagreement, much as the friendship had. Truman first proposed a work about Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, emphasizing Jefferson’s foresight. Benton answered that he could not paint foresight. Truman pressed him with the question, “Well, what the hell is it you can paint?” Benton proposed Independence and its importance in the opening of the West; Truman agreed. Their decision shifted the work away from an abstract quality embodied by a famous leader and toward a place and a human movement through history.

Truman did not seek to place himself inside that history as a painted figure. Benton later recalled that he expected the president to want inclusion in the mural, but Truman emphatically turned the idea down. That refusal matters to the finished work: the mural was not a presidential portrait or a record centered on identifiable leaders. Its subject was the passage of people through the region and the settlement of the West.

The Finished Work and Its Afterlife

A contract was signed in 1958. Benton received a fee of $60,000, and the work took two years. Completed in 1961, the Independence and the Opening of the West mural contained no specific written-historical events and no identifiable personages. Instead, symbolic figures represented the great human stream that had passed through: Plains Indians, trappers, hunters, and French voyageurs giving way to settlers and their Black slaves. Two lower panels showed a Missouri River landing and Independence Square in the 1840s, the period when Truman’s grandparents arrived. Truman thought the mural was wonderful, and its treatment of the past brought local history and his own family’s arrival into the same public space without making him a figure in the painting.

The friendship also became part of how visitors encountered the mural. When showing people around the library, Truman rarely passed it without stopping to praise the work and explain the history it portrayed. He eventually called Benton the “best damn painter in America.” The praise marked a striking reversal from his first refusal, but it did not erase the earlier disagreement; it grew out of the conversation, negotiation, and shared work that had transformed it into respect and affection.