Harry Truman’s concept of “luck”

Harry Truman’s concept of “luck” took shape amid ventures that could collapse despite hard work, and successes he later explained through a mixture of chance and human loyalty. In his account, luck was neither a dependable force nor a substitute for effort: it was something to hope for, fear losing, and invoke when the outcome exceeded what he could control.

The Commerce mining gamble

In 1916, Truman invested several thousand dollars in the T-H-C Mining Company with Thomas Hughes, a farmer from Grandview, Missouri, and Jerry Culbertson, a Kansas City promoter. The partners bought the Eureka Mine at Commerce, Oklahoma, hoping to finance operations by processing waste ore left above ground. None had substantial mining expertise, and the enterprise soon encountered a dishonest superintendent, a rival’s interference with its water supply, and failing equipment. Truman traveled repeatedly between the mine and Grandview, trying to keep both the business and the farm running.

The burden shifted further onto Truman when Culbertson showed little interest in daily operations and Hughes withdrew after lightning destroyed his barn. Truman took on work as mechanic, superintendent, night watchman, and troubleshooter. His optimism alternated with gloom, and he complained to Bess Wallace that he could not lose forever. But by May, with the mine failing and his finances exhausted, he feared he would lose his livestock and even his ability to sign his own checks. He framed the setback as part of a family pattern of failing to make money, and offered Bess the bleak possibility that she might be better off choosing a more capable partner.

That despair did not last. After a good night’s sleep, Truman wrote again with renewed confidence that he could continue in business. Frank Blair, a banker in Belton, had provided a loan, though he also warned Truman that joining Culbertson had been a mistake. Truman’s next thought was to ask whether Bess would join him as a partner and help run the mine. The reversal captures an important feature of his outlook: a severe loss could prompt self-reproach, but it did not necessarily extinguish his expectation that another attempt might work.

The mine closed in September. Before then, Truman had connected luck to both romance and financial ambition: he wanted to buy an engagement ring but hesitated to do so with borrowed money, which he feared would bring bad luck. He also considered opening a Ford agency in Commerce, newly convinced that it might lead to fortune. His hopes did not rest on a single stable plan; they moved from mining to a prospective automobile business as circumstances changed.

Risk renewed in the oil business

By November 1916, Truman was buying and selling oil leases from an office in Kansas City, once again entering business with Culbertson despite Blair’s warning and the recent mine failure. David Morgan, an Oklahoma lawyer and oil man, was the third partner. Truman invested $5,000 in five notes due in ten months, with his mother, Martha E. Truman, also signing the agreement. She urged him to take heart from his grandfather, Solomon Young, who had been financially wiped out several times but repeatedly started over. In this family comparison, recovery mattered as much as the initial fall.

The Morgan Oil & Refining Company leased land in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. Morgan led the company, Culbertson handled promotion and sales, and Truman served as treasurer. A bookkeeper later recalled that Truman’s particular contribution was meeting people: he dealt with salesmen, lease owners, scouts, and others while Morgan handled his own responsibilities. Truman appears not to have made sales himself, but he remained closely involved in the social and practical traffic of the venture. He told Bess that if the investment failed, he would know he was hoodooed; she, too, bought stock.

The company’s fate gave the language of luck a pointed irony. In April 1917, as Woodrow Wilson called on Congress to declare war, the prospect of wartime demand for petroleum did not produce the bonanza Culbertson had advertised. Manpower for oil work disappeared, investors withdrew, and the company went out of business. Only later did it become clear that one of its southeastern Kansas leases lay within the Teeter Pool, an oil supply that, had they drilled deeper, might have made millions. The episode distinguishes prospect from outcome: wealth had been physically beneath the leased land, but the company failed before it could reach it.

Luck under fire

Truman’s wartime experience offered a different measure of luck. After a chaotic night, he was convinced that he had disgraced himself. His superior reassured him that inexperienced troops often performed badly the first time and advised him to forget the incident. Truman did not initially understand what had happened; in a letter to Bess, he later acknowledged that his men did not know he had been too frightened by the shells to run.

The men nevertheless concluded that Captain Truman was cool under fire and brought good luck, because no one had been killed in the melee. When the battery had to return for abandoned guns, a potentially dangerous task, every man volunteered. Truman was deeply moved, but took only the men and horses necessary for the job. The contrast matters: the troops’ belief in his luck grew from survival, while the mission itself still required a measured decision and the willingness to act. Luck here was not simply his private hope; it was a reputation formed among people who had shared danger with him.

Explaining an election

After his 1922 election campaign, Truman offered more than one explanation for his victory. He later credited the soldier vote and relatives spread across nearly every precinct, and described his election as accidental. He also suggested that the failure of his haberdashery had helped: voters facing financial hardship sympathized with a candidate who admitted his own difficulties. These explanations placed the result partly in circumstances beyond an individual candidate’s control.

Other people close to the campaign emphasized Truman himself. In their view, people liked him because he plainly liked them and enjoyed being among them. That account does not erase his own focus on votes, family connections, or financial misfortune; it adds personal affinity to the sources of an outcome he could not reduce to a single cause. Privately, he had been disappointed by how much support the Pendergast organization provided. His retrospective sense of having been elected by accident therefore existed alongside a campaign in which relationships and organized political effort still mattered.

A vocabulary for uncertainty

Across these episodes, luck appears as a recurring way Truman negotiated the gap between effort and result. At Commerce, it accompanied borrowed money, a failed mine, and the hope of starting again; in the oil business, it named the fear that another venture might be doomed, even as the company’s later-discovered lease suggested how close failure could come to unrealized wealth. In wartime, the men around him made luck part of their judgment of his command, while his own letter preserved a more vulnerable account of fear. In politics, he used accidental election and family ties to explain a victory that others attributed partly to his character.

The pattern does not make luck a formula for success. Truman could work intensely and lose money, or survive a dangerous episode and acquire a reputation for good fortune; political success could be narrated through chance even when personal connection helped produce it. His concept instead keeps uncertainty visible. Persistence could make another attempt possible, but neither persistence nor optimism guaranteed the result.