Independence and the Opening of the West mural

The Independence and the Opening of the West mural is a large historical painting by Thomas Hart Benton in the lobby of the Harry S. Truman Library. Its making began with Harry S. Truman’s opposition to the artist and proceeded through a friendship, a negotiated subject, and two years of work. Completed in 1961, the mural gave visitors a colorful, expansive image of westward movement while placing Independence itself within that story. Its role did not end with its completion: it became part of the setting in which Truman welcomed visitors and, after his death, the public gathered to mourn him.

Commission and Initial Opposition

David Lloyd and Wayne Grover, Archivist of the United States, proposed a mural for the library’s main lobby. They wanted the entrance enlivened by a work with an appropriate historical theme. When they recommended Benton, a Missouri painter with deep ties to the state, Truman rejected the idea. He objected to Benton’s 1936 mural in the Capitol at Jefferson City, which he felt made a mockery of Tom Pendergast, and disliked Benton’s artistic style. Looking at Benton’s painting The Kentuckian, Truman invoked his own family history: both his grandfathers had come from Kentucky, he said, and neither resembled the figure he called a “long-necked monstrosity.”

Lloyd and Grover nevertheless arranged a meeting, believing the two men might discover common ground in person. Benton and Truman shared a southwestern Missouri background and a familiarity with politics, though the available account does not suggest that these similarities had overcome Truman’s objections beforehand. In the spring of 1957, Truman visited Benton’s Kansas City studio with Lloyd and Grover. The encounter changed the relationship: the men quickly became friends, and a contract followed in 1958. Truman took pleasure in Benton’s company and pride in the friendship that developed during the mural’s preparation.

Friendship and the Choice of Subject

The new friendship was expressed in small acts as well as in the public commission. On Truman’s first visit, he offered Benton bourbon from a bottle kept in his desk. Benton initially took the gesture as a possible test; later, he understood it as ordinary hospitality. When Benton asked for a second drink on another occasion, Truman refused because Benton was driving and still had work to do. Benton remembered the refusal as protective: he had, in effect, become Truman’s man, and Truman looked after him.

Choosing the mural’s theme required further discussion. Truman first proposed a subject centered on Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, with Jefferson’s foresight as its emphasis. Benton objected that foresight was not something he could paint. When Truman challenged him to say what he could paint, Benton proposed Independence and its importance in opening the West. They agreed on that subject. The decision shifted the work from a portrait of one statesman’s vision to a broader account of people moving through and settling the region associated with Independence.

Benton thought Truman might want to appear in the painting, but Truman emphatically declined. That refusal kept the president out of the image even as his library, family history, and chosen hometown history shaped its setting and subject. The mural was not to be a portrait of its commissioner; its subject would be the larger movement of people through the West.

Composition and Historical Vision

Benton received a fee of $60,000, and the work took two years. Completed in 1961, the mural contains no specific written-history events and no identifiable historical personages. Instead, it uses symbolic figures to depict a human stream passing through the region: Plains Indians, trappers, hunters, and French voyageurs give way to settlers and their Black slaves. The painting’s sweeping, collective form makes movement and settlement its organizing story, rather than the biography of a named leader or the illustration of a particular battle or date.

The image is described as robust, colorful, romantic, and as literal as a magazine illustration. Its broad procession thus makes a complicated history legible as a vivid visual panorama, but does so through generalized figures rather than individual stories. The presence of enslaved people within the stream of settlement is part of that panorama; the absence of identifiable people and specific events means their experience is not narrated individually. The mural’s two lower panels bring the expansive procession back to local ground: one shows a Missouri River landing, the other Independence Square in the 1840s, when Truman’s grandparents arrived.

That movement between broad regional history and particular local landmarks echoed an earlier public-facing interest in documenting Jackson County. As presiding judge, Truman had published Results of County Planning, a photographic booklet that presented the county’s schools, farms, industries, streets, bridges, roads, and traces of pioneer history. The booklet and the mural were distinct projects, but both placed landscape and local history before a public audience. The mural gave that history a more concentrated form inside the library: not a sequence of captions and photographs, but a painted procession whose lower panels fixed the broad theme to recognizable places.

Reception and Memorial Setting

Truman’s response to the finished work was emphatic. He thought the mural was wonderful, and when showing visitors around the library he rarely passed it without stopping to praise it and explain the history it represented. His judgment of Benton changed as decisively as their relationship had: he came to call his friend the “best damn painter in America.” The lobby painting was therefore both a public historical display and a recurring occasion for Truman to act as its interpreter, connecting the visitor’s view of the image to his account of the region.

The mural also remained present at the library’s most public act of remembrance. After Truman’s death, his closed casket lay in state in the lobby in front of Benton’s painting. An estimated 75,000 people filed past it; the line stretched half a mile, beyond the highway. The painting’s figures and local panels formed the visual background to a gathering that made the library, already a place for presenting history to visitors, a place of collective mourning. Truman had declined to enter the mural as a depicted person, but the work he helped bring into being stood behind the final public farewell in the building he had chosen as his own.