Jazz Age fashions Truman disliked

The Jazz Age fashions Truman disliked marked a cultural world he never felt at home in: modern art, new social habits, and a popular image of the 1920s that seemed foreign to his experience. Harry S. Truman preferred older books, art, manners, and amusements, yet the decade did not leave him politically detached. As fashions changed around him, politics became his vocation, and the habits of public service he formed in those years would shape a national career.

A Modern Age at a Distance

Truman’s cultural preferences were rooted in an older world. He favored Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, admired Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and preferred the old masters to modern painting. In American art, his taste ran toward George Caleb Bingham’s Missouri riverboatmen and political scenes and Frederic Remington’s western subjects. Modernist experiments held little appeal; he dismissed them as ham-and-eggs art. He showed no public interest in the theories of Einstein or Freud, and the fashionable language of the postwar years was absent from his vocabulary.

His resistance to novelty extended beyond art. He disliked the telephone and daylight saving time, briefly tried a typewriter before giving it up, and took little pleasure in the changing manners of the decade. He disliked cigarettes, gin, and fad diets, and disapproved of women smoking or drinking, as well as men drinking when women were present. Even Bess Wallace Truman’s decision to bob her hair met with his reluctance, though he ultimately told her he wanted her to be happy regardless of his own opinion. The episode shows the difference between his personal standards and his willingness to let his wife make her own choice.

Social Life and the Private Household

The social codes Truman preferred were visible in the life he did not adopt. He never learned to dance, play golf, or play tennis, and never joined a country club. Poker suited him better than bridge or mah-jongg. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara, with their depictions of the Roaring Twenties, were far removed from his own experience. The era’s cultural reputation for indifference to politics stood in sharp contrast to his growing conviction that politics was his life’s work.

His domestic life also sat uneasily beside the period’s image of liberation and fashionable leisure. After Harry and Bess married, concern for Madge Gates Wallace’s health shortened their honeymoon, and the couple returned to Independence to live in the family house at 219 North Delaware Street. Their household included Bess’s mother, brother, and elderly Mrs. Gates, while two small bungalows behind the house accommodated Bess’s brothers and their wives. Bess initially regarded the arrangement as temporary; Harry arrived with his clothes, a few books, and his Army trunk, nearly all he owned.

The private costs of Harry’s public ambitions fell unevenly within the family. Bess took no part in his political campaign in 1923 because she had suffered a second miscarriage; the first had occurred in 1920, and the couple kept both losses private. Harry’s devotion to her remained strong, and their correspondence during his summer separation at Fort Leavenworth records their affection. His suggestion to a cousin that a pair of old breeches might bring him luck in having a child reveals how directly the couple felt the absence of children, even as they rarely discussed it outside the family.

Politics as a Countercurrent

Truman did not share the notion that the Jazz Age had no interest in politics. He pursued new associations beyond the courthouse, became active in the Masons and Army Reserve, served as a deputy grand master in Jackson County, and studied law at night while maintaining his public duties. The decade’s changing social styles did not draw him into its fashionable amusements; instead, political work increasingly organized his life.

That commitment continued into the war years. In 1941, as chairman of the Senate committee investigating defense preparations, he criticized the Office of Production Management for divided leadership and challenged Sidney Hillman over a defense contract withheld because of anticipated labor opposition. Truman argued that the government should replace officials who would not protect the national interest. The committee also objected to more than 250 dollar-a-year executives serving in the office, warning that corporate loyalties could distort decisions. His response to a period of rapid industrial and social change was not to retreat into nostalgia, but to press for accountable public administration.

Private Counsel and Public Power

The contrast between Truman’s preferences and the modernizing world continued after he entered the White House. Bess guarded her privacy but advised him on decisions, and he listened to her. At the same time, she sometimes felt shut out of his public life, particularly because he had not discussed his decision on the atomic bomb with her. Their marriage combined close consultation with limits imposed by the demands and secrecy of presidential office.

Their wartime family life remained modest and private. Bess worked one day a week at the USO and was placed on Truman’s Senate office payroll at a salary of $2,400, a practice he had criticized in others. The extra income mattered, though the amount of work she performed was disputed among staff. In June 1942, after sending her twenty-three roses for their anniversary, Truman wrote that their marriage had carried them through both painful and happy turns, and that having the right wife had made his career. His words frame the household not as a retreat from public life but as one of its supports.

From the 1920s to the Presidency

Truman’s public responsibilities grew far beyond the local political world in which he had found his vocation. When he became President, his first decision was to confirm that the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would open as planned. He told his Cabinet he intended to continue Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program, welcomed advice, and made clear that final decisions would be his. The moment placed him at the center of an international institution-building effort, a striking destination for a man whose tastes remained oriented toward older cultural forms.

His postwar domestic program likewise showed that his political life was not simply a defense of the past. In September 1945 he sent Congress a 16,000-word message setting out a 21-point program, including increased unemployment compensation, a higher minimum wage, tax reform, crop insurance, and federal housing aid. He had worked intensively on the message during the return from Potsdam and chose to present the program as a whole rather than piece by piece. Later, he moved briskly through a press conference announcing a series of administrative changes, appointments, and resignations; among them, he named Stuart Symington to lead the Surplus Property Administration and appointed Robert Patterson to replace Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War. The pace and breadth of those decisions were far removed from the private tastes by which the Jazz Age is remembered.

In July 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, which Truman had sought as a reorganization of the federal government’s defense structure. It unified the armed services under a Department of Defense, established the Air Force as a separate service, created the National Security Council, and formally authorized the Central Intelligence Agency. The act institutionalized a new national-security order. Truman’s dislike of the Jazz Age’s fashions therefore matters less as a rejection of change in every sphere than as a contrast: he resisted many changes in taste and conduct, while helping direct consequential changes in government and public power.