Margaret Phelps

Margaret Phelps was Harry S. Truman’s favorite teacher and a formative influence on his intellectual and moral outlook. An exacting history teacher whose account of the past began with Adam and Eve, she regarded the subject not as a storehouse of facts but as a means of enlarging sympathy and setting standards of character. Truman later placed the influence of his teachers second only to that of his mother.

A Demanding History Teacher

Tall and slender, with her upswept hair always in place, Phelps struck many pupils as somewhat frightening until they came to know her. Truman liked her best of all his teachers, and history was the subject in which he did best. Her teaching ranged across an immense historical panorama, beginning with Adam and Eve, while her high expectations gave the subject a seriousness that matched her own manner.

Phelps described history as a force that developed both intellect and character: “It cultivates every faculty of the mind, enlarges sympathies, liberalizes thought and feeling, furnishes and approves the highest standards of character.” The statement captures the ambition behind her teaching: historical study should broaden a pupil’s sympathies and supply standards by which to judge conduct.

Preparing Truman for the Future

Phelps’s teaching also had a practical place in Truman’s school years. As he considered trying for the United States Military Academy, he and Fielding Houchens, who hoped to attend the United States Naval Academy, took extra hours in history with her to prepare for their examinations. In the class photograph, Truman stood at the back, apart from the other rows; his attention was on the photographer, but his plans were already directed toward a future that would require further study.

The account does not establish how much of Truman’s later outlook came directly from Phelps and how much he had formed independently. It does show that he excelled in her subject and sought additional instruction from her while preparing for an ambitious next step. Her role in his education was therefore both intellectual and immediate: she taught the field he valued most and helped him prepare for the examination he hoped would open a military career.

Influence and Limits of the Record

Truman later credited his teachers with an influence on his life second only to his mother’s. When he praised Phelps and another teacher, Matilda D. Brown, he assumed that people of his generation would recognize what such teachers could mean. His recollection presents Phelps as part of a formative circle whose effects were lasting, even if the surviving account offers only a brief view of their classroom relationship.

Phelps’s clearest legacy in the account is the connection she made between historical knowledge and moral judgment. Truman’s school writing emphasized patriotism, courage, and resistance to sham, but the record leaves uncertain how much of that outlook was his own and how much reflected his teachers’ influence. Rather than resolve that uncertainty, the evidence places Phelps within the education that shaped his interests and values, while preserving the limits of what can be known about her individual contribution.