Nineteenth century

The nineteenth century is the historical world that shaped Harry S. Truman before the upheavals of World War I made him a public leader. His cousin Ethel Noland saw him as a man of that older era: his tastes and habits resisted many novelties of the twentieth century, yet his life was repeatedly altered by modern events. The contrast is central to his portrait—not a simple opposition between an old-fashioned man and a new age, but the story of someone whose inherited outlook endured as the demands of public office changed around him.

An older world of taste and habit

Truman was born during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur, when the country was still debating whether to continue building a wooden Navy. By the time the United States entered World War I, he was thirty-three. In the book’s account, that war marked more than the passage of years: it divided the world that had formed Truman from the one that followed. His optimism and faith in progress did not make every feature of the new era attractive to him.

His preferences made the contrast visible in daily life. He never took to the telephone or daylight saving time, an innovation adopted during the war, and abandoned his experiment with a typewriter. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens remained his favorite authors. Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee were lifelong heroes; until he met George C. Marshall, Truman questioned whether modern times could produce a great man. These were more than isolated enthusiasms: they located his imagination in older models of character and public service.

Modern art and postwar intellectual fashions were equally distant from him. The modern paintings displayed at New York’s Armory Show in 1913 held no appeal; he dismissed that kind of work as ham-and-eggs art and preferred the old masters. In American painting, he favored George Caleb Bingham’s scenes of Missouri riverboatmen and politics, as well as the western subjects of Frederic Remington. The theories associated with Einstein and Freud left no evident mark on his expressed interests, and terms such as libido and id did not enter his vocabulary.

World War I as a dividing line

World War I changed Truman’s course more decisively than the turn of a calendar. He later wondered how his life might have developed had the war not come when it did. Most plainly, it took him away from the farm; he returned only as a visitor. His experience belonged to a wider postwar movement of men whose lives no longer followed the paths they had left behind.

The deeper change was personal. Truman returned with greater confidence, having discovered that he could lead men and preferred that work to anything he had done before. He found courage in himself, no longer the boy who ran from fights, and learned that he could encourage courage in others. The old agricultural life gave way to a new sense of vocation grounded in command and responsibility.

He also came home with the loyalty of the men in his battery, who regarded him like an older brother. As their captain, he had brought many sons of Jackson County home safely. In France, he had spent late nights in a tent or dugout answering letters from the parents of men under his command—an attention the account describes as unusual among American Expeditionary Forces officers and one remembered in Kansas City. His wartime leadership thus became a public reputation built out of personal care as well as military authority.

That new standing mattered in his private life, too. Bess Wallace Truman had decided to marry him after learning he was enlisting. Their wedding took place on the same day as the signing of the peace treaty at Versailles, tying a personal beginning to the formal close of the war that had redirected Truman’s life.

The old-fashioned man in public life

Truman’s resistance to new fashions did not mean that he stood outside the political life of his own time. He never learned to dance, play golf or tennis, or belong to a country club; poker suited him better than bridge or mah-jongg. He disliked the Jazz Age, including Kansas City jazz, and found the social world represented in novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara foreign to his experience. Yet while Fitzgerald characterized the Jazz Age as indifferent to politics, Truman was discovering politics as his life’s work. The contrast places him at odds with one prominent image of his generation without making him a stranger to the era’s public transformations.

As president, he faced forces that had no nineteenth-century equivalent in scale. In 1943, investigators looking into unexplained wartime spending encountered the secret Manhattan Project. When Truman spoke by telephone with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Stimson told him the development was both highly secret and of a unique purpose. Truman accepted that assurance and did not press for further explanation in the conversation. By July, he had learned enough to understand the project’s essential nature; when Senator Lewis Schwellenbach worried about immense land condemnations near Hanford, Truman wrote that he should not be concerned.

In 1945, Stimson presented Truman with a memorandum warning that within months the United States might complete a weapon capable of destroying a city. The account places this revelation beside the president’s deliberation over invading Japan: in his diary, Truman described the choice between invasion and bombing and blockade as his hardest decision to that date. At a meeting on invasion plans, however, the atomic project was not mentioned. General George C. Marshall presented a two-phase invasion plan, beginning with Kyushu, and estimated 31,000 losses in its initial thirty days. The juxtaposition shows Truman confronting an unprecedented weapon while still weighing the military options and human costs before him.

Presidential authority and restraint

The book also traces Truman’s older habits of judgment into conflicts over persuasion and authority. In his first address to Congress as president, he began before the introduction was complete; Speaker Sam Rayburn interrupted to introduce him, and the fifteen-minute speech received applause seventeen times. The episode presented a new president meeting a defining public test with confidence, despite the small confusion at its opening.

Later, Truman’s response to congressional resistance was persistence rather than a change of course. He continued to request national compulsory health insurance and universal military training even when their prospects were poor. He also presented a redesigned presidential flag: the eagle faced toward the staff and the olive branch, a visual choice he explained as looking forward while favoring peace. These actions joined practical political advocacy to a stated preference for preparedness and peaceful purpose.

That approach could also mean restraint in a confrontation with powerful advisers. When George C. Marshall strongly opposed a course Truman was considering, the president showed no visible reaction, acknowledged the risks, and suggested that the group sleep on the matter. Later, when General Douglas MacArthur issued a public statement in defiance of presidential and United Nations policy, Truman did not immediately dismiss him. He dictated a restrained reprimand reminding MacArthur that public statements required clearance from Washington. The book presents these moments as evidence that Truman could hold his response in check despite pressure and personal feeling.

Nineteenth century, in this portrait, names the inheritance Truman carried into a world transformed by war, modern technology, and presidential responsibility. His preferences remained old-fashioned, but his life did not remain confined to the older world: World War I drew him from the farm into leadership, and the presidency confronted him with questions of atomic power, national preparedness, legislative persuasion, and military obedience. The force of the contrast lies in that coexistence—an older sensibility tested not by escape from modernity, but by the decisions modernity placed before him.