Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties are presented through a pointed contrast: the decade’s fashionable tastes and social habits largely left Harry S. Truman cold, even as he found his life’s work in politics and briefly shared in the postwar business boom. The period’s promise of normalcy and prosperity gave way, in the account of Truman’s own early 1920s, to falling farm prices, a failing store, and a depression that tested the obligations he felt toward friends.

A cultural world at a distance

Truman was more at home in an older era. He disliked the modern art associated with the 1913 Armory Show, dismissed it as “Ham and eggs art,” and preferred old masters, George Caleb Bingham’s paintings of Missouri riverboats and politics, and Frederic Remington’s western scenes. He never expressed interest in the theories of Einstein or Freud, and words such as “libido” and “id” did not enter his vocabulary. The book presents these preferences not as a passing quirk but as part of his broader distance from the manners and fashions of the decade.

The same distance marked his private habits. Truman disapproved of cigarettes, gin, fad diets, and women smoking or drinking; he was also reluctant when Bess Wallace decided to bob her hair, though he told her, “I want you to be happy regardless of what I think about it.” The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara offered a picture of life in the Roaring Twenties that was foreign to his experience. He never learned to dance, play golf, or play tennis, and never joined a country club. Poker, rather than bridge or mah-jongg, was his game.

That mismatch did not mean withdrawal from public life. Fitzgerald’s claim that “It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all” throws Truman’s path into relief: during those years, politics became his life’s work. He could dislike the decade’s cultural style while moving actively through its business and civic world.

Normalcy, business, and civic life

In the 1920 presidential campaign, Warren G. Harding called for a return to “normalcy,” and he and Calvin Coolidge defeated the Democratic ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt by a larger majority than any previous election. The account places Truman and Eddie Jacobson, restocking shelves and serving customers in Kansas City, within this prevailing mood. Their store’s first year brought $70,000 in sales, a strong return on their investment. The partnership rested on trust rather than signed agreements; Jacobson’s wife later recalled that the two men trusted one another throughout their lives.

Truman also joined the Kansas City Club, the Triangle Club, a businessmen’s lunch group, and the Kansas City Athletic Club. At the Athletic Club he taught himself to swim with a choppy sidestroke, keeping his head above water so that his glasses stayed dry. He ate regularly at the Savoy Grill with Ted Marks or Jim Pendergast and imagined replacing his second-hand Dodge roadster with a new car. These details show him participating in the decade’s urban routines without adopting all of its fashionable pleasures.

The store itself became more than a place of trade. As customers dwindled, old friends came by to borrow five or ten dollars, and Truman’s generosity turned the shop into a club, an informal unemployment agency, and a small loan office. Jacobson learned to distinguish a visitor asking for “Captain Harry” from one asking for “Captain Truman”: the former wanted a loan, the latter had come to buy. The contrast captures how commercial and personal obligations overlapped in Truman’s circle.

The boom gives way to depression

The postwar prosperity did not hold. Farm prices fell sharply, with wheat dropping from a record $2.15 a bushel in 1919 to $1.44 by the fall of 1920; overall farm prices fell 40 percent. The Middle West was particularly hard hit. By 1921, the silk shirts that had symbolized the boom were no longer selling at Truman and Jacobson’s store. By midyear, the business’s earlier prosperity had evaporated, and the partners had to borrow more money to keep their stock current.

The book sets the store’s troubles against a wider crisis in the countryside. Falling prices were visible at the Kansas City grain exchange, where Truman’s father, John Truman, had lost money two decades earlier. The farmers’ hardship spread into the business that had seemed to place Truman and Jacobson in step with the times. The shift from brisk sales to borrowing makes the early decade’s economic reversal tangible: the Roaring Twenties did not begin for everyone as a sustained boom.

Truman’s generosity carried a cost as well as a social consequence. He paid for damage after a Battery D reunion at the Kansas City Elks Club on St. Patrick’s Day in 1921 turned into a food fight and brawl. Whiskey was plentiful despite Prohibition, and police were called; one officer proved to be former Battery D sergeant George Brice, whom the other police relieved of his revolver and most of his clothes. The episode places the decade’s legal restrictions beside the informal loyalties and rowdy fellowship that survived among Truman’s wartime comrades.

A decade of transition

The war had already changed Truman’s direction: he left the farm for service in France and returned with new confidence in his ability to lead men. He did not go back to farm life except as a visitor. In the early 1920s, the store and his political work belonged to that altered course. The decade thus stands between the farmer he had been and the public figure he was becoming, while its economic downturn exposed the fragility of private business and the demands of loyalty to friends.

The book’s Roaring Twenties are consequently neither a single mood nor an uncomplicated age of prosperity. They include the national appeal of Harding’s normalcy, a growing Kansas City business, Truman’s resistance to much of the era’s popular culture, and the rapid arrival of depression. The same years in which politics became his vocation also tested what prosperity could sustain—and what he would give away when it failed.