The idea of an ordinary person as president

The idea of an ordinary person as president is a recurring measure of Harry S. Truman’s character and political authority. Truman grounded his claim to the presidency not in exceptional birth or lofty language, but in the conviction that ordinary Americans were capable of judging public affairs—and that he, too, could serve without pretending to be extraordinary. The book tests that claim against his conduct: the modest campaigner who wanted voters to see him for themselves became a president who pressed a resistant Congress, navigated crises, and refused to mistake an ordinary manner for a lack of resolve.

The Meaning of the Average Man

Truman’s sense of ordinariness was tied to the farm life in which he had courted Bess Wallace, what he called his first campaign. He told her he was only a common, everyday fellow and could promise no more. But his account of farmers contained a democratic assertion: each farmer, he wrote, “thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little better.” In this view, being ordinary did not mean being lesser. It meant that ordinary people possessed the standing to judge those who governed them.

Asked by a reporter whether he regarded himself as the sublimation of the average man, Truman rejected the elevated phrasing and answered, “Well, what is wrong with being the average man?” The question turns a supposed limitation into a challenge to the assumptions behind it. The issue was not whether a president resembled an abstract ideal of greatness, but whether a person of ordinary background could exercise the office with sound judgment and earn public trust.

The distinction mattered because Truman’s manner could invite opposite readings. Arthur Krock saw something “very good and human and courageous” in the unlikely president; Felix Belair thought that, although Truman looked like the average man on a streetcar, he could rise to the occasion. Other observers initially saw provinciality or weakness. The same unvarnished public manner that made Truman recognizable to voters could therefore be treated as evidence against his fitness by critics who expected presidential authority to look more imposing.

Making Contact with Voters

Truman’s public presentation relied on direct contact rather than grand oratory. In the 1940 Missouri primary, he worked through small-town crowds, shaking hands and telling people he had come to show them that being from Jackson County did not mean he had horns and a tail. Years later, on a Western tour, he renewed the appeal in a different form: he wanted people to see and hear him, then decide whether to believe what had been said about their president. The invitation to judge him for themselves made the ordinary-person image a practical campaign method as well as a statement of belief.

That appeal suited Truman’s enjoyment of political work. He liked seeing the country, meeting crowds, and taking time to greet local politicians who boarded his train. On one Washington walk, he descended the iron steps of the Memorial Bridge to inspect the machinery that raised and lowered its middle span and encountered the bridge tender eating supper from a tin bucket. The tender greeted him by saying he had just been thinking about the president—a greeting Truman adored and remembered. The encounter joined the grandeur of the office to an unceremonious exchange with a working person, without requiring either to disappear.

The campaign style could look plain beside the formal rhetoric of national politics. During a Senate campaign, Tuck Milligan joked that if Truman reached the Senate, he would develop calluses on his ears listening to his boss’s orders. The jab invoked the suspicion that Truman was merely an instrument of Tom Pendergast. Yet Truman’s own small-town speaking was valued precisely for its lack of excessive oratory: one newspaper acknowledged that he was no orator, then treated that as an advantage in a political world already burdened with speeches. His public manner could be read as unpolished, but it also made directness part of his appeal.

Ordinary Manner, Presidential Work

The demands of office exposed how little ordinariness implied passivity. On April 16, 1945, Truman addressed Congress for the first time as president. He entered to a standing ovation, opened a large black loose-leaf notebook, and began speaking before Speaker Sam Rayburn had introduced him. The fifteen-minute address drew applause seventeen times. The small procedural confusion at the opening sat beside the authority of the speech itself: Truman was visibly new to the role, but the chamber and radio audience were listening to him as president.

His approach to domestic policy likewise unsettled assumptions about what kind of president the supposedly ordinary man would be. Truman spent ten concentrated days developing a sweeping program and chose to present it to Congress as one comprehensive message rather than a series of separate proposals. Conservative Republicans and Democrats who had expected the New Deal to end under him were confronted with a broad liberal agenda. When Congress balked, Truman did not simply retreat or replace his aims with a more accommodating posture. He sought national compulsory health insurance, funded by payroll deductions, and called for universal military training: one year of training for young men aged eighteen to twenty as citizens in a trained reserve. He knew the training proposal had little chance of passing, but believed in it. His persistence made the ordinary-person image compatible with a forceful conception of presidential responsibility.

His handling of information and disagreement revealed another side of the same character. In June 1943, when staff investigators were puzzled by unexplained spending associated with the secret Manhattan Project, Truman telephoned Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Stimson told him that the matter was known to only a few people and was part of a highly important secret development. Truman accepted that assurance and did not press for further details in the call. By July he knew the project’s essential nature; when Lewis Schwellenbach raised concerns about the huge land condemnations near Hanford, Truman wrote to reassure him. The episode shows that his practical judgment could include accepting strict limits on what he was told, rather than treating every question as one he had to answer personally.

In a crucial 1947 meeting about assistance to Greece and Turkey, Truman heard George Marshall warn congressional leaders that Soviet domination might spread across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The choice, Marshall said, was to act with energy or lose by default. Truman expressed emphatic agreement. Later, in a different dispute, Marshall’s forceful opposition to a presidential course brought a stunned silence to a meeting. Truman kept his expression unchanged, acknowledged the dangers and political risks, and proposed that the group sleep on the matter. These moments resist a simple portrait of either impulsiveness or meekness: his public resolve existed alongside a willingness to weigh counsel and delay a decision.

Even the informal life of the White House could preserve a recognizably domestic scale. Before dinner, Truman and Bess relaxed with cocktails in the sitting hall. When Bess found the first old-fashioneds too sweet, the staff tried another recipe; after she complained that the next drinks were the worst she had tasted, the butler finally served her a double bourbon on ice and waited for her reaction. The domestic anecdote does not explain presidential policy, but it shows how ordinary preferences and household negotiations continued within the setting of the executive office.

A Claim Tested by Public Judgment

The ordinary-person image remained contested, especially when Truman’s political origins shaped judgments of his authority. At the 1944 Democratic convention, he was labeled the Missouri Compromise and the Common Denominator. Critics objected to the method of his nomination and the influence of city bosses; editorials invoked his Pendergast roots, and Time portrayed him as a drab mediocrity. Such reactions treated his local political associations and unassuming manner as reasons to doubt the office he might hold.

Truman’s later standing depended less on the image itself than on whether his performance could withstand public tests. After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, he passed his first major test in Congress, earning repeated applause. Yet when Congress resisted his requests, he continued to press them, and when crises demanded judgment he sometimes acted decisively and sometimes moved with caution. The result was not a smooth conversion from ordinary man to universally acknowledged great president. It was a continuing argument over what ordinary competence looked like and how much authority it could command.

The book places that argument in the changing opinions of people around him. Walter Lippmann regarded Truman as an embarrassment and saw his bravado as a facade for insecurity. Winston Churchill, by contrast, came to admire his determination and his contribution to peace and freedom; Dean Acheson continued to regard him as straightforward, decisive, and honest. In 1948, when Clark Clifford tried to conceal a magazine predicting a unanimous victory for Thomas Dewey, Truman recognized what was under his jacket and dismissed the judgment of its fifty writers: “There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.” The anecdote captures confidence without polish—and a president unwilling to let elite opinion settle the question of his capacity.

Ordinariness, in this account, is neither a claim that Truman lacked exceptional qualities nor a guarantee that he would succeed. It is the democratic premise from which his political identity began: a farmer, a candidate, and a president could be judged by conduct rather than by grand style. His public appeal came from making himself available to that judgment; his authority came from what he did when the judgment became consequential.