Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton was a Missouri painter whose friendship with Harry S. Truman grew out of a proposed library mural and culminated in Independence and the Opening of the West. The collaboration joined two men who initially seemed unlikely to agree: Truman disliked Benton’s style and objected to an earlier mural, while Benton was outspoken and independent-minded. Their eventual friendship became as important to the project as the painting itself, shaping its subject, its making, and the way Truman presented it to visitors.

Background and First Impressions

Benton was born in 1889 in Neosho, in southwestern Missouri, and grew up amid politics. His father served several terms in Congress, and Benton’s own family history connected him to Missouri’s public life: his great-uncle and namesake had been one of the state’s first two U.S. senators. In the account of their first meeting, Benton appears as gruff, opinionated, outspoken to a fault, often profane, and full of energy. These qualities made him an arresting counterpart to Truman, but they did not initially recommend his art to the former president.

David Lloyd and Wayne Grover, the Archivist of the United States, wanted a mural in the main lobby of the Truman library: it would enliven the space and establish a historical theme for visitors entering the building. When they proposed Benton, Truman bluntly refused. He remembered that Benton had made a mockery of Tom Pendergast in a mural at the Capitol in Jefferson City, and he did not care for Benton’s style. Shown The Kentuckian, Truman objected to its long-necked figure by recalling that both his grandfathers had been from Kentucky and neither looked like the painting’s subject. His rejection was specific: it was not simply that Benton was a famous painter whose manner did not appeal to him; Truman felt the work misrepresented people and history he knew.

A Meeting That Changed the Relationship

Lloyd and Grover nevertheless arranged a meeting, convinced that Truman and Benton would discover common ground if they had a chance to talk. In the spring of 1957, Truman went with them to Benton’s studio in Kansas City. The encounter quickly overturned his earlier resistance. The two men became fast friends, and when the mural contract was signed in 1958, Truman took evident pleasure in Benton’s company and pride in the friendship.

Their connection developed through ordinary acts as well as through the public commission. On the first day Truman offered him a drink in his office, he drew a bottle of bourbon from his desk and said, “I hear you like this,” a gesture Benton initially took as a calculated test. The setting mattered to Benton: even what he recognized as ordinary hospitality carried the weight of Truman’s presidential authority. As their bourbon ritual became familiar, Truman sometimes refused Benton a second drink because Benton was driving and still had work to do. Benton understood the refusal as protection, not ceremony; he wrote, “I was now, in effect, his man,” and said Truman did protect him. Their friendship thus had a practical, attentive dimension, expressed in Truman’s concern for his friend’s safety.

Choosing and Painting the Mural

The subject of the mural emerged from discussion rather than from Truman’s initial preference. He first proposed a work about Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, emphasizing Jefferson’s foresight. Benton replied that he could not paint foresight. Truman challenged him to say what he could paint, and Benton proposed Independence and its importance in the opening of the West. That subject was accepted. The exchange captures the difference between the men’s roles: Truman brought a historical idea, while Benton insisted that the theme had to become something paint could show.

Truman also declined Benton’s expectation that he might appear in the mural. The finished work would portray the movement of people through the region, not turn the former president into one of its figures. Benton received a fee of $60,000, and the work took two years. Completed in 1961, Independence and the Opening of the West contained no specific events of written history and no identifiable personages. Instead, it conveyed its subject through symbolic figures representing a human stream: Plains Indians, trappers, hunters, and French voyageurs giving way to settlers and their Black slaves.

The mural was robust, colorful, romantic, and, in the book’s description, as literal as a magazine illustration. Two lower panels gave the broad historical theme a local frame: one showed a landing on the Missouri River, the other Independence Square in the 1840s, when Truman’s grandparents arrived. These details linked regional movement to the town and family history familiar to Truman without inserting him personally into the scene. He thought the mural was wonderful. When showing visitors around the library, he regularly stopped before it to praise the work and explain the history it portrayed. He came to call his friend the “best damn painter in America.”

Friendship Beyond the Commission

The mural transformed Truman’s view of Benton, but it did not make the relationship merely professional. Truman had begun by objecting to Benton’s representation of Pendergast and to the look of The Kentuckian; after their meeting, he trusted the painter enough to welcome him into his office, share a recurring drink, and climb onto the scaffold to help paint a corner of the sky. The scaffold episode made their collaboration physical as well as conversational: Truman did not simply approve a finished work from a distance but joined Benton briefly in its making.

Benton’s regard for Truman likewise extended beyond the commission. Later, he came to Truman’s house and sketched him as an old, frail figure sitting in a chair among his books. Benton thought the face had gained character, though the drawing looked so unlike the public image of Harry Truman that few Americans would have recognized him. The contrast gives the friendship a late-life coda: the painter who had once been chosen to create a public historical scene now recorded his friend in private, diminished circumstances, finding character where the familiar likeness had receded. Across both works—the mural and the sketch—Benton’s relationship with Truman joined public history to personal observation.