Truman and Jacobson Store

The haberdashery founded by Harry S. Truman and Eddie Jacobson was a short-lived business whose consequences outlasted its commercial life. Conceived as a promising partnership after the First World War, it opened in Kansas City with a costly inventory and confidence in a market for quality men’s furnishings. When the business failed, the partners chose to repay their creditors rather than erase their debts through bankruptcy. Truman continued paying for the venture long after its doors had closed, even as the circumstances of its decline brought him into reach of a new political opportunity.

Founding and operation

Truman and Jacobson decided to join forces again about a month before Truman’s wedding to Bess Wallace in June 1919. They had known each other through their earlier partnership at Camp Doniphan. Although Jacobson served with another battery in France, they saw each other occasionally and both returned home aboard the Zeppelin. Their decision to open a men’s furnishing store was quick, and Truman’s choice may also have been intended to impress Bess and her mother as he established himself for married life.

The store occupied the ground floor of the Glennon Hotel at 104 West 12th Street in Kansas City, diagonally opposite the larger Muehlebach Hotel. Truman kept the books; Jacobson handled purchasing; they took turns serving customers. Their different experience complemented the division of labor: Jacobson, known to everyone as Eddie, had spent twelve years in retail clothing, beginning as a stock boy at fourteen, while Truman brought the bookkeeping role. The partners aimed for a first-class operation built around recognized brands, selling shirts, socks, ties, belts, underwear, and hats rather than suits or coats.

Getting that operation ready required substantial investment. The partners pooled their money and borrowed from a bank, remodeled the store inside and out, and spent $35,000 on their initial inventory. Truman contributed $15,000, most of it raised by selling livestock and machinery from Grandview Farm. He had hoped the farm could continue operating and tried to persuade his sister Mary Jane Truman to run it, but she would not take responsibility if he would not be there to do his share. That autumn, horses, hogs, plows, a seed drill, and nearly everything else were auctioned. The proceeds went to Truman for the store, although the arrangement did not fairly reflect Mary Jane’s contribution to the farm. The land was thereafter rented to another farmer.

A promising shop in a falling market

The store opened in late November 1919 and made a good impression on friends and customers, who remembered it as a sharp, well-appointed place. At first, the business seemed in step with the postwar mood. But the prosperity on which it depended was already weakening, especially in the agricultural Midwest. Wheat that had reached $2.15 a bushel in 1919 fell to $1.44 by the autumn of 1920, and farm prices overall declined by 40 percent. As farmers’ difficulties spread, customers who had once bought the store’s silk shirts stopped buying them. By mid-1921, the business that had seemed to be flourishing had evaporated, and the partners borrowed more to keep their stock current.

The shop’s social life continued even as its sales dwindled. Old friends still came by, but some now asked to borrow five or ten dollars. Because Truman lent generously, the store became, in effect, a gathering place, an informal unemployment agency, and a small loan office as well as a shop. Jacobson learned to distinguish a request for Truman by the military title Captain Harry, which meant a friend wanted money, from a request for Captain Truman, which signaled a customer. The distinction captures how the partners’ business was increasingly pressed into service as support for the people around it, even as its commercial foundations weakened.

Failure and the burden of the debt

The partnership failed in 1922, with the business about $35,000 in debt. After discussing their options, Truman and Jacobson decided against bankruptcy and tried instead to pay creditors gradually. Jacobson went on the road as a shirt salesman, doing what he could to meet his share. Three years later, unable to keep up, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. The two men’s friendship endured: when they met for lunch downtown some time afterward, Truman saw Jacobson’s frayed suit, gave him money, and told him to buy new clothes.

Truman’s own obligations lasted far longer. Fifteen years after the store closed, he was still paying toward the haberdashery debt, leaving him strapped for money for twenty years. Even under that pressure, he maintained his concern with appearances. The failure was often attributed by friends to the economic conditions rather than to Truman’s management. Edgar Hinde, who was trying to sell Willys-Overland automobiles in Independence, remembered the store as a good one and Truman as a victim of the times. The price of wheat, down to 88 cents a bushel in 1922, offered a stark measure of the continuing agricultural crisis. A less sympathetic former neighbor, Gaylon Babcock, whose father had invested in the store, remembered the collapse as characteristic of Truman’s repeated misfortune. Truman himself blamed the Republicans in Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon’s tight-money policy; the account also notes that the trouble had begun earlier, when the Wilson administration sharply cut spending and raised taxes.

The store and Truman’s political turn

Before the business finally collapsed, its prospects were already poor. In late 1921 or early 1922, while the store was still operating, Truman met with representatives of the Pendergast organization at the 12th Street location. They asked whether he would run for eastern judge of Jackson County. The post was administrative rather than judicial, but it carried influence over county finances, road overseers and work crews, clerks, other employees, and public contracts. Truman understood the political value of one vote on the three-judge county court and accepted the offer without hesitation.

The organization saw qualities in him that extended beyond his immediate need for a new livelihood. His war record and family background helped his appeal, as did his farming knowledge, Baptist faith, Masonic membership, and reputation for honesty. Those attributes could help the Pendergasts reach country voters whom their big-city political organization might not otherwise attract. Truman’s failing business and his political recruitment thus overlapped: the store was both the site of a consequential approach and the venture whose debts would constrain him for years. Its failure did not by itself determine his political future, but it sharpened the circumstances in which the opportunity arrived.