Truman's letter to Paul Hume

Truman's letter to Paul Hume was a furious response to a music critic's review of Margaret Truman Daniel, but its significance grew far beyond a father's anger. Written at Blair House and sent through an unsuspecting messenger, it turned a private outburst into a front-page story, exposing the tension between Harry S. Truman's sense of himself as a private person and the public responsibilities of the presidency.

The review and its timing

At 5:30 on the morning after Margaret Truman Daniel sang at Constitution Hall, Truman opened The Washington Post and found Paul Hume's review on page 12 of the second section. Hume described her as attractive onstage and possessed of a pleasant voice, but judged that she sang poorly, was frequently flat, and lacked professional finish. He also objected that audiences paid the price of admission they would pay for the world's finest singers. The review ended by presenting criticism as an unpleasant duty, while suggesting that the paper might otherwise have to omit comment on her performances.

The criticism was not entirely new. Margaret Truman Daniel had previously been advised by the opera star Helen Traubel not to rush her career: Traubel believed her voice needed at least five more years of study and wanted her to succeed independently of her father's position. Truman had agreed with that principle. What provoked him now, the account emphasizes, was less the substance of Hume's assessment than its timing. He was under strain and grieving, and the review became the immediate occasion for an outburst that might otherwise have found another target.

Writing and sending the letter

In the Blair House study, Truman wrote roughly 150 words by hand on a White House memorandum pad. He sealed the note in an envelope, addressed it to Hume, attached a three-cent stamp, and carried it over to the White House. The physical simplicity of the act sharpened its consequences: an angry message, composed in private, was already prepared for ordinary postal delivery.

Truman asked an elderly White House messenger, Samuel Mitchell, whether the day was pleasant. When Mitchell agreed, Truman suggested that he take a walk and drop a letter into a street mailbox on the way. The arrangement allowed the letter to leave the White House without the sort of intervention that might have stopped it. George Elsey later observed that Charlie Ross, had he still been on duty, would have anticipated Truman's reaction to the review and prevented the letter from going out. Ross, Elsey recalled, had been more than a press secretary: he had served as a calming and tempering influence.

The letter attacked Hume personally rather than limiting itself to a defense of Margaret Truman Daniel. Truman accused the critic of frustration and failure, mocked his review, and threatened that a future meeting would leave Hume needing a new nose and black eyes. He also invoked Westbrook Pegler as a comparison, using the comparison to intensify the insult. The message's combination of paternal defense, personal abuse, and physical threat made it difficult to treat as merely a disagreement about a performance.

From private message to public controversy

Hume and his editor at The Washington Post chose not to act on the letter. Copies nevertheless circulated, and the full text appeared on the front page of the tabloid Washington News. Publication transformed a note addressed to one critic into a national judgment on the President's conduct. Hume regretted that the letter had become public and said he sympathized with a man coping with the loss of a friend and the burden of the world crisis. His sympathy did little to quiet the response.

The Chicago Tribune questioned Truman's mental competence and emotional stability. Letters and telegrams to the White House ran nearly two to one against him, with many writers condemning his lack of self-control and manners. Some connected their anger to Margaret Truman Daniel's performance, while others objected to the President taking the review so personally. A smaller number defended him as a father acting out of loyalty and affection. The episode's public reach thus depended not only on the letter's language but also on its collision with the expectations attached to presidential office.

The private man and the office

Truman privately accepted that he should not have written the letter, but he would not disown it once it had been sent. To Margaret Truman Daniel, he distinguished between the President and Harry S. Truman as a human being, and insisted that the latter had written it. That distinction expressed his own defense of the outburst, but staff members saw a problem in it: the country might not separate the private man from the office he held. Elsey specifically recalled that hot letters and personal insults embarrassed the staff and reflected on the presidency, despite Truman's wish that they should not.

The Hume letter also belonged to a broader pattern of angry correspondence and remarks. Truman had written sharply to Bernard Baruch during the 1948 campaign; he had said he would not appoint John L. Lewis dog-catcher; and he had insulted the Marine Corps in a letter to a congressman, later apologizing publicly for that accusation. None of those episodes produced a furor equal to the Hume controversy. The letter's lasting force lay in how plainly it exposed the costs of Truman's refusal to divide private indignation from public conduct: a father's defense of his daughter became a test of how the nation understood its President.