Harry S. Truman - The autobiography of Harry S. Truman

Copyright 1980 by Robert H. Ferrell

Published by the University Press of Colorado

P.O. Box 849, Niwot, Colorado 80544

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Southern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

ISBN: 0-87081-091-x (paper)

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 80-66304

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Bruce Campbell

While the portions of this work created by the editor have been copyrighted, it should be noted that Mr. Truman's writings have been dedicated to the people of the United States and are therefore in the public domain.

The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman consists primarily of one large "core" manuscript together with several smaller autobiographical accounts, all in the president's handwriting. The result, one hopes, is a readable and instructive description andbecause the late president was an imaginative, thoughtful personan analysis of how a small boy in western Missouri became president of the United States.

In the early years of his adult life, and well into middle age, at least until the age of fifty, Harry S. Truman never had the slightest idea that he would achieve the presidency, and it is instructive to observe how remote the nation's highest political office seemed from him. As a youth in Independence, a young bank clerk in Kansas City, and then a farmer on a big farm near Grandview, Truman thought about the affairs of his town, of Jackson County, or his farm. He thought a good deal about the principles of Masonry, and not merely joined the lodge in nearby Belton in 1909 but next year organized a lodge in Grandview and became its first master, and took an intense interest in Masonry for the rest of his long life. When the First World War opened in 1914 he did not see any immediate dangers to his orderly ways, nor during his two years of military service after the United States entered the war did he anticipate any sort of political career. There is a piquant observation in one of his later letters of how during a leave in Paris in early 1919 he stood outside the Hotel Crillon and watched President Woodrow Wilson walk down the steps after a conference inside. At that moment no oneWilson, Truman, anyonecould have imagined that the thirty-five-year-old captain with the roundish