In this installment of our ‘Ex Libris’ series, we look at the books that influenced the last US president who guided the country through post-WWII changes.
With the death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Harry Truman (1884–1972) became America’s 33rd president. For the next seven years, he was caught up in swirl of momentous events.
He oversaw the ending of the war in Europe, authorized the atomic bombings on Japan, guided the country from a wartime to a peacetime economy, faced the international challenges brought on by the Cold War with Russia, helped institute the Marshall Plan, recognized the new state of Israel, and dispatched military forces to defend South Korea from a communist invasion.
Truman had hopes of going to college to study law and finance, but his family’s financial difficulties left that possibility off the table. Later he attended business school and then law school, but circumstances again prevented him from earning a degree.
This lack of a diploma, however, was not evidence of a lack of education.
Learning Along the Way
In his early adult years, Truman worked a number of jobs, from timekeeper for a railroad construction outfit to bank clerk to farming. Serving with the Missouri National Guard led to his becoming a field artillery officer in France during World War I. Afterwards, he and a friend opened a haberdashery business, which failed after only three years. Eventually, Truman became involved in politics, showing a talent for administrative skills and efficiency. His election to the U.S. Senate in 1934 was the stepping stone that led to the White House.
Perhaps just as important for America’s future as the “people skills” Truman acquired during these years was his lifelong voracious reading, particularly histories and biographies. In his 1955 “Memoirs,” he wrote, “My debt to history is one which cannot be calculated. I know of no other motivation which so accounts for my awakening interest as a young lad in the principles of leadership and government.”
School Days
Harry Truman at age 13, in 1897. Public Domain
In his article “Harry Truman’s History Lessons,” supervisory archivist of the Truman Library and Museum Samuel Rushay notes the fascination stories of the past held for the adolescent Truman. When he was 10, his mother gave him a four-volume set, Charles F. Horne and Selmar Hess’s newly-published “Great Men and Famous Women,” which introduced him to historical figures from Europe and the United States. As Truman later remembered, she also provided him with “a blackboard on the back of which was a column of about four or five paragraphs on every President up to that time, which included Grover Cleveland, and that’s where I got interested in the history of the country.”
In a 1962 letter, Truman recalled his adolescent engagement with the printed word: “I had to study whether I wanted to or not. Read the Old & New Testaments King James translation three times before I was fifteen, and all the histories of world leaders and heroes I could find. Our public library in Independence had about three or four thousand volumes, including the encyclopedias! Believe it or not I read ‘em all. … It served me well when my terrible trial came.”
The terrible trial to which he refers were the events of his presidency.
A Classroom Without Walls
The 2015 reprint of Charles F. Horne and Selmar Hess's "Great Men and Famous Women," which included biographies of famous statesmen and heroes.
In his essay, Rushay also points us to the books of history and biography Truman read as an adult, explorations of the past that helped carry him through those epoch-making postwar years.
We learn that Truman’s knowledge of military history in particular was thorough and deep, that he believed in the power of individuals to shape events, and that history was the great teacher for those who were paying attention. He read the biographies of men like the Roman Cincinnatus and the Carthaginian Hannibal, the Americans George Washington and Robert E. Lee, and admired them for their leadership skills and character. He disliked those who seemed vainglorious and intent on their personal reputations, like Napoleon and his own general, Douglas MacArthur.
Interestingly, the Bible remained a core of Truman’s philosophy regarding the American republic. In 1952, while still president, he told a meeting of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association that “the fundamental basis of this Nation’s ideals was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. The fundamental basis of the Bill of Rights of our Constitution comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus, St. Matthew, Isaiah, and St. Paul. The Sermon on the Mount gives us a way of life, and maybe some day men will understand it as the real way of life.”
Lessons for Today
President Harry S. Truman in this file photo, circa 1945. Library of Congress
It was Truman who made famous a saying still in use today: “Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”
Of a list of books he recommended, which included such works as Plutarch’s “Lives” and Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Truman noted, “It has been a life-time program for me, and if you start out even on this incomplete list, you will find it a lengthy study but well worthwhile.
“It will keep you out of mischief, too.”
Good advice then for our leaders. Good advice now.
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Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
