Matthew Algeo’s entertaining and irresistible account of the Trumans’ 19-day road trip just after leaving the presidency in 1953 triggered a unique combination of reactions as soon as I put it down: tears at the elegiac ending and an almost uncontrollable urge to rent an RV and hit the road, just as the ex-president and first lady had done.
Algeo traces the Trumans’ peripatetic journey starting June 19, 1953, in Independence, Missouri, (where he had just retired after his party’s bruising loss to Dwight Eisenhower) to Philadelphia (with stopovers in Illinois, West Virginia, Indiana, Maryland, DC, Manhattan and Ohio) to give his first post-presidential speech to the Reserve Officers Association convention on June 26, 1953. Algeo also takes the opportunity during the Trumans’ excursion to rhapsodize about the colorful and, for the most part, long-gone America of small towns and bedrock citizenry (now uniformly dismissed as “deplorables” relegated to “fly-over” country) the First Couple encountered as they fueled, slept, ate and motored their way back East.
The book grants (to me at least) new insight into Harry S Truman’s (the “S” famously standing for no middle name) principled — and long-discarded by his successors — refusal to cash in on his former lofty status, declining offers to join corporate boards or endorse advertising that would ~ in his eyes ~ demean the office of president. Even the unheard-of $600,000 advance on his future memoirs from Doubleday publishing only netted Truman, after taxes, a paltry $37,000. [In contrast, when Bill and Hillary Clinton released the last 8 years of their tax returns to public scrutiny during her 2008 bid for president, their combined income was $109 million.] I got the impression Algeo, who judging from some of his statements is a staunch Democrat, was fairly shocked at the extent of the Clintons’ wealth.
The upshot of this moral stance meant that the newly-unemployed Trumans were very soon struggling financially (on a small Army pension from his years as a colonel in World War I) with many productive years still ahead and no means to live above a penurious subsistence. (His monthly expenses, none of them as yet footed by the public till, included almost $4000 per month alone for office space and two fulltime secretaries to assist with the deluge of fan mail he continued to received daily as ex-Commander-in-Chief.)
In a century when shallow, narcissistic pop stars and celebrities host TV “reality shows” devoted to themselves, it’s almost impossible to imagine how unprecedented it was in the 1950’s for a former president and first lady to simply “hit the road” without benefit of bodyguards (or apprehension at their absence) , overnighting at the latest craze among road travelers: motor hotels or “mo-tels” which, starting in 1933, mushroomed across the country (most of them family-owned mom-and-pop operations, until a Memphis businessman named Kemmons Wilson started a nationwide chain in 1951 called Holiday Inn).
(Leave it to the reprehensible J. Edgar Hoover to condemn the fledgling industry in 1940 as “a new home of disease, bribery, corruption, crookedness, rape, white slavery, thievery and murder”.)
The Trumans invariably drew a crowd (and frequently the local press) at every filling station, greasy spoon and lodging place where they stopped along the route to New York via Washington DC, astonishing waitresses, gas station attendants and store owners (while giving ulcers to sheriffs and police chiefs, who blanched at the thought of the Trumans coming to harm while in their jurisdictions).
Some snapshots from the trip:
The book gives us not only a well-rounded portrait of the last “citizen president” but also, in deft strokes, a fleeting glimpse of a vanished American landscape and the people who made it great once.