Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip Read Online Free

that night. “It was the payoff for thirty years of hell and hard work.”
    Harry and Bess walked hand in hand into the house. The next morning Harry was asked what he planned to do. “Take the grips up to the attic,” he said, using the old-fashioned word for suitcases.
    Retirement, as it has come to be known, is a relatively recent concept. The first edition of Noah Webster’s
American Dictionary of the English Language,
published in 1828, lists four meanings for the word, none of which mention age. You worked until you couldn’t work anymore, in which case your family, probably large, provided for you. Or you worked until you died. No gold watches, no pensions, no Social Security.
    But older workers had no place in the Industrial Revolution. They couldn’t operate the newfangled machinery as nimbly as younger workers. And assembly lines were only as efficient as their weakest link, which was usually an older worker. The aged were simply in the way, and many employers began wondering how best to get rid of them.
    The answer, suggested a Johns Hopkins professor named William Osler in a 1905 lecture, was “a peaceful departure by chloroform.” Osler was being facetious (one hopes), but his point was serious. Osler believed men over forty contributed little to society. “Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty and … we would practically be where we are today.”
    As for men over sixty, Osler thought them completely useless. His proposal, short of chloroform, was mandatory retirement. There would be an “incalculable benefit … if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.” (Osler, who was fifty-five at the time, would live another fifteen years—and never retire.)
    But older workers couldn’t afford to stop working. They needed the money. In response, some employers began offering pensions—in the name of efficiency, not altruism. Funded by younger, lower-paid employees, pensions gave older workers the means to retire—sometimes involuntarily. A foreman in a Connecticut textile mill recalled how one worker was “retired” in 1916:
    Old Mr. McGuire, Jim McGuire’s father, used to make spools, and he was getting to be a pretty old man. He’d go over to the storage bin, and sometimes he’d only bring one spool at a time…. Well, finally, I spoke to [a supervisor], and I guess he mentioned it in the office because Mr. Shields come out. He got me and Mr. McGuire together, and he said, “We have decided that you have worked long and hard. And you always done good work too. And we think it is time you had a rest. So we have decided to pension you, and we will give you $55 a month, and you can have your house free as long as you live. But that doesn’t mean your wife can have it free after that.” … So the old man was pensioned off. You know, it’s a funny thing about them pensions. Practically everybody that gets one dies pretty soon after.
     
    But by 1932, just 15 percent of American workers were eligible for private pensions. Not until the Social Security Act was signed by FDR in 1935 were most workers guaranteed at least some income after retirement.
    As a government employee, however, Harry Truman did not qualify for Social Security. And he’d left the Senate too soon to qualify for a congressional pension.
    His only income was that army pension.

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    Independence, Missouri,
Winter and Spring, 1953
     
    N o twentieth-century president retired to more humble surroundings than Harry Truman. When not traveling the world, Teddy Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill, his estate on Long Island. Woodrow Wilson retreated to a fashionable townhouse in Washington, the only ex-president to stay in the capital. Herbert Hoover eventually settled into a plush suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Gerald Ford would retire to the pristine golf courses of Palm Desert, California. Bill Clinton would choose