Harry S. Truman
A Missouri farmer, artillery officer and county administrator who reached the White House on Franklin Roosevelt’s death, and the last president to hold the office without a college degree.
Biography
Truman grew up on a farm outside Independence, Missouri, and finished high school in 1901. Money and eyesight closed off the paths he had wanted — the family could not afford college and West Point turned him down — so he spent his twenties as a bank clerk, a farmer and a National Guardsman. He commanded an artillery battery in France in 1918, returned to open a Kansas City haberdashery that failed in the post-war slump, and entered county government through the Pendergast organisation.
Elected to the Senate in 1934, he became nationally known in the early 1940s chairing the committee that audited war production. He was nominated for vice president in 1944 and had held the office for 82 days, with almost no briefing on the war’s conduct, when Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945.
His presidency covered the end of the Second World War and the construction of what followed it: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the reconversion of a war economy amid strikes and price-control fights, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin airlift, NATO, the desegregation of the armed forces by executive order, and the Korean War. Most of the federal statistics on this site begin in the middle of his first term, so his earliest years are only partly covered by the data.
Education
- Independence High School, Missouri, Graduated (1901)
- Spalding’s Commercial College, Kansas City (1901–1902)
- Kansas City School of Law (now the UMKC School of Law) (1923–1925)
Military service
Missouri National Guard from 1905; captain commanding Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, in France in 1918; later a colonel in the reserve.
Offices held before the presidency
- Judge, Jackson County Court, Missouri (an administrative rather than judicial post), 1923–1925 and 1927–1935
- United States Senator from Missouri, 1935–1945
- Vice President of the United States, January–April 1945