By SUSAN SESSIONS RUGH
"Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure"
By Matthew Algeo
Chicago Review Press, 262 pages, $24.95
On July 5, 1953, a Pennsylvania state trooper pulled over a black Chrysler sedan that was moving slowly in the westbound passing lane of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, blocking traffic. The trooper approached the driver's-side window and started to speak to the man behind the wheel. As the officer later reported, he was "flabbergasted" to discover that the driver was Harry Truman. The trooper cautioned the former president to stay in the right-hand lane if he was going to drive below highway speeds. Bess Truman, the former first lady, leaned across from the passenger seat and said: "Don't worry, Trooper, I'll watch him." Let off with a warning, the Trumans got back on the road and continued their summer vacation. View Full ImageHistorical Society of Frederick County MDHarry Truman drinks a Coke at a service station in Frederick, Md.Journalist and public-radio reporter Matthew Algeo relates the story in "Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure," an engaging account of the Trumans' three-week driving trip from the Midwest to the East Coast. To tell "the story of the monumental changes that have occurred in America since then," Mr. Algeo also juxtaposes the 1953 Truman trip with his own more recent journey retracing the former first family's route. When Harry and Bess Truman took their vacation, they were part of a growing American pastime: the automobile vacation. Postwar prosperity, brand-new highways and an itch to see the country made road travel popular with the middle class. In the golden age of the American family vacation, Detroit's Big Three auto makers manufactured family-friendly cars that were both roomy and affordable. The price of gas was 27 cents per gallon, and uniformed attendants filled up the tank and cleaned the windshield. Motels -- where you could pull right up to the door of your room -- were a new phenomenon. Urban Archives/Temple University LibrariesHarry Truman speaking in PhiladelphiaThe Trumans' trip in 1953 took them from their home in Independence, Mo., to Washington, D.C., where, until January of that year, the couple had been living in the White House. Truman drove the entire length of the 2,500-mile route on the old "blue highways" of the pre-interstate era, except for his stint on the turnpike in Pennsylvania. It was 102 degrees the day that they departed, in a car that wasn't equipped even with the rudimentary air-conditioning then available. Harry "never much saw the need for AC," Mr. Algeo says. With the windows rolled down, Harry at the wheel and Bess watching the speedometer, they traveled all day, with a midday stop for lunch, and usually arrived at their motel in the evening exhausted from the heat, wind and dust. Everywhere the Trumans stopped, they were surrounded by curious well-wishers. Harry shook hands and posed for pictures even though he was worn out from the ride. The cross-country jaunt was not just a sightseeing trip, and Mr. Algeo ably depicts the political sideshow that accompanied the Truman family vacation. In Washington, the former president held court at the Mayflower Hotel with Democratic Party leaders. In New York, where the couple stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria (on the house), Truman visited the United Nations. He took a side trip by rail to Philadelphia, where he delivered his first major speech since leaving office. In the address, Truman attacked President Dwight Eisenhower for proposing to cut defense spending. "Big talk does not impress the rulers of the Soviet empire," he said. "What impresses them are planes, and divisions, and ships." View Full ImageIn keeping with one of the book's conceits, Mr. Algeo makes a pilgrimage to the Grand Ballroom of Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where Truman spoke. "I was standing in the very spot where Harry had stood exactly fifty-five years earlier, front and center in his white dinner jacket, under the blazing klieg lights, measuring an imaginary fish, and giving Ike hell." Through such vignettes Mr. Algeo takes us back to a time, despite Cold War anxieties, "of unbridled optimism," then brings us forward to our supposedly more cynical age. The author retraced the Trumans' trip in stages from fall 2006 to summer 2008, hunting down the service stations where the couple bought gasoline, the diners where they ate a square meal and the hotels where they stayed the night. He even tracked down eyewitnesses who remembered the Trumans passing through, including one man who had saved the Coke bottle that Truman drained at a Gulf gas station in Maryland. The station owner asked the former president to take his mechanic to task for being a Republican, Mr. Algeo reports, but Truman replied that it was "too hot to give anybody hell." We even see the former president polishing off the soda in one of the many charming snapshots of the traveling Trumans that Mr. Algeo unearthed. The small-town America that Truman visited -- where he seems to have been enthusiastically greeted by folks eager to thank him for his service -- is of course much changed when Mr. Algeo arrives, following in the president's footsteps. Those same towns are now generally in a decline that began a few years after Truman passed through, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and created the interstate highway system that sent travelers whizzing past towns where once they might have stopped for gas or a meal or an overnight stay. As Mr. Algeo reports, the Parkview Motel in Decatur, Ill., where the Trumans stayed in 1953, is now owned by the Illinois Department of Corrections, home to prisoners finishing out the last year of a sentence. View Full ImageHerald & Review, Decatur, IllinoisFormer President Harry Truman unloads his car's trunk at a motel in Decatur, Ill., on June 19, 1953.For readers who want to get lost in the Trumans' story, Mr. Algeo's repeated returns to the present can present annoying detours. So, too, can the historical background -- well-researched though it might be -- that the author ladles into the story. It's a bit of a stretch to launch into a discussion of a civil-rights bus boycott in Baton Rouge, La., just because it started on the same day that the Trumans were leaving Independence on their trip. But such digressions, by reminding us of a social order that required a drastic overhaul, do have the benefit of tempering nostalgia for the era. But as the title of "Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure" suggests, the book is not heavy going. It's a light read, more suitable for an airplane ride than a long car trip. Some readers will wish that Mr. Algeo had paused to ponder more deeply the meaning of the changes he chronicles. One of the most dramatic transformations, of course, has occurred in the presidency itself. Harry Truman was the last ex-president to travel about the country as he pleased. The idea that George W. and Laura Bush would hop in an SUV in Crawford, Texas, and drive to Washington seems absurd to us now. In effect, American standard-bearers for freedom are denied the freedom of the road. Ms. Rugh is a history professor at Brigham Young University and the author of "Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of the American Family Vacation" (University Press of Kansas, 2008). Her latest book, "Family Vacation," is just out from Gibbs Smith.
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