A HEART RIGHTLY POSITIONED:

Mutual Admiration and a Few Jokes: The Correspondence of Harry Truman with Groucho and Harpo Marx (Raymond H. Geselbracht, Spring 2001, Prologue)

President Harry S. Truman's improbable relationship with the zany Marx Brothers of vaudeville and movie fame began as a young man in Kansas City and extended into Truman's tenure in the White House and afterward. But it was not all jokes and laughs— by either the brothers or the thirty-third President— as correspondence in the files of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, reveal.

Harry Truman's association with the Marx Brothers began at some unrecorded time fairly early in Truman's life. From the time he was a young man in his teens, Truman loved vaudeville. He loved almost every kind of live theater, but his favorite was vaudeville. That meant that he went often to the Orpheum Theatre and the Grand Opera House in Kansas City. "Between the time I was about 16 to 20," Truman said when he was President, "I used to go to every vaudeville show that came to Kansas City at the old Orpheum, and at the Grand." He even ushered for a time at the Orpheum so he could get into the show for free. After he started courting Bess Wallace in 1910, he took her to the vaudeville shows.

The Marx Brothers started coming to Kansas City shortly after they moved to Chicago from New York in about 1910. Truman probably came in from the Grandview farm as often as he could to see them. He remembered many years later, when vaudeville was long gone and he was an old man, that he almost never missed a chance to see the Marx Brothers when they were in town.

When Truman became President in the spring of 1945, one of the first problems that came to him was what to do about the survivors of the Holocaust who were living in displaced persons camps in Europe. He had great sympathy with the displaced persons, and he issued a directive in late 1945 intended to allow some of them to immigrate to the United States. Among the many Americans who were concerned about the displaced persons and were following Truman's actions with regard to them was a former vaudevillian whom Truman certainly remembered. On October 8, 1946, Groucho Marx sent Truman a clipping of a Life magazine editorial, "Send Them Here! Europe's Refugees Need a Place to Go and America Needs to Set a World Example." The article claimed that Truman's attempt to help displaced persons to immigrate to the United States had failed. "In God's name[,]" the editorial concluded, "can we go on doing nothing about these DPs?" Groucho asked Truman to consider the article. "I am sure that you are deluged with mail of this sort," he wrote, "but even a president at times can be confused." He added a PS: "Despite all this I propose voting for you in 1948."

Truman responded by sending Groucho a copy of a letter he had recently sent to Senator Walter George of Georgia. "I sincerely wish that every member of the Congress could visit the displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria," Truman wrote, "and see just what is happening to Five Hundred Thousand human beings through no fault of their own." Truman thought if the members of Congress did witness the misery of the displaced persons, they might help him bring some of these people to the United States and find other homes for them. "Your ancestors and mine," Truman concluded, "came to this country to escape just such conditions. There is no place for people to go now unless we can arrange it." [...]

Truman felt the allure of the Marx Brother's zany view of life from the time he was a young man, and he never forgot or renounced it. His memories of the Marx Brothers' riotously irreverent attitude to authority and to all the people and institutions that embodied it might well have contributed to the remarkable humility that he maintained during all the time he held high office. His youthful encounter with the Marx Brothers certainly encouraged him to recognize, as he always did, that life, among its other mysteries, is fundamentally humorous.

For the Marx Brothers, on the other hand, Truman was the President whose heart was rightly positioned on the refugee issue after World War II and who recognized and supported Israel. Though it is not recorded in the correspondence in the Truman Library's holdings, they must have recognized that Truman felt strongly the need to bring social justice to all Americans and to bring what was best in American life to people all over the world. In any event, Groucho voted for Truman the only time he could, in 1948, and would have voted for him again; one thinks the same is true of Harpo.

Truman was obviously a terrible president, but, unlike some other terrible presidents (Wilson, LBJ, Nixon, etc.), one doesn't doubt that his heart was rightly positioned.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 14, 2003 10:00 AM