American Experience

Historian Alonzo Hamby on Small Town Living

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Well, Independence was very much an upper South county seat town. The bulk of its residents were people who had immigrated to Missouri from Kentucky, mostly before the Civil War. I think you particularly get a sense of the provincial character of the town in its race relations, which were quite fascinating. The black population was basically a servant class. Most of the local whites were quite paternalistic. They were convinced that their blacks were "good folks." Occasionally, if you're reading the Independence paper in the early 20th century, you'll read about an armed hold-up late at night perpetrated by a black person. It's always believed this is someone who came over from Kansas City and has disappeared back into Kansas City. "Our blacks would never do anything like that."

This was the atmosphere that Harry Truman grew up in. It was a sense of race relations that that he had. The Truman family had a couple of black servants, sort of hired hands, a woman who did some of the house work and cooking for them, a man who helped out with the livestock business, gardening, yard work, and the like. They obviously felt very paternalistic toward this black couple and years later when Harry Truman is president and one of the children of this couple is having a hard time, he tells an aide to make sure that this person's "taken care of" and that he gets whatever's coming to him in the way of public assistance, among other things. So I think with today's consciousness, that's particularly one aspect of Independence that hits people very quickly and very directly.

More broadly speaking, Independence was a fairly homogenous community. It was kind of protypical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in its overall make-up and, as some residents of turn of the century Independence remember it, you had a rough class system that sort of went along the lines of church membership with the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians at the top, with the Southern Baptists, which was the church of Harry Truman's parents, somewhere in the middle, and then down at the bottom the relatively small population of Catholics, and maybe even less regarded than the Catholics in those days, the Latter Day Saints whose families had settled in Independence before the Civil War period and who had not made the trek out to Utah with the bulk of the Mormons, but who'd stayed there to establish what we know today as the reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints.

This was kind of the Independence class system. There was no cosmopolitanism here. That was for sure. Basically the working assumptions, presuppositions of the white upper South, Protestant South dominated the town and permeated the cultural atmosphere.

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