Has the dusting been done up in heaven?
If it hasn’t, there’s one thing I know good and well:
You’re clipping the wings of those damn lazy angels
And telling them all about going to hell;
Do they run a tight ship up in heaven?
Do they keep to their word and not waste a move?
Do they throw things away they might need someday?
If they do, I know you’ll surely make them improve.
And how is the chow where you are now?
Do they give you your steak and potatoes?
Are there locks on the doors, can you eat off the floors,
Do they let you grow Big Boy tomatoes?
I know you’ve found work up in heaven,
Oiling the tools and sharpening them well,
And you’ll cut a straight line through the rest of all time .
So why don’t you set down and rest for a spell?
Don’t have to turn out the lights
You can let’em burn all night.
So why don’t you set down and rest for a spell?
I wrote that song to my dad a couple of years after he died, violating one of his many teachings – I was late. But at least I got much of what I learned from him into that song. I don’t believe I ever heard dad use the phrase “run a tight ship,” but it sums up much about how he lived his life, and much of what I learned from him.
Life meant work. When his father got too sick to work, Dad left the 7th grade and started shoveling tons of coal a day to help support his family. Dad never stopped working again. Many years later, when he got home from his job down in Chicago, he’d get to work on our house, garden or yard, maintaining, fixing, planting, weeding, harvesting. I don’t recall ever seeing him use any chemical weed killers or fertilizers. He made a large, typically substantial compost bin and used it religiously.
(I’m not sure what he ordinarily added to his compost to beef up its nitrogen content, but I vividly remember one year when he somehow heard about free chicken manure available on a farm somewhere outside town. One Saturday we drove out there and collected many bushel baskets full of that chicken manure. Dad had put down the rear seat back rest in our gigantic Chevy station wagon, and those baskets filled up the entire space. And not just that space. Their ammoniac reek filled the entire car, even with all the windows down. We drove back up our alley trailing a nearly visible cloud of chicken stench. I was glad when we finished transferring the manure into the compost bin.
For at least the next two weeks, I could have walked home for lunch from my junior high blindfolded, following the beacon of vileness emanating from that compost bin. I never heard about Dad getting any negative remarks from the neighbors, but he didn’t repeat that particular addition to our garden.)
He didn’t give me much formal instruction, but I learned how to work by watching him. I learned some physical skills from him – how to cut a straight line with a crosscut or a rip saw, how to handle a paint brush well enough to paint a window, including the corners of the muntins, without needing to mask the glass, how to sharpen a blade. But the physical skills were not the most important things I learned. The most important was a systematic approach to doing any kind of work. I’ve done a lot of work with my hands and body over a long life, but made most of my living as a teacher. No matter – knowing how to work is useful no matter what the work may be.
First thing, you made a plan. If the job was a recurring one, you probably wouldn’t have to write or draw the plan out, but if it was a job you hadn’t done often or ever before, a written plan or diagram or blueprint would be a wise preparation. It would include a list of required materials and tools for the job at hand.
Whatever your work area was going to be, you made sure it was cleared of extraneous stuff before you started working. You did that for safety, and to avoid having to interrupt the job to move crap out of the way. You kept it cleaned up as you worked, for the same reasons. That meant putting sawdust, scrap lumber, or hardware you’d finished using back in whatever container it belonged in.
You did one job at a time – again, for safety, and so you could concentrate on what you were doing and how you were doing it, and to make sure each step had been completed before you set off on the next one. “Multi-tasking” hadn’t been heard of when dad was alive. He would have profanely scorned any such practice. Whatever you were doing, you were obliged to do the best job you could, and so you weren’t done with a job until you’d made sure that you had.
I was reminded of all those things I learned from watching Dad work by a passage in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s great book Braiding Sweetgrass: “Woven into my dad’s fire teachings was appreciation for all the woods gave us and a sense of our responsibility for reciprocity. We never left a camping place without leaving a pile of wood for the next people on on the trail. Paying attention, being prepared and patient, and doing it right the first time: the skill and the values were so closely entwined that fire making became for us an emblem of a certain kind of virtue.”
After you’d completed the job – and unless it required more than one day or night to complete, you’d damn well better finish what you started – you cleaned up the work area and you put any remaining supplies you hadn’t used and all the tools back where they belonged. That way your tools wouldn’t get lost or damaged and you’d be able to find them without difficulty the next time you needed them. (That meant, of course, that you’d first created a storage system for your tools, which does not go without saying for many people.)
You took care of your tools that way because you’d bought tools that were built to last a lifetime – as tools in those days were meant to do. To lose a tool or let it be damaged was wasteful. And waste was a very serious offense.
A lot of people made affectionate fun of Dad’s refusal to throw things away. Once I heard one of the guys he hired to help him work around the house muttering to himself with affectionate exasperation about “Walt and his goddam rubber nails.” He was referring to Dad’s insistence on keeping used nails and spikes in used jelly jars on a shelf above his work bench, after he’d hammered them back out more or less straight on his anvil. After he died, I went up under the rafters above the three-car garage attached to the last house he’d lived in with my mom, and found the entire attic jammed full of butt ends of lumber – 2x2s, 2x4s, 2x6s, even a few 2x12s – nailed together in bunches of 10 or 12. You never knew when you might need a little stub of 2×4 for some job. I had to laugh, even though I was stuck with the duty of dealing with this forest of wood no one would ever use, unless maybe for kindling.
Dad had grown up poor. (If you want an idea of what that little word really meant, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, take a look at Michael Lesey’s book Wisconsin Death Trip.) After WWI he’d gotten a good job as a lineman with the Commonwealth Edison Company, shortly before the Depression hit. He and my mother got through those long years somehow, but “hard times” hadn’t been visitors to most people’s lives back then – they’d been the standard condition of those lives, and avoiding any sort of waste was one of the habits you learned early and well if you wanted to survive.
Another lesson was living within your means. In all his life, Dad never bought a car or a house or anything else on credit.”Deficit spending” was an abomination. Dad had observed the stock market frenzy of the late 1920s, but he’d never joined in. He’d just kept working and saving what he could. During most of the 1930s, he’d been promoted to the office, where he eventually became a vice-president of personnel, and part of his compensation came in the form of Commonwealth Edison stock, which he accumulated along with a few other blue chips stocks. These were never used in speculation – he viewed them as investment savings, period. By 1939 he’d accumulated enough savings to buy a house built to his specifications. The next three houses he bought were also bought outright, as was every car he ever owned. If he wanted to buy something he couldn’t afford, he saved up for it. (“Save up” was a common expression in his days. I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use it. Most everyone has learned, instead, to Put It On the Card.)
Dad also kept his own accounts, and kept them up in his big account books every week. That was another way of making sure you kept living within your means – knowing where your resources were, and where they were going. He didn’t need any apps to do it for him, since his grade school education had taught him to write legibly and to do basic math operations faultlessly (though you always checked your work, since nobody was perfect).
America’s Free Market religion promotes the belief that hard, honest work will lead to financial success, that the Market is truly free (unless befouled by politicians’ attempts to regulate it) and always leads to the greatest good for the greatest number, that those who wind up with the greatest goods must have gotten them by hard work and intelligence, and are therefore to be admired and respected. Dad believed these things, and he never forgave Samuel Insull, the corporate titan accused (though acquitted) of fraud. Dad’s company, Commonwealth Edison, had been part of Insull’s immense corporate holding company’s utilities, and while it survived Insull’s downfall, Dad’s belief in the infallibility of the Free Market was challenged by Insull’s saga, and he never forgave Insull. But he also never rejected the religion, and continued to live by his beliefs: hard work and scrupulously honest dealing in all transactions were the Two Commandments.
But dad’s close attention to his money didn’t emanate from greed. He first intended to make sure he could provide a decent life for his family, and while he encouraged us to work as soon as we could, he never insisted that we pay our own way, and he saved enough money to put me through four years at Northwestern University, whose tuition was not inconsiderable. He’d set aside money for my sister’s college as well, but her high school experience had soured her on further education. Though he had little contact with native Americans during his life, he seemed to share the attitude toward wealth that Robin Wall Kimmerer attributes to them: “Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away.” You needed to respect money, but other values came first.
Respect for other people meant keeping to your word. If you told someone you’d do something, you’d better do it, even if you came to regret your promise. If you made an appointment to meet with someone, you kept that appointment to the minute. (In fact, Dad was so obsessive about never being late for anything that we always arrived about fifteen minutes early – a habit I’ve been unable to shake.)
Respect also meant fulfilling your duties and obligations to the people for whom you were responsible. Though in his later years Dad had risen to be a Vice-President of Personnel, he still answered calls for help of one kind or another from workers in his company, often in the middle of the night, and he gave a good deal of work (and pay) around our house to some of the lowest men on the company totem pole. And though he used all of the racial and ethnic and religious slurs common during his time, he taught their stupidity in his acts. The three most common visitors in our house were a black janitor from the company auto shop, an illiterate Italian immigrant, and a Polish mechanic. They not only worked for and with Dad, they ate with us. My sister and I both grew up as free of the common prejudices of the day as anyone can be, thanks to Dad’s example.
Respect extended not just to people you knew, but to all the people you came in contact with. One of Dad’s mantras was “Pay attention.” You were to pay attention to the world around you, and especially to the people around you in public places. (When he was alive, there were still places everyone agreed were Private.) You respected their space.
If you spend much time in grocery stores, or other crowded sites, you will have noticed that many people have not had this sort of upbringing. They wander about sublimely unaware of the presence of anyone else, blocking aisles while they ponder a purchase choice, blundering across your path, arriving at the checkout counter completely unprepared to pay for their purchases, as if the idea that things cost money were a recent, surprising development.
Though Dad was a cusser, he kept his cussing under strict control. He never cussed around people he didn’t know, who might be offended. It would be disrespectful. Though my mother was often offended, the family was an exception to his rule – he felt free in our presence to damn various wrongdoers, such as Democrats, to hell, where those sons of bitches deserved to spend eternity. Even within his own home, though, he observed the limits everyone else recognized – no sexual or excretory obscenities ever passed his lips in our presence. In my case, that proved to be a prohibition removed by official manhood – the first time I realized dad even knew the word “fuck” was when he applied its adjective form to the ants infesting his peonies. On the day of my 21st birthday.
Democrats were his favored targets of excoriation – always, for any or no act on their part – because Dad adopted his political philosophy whole from the editorial stance of the Chicago Tribune. The Trib, as Dad always referred to it, strongly opposed American entry into World War II, equated Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Truman’s Fair Deal, with Communism, attacked liberal Republicans, lionized Joe McCarthy. Dad accepted these viewpoints uncritically throughout his life. He was still denouncing Franklin Roosevelt on his deathbed. He was briefly cheered, in 1948, when the Trib informed him that Truman had lost the presidency to Governor Dewey, but he soon had Truman back in office to curse again, which he did until he had a suspect Republican to curse for prevailing over his and the Trib’s favorite Neanderthal, Robert Taft, for the 1952 presidential nomination. Taft had endeared himself to Dad with his anti-labor legislation.
I’ve never been able to figure out why Dad, a workingman at heart who felt most comfortable with other working men, so thoroughly embraced the Right-Wing Republican line. That line used to have some basis in reality, though not much. Probably it was the “fiscal conservatism” and praise of “free enterprise” that appealed to Dad, since both characterized his practice or values. But only the utterly biased picture of Harry Truman the Trib relentlessly trumpeted – Truman, the free spending communist enabler, the crook who owed his career to a big city boss, the man who first strait-jacketed, then fired that great American hero, Douglas MacArthur – could have kept Dad from seeing that Harry Truman was, in most basic respects, very much like him.
After high school, Truman worked a variety of jobs around Kansas City, but returned to his father’s farm when called, and after his father died, “. . . somebody had to run the farm, and so I did it.” Asked later in life if there had been other things he’d rather have done, he replied, “Oh, there may have been, but I didn’t give it any thought, because what would have been the use of it?” As in my Dad’s case, obligations to family came before any other desires or considerations. You did what needed to be done.
If he took a job on, Truman determined to do it as well as he could. He’d never aspired to be a farmer, but once he returned to help his father, he learned everything he could about farming. He made the Truman farm one of the first in the state to practice crop rotation, leading to dramatically increased yields and improved soil for future crops.
Throughout his life, Truman insisted on doing whatever job came his way as well as he could do it. For instance, in 1931, elected to a second term as a “presiding judge,” Truman determined to build a new courthouse. His account of that venture included his search for an architect: “I wanted the best-looking one you could get for the money, built by the best architect. So I got in a car, and I traveled a good distance before I ended up in Shreveport, Louisiana . . . and that was the courthouse I liked. It had been designed by a man named Edward F. Neild, and I hired him to come to Kansas City and build the courthouse there.” Since the budget for the bond issue he’d persuaded the voters to approve didn’t include such travel, Truman paid for this trip himself – “I felt it was necessary, and so I went ahead and did it.” A statue of Andrew Jackson was to grace the front of the courthouse, and Truman traveled further in search of the best sculptor, again at his own expense – “I wanted that courthouse and that statue to be the best they could be . . . . When I was a boy, that was the way everybody went about things. Or so it seems to me.”
He held his dealings with other people to an equally high standard. In command of an artillery battery in the final year of WWI, Truman established his authority over his new command by calling his noncommissioned officers together and saying, “Now, look I didn’t come here to get along with you guys. You’re going to have to get along with me, and if any of you thinks he can’t, why, speak right up, and I’ll give you a punch in the nose.” A group that had already driven off several commanding officers came to admire and love Truman. One of them later summed up their view of him: “He was tough, but he was fair; he was a good officer.”
Another illustrated what the men meant by “a good officer”:
“The men trusted him to get them through the war and to get them back home. And he went out of his way to help them.
“That was illustrated I think by something that happened when we were on the march in the Vosges Mountains on our way into the St. Mihiel sector.
“The men would be walking all day and leading their horses, [including Truman, whose horse was pulling the guns] and the infantry would ride by in trucks and yell at us to join the infantry and ride . . . .
“. . . . And the colonel of the regiment came by . . . . and started sounding off about how we were just straggling along and were a sight to behold and so on, and he wanted to know whose outfit it was.
“. . . . Captain Truman said that this was his outfit, Battery D.
“And the colonel said it was a hell of a looking outfit and that he wanted the men to be called to attention and fall in and double-time up a hill about half a mile . . . away.
“Captain Truman realized that the men were out on their feet, and instead of giving the men a double-time order, he took us off the road, gave us a right turn, and took us into a forest with instructions to put the horses on the picket line and to bed the men down.
“. . . . And he risked a court-martial by his action. But he told the colonel that his men weren’t going to go any farther. They were going to rest that night. And he said if the colonel wanted his job, why, to court-martial him.
“The result was, he came back with the orders that we’d stay right there that night, and the whole outfit bedded down.
“The next day word spread around that he’d gone to bat for us, and things of that nature happened all the time.”
Truman’s idea of being an officer, like my dad’s, was not that that rank somehow gave you status or superiority. It gave you responsibility to take care of the welfare of the people “under” you. That was true of my dad as a vice-president of personnel, and of Truman, whether he was responsible for the welfare of a county, a congressional district, or the United States.
Early on in his political career, Truman became well aware of the tendency of those who handled the people’s tax money to succumb to greed. When he reached the U.S. Senate, Truman kept hearing from his constituents about the corruption among the builders of Ft. Leonard Wood. He went down there and found that the reports were, if anything, understatements, and went back to inform the Senate of his findings and create the Committee to investigate the National Defense Program, of which he was named chair. It soon became widely known as The Truman Committee. He never confined the Committee’s investigations of defense contracting to the hearing room. Years later, he told Merle Miller:
I can tell you the story of the airport between Fort Worth and Dallas. Myself and a couple of Senators went down there because the payrolls were outrageous.
But they heard we were coming, and so they straightened things out, and everything looked perfectly fine. But under a great big hangar was a kind of basement which was above ground.
And I said, ‘What’s under there?’ And they said, ‘Oh, that’s just a basement for storage.’
So I said, ‘Fine. Raise up the trapdoor and let’s see.’ And I counted over six hundred men come out of there. They were hiding. They were on the payroll, but they weren’t doing a day’s work.
. . . . Of course that contractor had to restore the overpayments which he had received, and he didn’t get any more contracts.
That wasn’t the only time Truman left Washington to investigate suspicious activities:
. . . . Glenn Martin was making B-26 bombers, and they were crashing and killing kids right and left. So I said to Martin, ‘What’s wrong with these planes?’
He said, ‘The wingspread isn’t wide enough.’
So I said, ‘Then why aren’t you making it wider?’
And he said, ‘I don’t have to. The plans are too far along, and besides, I’ve got a contract.
So I said, ‘All right. If that’s the way you feel, I’ll see to it that your contract is canceled and you won’t get another.’
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘if that’s the way it’s going to be, we’ll fix it,’ and he did.
. . . . He was killing kids, murdering kids, and he didn’t give a damn. I never will understand people who can do a thing like that.’
It was estimated that the Truman Committee saved taxpayers somewhere around $15 billion (close to $300 billion in today’s dollars), as well as the lives of many American servicemen who didn’t have to depend on faulty equipment. Not a bad accomplishment for a Tax-and-Spend Liberal. Truman, throughout his political career, treated taxpayer money as Dad treated his own money: he paid close attention to where every penny was going, and he put a quick stop to any wasteful expenditures he discovered. Dad, of course, wouldn’t have heard about any of this from the Trib.
Truman also resembled my dad in the contradiction between his frequent use of what would now be seen as racial slurs and his beliefs and behavior regarding race, ethnicity and religion. Truman grew up in what had been a slave state, one (of many) still infected by the KuKluxKlan. Looking back on the days when the Klan exercised considerable political power in his county, Truman recalled:
Here in Jackson Country the Klan was a Republican adjunct, just
like it was after the Civil War. And it was used politically to cause
a great many good people in Missouri, Democrats, to be defeated.
And they had several meetings in Jackson County when I was
running for county judge and also when I was running for presiding
judge and the Senate.
And in 1924 I went to one of their meetings; it was in the daytime
down in the eastern part of the county. I guess there must have
been a thousand people there, and I knew every durned one of
them . . . . And I got up and told them exactly what I thought of
them. Got down off the platform, walked right down through the
center of them, and started home.
He took the Declaration of Independence as seriously as did Abraham Lincoln, who wrote of the American Party’s (The “Know-Nothings”) refusal to oppose slavery and its conspiratorial fantasies of a Catholic plot to take over the United States:
‘As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created
equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal
except negroes.” When the Know-nothings get control, it will
read “all men are created equal except negroes and foreigners
and Catholics.” When it come to this, I shall prefer emigrating
to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty
– to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure,
and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.’
Truman was the first President to act against legalized segregation, issuing an executive order integrating the armed forces in 1948 despite the opposition of Southern Democrats which might have cost him his election in the upcoming election. As usual, he did what he believed was the right thing for the country, whatever opposition he might expect to meet, whatever the political cost.
US District Court Judge Albert A. Ridge, who served in Truman’s WWI battery and remained his friend for many years after, said of Truman,”Harry Truman never learned to put on a public face, and he never had a public manner. He just never learned to be anybody but himself.” While that should probably merit a few grains of salt, it was certainly true that Harry Truman rarely talked out of more than one side of this mouth, and prided himself on keeping his word: he once said, “Unless you were a man who stood by what he said, you were not well thought of around here and you never got very far, never got anywhere at all in this part of the country”. His biographer Merle Miller once observed to him, “You seem to be saying that trust is like a cement that holds everything together, holds society together,” to which Truman replied, “That’s a very good way to put it, yes, trust is absolutely fundamental in every possible kind of relationship, and in government . . . . If the people can’t trust their government . . . the whole works will fall apart.” Miller responded, “Those are very old fashioned sentiments, Mr. President. A lot of people don’t feel that way anymore. “To which Truman said, “I know they don’t and it’s a pity. That’s the reason we’re in the shape we’re in.”
Because he placed other values above monetary profit, Truman had long before seen the day coming when they would be considered “old fashioned sentiments.” In his second year in the Senate. Truman spoke of this to his colleagues: “One of the difficulties as I see it is that we worship money instead of honor. A billionaire in our estimation is much greater in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for the public interest . . . . It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor . . . . No one ever considers the Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steel workers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundations is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel Company and a dozen other performances. We worship Mammon . . . . We are building a tower of Babel.”
His words went unheeded, and after World War II demonstrated that massive government investment in the tools of war led to boom times, deficit spending became the order of the day for both political parties, and, increasingly, for the American economy. During the 1980s and 1990s, most of the restraints on lending and investment practices fashioned in the 1930s were abolished, and, in the words of Michael Lewis in The Money Culture, “For almost ten years, however, the lucky winners of the Reagan years sent a quite different message to the less fortunate: success was money, and money was made with debt, tax games, paper shuffling, and arrogance. The people listened. And an insidious side effect of the chrome-plated Reagan boom may yet to be fully realized; the average American has been left with a whole new notion of how to succeed.”
“Debt, tax games, paper shuffling, and arrogance” – a formula that could lead to immense short-term profits but led to disaster in the long run, over and over. Yet we have accepted such behavior, when we haven’t embraced it ourselves, because, as Truman said, we have come to worship Mammon. We have come to believe, whether we admit it or not, that The Bottom Line is always preceded by a dollar sign.
Unless we somehow, individually and collectively, can once again refuse to “worship money instead of honor,” and reassert in our own lives and demand that our institutions abide by the values we claim to live by – honesty, fair treatment, kindness to the less fortunate, and financial prudence, to name a few – I think we will not see the like of people like Harry Truman and my father again. And that will be a shame.
Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson spoke in 1946 to the Harvard Club of the vital need for such people in a Republic: “For a long time we have gone along with some well-tested principles of conduct: That it was better to tell the truth than falsehoods; that a half-truth was no truth at all; that duties were older than and as fundamental as rights; that, as Justice Holmes put it, the mode by which the inevitable came to pass was effort; that to perpetuate a harm was always wrong, no matter how many joined in it but to perpetuate it on a weaker person was particularly detestable . . . . Our institutions are founded on the assumption that most people will follow these principles most of the time because they want to, and the institutions work pretty well when this assumption is true.”
For all the party animosity Harry Truman aroused in my dad, they both were men of character, who lived – of course imperfectly, since they were humans – by their understanding of right and wrong behavior, not by self-interest or greed. I wonder if our soil can still grow such crops.
