This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations

He was born into an America with no automobiles, and lived to the age of 88 to see an America dominated by automobiles, due in part to his work. Harry S. Truman is the one U.S. President whose lifetime encompassed the invention and rise of the automobile, as well as its pervasive transformation of American life, including his own. Born in 1884 when Henry Ford was still a teenager, Truman died in 1972, the very year that construction of the first 41,000 miles of the Interstate Highway system was to have been completed, according to its original enabling legislation. (As it turns out, 34,393 miles were completed by 1972, which was in range with the first planned 37,681 miles that had first been designated in 1947, when Truman was President.)

President Harry Truman

While the most famous snapshots linking Truman to transportation are the scenes of him speaking from the rear platform of a train, both his personal and political life were dominated by the car. He was the first U.S. president of whom it could be said, “He was an avid motorist his whole life.”  We can anoint him the first President of  Motordom.  

As a young man in Missouri in the early 20th century, Truman matured as automobile technology did. He had one brief turn at railroad employment, working briefly as a clerk for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway immediately after graduating from high school, but like other Americans, his transportation orientation inexorably shifted to these new-fangled automobiles. His early political career focused on transforming public infrastructure to accommodate the private car.  

After a period of running his grandparents’ farm, serving in the Army during World War I, and then opening a haberdashery store in downtown Kansas City that went bankrupt, he turned to politics – and cars figured prominently in his campaign. He first ran for office in 1922, to become Jackson County Judge, on a platform of expanding the roads. (Despite the title, a “judge” in that time and place was more of an executive function than a judicial one.  Jackson County contains Kansas City and its environs.) His first term of two years in public office was devoted to turning gravel and dirt lanes into paved roads. Politically and personally, he became a member of the American Roadbuilders’ Association, an affiliation he would maintain for years. 

When he barely lost his Jackson County reelection bid in 1924 – the only election he would ever lose – he went into the automobile industry as a full-time profession, as a Sales Representative for the Kansas City Automobile Club. As he marketed memberships to motorists, Truman also became active in the National Old Trails Roads Association (NAOTRA), a national group founded in 1912 to lobby for federal support for highways that paralleled pre-industrial routes like the Santa Fe Trail and the 19th century National Road.

Truman’s campaign poster. Source: Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

Truman became President of the NAOTRA in 1926, a post that figuratively and literally put him on the road, coast-to-coast, campaigning for federal designations that would make state roads better connected to adjoining states and eligible for more federal money. Much of the corridor built as the National Road for wagons and horses in the 1820s and 1830s became U.S. Highway 40, and the fabled Santa Fe Trail of the pioneers was transformed into the just as fabled U.S. Highway 66 (“get your kicks on route 66”) for motorists.

Official Map of the National Old Trails Association connecting (west to east): Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Jefferson City, Indianapolis, Columbus, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York.

In addition to his success at drawing more federal funding to roads and inducing different states to better connect their own highways to the highways in adjoining states, Truman spearheaded an effort to commission roadside statuary. (No, not the concrete “tee-pees” along route 66 – those would be built by later generations.) He partnered with the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) to site identical “Madonna of the Trail” statues in the 12 states of the original National Road, dedicated to the “pioneer mothers of covered wagon days.” Each statue was 18 feet tall, featuring a pioneer mother. The DAR described her as, “The ‘Madonna of the Trail’ is a pioneer clad in homespun, clasping her babe to her breast, with her young son clinging to her skirts. The face of the mother, strong in character, beauty, and gentleness, is the face of a mother who realizes her responsibilities and trusts in God.” 

Truman held abiding sentiment for these statues for the rest of his life. In 1941, as a U.S. Senator, he declared, “I am just as interested in the Old National Trails as I ever was.” As President during the 1948 campaign, he made a point of visiting the statues in Albuquerque (New Mexico), Dodge City (Kansas), and Richmond (Indiana), regaling the crowds with stories about what the statues still stood for. Even after leaving the Presidency, on July 7, 1953, he returned to Richmond to be photographed with local dignitaries near their Madonna of the Trail.

Madonna of the Trail Statue in Lexington, Missouri, dedicated by Truman in 1928.

Another of the statues still stands near its original location in Bethesda, Maryland. If he returned today, Truman would immediately recognize the statue which he personally dedicated on April 19, 1929, but not its surroundings, which include the entrance to the Bethesda Metro subway station and the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Truman mounted a successful campaign in 1926 to return to public service as Jackson County Presiding Judge. The Truman Library and Museum still lists his top accomplishment in office as “supervising county road construction.” His eight years of improving roads and other popular services in local government was a good platform for his election to the U.S. Senate in 1934, the first midterm of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Truman went to Washington D.C. as a New Dealer, with a particular interest in public works. He was not merely pro-roads – he was also in favor of a strong federal role in coordinating and standardizing roads, which many politicians considered purely a local and state matter. Truman’s interest in interstate car travel, and connecting highways in one state to its neighbor states, had a personal dimension as well, since he and his wife Bess often drove between his home in Independence and Washington D.C.

Senator Truman devoted political capital to road safety and standards, introducing several bills that would have required state governments to be more rigorous about driver licensing requirements. He advocated that states should require applicants to take a safety test, arguing that by “means of this simple instrument, we believe that the needless slaughter of American citizens can be greatly reduced and that the highways of our nation can be made safer.” He noted ruefully that even in his home state of Missouri, anyone could obtain a driver’s license by paying 25 cents for a simple paper card at a general store. None of Truman’s licensing bills passed, due to opposition based on “states’ rights.”

President Roosevelt surprised the nation in 1944 by choosing Senator Truman as his new Vice Presidential nominee.

The President, Vice-President Elect Truman, and outgoing Vice President Henry Wallace are shown, after they were elected that November (Photo source: Abbie Rowe, Truman Library.)

In April 1945, Vice President Truman ascended to the presidency upon Roosevelt’s death. The transportation element of that transition is detailed in Robert Klara’s book, FDR’s Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance (MacMillan, 2011), which describes the funeral train trip to Hyde Park, New York, with Truman in one train compartment, huddled with speechwriters drafting his unexpected speech to the nation, while FDR’s coffin occupies the salon in the Presidential car at the rear of the train.

As President, Truman carried on his predecessor’s work in bringing World War II to a close and propelling the New Deal further at home. In addition to the support for infrastructure, Truman brought his longtime interest in traffic safety to his new bully pulpit. On May 8-10, 1946, he convened the first President’s Conference on Traffic Safety. He spoke to delegates from across the nation, reviving a bugaboo that he had fixated on in the Senate: his conviction that driver’s licenses should require the applicant to be tested. In the colorful language the nation was becoming accustomed to hearing from their new President, he proclaimed, “It is perfectly absurd that a man or a woman or a child, can go to a place and buy an automobile and get behind the wheel – whether he has ever been there before makes no difference, or if he is insane, or he is a “nut,” or a moron doesn’t make a particle of difference – all he has to do is just pay the price and get behind the wheel and go out on the street and kill somebody.”

He tried to pre-empt the sentiment that had killed his proposed legislation, state’s rights. (A theme also being used to stop the minor advances on civil rights for Black people that Truman and others were starting to talk about.) The state governments, he complained, “have been standing idly by for the last 25 years, and I think they will continue to stand idly by, unless you do something to force the control of this terrible weapon which goes up and down our roads and streets all this time.” Truman would continue to harp on traffic safety for the remainder of his time as president, as the fatalities soared. At his final President’s Conference on Traffic Safety in 1952, his last full year in office, he decried the escalating trend, with 36,088 traffic fatalities per year in a nation of 157 million people.

Truman’s personal and political devotion to motordom nothwithstanding, his most famous association with transportation in the public mind involves trains. Declining in popularity as he completed Roosevelt’s term, Truman was not favored to win a full term of his own in the election of 1948. Trailing in the polls, he decided he needed to do something dramatic to get closer to the people: he decided to take train trips. Truman’s epic “whistlestop tours” of the country, and the political comeback it powered, are one of the greatest political stories of the twentieth century, indelibly linking the man from Missouri with the railroad train in the public mind. A whole book was written about it, fascinating to rail enthusiasts and political junkies alike — Phil White’s “Whistlestop: How 31,000 Miles of Train Travel, 352 Speeches, and a Little Midwest Gumption Saved the Presidency of Harry Truman.”

President Truman on the rear platform of his presidential train in 1948. Source: National Archives and Records Administration.

In 31,000 miles over three major journeys, Truman made 352 speeches in small towns and large cities and obscure trackside villages, often addressing his fellow citizens from the rear platform of the Presidential car, the Ferdinand Magellan. He spent days at a time on board, with periodic layovers at hotels for more extensive visits to larger cities. Cumulatively, he devoted a month’s worth of time to the tours, with a fifteen day transcontinental odyssey to the west coast, a six day trip all over the Midwest, and a ten day trip to the northeast.

Presidential dining room in the Ferdinand Magellan Presidential Railcar at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Soon after his upset victory, the most famous picture of Truman was taken with him holding the Chicago Tribune’s erroneous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” The real winner was standing on the rear platform of his train car when the picture was snapped.

Truman, standing on a train car platform in St. Louis, holding an early edition of the November 3, 1948 Tribune.

Several months after leaving the White House and retiring to their modest home in Independence, Missouri, private citizens Harry and Bess Truman embarked on another trip. Restless at home after decades of public service, in July 1953 Truman had a hankering to re-visit the east coast. He and Mrs. Truman did what Americans were doing in greater and greater numbers: tossed their bags in their car, pulled out of the driveway, and hit the open road. No staff or security accompanied them – a former President was not entitled to any staff, security or office space at that time.  

The journey in their Chrysler New Yorker in 1953, a private trip with a loose schedule, not intended to draw crowds, was in some senses the opposite of the great rail journey of five summers earlier. Yet when a recent ex-President and First Lady spontaneously materialized in random gas stations, diners and roadside motels, they inevitably drew attention. As vividly described in Matthew Algeo’s delightful book, Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, on the first days of the trip, the Trumans unobtrusively walked into a restaurant, seated themselves, and were perusing the menu oblivious to the other customers and waitresses whispering to each other about how much that older couple resembled the former President and First Lady. At the end of one day, they pulled into the Parkview Motel along Route 36 in Decatur, Illinois, inquired about a room (the price was $5) and simply filled out the registration card as if the proprietor did not know who they were.  

On July 5, 1953, Pennsylvania State Trooper Manley Stampler was working his regular shift along the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Bedford, and noticed a sedan with Missouri plates driving at 50-55 miles per hour in the left lane, a slow speed more suitable for the right lane. Private Stampler pulled the car over and approached the vehicle, and was flabbergasted to recognize the driver’s smiling face. The trooper did his duty, in that innocent era before the Supreme Court immunized ex-Presidents for their crimes. “I told him what he had done wrong, and he said he hadn’t realized it. I told him how dangerous the turnpike is …. and would he be more careful.” With that verbal warning, the trooper let the motorist proceed on his way. Back at the barracks at the end of his shift, he reported to his supervisor, “You’ll never guess who I pulled over today.” 

Whether “giving ‘em hell” from the rear of his campaign train or tooling down the U.S. Highway with Bess at his side, Harry Truman was a transportation man of his times.

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David Bragdon is a lifelong transportation maven, who has been an agent for Panamax grain ships on the lower Columbia River, president of an elected regional government and Metropolitan Planning Organization, executive director of TransitCenter (an applied research and advocacy foundation), and a taxi driver. His transportation pursuits have included jump-seating 747 freighters into the Soviet Far East, taking passage on a Dutch containership through the Strait of Malacca, and riding in the locomotive of a freight train from Council Bluffs to Des Moines. He currently lives 200 meters from the banks of the Hudson River and is the author of another wonderful article in our presidential series: Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885): Muttonchops and Mobility.