Truman, Harry S.

48 leaves (5 x 3 in.; 127 x 76 mm), written in pen and pencil, [Kansas City, Missouri, ca. 20 November 1924–29 January 1925], the leaves on a removable pad of no. 2 memorandum paper, inserted in a limp mottled brown leather binder, the front cover gilt with the logo of the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Co. and gilt-lettered “things to do today” and harry s. truman, the front pastedown stamped with the name of Phoenix Mutual special representative Edwin H. Green. Maroon buckram folding case.

Nathaniel E. Stein (Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, January 30, 1979, lot 166)

An important relic from the period of Truman’s first elected office—the humble beginning of a political career that would lead to the White House.

In November 1922, Harry Truman was elected to a two-year term as Judge of County Court, Jackson County, Missouri. Truman was elected with two other judges, Elihu Hayes and Henry McElroy. Truman later claimed that the three men “ran the county, but we ran it carefully and on an economic basis,” and his biographer, David McCullough, wrote that “in truth the new court stood in striking contrast with what had gone on before. … Under McElroy and Truman a county debt of more than a million dollars was cut in half. The county’s credit rating improved. So did county services and … the quality of work on the roads.”

Although Truman’s was an administrative, not a judicial, position, he still recognized that his lack of a legal education could impede his political advance. In 1923 he began attending night classes at the Kansas City School of Law, studying contracts, criminal law, and Blackstone, and as part of his method of study he took extensive note. The present notebook is filled with lecture notes, references to legal cases, and occasional notes to himself: “Inquiry is the wrong subject or tort which causes loss or harm actual on compensation damages are those which are given for the actual loss. … Direct damages result from the wrong without any intermediate or controlling factor. Excessive damages are those which are greater than the law allow. Exemplary, punitive, or vindictive are in the way of punishment” (pp. 29–31); “analize the cases for next lecture under that section 4th Year of James I Common law of England is the law of Mo. Pleading is a branch of the law procedure in which wrongs are redressed. Code pleading—a logical sylogism Law is a major premise Facts—minor premise” (p. 41); “Section I must be learned in detail and as a whole Page 32 Back part Sec I learn by heart” (p. 54); “Replevin a proceeding between landlord and tenant by his tenants goods. The tenant went to the sheriff and got his goods without an original writ and it was taken to a higher court on a writ of certiorori” (p. 62).

Truman was defeated for reelection in 1924 and began to direct his energy in new avenues. He was a salesman for the Kansas City Automobile Club, president of the National Old Trails Association, and an active Mason and Army reservist. Law school became less important to Truman as he began to map his future. He dropped out of the Kansas City School of Law after two years of classes, but his career suffered no ill effect. The year after leaving law school, he was elected the presiding judge of the Jackson County Court, a position he held until 1934, when he was elected to the United States Senate.

According to American Book Prices Current, apart from a few checks, no earlier example of Truman’s holograph has appeared at auction since the present notebook was sold in 1979.