Up Against the Wall: Madcap Missouri Muralist

In the spring of 1957, two collegial men hatched a scheme. The Archivist of the United States and the Director of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, decided that it would be highly appropriate to commission Missouri native Thomas Hart Benton to paint a historical mural for the library’s lobby, filling all four walls. The plan would require the former president’s approval, of course, and he had met the feisty artist only twice, very briefly. When they were introduced on the first occasion, eight years earlier, Truman asked flat-out, “Are you still making those controversial pictures?” He had in mind, for example, Benton’s 1936 decision to include political boss Tom Prendergast in his grand mural for the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. The corrupt politician had provided Truman with his first patronage; it was not a propitious memory for the president. Therefore accomplishing the library objective required considerable finesse.

At the time, Benton was living in Kansas City and working at his studio on a mural of Jacques Cartier discovering the St. Lawrence River in 1534, a work commissioned by Robert Moses for New York’s first hydropower facility in Massena. Wayne Grover and David Lloyd persuaded Truman to visit Benton’s studio and have a look at his latest project. This later meeting of the artist and the president seemed like nothing so much as an encounter between two testy male dogs, suspiciously sniffing each other’s backsides to determine character and compatibility.

The president immediately encountered a life-sized vision of a Seneca Indian wearing only a loincloth, and he turned away in dismay. Lloyd and Grover quickly steered Truman to the second panel. Cartier had claimed the St. Lawrence for the French. Benton mentioned that he was having difficulty with one particular detail, the emblem on the French banner, “which he wanted to depict with historical accuracy,” according to art historian Justin Wolff. “The men discussed the problem for a few minutes, and Truman seemed to relax, stating, ‘I never knew that artists could be so careful about historical facts’” (pp. 298–99). The president would approve.

From the perspective of a realist, Benton was indeed particular. In preparation for Independence and the Opening of the West, he not only consulted books, as he always had, but made two trips west: the first to research costumes and weapons in libraries and museums, and the second in May 1959 to travel along the Santa Fe trail. By then the pair had bonded over the bourbon they both enjoyed, and Benton called Truman “a first class historian.”

Benton also perceived in the president a temperament similar to his own: opinionated, obstinate, and sometimes even fractious. “I sensed that he was very much used to making up his own mind, and I quickly discerned a quality of stubbornness there which I didn’t want to activate” (p. 299). Nevertheless, the artist determined to have the mural’s focus go his way. Truman had proposed that the subject be Jefferson and Jeffersonian democracy, which would provide “an important historical lesson, of interest to all Americans” (p. 300). Although he admired Jefferson, Benton found that gnarly topic too abstract to paint. As Wolff wisely observes, “he was more comfortable depicting actions than grand concepts, and a theme as theoretical as Jeffersonian democracy” seemed unmanageable (p. 300). Mind you, the artist had met and read Charles Beard during the 1920s and 1930s, but he had also read Frederick Jackson Turner. Benton eventually prevailed and persuaded Truman to go along with his frontier motif. They abided with that and became a mutual admiration society ever after.

If Benton was so enthusiastic about history, what influenced him and what did history eventually mean to him? Although he enjoyed reading history and biography as a youngster, a pivotal moment came while he was stationed at Norfolk at the end of World War I. In a parlor library, he found Jesse Ames Spencer’s History of the United...