Harry S Truman, 33rd President of the United States was born on this date in in 1888. 10 things you might not know about him:
The S in his name doesn’t actually stand for anything. His parents, John amd Martha, couldn’t decide on a middle name for their son. Solomon, after his mother’s father? Or Shipp, his paternal grandfather’s middle name? “S” was a compromise which honoured them both.
Truman only attended college for a short time and never graduated. After taking a variety of odd jobs and helping on the family farm, he joined the National Guard, even though his eyesight wasn’t up to standard. He failed the first time, but tried again, having secretly memorised the eye chart.
He proposed to Bess Wallace in 1911, but she turned him down. He got involved in a number of business ventures, including a Zinc mine and a haberdashery store, in an attempt to improve his income before he proposed again. He finally married Bess in 1919, after he returned from serving in France in the first world war.
Truman was elected a judge of the Jackson County Court (an administrative position) in 1922. He became a Senator in 1934. During World War II he headed the Senate war investigating committee, checking into waste and corruption and saving as much as 15 billion dollars.
It was this work which brought him to the attention of Franklin D Roosevelt's campaign committee. Roosevelt was going for a fourth term as President but there were fears that he wouldn’t live to see the end of it. Hence they wanted to choose a Vice-President who could take over if need be. Truman fit the bill.
They were right to be concerned as Roosevelt only lasted 82 days into his term before he died. Hence Truman was VP for less than three months before having to take the reins.
The second world war was raging at the time and Roosevelt hadn’t confided much to his VP about his plans for ending it. Truman once said that he felt as if "the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me" when he was thrust into the presidency. He wasn’t told anything about the atomic bomb until after he was sworn in, but it was he who had to make the decision to drop it Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While in office. Truman tried, but failed, to introduce a national health insurance system to the US. He wanted Americans to pay monthly fees that would go toward health care and cover costs if they fell ill. He would later say that this was one of the biggest defeats of his presidency. He did succeed, however, in almost doubling the minimum wage.
He narrowly escaped being assassinated on November 1, 1950 when two members of the Puerto Rican National Party, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, travelled to the house where Truman was staying with guns. A gun fight took place in which a guard and Torresola were killed. Collazo was shot but survived and later had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment by Truman.
A play about Truman’s life was staged in 2017, called Give 'Em Hell, Harry!, in Wilmington, North Carolina. The actor who played Truman was his grandson, Clifton Daniel. He’d listened to old recordings of his grandfather in order to get the vocal inflections right.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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