The Myth of Harry Truman

All Americans are familiar with our 33rd president, Harry Truman. An avuncular, hard-drinking law school graduate, Harry Truman rose through the ranks of the Army during World War I and later parlayed that experience into a successful Senate bid, and later the vice-Presidency, ultimately being elected President in 1948. But some stunning new research into the life of this most beloved of chief executives has revealed that the real Harry Truman likely died before his third birthday. Who the hell, then, is the real Harry Truman?

Madeleine Hindie, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri, Indepedence Campus, has been researching the biography of Harry Truman for her dissertation; what she has found is startling, to say the least. Harry Truman’s parents, John and Martha Truman, were Polish immigrants, coming to the US in 1881. John Truman changed the family name from Dziubanski in the hopes of fitting in with American culture – anti-immigrant sentiments were running high in Missouri at the time. He and his wife settled in to their new life and proceeded to start a family; they christened their first child, born in May 1884, Harold. Around the time of the birth of their second child, Vivian, in April 1886, Harold contracted diphtheria. Death records from the town of Lamar (where the family was living at the time) suggest that Harold Stanislaw Truman died on July 28th, 1885. Around the same time John’s brother, Pawel Dziubanski and his wife Sofia died during a famine in what was then the kingdom of Prussia. They left behind a son close to Harry’s age. John and Martha adopted the boy and raised him as their own son, Harry. It was this boy who went on to marry Elizabeth Wallace and have a successful legal and political career. So ultimately, President Harry Truman occupied that office illegally, although it is possible (and likely) that John and Martha kept the truth of his birth from him.