Harry Truman’s First Mother’s Day as President
Harry Truman was serving as vice president of the United States when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office on April 12, 1945, and Truman was sworn in as our 33rd president. He had only been vice president since January and had had very little interaction with President Roosevelt during those three months. World War II was not yet over in Europe, and it was still raging in the Pacific Ocean. Needless to say, his plate was full. He told reporters, ““I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
President Truman was a devoted family man with a close relationship with his wife, Bess, and only child, Margaret. Truman had lost his father in 1914, but his mother, Martha Ellen Young Truman, then 92 years old, remained a strong influence in his life. As president, Truman wrote to her often and not simply, “I am fine. How are you?” letters. He wrote to her about the important issues he was dealing with as president. After one major national event, Mama Truman — he never quit calling her Mama — had guests in her home. When the telephone rang, she answered it. When she got off the phone, she told her guests, “It was Harry. I knew he would call. He always calls after something big happens.”
Many big things were happening in those early days of his presidency in April of 1945. In the midst of major decision making, just five days after becoming president, he made his first Mother’s Day proclamation. It reads as follows:
WHEREAS it is fitting that we acknowledge anew our gratitude, love, and devotion to the mothers of America; and
WHEREAS in this year of the war’s greatest intensity we are ever mindful of their splendid courage and steadfast loyalty to the highest ideals of our democracy; and
WHEREAS Congress by joint resolution approved May 8, 1914, set aside the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and acclaimed the service rendered the United States by the American mother as “the greatest source of the country’s strength and inspiration”:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, HARRY S. TRUMAN, President of the United States of America, do hereby request the observance of Sunday, May 13, 1945, as Mother’s Day, and call upon the officials of the Government to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings, and the people of the Nation to display the flag at their homes or other suitable places, on that day. And I urge that by our prayers, by our devotion to duty, and by evidences of affection, we give expression to our love and reverence for America’s mothers.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed.
DONE at the City of Washington this 17th day of April in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and sixty-ninth.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
Now that he was president, Truman had to decide what he was going to do to honor his own 92-year-old mother on that Mother’s Day of 1945. He was committed to being with his mother that day. The only question was where. Harry’s sister, Mary Jane, wrote to him asking what they should do about that first Mother’s Day after he became president. Could he come home or should she and their mother come to Washington? He decided that they should come to Washington — and he sent a plane to bring them.
The busy president came to the airport in Washington on May 11, 1945, to welcome his mother (center) and his sister, Mary Jane. Photos courtesy of Library of Congress.
With war raging and a mountain of new responsibilities, Truman took the time to meet his mother personally at the airport. I am sure that Truman was thankful to be with her on his first Mother’s Day in office and thankful, too, to be able to write those letters and make those phone calls home. She passed away in the summer of 1947 after her son had served as president just over two years. He wisely made good use of the time.
Let your father and your mother be glad,
And let her rejoice who gave birth to you.
Proverbs 23:25