News 8 Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Orange County Register
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PHOTOILLUSTRATION
INITIAL CONFUSION
By JOHN KELLY
THE WASHINGTON POST
———————
WASHINGTON ∙ There is only one thing a
journalist likes more than being able to
prove he was correct after being accused
of making an error. (That one thing? A
back rub.)
I bring this up because of the many
readers who gleefully told me I was
wrong to render the name of our 33rd
president thusly: Harry S. Truman.
“Aha!” these readers more or less
said. “Truman didn’t have a middle
name, and so the S doesn’t stand for
anything and so it doesn’t take a period.
It should be ‘Harry S Truman.’ You are
wrong, wrong, wrong!”
My back tenses at such communications. I don’t like to be wrong. So I again
consulted The Washington Post Stylebook to make sure I had not erred. “Use
the period,” the stylistic oracle
pronounced. “Truman used it.”
But let us consult a higher authority:
the folks at the Harry S. Truman
Presidential Library and Museum in
Independence, Mo.
“Oh, my heavens,” said Tammy
Williams, an archivist. “Every five to six
months, almost like clockwork, someone
comments on it.”
So many people tell the Harry S.
Truman Library and Museum to lose
the period that it has devoted a page on
its website to explaining why the period
belongs.
“We have examples of Truman’s
handwriting when he was a little kid,
where he’s written on the side of
textbooks Harry S period Truman,”
Williams said. “It’s very emphatic. We
have medical records where it’s Harry S
period. We have copies he signed when
he was president with the period.”
To be honest, the library/museum has
examples of Truman’s signature
without the period, too. “Sometimes it’s
hard to tell,” Williams said. “He would
squirm his signature into one stroke
without lifting the pen.”
Williams said there is even a period
after the S on Truman’s gravestone.
What about his birth certificate? They
didn’t have them in rural Missouri in
the 1880s.
Why the confusion? It isn’t exactly
true that the S doesn’t stand for
anything. It actually stands for two
things. In 1959, six years after leaving
the White House, Truman visited
Washington, D.C. During the trip, he
explained to reporters that his family
couldn’t decide whether his middle name
should honor his maternal grandfather,
Solomon Young, or his paternal grandfather, Anderson Shippe Truman. The Post
wrote: “The matter was settled by using
only the initial ‘S,’ intended to stand for
either or both. The style the former
president follows is ‘S.’ – with a full stop
SEE? HE DID..
Th T
The
Truman Lib
Library
and Museum says on
its website:
“Mr. Truman apparently initiated the
‘period’ controversy in
1962 when, perhaps in
jest, he told newspapermen that the period
should be omitted ... He
was later heard to say
that the use of the
period dated after 1962
as well as before.”
“Whil as many
“While,
people do, Mr. Truman
often ran the letters in
his signature together
in a single stroke, the
archives of the Harry
S. Truman Library
have numerous
examples of the
signature written at
various times throughout Mr. Truman’s
lifetime where his use
of a period after the
‘S’ is very obvious.”
The library itself uses
a period...
...as did the publisher of Truman’s
memoirs in 1955 and 1956.
Presumably, Truman could have
said something if he objected.
. .BUT NOT EVERYONE ELSE DOES
The main building for the State Department in Washington, D.C., was named
after President Truman in 2000. The sign out front omits the period.
WHY IT
MATTERS
If you’re a Truman family
member, a sign designer
who got it wrong or a
member of the Grammar
Police, then it matters
quite a bit. To the rest of
us, however: Not so
much.
However, it’s fun to
know.
PHOTO OF THE STATE
DEPARTMENT BY JOHN
KELLY, WASHINGTON
POST. ALL OTHERS:
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
or period – on the theory that the period
could be dispensed with, properly, only if
the ‘S’ did not represent abbreviation.”
Not everyone agrees with the Truman
library. Take the Harry S Truman
Birthplace State Historic Site, for
example. The people who staff the small
frame house in Lamar, Mo., where the
future president was born are adamant
that there is no period.
And then there is the State
Department’s main building, named
after Truman in 2000. Throughout the
Foreign Affairs Manual, the document
that governs the State Department, the
Foggy Bottom building is referred to as
the Harry S Truman Building (in
contrast with the National Foreign
Affairs Training Center in Arlington,
Va., which in 2002 was named the
George P. Shultz National Foreign
Affairs Training Center).
That is the thin reed upon which
critics rest their argument. Of course, I
must defer to The Post Stylebook – and
to the Truman library. “We’re patient
with everyone who thinks they’re the
first person to tell us there shouldn’t be
a period after the initial,” said Williams,
the archivist.
Of course, we haven’t even touched on
the issue that really got Truman’s goat:
He didn’t think he should be referred to
as the 33rd president. He even wrote a
letter to the publisher of Who’s Who
arguing he should be called the 32nd.
Why? Truman didn’t consider Grover
Cleveland both the 22nd and 24th
president because Benjamin Harrison
was between Cleveland’s two terms.
“He could get riled up about that one,”
Williams said.