Mark fews brother10/29/2023 ![]() Truman was on his way to Wake Island to meet with Gen. Truman's next encounter with the Marx Brothers-with Harpo this time-came late in the night of October 12, 1950. He must have been pleased to see that the President had apparently taken a personal interest in his letter and had added a postscript in his own hand: "Please regard Sen. Groucho must have been at least partly satisfied with Truman's response as he told Truman later, he voted for him in 1948. There is no place for people to go now unless we can arrange it." "Your ancestors and mine," Truman concluded, "came to this country to escape just such conditions. "I sincerely wish that every member of the Congress could visit the displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria," Truman wrote, "and see just what is happening to Five Hundred Thousand human beings through no fault of their own." Truman thought if the members of Congress did witness the misery of the displaced persons, they might help him bring some of these people to the United States and find other homes for them. Truman responded by sending Groucho a copy of a letter he had recently sent to Senator Walter George of Georgia. "I am sure that you are deluged with mail of this sort," he wrote, "but even a president at times can be confused." He added a PS: "Despite all this I propose voting for you in 1948." "In God's name" the editorial concluded, "can we go on doing nothing about these DPs?" Groucho asked Truman to consider the article. On October 8, 1946, Groucho Marx sent Truman a clipping of a Life magazine editorial, "Send Them Here! Europe's Refugees Need a Place to Go and America Needs to Set a World Example." The article claimed that Truman's attempt to help displaced persons to immigrate to the United States had failed. Among the many Americans who were concerned about the displaced persons and were following Truman's actions with regard to them was a former vaudevillian whom Truman certainly remembered. He had great sympathy with the displaced persons, and he issued a directive in late 1945 intended to allow some of them to immigrate to the United States. When Truman became President in the spring of 1945, one of the first problems that came to him was what to do about the survivors of the Holocaust who were living in displaced persons camps in Europe. He remembered many years later, when vaudeville was long gone and he was an old man, that he almost never missed a chance to see the Marx Brothers when they were in town. ![]() Truman probably came in from the Grandview farm as often as he could to see them. The Marx Brothers started coming to Kansas City shortly after they moved to Chicago from New York in about 1910. After he started courting Bess Wallace in 1910, he took her to the vaudeville shows. ![]() "Between the time I was about 16 to 20," Truman said when he was President, "I used to go to every vaudeville show that came to Kansas City at the old Orpheum, and at the Grand." 1 He even ushered for a time at the Orpheum so he could get into the show for free. ![]() That meant that he went often to the Orpheum Theatre and the Grand Opera House in Kansas City. He loved almost every kind of live theater, but his favorite was vaudeville. From the time he was a young man in his teens, Truman loved vaudeville. Harry Truman's association with the Marx Brothers began at some unrecorded time fairly early in Truman's life. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, reveal. But it was not all jokes and laughs-by either the brothers or the thirty-third President-as correspondence in the files of the Harry S. Truman's improbable relationship with the zany Marx Brothers of vaudeville and movie fame began as a young man in Kansas City and extended into Truman's tenure in the White House and afterward. Harpo Marx and President Truman chat at Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, late in the night of October 12, 1950.
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