“I wanted to tell you,” Truman said, “that I agree with you.”
Then, according to the story, Truman asked how the presentation of Ike’s name could be prevented, and Royall, assuring Truman that the general, too, had the same objective, agreed to see what he could do. “In a telephone conference with Ike,” wrote Arthur Krock, “Royall worked out the statement that Eisenhower sent to Pepper and others that put an end to the effort to present his name.”
On Friday, July 9, Eisenhower again said no, his refusal this time “final and complete,” and “no matter under what terms.” On reading the Eisenhower telegram, Boss Hague reportedly crunched out his cigar, saying, “Truman, Harry Truman. Oh my God!”
Claude Pepper, refusing to give up, declared it “no time for politics as usual” and announced he would run himself. His candidacy lasted a day.
Clark Clifford slipped in and out of Philadelphia to pass the word that the President had telephoned William O. Douglas, who was on vacation in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Douglas was Truman’s choice for Vice President. He would give the ticket geographical balance. He was youthful, strong on civil rights, a solid New Dealer. Douglas only wanted time to consider.
Clifford was in the thick of things as usual, but more out of devotion to Truman than any high expectations. “None of us,” he later admitted, “really felt at the time that the nomination meant very much. Our aim was just to get the President nominated. Because it would have been an unconscionable reflection on him, if after four years, the party had turned him down and gone to somebody else.”
Though the Eisenhower boom had passed, it had been a measure of how intensely fearful Democrats had become of a debacle in November. It was not just that Harry Truman would fail to be reelected, but that he would pull everyone down with him. After sixteen years with the all-time winner, FDR, as their standardbearer, they now faced the prospect of a certain loser. And if there was anyone left banking on a revival of party spirit, once everybody was gathered in Philadelphia, the illusion was quickly disabused. The newly arrived delegates who wandered through the city’s empty Sabbath streets on July 10, the day before the opening gavel, looked, it was reported, like nothing so much as mourners at a funeral.
“We got the wrong rigs for this convention,” a cab driver was quoted. “They shoulda given us hearses.”
Attendance was below expectations. Hotels that had been booked solid, their lobbies a continuous hubbub during the Republican Convention just weeks before, were receiving cancelations. Bunting and flags left over from the Republican affair looked pathetically shopworn.
“You could cut the gloom with a corn knife,” remembered Alben Barkley. “The very air smelled of defeat.”
The crowd expected for the opening day at Convention Hall failed to materialize. The galleries were largely empty. Delegates down on the floor milled about during the speeches, or shifted restlessly in their seats, fanning themselves furiously in the almost unbearable heat, for though the auditorium had been refurbished at great expense for this and the Republican Convention, there was no air conditioning and the big television lights, in combination with Philadelphia’s oppressive summer weather, had made the place a steambath. The temperature at the rostrum was 93 degrees.
It was the presence and paraphernalia of television, the lights, cables, wires, microphones, amplifiers, cameras, the swarms of technicians, and the theatrics involved, that gave the event what novelty and interest it had. For many who attended, television would be the best-remembered part of the 1948 Democratic Convention.
Everything possible had been done to make the “political show” come off, and like their Republican counterparts, one Democrat after another now submitted to pancake makeup and eye shadow before going to the rostrum or in preparation for a “candid” off-the-floor interview. Several women addressed the convention wearing brown lipstick, because they were told it would look better on the black-and-white home screens. Reporters in the press gallery wore dark glasses in order to work in the fierce glare of the lights.
At the White House, arrangements had been made for Truman to watch as much or as little of the proceedings as he wished. A new console type DuMont television set with a 12-inch screen had been brought into his office and positioned against the wall to his left. So, in somewhat fuzzy black-and-white images, he would follow the proceedings right from his chair, like no President ever before. When television cameras were set up in the press room for the first time on the afternoon of the 12th, for an NBC broadcast of a half-hour discussion with several White House correspondents, Truman and his staff gathered about the new set to watch.
William O. Douglas had by now decided to refuse second place on the ticket, for the reason, he told Truman, that he wished to remain on the Supreme Court. Truman was deeply hurt. “I stuck my neck all the way out for Douglas and he cut the limb out from under me,” he remarked to his staff. Reportedly Douglas had told others he did not want to be number two man to a number two man.
From the podium at Philadelphia that night, in a rousing keynote address, Alben Barkley brought the convention to life for the first time. The band played “My Old Kentucky Home.” Delegates cheered and stomped. It was a speech made for the occasion, as the old warhorse politician, an orator of the old school and a sentimental, favorite Democrat who had been born in a log cabin, evoked the past glories of the New Deal and heaped unmerciful scorn on the opposition. And it was a speech, not incidentally, made for television. Truman, watching at the White House, was nearly as pleased as the crowd at Convention Hall.
Dewey, in his acceptance speech, had vowed to clean the cobwebs from Washington. Barkley, with perspiration pouring from his brow and nose, declared he was not an expert on cobwebs. “But if memory does not betray me, when the Democratic Party took over the government sixteen years ago, even the spiders were so weak from starvation that they could not weave a cobweb in any department of the government in Washington.”
For the first time it seemed a real convention. Barkley was a hero and a favorite for second place on the ticket. There was even talk of Barkley for President.
Yet Barkley had never said a word about victory in November and mentioned Truman only once in a speech lasting more than an hour. Truman, as much as he had enjoyed the performance, commented that Barkley had all the markings of a man trying for the presidency.
Howard McGrath called from Philadelphia to find out if the President had seen the speech and to say it had put Barkley “out in front” for the nomination for Vice President. If Barkley was what the convention wanted, Truman said, then Barkley was his choice, too.
He tried to reach Barkley by phone that night, but Barkley had gone to bed.
Until now Truman had felt he needed someone like Douglas, a strong liberal, to run with him, and preferably someone younger than he. Barkley was neither. At seventy-one, he was seven years older than Truman, and coming from Kentucky, he would bring no geographical balance to the ticket. The contrast with the Republican ticket could be damaging.
But by phone the next morning Truman asked Barkley why he had never told him he wanted to be Vice President.
“I didn’t know you wanted the nomination,” Truman said.
“Mr. President, you do not know it yet,” Barkley answered.
“Well, if I had known you wanted it, I certainly would have been agreeable,” Truman said, which though hardly a ringing confirmation was sufficient for both to consider the decision settled, and almost immediately afterward in Philadelphia, McGrath told reporters that if the convention saw fit to nominate Senator Barkley for Vice President, the President would be “most happy.” (Barkley, who had been available as a vice-presidential choice at every convention since 1928, told friends that if the nomination were to be his, he wanted it quickly. “I don’t want it passed around so long it is like cold biscuit.”)
As it was, Truman showed more distress over the Douglas refusal than enthusiasm over Barkley. To his staff, he seemed oddly, almost irrespo
nsibly disinterested in the whole matter. He, if anyone, should have appreciated the potential importance of the decision. Yet there was no sign of thoughtful deliberation on his part. “Talking about the vice-presidency,” wrote Eben Ayers, “the President said he never did care much who was nominated with him.”
Excitement over Barkley was quickly eclipsed as a floor fight broke out over civil rights.
“A Negro alternate from St. Louis makes a minority report suggesting the unseating of the Mississippi delegation,” Truman recorded, as he watched the drama unfold on the tiny black-and-white screen. “Vaughan is his name. He’s overruled. Then Congressman Dawson of Chicago, another Negro, makes an excellent talk on civil rights. These two colored men are the only speakers to date who seem to be for me wholeheartedly.”
The following day, Wednesday, July 14, the day scheduled for Truman’s nomination and acceptance speech, the uproar over civil rights turned angry, as a vehement ADA faction headed by Mayor Hubert Humphrey demanded a stronger civil rights plank in the party platform. The existing plank was substantially what it had been in the 1944 platform—mild and ambiguous enough to mollify the southern delegations—and the wording had been agreed to at the White House, Truman and his advisers having decided now was no time to alienate the southerners. Humphrey was warned he would split the party and ruin his own career if he persisted.
But Humphrey and his forces held out for a plank that would emphatically endorse Truman’s own civil rights program, item by item—anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, fair employment laws, an end to segregation in the armed services. In bitter, heated sessions of the platform committee on the top floor of the Bellevue-Stratford, Humphrey charged that the administration plank was a “sellout” to states’ rights over human rights. When the committee approved the moderate plank, the Humphrey forces took the fight to the convention floor. “We were inherently stronger than Truman’s followers had believed,” remembered one of them, Paul Douglas, a candidate for the Senate in Illinois.
As the majority report of the platform committee was being read before the convention and Humphrey sat near the rostrum waiting his turn to speak, Boss Ed Flynn beckoned Humphrey to show him the minority report, and having looked it over, Flynn said, “Young man, that’s just what this party needs.”
Unlike Jake Arvey and Frank Hague, Flynn had thought the whole Eisenhower idea silly, and that those who imagined otherwise were hacks and amateurs, blind to his own favorite political maxim: “Never confuse wishes with facts.” There was no question that Harry Truman would be nominated, Flynn had been saying, and he wanted to see Harry Truman win.
Humphrey stepped to the podium, his face shining, the audience suddenly hushed. He spoke less than ten minutes and he made history. It was time for the Democratic Party to move forward. “There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years late…. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
As the convention roared its approval, the California and Illinois delegations marched into the aisles. Others followed, joined by a forty-piece band led by James C. Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, while here and there glum, silent southern delegations kept their seats. At the podium Sam Rayburn of Texas, permanent chairman of the convention, looked down disapprovingly, fearing a southern “walkout” would destroy whatever slim chance Truman might have in November and devastate the party, possibly forever. Rayburn tried to stall a vote, but when it came the Humphrey forces won a resounding victory.
Told the Alabama delegation intended to lead a walkout that night, on the final roll call, Rayburn ordered a voice vote instead and the convention again thundered its approval.
At the White House, angered by the turn events were taking, Truman spoke of Humphrey and his followers as “crackpots” who hoped the South would bolt. But the fact was the convention that seemed so pathetically bogged down in its own gloom had now, suddenly, dramatically, pushed through the first unequivocal civil rights plank in the party’s history; and whether Truman and his people appreciated it or not, Hubert Humphrey had done more to reelect Truman than would anyone at the convention other than Truman himself.
There were television cameras at Union Station for the President’s departure that evening and there would be more cameras at the Philadelphia station when he arrived. “No privacy sure enough now,” he wrote, though he remained calm and composed. He had a surprise for the convention and he knew what the effect would be. On their home screens, those still relatively few Americans who owned television sets in 1948 saw him sitting quietly at the window of his private railroad car waiting to leave the station.
The First Lady, Margaret, Charlie Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Ayers, Connelly, and Sam Rosenman were’on board with him, and had dinner en route, while Truman kept to himself in his room going over his notes. It was by radio, approximately halfway to Philadelphia, that he heard the Alabama delegation and part of the Mississippi delegation stage their walkout. “Hard to hear,” he noted. “My daughter and my staff try to keep me from listening. Think maybe I’ll be upset. I won’t be.”
At Philadelphia, where a fine rain was falling, he stepped from the train at 9:15, looking relaxed and spotless in a white linen suit. From the station he was driven directly to the convention hall, now packed to capacity, the crowd noisy and full of anticipation—and suffering intensely from the heat, suit jackets long since discarded, ties and collars undone, shirts stained dark with perspiration.
The seconding speeches had begun and as they dragged on, Truman was kept out of sight, first in McGrath’s so-called “office,” a stifling room with no windows, then in the somewhat cooler air on an outdoor ramp near the stage entrance, overlooking an alley and the railroad tracks. He was joined by Alben Barkley and together they sat chatting side by side hour after hour, Truman in a straight-backed wooden chair, Barkley in a more accommodating red leather armchair that someone had borrowed from the speaker’s platform.
To many who had attended other national conventions over the years, this one was as bungled, as badly managed as any in memory—Newsweek called it the worst-managed, most dispirited convention in American political annals—and the idea that a President of the United States had to wait his turn as Truman did, under such conditions, seemed the final straw. The scene would be portrayed in some accounts as one of the extreme low points of Truman’s career. However, neither Truman nor Barkley saw it that way. Barkley would remember having “a very agreeable visit,” during which they talked about “many things: politics, trivia, how to bring up daughters….” To Truman, too, it was “an interesting and instructive evening,” as he recorded in his diary. Tom Evans, remembering the “hot, horrible night,” would describe Truman sitting calmly in his white suit, “and I give you my word of honor, there wasn’t a wrinkle in it—he was cool…collected…it didn’t seem to bother him at all.”
To be a professional in politics required patience, often great patience, and the strength not to take things too personally, and Truman and Barkley were two veteran professional politicians.
“They did what you do under such circumstances,” recalled George Elsey. “They waited.”
Nearly four hours went by, as the seconding speeches were followed by the balloting for President. At 12:42 Truman was finally nominated, receiving 948 votes, while 263 votes went to Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the last-minute candidate of the South. Then, by acclamation, Barkley was nominated for Vice President.
So it was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Truman and Barkley at last made their entrance, striding onto the platform as the band played “Hail to the Chief.”
Considering the time, the fatigue of the crowd, it was a scene made for failure. Any radio or television audience that Truman might have hoped for was long since asleep. To make matters a little worse, the sister of a former P
ennsylvania senator suddenly released a flock of white pigeons—“doves of peace” supposedly—from a floral Liberty Bell, where they had been held all night, cooped up in the heat. The distraught birds careened desperately into the air every which way, smashing into the balcony, the lights, bombarding spectators, and swooping so low over the rostrum that Chairman Rayburn had to fend off several at once, to the delight of the crowd as well as Truman and Barkley who were laughing uproariously. (Years later Truman would describe how one pigeon had actually landed on Rayburn’s bald head, a claim that Rayburn, who saw nothing funny in the situation, stoutly denied, telling an interviewer, “Harry Truman’s a goddamn liar. No pigeon ever lit on my head.”)
Barkley spoke first, and briefly. Then came Truman’s turn.
He advanced to the microphones, his natty white suit gleaming now in the full glare of the lights. And despite the hour, the heat, the discomfort and weariness of his audience, he did what no one would have thought possible. Wasting no time with pleasantries or grand phrases, his head up as he spoke without a script, his voice strong, hands chopping the air, he brought the convention immediately to its feet cheering.
“Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that.” Not until this moment had anyone used the word “win” as though he meant it.
The Democratic Party would win in November because the Democratic Party was the people’s party. The Republicans were the party of the privileged few, as always.
For the first time since 1945 he was speaking not as a leader by accident, by inheritance, but by the choice of his party. He was neither humble nor elegant nor lofty. The contrast with Dewey’s stilted acceptance speech from the same platform could not have been greater. In manner as well as content he was drawing the line so there could be no mistaking one candidate for the other. Mere victory was not the purpose, Dewey had proclaimed, as if he had already been elected. “Our task,” Dewey had said, “is to fill our victory with such meaning that mankind everywhere, yearning for freedom, will take heart and move forward….” Truman declared: “Now it is time for us to get together and beat the common enemy.” He was cracker-barrel plain, using words like “rotten” (for the Republican tax bill) and “poppycock” (for the Republican platform promise to increase Social Security benefits). Life magazine called it his “Li’l Abner Ozark style.” It was exactly in the spirit of the vehement backcountry politics he loved, and where he knew he belonged, the tradition of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, alive and full of fight.
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