by Roy Jenkins
Meanwhile his own personal contribution was to get involved in two unfortunate controversies. A few people close to him (Edwin Pauley in a big way and General Wallace Graham, his doctor, in a small way) were exposed by the Senate Appropriations Committee as having engaged in commodity speculation, acting allegedly on inside knowledge. This might not have mattered too much had not Truman denounced such speculators in October as particularly heinous contributors to inflation. Still more controversially he decided to build a stone balcony between the second and third floors (in American parlance) on the south front of the White House. It was against the advice of the Commission of Fine Arts. It was regarded as presumptuous interference with a national monument by a peculiarly temporary and unaesthetic tenant. Apart from anything else it would involve the re-designing of twenty dollar bills. However Truman persisted in creating this ‘monument to a Missouri mule’ as it was sometimes called. The passage of time has tended to justify him in this, as in bigger things. It certainly improved the amenity of the White House, and probably the appearance too, for it got rid of the canvas awnings, which were always previously used in summer, and would look more cluttering today than they did in 1948. At the time, however, it seemed a singularly ill-judged enterprise for Truman to undertake in what was so widely assumed to be the last year of his presidency.
This was the background against which he formally announced his candidature on March 8th. At this stage at least it looked as though there was no direction in which he could go except up. That however proved an illusion. His declaration, so far from being steadying, coincided with the beginning of a widely-based but ill-considered ‘draft Eisenhower’ (and ‘dump Truman’) campaign which continued from then until the threshold of the Democratic Convention in mid-July.
It began, paradoxically, on the left of the party. During March and the first week of April two of the Roosevelt sons, several important labour leaders, both the (liberal) senators from Alabama (one of whom, Sparkman, was to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952) as well as the equally liberal Senator Pepper of Florida all issued anti-Truman and broadly pro-Eisenhower statements. Colonel Arvey, the effective boss of Chicago, joined in the chorus from a slightly different angle. The common keynote of the statements made them particularly wounding. It was not just that they preferred Eisenhower. They were all predicated on the view that Truman was incompetent, unappealing and unelectable. It was his duty to the party to withdraw. ‘I hope (he) will not be a spite candidate like Henry Wallace’ one of the labour leaders said. On April 12th, Americans for Democratic Action formally repudiated his candidature and urged one of Roosevelt’s former dark horses, Justice William O. Douglas, as an alternative if Eisenhower would not run.
There is not the slightest indication that Truman was ever tempted towards withdrawal by these disavowals and appeals. Once he had got over his hesitations of 1946-7 it was the mule-like rather than the modest side of his character that was to the fore.
He privately denounced the liberals.4 In public he mostly ignored them. He had come to a more realistic view of Eisenhower’s intentions than they had: ‘General Eisenhower, I am sure, is not a candidate for President’, he wrote unusually temperately in a political letter at the end of April, ‘and I don’t think he would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket anyway—his whole family are Republicans and I know them all.’12
Eisenhower’s behaviour in 1948, let alone 1952, fully bore out the truth of this statement. But still the extraordinary wave of liberal support for him rolled on. It was joined by two major tributaries: some of the most important machine politicians in the northern cities and the leaders of the disaffected South. As the General persistently said he had no intention of being a candidate he had no need to declare his position on any issue from civil rights to Taft-Hartley to farm support. All who wanted to get away from Truman could cluster under his branches.
As late as the first week of July, with the Convention opening on July 12th, a group, including in addition to those already mentioned, Hubert Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis, Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina and soon to be ‘Dixiecrat’ candidate against the ticket, two other southern governors, Chester Bowles, former head of Roosevelt and Truman’s Wages and Prices Administration and successful aspirant to the governorship of Connecticut, Mayor O’Dwyer of New York City, and ‘Boss’ Hague of New Jersey, came together in a last minute appeal for the Convention to offer, and Eisenhower to accept, a draft. It was a remarkable coalition by any standards. Walter Reuther of the Automobile Workers, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers, and Philip Murray of the CIO, had also been involved at earlier stages in moves for the promotion of the General and the demotion of the President.
On July 9th, in reply to a final ploy of Pepper’s which was that he should be drafted by the Convention, not as a Democrat but as a ‘national’ candidate, Eisenhower issued a refusal sufficiently comprehensive and categoric to bring everyone at last to their senses so far as he was concerned. Arvey and O’Dwyer, as ‘pros’, responded by immediately endorsing Truman. Pepper responded by announcing his own candidature, which lasted for little more than 24 hours. The chairman of ADA responded by trying to launch Douglas. Douglas killed that on the Sunday (July 11th). On the Monday he killed Truman’s attempt to get him to accept the vice-presidential nomination. ‘I can’t be a No. 2 man to a No. 2 man,’ he was reported to have said.13 On the Tuesday there was a brief ‘Barkley for President’ boomlet; he had made a notable keynote speech on the previous night, and it still did not take much to set some people flapping towards anyone but Truman. On the Wednesday Truman himself, having disposed of Barkley by getting him to accept the vice-presidential nomination, for which it was alleged that he had been angling at every Convention since 1928, made the short train journey to Philadelphia and arrived at 30th Street Station ‘in the rain at 9.15,’ as he recorded. Margaret Truman put it more graphically: ‘Philadelphia on that night of July 14th seemed to be wrapped in a huge suffocating blanket of heat and humidity.’14
It was nearly five hours before he could make his acceptance speech. This was because of the general incompetence with which this despondent Convention was run rather than because of any particular difficulty at this stage over his nomination or that of Barkley. His dangerous rivals had eliminated themselves. Irwin Ross, the authoritative chronicler of the 1948 campaign,5 thinks that even had Eisenhower entered the contest, the sundering of his totally disparate coalition, which must have followed from a declaration of his position on civil rights, would probably just have given Truman the edge. But it would at best have been a very close run thing. As it was Truman cantered to a formal victory, with 947½ votes to 2636 for Senator Russell of Georgia, who, as an anti-civil rights candidate had a strictly limited constituency, the more so as Mississippi and Alabama had already walked out of the Convention.
Truman’s nomination was not then made unanimous as was customary. Rayburn, in the chair, although pro-Truman, could not risk it. The South was too adamant, and had been made more so by the main excitement of the Convention, which had occurred earlier that day. The liberals, deprived of Eisenhower, compensated with an amendment for a stronger civil rights commitment, moved by Hubert Humphrey, and carried against the platform by 651½ votes to 582½. The Truman forces-McGrath, Clifford, Niles, the Missouri delegation—had all been against the amendment, so it was perhaps a little hard of the South to deny him the unanimity which they had always given to Roosevelt and which they gave to Barkley on this occasion. His daughter suggests that he had already said enough and that they (Thurmond at least) paid him the compliment of believing that, unlike Roosevelt, he meant what he said on the issue.
The absence of unanimity was however the last of the series of insults which the Democratic Party had been delivering to Truman. His speech, to a packed audience in a foetid convention hall in the middle of the night, was a remarkable success. He used his new technique, which he had been developing under advic
e since early May, of speaking not from a text, of which his reading was always deadening, but from a series of headings. These left room for improvisation and animation, and the fact that they gave a certain staccato quality to his speaking suited his style:
‘Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make the Republicans like it—don’t you forget it. We will do that because they are wrong and we are right.’15
The lash was almost as harsh on the shoulders of the somnolent, warring, defeatist delegates as on the despised Republican Party ‘of special privilege’. It was not a visionary general offering his legions new frontiers or a freedom from fear. It was a sergeant-major telling his squad to get off their backsides. It worked rather well. They sat up. They listened. They cheered. For a moment they almost thought they might win.
Truman had one skilful ploy in his speech. The Republicans meeting in the same hall three weeks before, had adopted a liberal candidate and a notably liberal platform, substantially at odds with the record of the 80th Congress. If Truman was going to make a success of his strategy of portraying them as a party of reactionary ogres he had to expose the contradiction and keep that Congress to the fore. So he announced that he was using his presidential powers to summon it back for a special fifteen day session on July 26th. During these fifteen days he invited the Congress to do a good four years’ work: to deal with rising prices, the housing problem, education, civil rights, and to provide for an increased minimum wage, a national health programme and extended social security benefits. He topped off this extravagant ice-cream sundae of satirical propaganda by offering a ready-made disparaging nickname for the special session. July 26th, he said, was called ‘Turnip Day’ in Missouri. A local jingle advised people to ‘sow your turnips wet or dry’ about then, but most of the few who knew it thought it referred to the 25th rather than the 26th.
However both the name and the idea served their purposes. It was a fairly outrageous use of executive powers which produced predictably exaggerated howls of execration from the other side. ‘Never in the history of American politics has a Chief Executive stooped so low,’ pontificated Senator Brooks of Illinois. The ploy was good, rather undignified, partisan propaganda. However, Truman was not running on non-partisan dignity. He left that to Governor Dewey, the young statesman, still well under fifty, again as in 1944 the Republican candidate.
Dewey had to fight harder for the nomination in 1948 than in 1944. It was regarded as a much more worthwhile prize, an almost certain key to the White House. He had two serious rivals. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, son of a president, effective party leader in the Senate, disdainful of the tricks of political packaging but widely respected and even revered, the core and conscience of the Republican Party; and Harold Stassen of Minnesota who had made himself something of a boy wonder as a successful governor in his early thirties, who was as liberal and internationalist as Dewey, over whom he physically towered, and a great deal more genial.
However, Dewey, whatever he lacked in warmth and stature, had a beautifully oiled machine and once he had decisively beaten Stassen in the Oregon primary, both in debate and votes, looked the favourite, although not irresistibly so. He was ahead on the first two ballots and won on a landslide on the third. Earl Warren, Governor of California and future Chief Justice, was unanimously chosen as vice-presidential candidate. The Convention was one of the best organized in American history. There was enough uncertainty to create interest, but not enough bitterness to leave dangerous wounds. Few doubted that it was a prelude to victory.
The ticket, with New York and California, was excellently balanced geographically, much better than the Democratic one with Missouri and Kentucky. But it was not balanced ideologically. Warren was as liberal as Dewey. He was also as bland.7 However there was nowhere else for right-wing Republicans to go. The strain on their loyalties did not begin to approach that needed for a break. The ideological splits and the prospects of the erosion of votes were all within the Democratic Party.
Dewey behaved throughout the campaign with dignity and decency. He also behaved with complacency. He was totally dedicated to being President, but at least equally dedicated to being a good one. He was uninterested in collecting cheap plaudits or scoring demagogic points on the way. This was the good side of his somewhat cold personality. If it was true, as a New York Republican lady was reputed to have said, that it was difficult to decide which was the chillier experience, having Tom Dewey ignore you or shake you by the hand, it was also true that he was intellectually honest and rarely stooped to conquer.8 His most brazen demagogic point during the 1948 campaign was to claim that the Republicans would not have to spend a lot of time and money rooting Communists out of the government because they would not have them in in the first place. This elipsis apart, his pronouncements on how to deal with internal Communism were impeccable (’You can’t shoot ideas with a gun’ ‘We will not jail anybody for what he thinks or believes’), and a model which his successors would have done well to follow. The principal lesson which he drew from his 1944 joust with Roosevelt was that he did better when he behaved as a statesman and worse when, exceptionally, he took the low road, notably in a vituperative Oklahoma City speech.9
With this experience behind him, with his confidence bolstered by every poll and every editorial writer, the choice between stooping and conquering never seriously presented itself to him. All he needed to do was to avoid gaffes and remain securely ahead. He made few gaffes. He appeared to remain securely ahead. He behaved like an incumbent president and never mentioned Truman’s name. In the words of one reporter he rarely left ‘a high road of rich baritone homilies’.10 Truman naturally and happily fell into the inverted role of the challenger. But he was not running against Dewey any more than Dewey was running against him. He was running against a mixture of the 80th Congress and the reactionary aspects, real and imaginary, of the Republican tradition. As a result the two main candidates of the 1948 campaign were, for different reasons, like darkened ships which passed in the night without recognition or engagement.
Dewey’s confidence was not based exclusively upon the polls. These were not in fact as annihilating of Truman as is commonly assumed in retrospect. The Roper Poll, which had achieved an impressive record for accuracy in the later Roosevelt elections, gave Dewey 46.3% against 31.5% for Truman in early August. Gallup at approximately the same date gave Dewey a lead of 48% to 37%. On September 9th Roper (on material collected in August) showed Dewey still leading by 44.2% to 31.4% and foolishly announced that he was giving up polling as the issue was so far beyond doubt. But on September 24th Gallup only gave Dewey 46.5% against 39% for Truman. On the eve of the election Gallup had narrowed the gap to 49.5% over 44.5%, and the Crossley Poll confirmed this with 49.9% against 44.8%. While Dewey was never out of the lead, these later figures, particularly when seen against the big movement since August, do not now look like a solid basis for certainty.
They were however buttressed by other considerations. It looked as though Truman would be still weaker in the Electoral College than in the popular vote. While they might not do a great deal for themselves, Thurmond and Wallace would surely at least have this effect. Thurmond would rob him of a part of the hitherto solid South, and Wallace would make it impossible for him to carry some of the populous northern states, most notably New York, which had been safely in the Roosevelt column. In fact both these things happened: Thurmond won in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina and the Wallace vote demonstrably robbed Truman of New York, Michigan and Maryland. But Truman, even though he also lost Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which had been for Roosevelt in all his four elections, was able to ride these defeats.
In addition there was the low repute of the President, the low morale of the Democratic Party (most of them thought they were fighting to hold governorships and Congressional seats, with no hope of the White House), and the crippling shortage of funds which went with this. Truman was sometimes cut off the air before he had finished a broadca
st speech because there was no money with which to pay for a little extra time. In Oklahoma City, at the end of September, Margaret Truman says that they did not have enough money ‘to get the train out of the station’ without an on the spot fund-raising effort.16
Against all the evidence Truman pretended from the beginning that he would win. Whether he believed this in August and September is impossible to say. His letters and private writings are silent upon the point. The pretence had to be complete. What can be authenticated, however, is that for the last three weeks of the campaign he was operating on a basis of genuine and (as it turned out) accurately based confidence. On October 13th, as the campaign train steamed south through eastern Minnesota, he sat with George Elsey at the dining table and wrote out a state-by-state prediction. It was about 85% accurate, with most of the errors on the side of optimism. He gave himself 340 electoral votes; he got 303. He gave Dewey 108; Dewey got 189.
Truman campaigned harder than Dewey. He did it almost all by train, and depended essentially on direct contact with the electorate and short speeches from the rear platform. Television was still of negligible importance, the number of his radio broadcasts was limited by money (his voice was not very good for that medium in any event) and although he occasionally addressed large rallies—23,000 in Chicago, 12,000 in Philadelphia—these set-piece occasions, unlike the Roosevelt practice, were not the core of the campaign.
