Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul

by A. J. Baime

  When Truman asked General Douglas MacArthur—the supreme commander of the Allied occupying forces in Japan—to make a trip to Washington for a meeting in the White House, MacArthur defied the president’s request and refused to come home, citing “the extraordinarily dangerous situation in Japan.” (Truman told staffers that he was “going to do something with that fellow.”)

  In February 1946 Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—an African American Democrat from Harlem—attacked the Truman family in an interview with newspaper reporters after Bess Truman attended an event at a segregated theater, closed to African Americans. “My mind is not made up on some things but there is one thing of which I am now certain,” Congressman Powell declared. “I will not vote for Harry Truman for president in 1948.”

  That same month, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes—the self-styled “old curmudgeon,” a highly respected Roosevelt holdover—resigned after a disagreement over Truman’s choice of a new undersecretary of the navy. Ickes accused Truman of trying to appoint a political crony who had grave conflicts of interest. Ickes held a press conference and viciously rebuked the president. The Los Angeles Times called it “the biggest press conference in the history of Washington”; “the White House will be rocking on its foundations from the reverberations two years from now” (i.e., the next presidential election).

  When railroad workers went on strike in the spring of 1946, paralyzing the nation’s transportation system and threatening the safety of the economy, Truman came up with a plan to draft striking railroad workers into the army, to force them to work. He called Alexander Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and one of the nation’s most powerful union leaders, “un-American” and an “enemy of the people.” Union support was the Democrats’ calling card. Truman’s move was bold, but hardly wise for a president with an election on the horizon. Whitney shot back at Truman, “You can’t make a President out of a ribbon clerk.”

  “If I live and have my health,” Whitney said in a speech to union workers in Cleveland, “I’ll be fighting the infamy of such work when Harry Truman is back in Missouri and forgotten.”

  The biggest story in Washington became the unraveling of the Truman administration. The president was the butt of jokes. “I’m just mild about Harry” punned off the popular song “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” “To err is Truman” became a popular quip. The star New York entertainer Billy Rose suggested that the comedian W. C. Fields run for president in 1948: “If we’re going to have a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” Columnists poured on the vitriol, criticizing everything from Truman’s choice of neckties to his plan to add a balcony to the White House. His advisers were hacks, the critics said—“a lot of second-rate guys trying to function in an atom bomb world,” in the words of one administration official, speaking to reporters anonymously.

  Republicans feasted on schadenfreude. “If Truman wanted to elect a Republican Congress,” Senator Robert Taft joked in a letter to the Republican governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, “he could not be doing a better job.”

  * * *

  At 11:45 a.m. on September 19, 1946, Truman arose from behind the Oval Office desk to greet a delegation of black activists led by Walter Francis White. Truman expected the meeting to be another of the usual affairs that crowded his office calendar. Few came to see the president unless they wanted something from him, and Truman cynically called these visitors his “customers,” whether they were Democrats or Republicans, white or black.

  Walter Francis White, however, was no ordinary customer.

  White was the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This struck Truman as odd, because White did not appear to be colored. He was of mixed race, and with his light skin and blue eyes, he could easily pass as Caucasian, which, it turns out, he sometimes did.

  He had been raised in Atlanta, had gone to a black college, and had become involved in race activism soon after, moving to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance to work for a fledgling organization called the NAACP. During the 1920s, he had gone undercover as a white man to investigate lynchings of black men in the South, and his reports on these crimes in his writings had shocked the nation. He became head of the NAACP in 1931. During the war, the organization had grown considerably, and with it, the stature of Walter White.

  Following the end of the war, a horrifying spate of violence against black men in the South had mobilized White and the NAACP to fight back. Some of the victims had been black soldiers recently discharged from the United States military. In the Oval Office, White began to tell harrowing stories as Truman sat in his chair with his arms folded in front of him.

  There was the story of John C. Jones, a corporal recently honorably discharged from the army, who had returned to his home in Minden, Louisiana. Jones had been suspected of loitering in the backyard of a home where a white woman lived. In August 1946, just a month before White’s meeting with Truman, Jones was brutally tortured with a blowtorch, and then lynched. “The undertaker described him to us later,” White recalled, “as having been jet black in color though his skin had been light yellow.” Even though the perpetrators were known in their community, they were never charged. With an all-white police force, an all-white courtroom jury, a white judge and white lawyers guiding the rule of law, the family of John Jones had no shot at justice.

  Jones had served his country during wartime. His own countrymen had killed him and had gotten away with it.

  In another incident—also in the summer of 1946—two black couples were murdered in rural Monroe, Georgia. “The facts discovered by our investigators revealed a sordid background of twisted, sadistic sexuality,” White recorded. “One of the lynched Negroes had become involved in a fight with a white man over the attentions which the latter had been paying to the Negro’s wife.” Within hours, the black man, his wife, and another black couple were rounded up and slain by a white mob.

  “We turned over to the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the evidence gathered by our investigators,” White recorded, “naming seven ringleaders of the lynching party.” The accused were known to members of their community. However, “a reign of terror and fear swept over Walton County and effectively shut the mouths of both whites and Negroes,” according to White. One man who testified before a federal grand jury was beaten nearly to death.

  Truman grew increasingly uncomfortable as White arrived at the story of Isaac Woodard, an army veteran who had spent fifteen months serving his country in the jungles of the South Pacific. On February 12, 1946, just hours after Woodard had been honorably discharged from the army, he was riding a bus in South Carolina, eager to reunite with his wife and family. At a stop near a small town he got off to use a bathroom, and when he went to get back on, the bus driver complained that Woodard had taken too long. The driver had Woodard arrested for being drunk, and when Woodard protested that he did not drink, a police officer attacked him, gouging out Woodard’s eyes with a blackjack. Woodard was still wearing his military uniform at the time. He was placed overnight in a jail cell without medical care.

  The NAACP had taken up Woodard’s case, paying for a team of lawyers. A police officer was indicted. However, no witnesses would come forward, and when the officer was acquitted, a crowded courtroom erupted in ­cheering.

  Truman was appalled. “My God!” he said to White. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something!”

  The next day, the president wrote Attorney General Clark: “I had as callers yesterday some members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” He was “alarmed at the increased racial feeling all over the country” and asked for a special federal commission to investigate lynchings and civil rights. Clark immediately launched an investigation into the Woodard case, and a new group called the President’s Committee on Civil Rights was soon formed. Its goal would be to challenge states with a history of lynching—such as South Carolina, L
ouisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—to enforce the rule of law. Truman told his assistant David Niles, who advised the president on social issues, “I am very much in earnest on this thing and I’d like very much to have you push it with everything you have.”

  “The main difficulty with the South,” Truman wrote in a letter to a friend, “is that they are living eighty years behind the times . . . I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight. When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [local area] is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from a law enforcement standpoint. When a Mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”

  Long before most other white Americans, Truman could see that the nation was at a crossroads with respect to its racial identity. He came from a state in which segregation was still the norm. He had grown up with these traditions, thinking of them as a normal part of daily life. Some of his closest friends and political allies were powerful Democrats who hailed from southern states, who were highly entrenched in southern traditions of white supremacy. One of them, Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina, had confided in a friend while both he and Truman were aboard FDR’s funeral train in 1945: “Everything’s going to be all right—the new President knows how to handle the niggers.”

  Maybank was in for a surprise.

  * * *

  Over the same summer that a wave of lynchings terrorized blacks across the American South, terrorism threatened what little stability was left in the Middle East. On the morning of July 22, 1946, a few minutes before noon, the phone rang at the switchboard of the palatial King David Hotel, which looked out over the Old City of Jerusalem. The switchboard operator picked up to hear a female voice, warning that the hotel should be evacuated, that there was a bomb inside.

  The warning was ignored.

  The hotel served as headquarters for the British military command in Palestine and the United Kingdom’s Criminal Investigation Commission, which had recently raided the headquarters of a militant Zionist organization called Irgun and seized a number of documents. Those documents were now inside the hotel, along with numerous British and Palestinian officials. Irgun was willing to use violence to push for a Jewish homeland. From the organization’s point of view, there were few if any other options. Recent violence against Jews in Poland had continued to fuel the rage of Zionists, who were critical of laws preventing Jews from leaving Europe and immigrating to Palestine.

  At roughly noon, an explosion ripped the pink limestone face off the hotel. Nearby trees were lifted from the soil and hurled like toothpicks. Windows of buildings throughout the neighborhood shattered.

  A scramble for survivors began. By 9:30 that night, the local Palestinian authorities reported forty-one dead, a number that would reach ninety-­one within the next two days, and included numerous high-level British officials. Irgun—led by Menachem Begin (a future prime minister of Israel)—took responsibility. The bombing of the King David Hotel put the world on notice: There was going to be war in the Middle East between Jews and Palestinians.

  In Washington eight days later, Truman gathered his cabinet to discuss the Palestine problem. The situation was “loaded with political dynamite,” one cabinet officer noted. Jews who had survived the Nazi Final Solution had been organizing an effort to establish a homeland in Palestine. American money was pouring into the effort, but opposition was fierce. Arab tribes had occupied these lands for fourteen hundred years. The region was governed by the British Mandate for Palestine, in which British officials ran the local governments and, in the process, gained access to cheap oil from the Arabs. The mandate reached back to the days after World War I, and part of the original British commitment to the region was the eventual establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. That homeland had yet to materialize. Now, more than two decades later, the Jews were intent on making it happen.

  In the White House, Truman showed members of his cabinet a file four inches thick—letters that had been sent to the White House in support of the Jews in their quest for a homeland. He was surprised when members of his cabinet pushed back, ferociously. If the United States supported a Jewish homeland, argued Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, the Arabs would be incensed. America depended on Saudi Arabia for oil, and in fact for the first time in its history the United States was about to start importing more oil than it was pulling out of the ground in its own territory. In the event the nation went to war with the Soviet Union, the US military would need Saudi oil.

  Besides, argued Forrestal, if the Jews attempted to create a homeland in Palestine, the Arabs would destroy them. “You just don’t understand,” Forrestal argued. “Forty million Arabs are going to push 400,000 Jews into the sea. And that’s all there is to it. Oil—that is the side we ought to be on.”

  A Jewish homeland would likely require American troops to ensure its survival. A memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that summer to the heads of the State, Navy, and War Departments warned against the use of American troops in the region. “The Middle East could well fall into anarchy and become a breeding ground for world war,” the Joint Chiefs’ memo declared.

  The main opposition to a Jewish homeland came from Truman’s own State Department. The department’s lead diplomat on Middle East matters, Loy Henderson, was virulently opposed to a Jewish state, and his voice was influential in the department. Truman summoned Henderson to the White House to grill him on his views. In the room at the time were two of Truman’s closest advisers on the issue—David Niles and Clark Clifford, both of whom supported a Jewish homeland. When Henderson arrived at the White House to state his case, he quickly realized he was outnumbered.

  “After I set forth my reasons [for opposing Zionism],” Henderson recalled, “I was cross-examined. What were the sources of my views? . . . It seemed to me that the group was trying to humiliate and break me down in the presence of the President.” But Henderson held his ground. The Palestine problem “was one that would be sure to give rise to strife, hatreds, recriminations, intrigue, and political machinations on a domestic and international level for years to come,” he recalled, “and I did not want it to be also our particular problem.” He went on to explain that these were not his views alone, “but of all our legations and consular offices in the Middle East and of all the members of the Department of State who had responsibilities for that area.”

  Leaders of Arab states knew that the future of the region was likely to depend on the opinion of a single man—Harry S. Truman. Such was the power of the American presidency in this new postwar world. The Egyptian prime minister, Nokrashy Pasha, wrote Truman promising that his people would “resist at all costs” the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Other Palestinian leaders warned that any Jewish homeland would result in immediate warfare.

  A majority of American voters, however, stood behind a Jewish state. All the emerging 1948 presidential candidates—candidates not beholden to the wishes of the State Department—were happy to make promises of support to Jewish groups. On June 20, 1946, Truman received a petition backing the creation of a Jewish state from nine US senators. It pointed out that “in Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps, 6,000,000 Jews were tortured, gassed or burned to death . . . The 1,500,000 Jews still left alive in Europe are largely destitute, unwanted or homeless with a well-grounded need and want to migrate to Palestine.” Among the public figures speaking out in favor of the Jews were Eleanor Roosevelt, the film star Orson Welles, the labor leader David Dubinsky, and numerous liberal columnists such as the popular writer I. F. Stone.

  Truman told his political aide Oscar Ewing, “I am in a tough
spot. The Jews are bringing all kinds of pressure on me to support the partition of Palestine [into two states, one for Arabs] and the establishment of a Jewish state. On the other hand the State Department is adamantly opposed to this. I have two Jewish assistants on my staff, Dave Niles and Max Lowenthal. Whenever I try to talk to them about Palestine they soon burst into tears because they are so emotionally involved in the subject. So far I have not known what to do.”

  Truman heard again and again from fellow Democrats: Prominent Jewish campaign donors were asking for assurance that he would support a Jewish homeland. If not, these powerful constituents would turn to the Republicans. Jews made up roughly 4 percent of the national electorate, but they held considerable influence in critical states, including California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland, and most notably New York, the nation’s most populous state. Truman grew resentful of the pressure Jewish organizations were putting on him to move against the wishes of his own State Department.

  “Those New York Jews!” the president reportedly said in conversation with the publisher of the New York Post, Ted Thackrey. “They’re disloyal to their country. Disloyal!”

  “Would you mind explaining a little further, Mr. President?” Thackrey demanded. “When you speak of New York Jews are you referring to such people as [the highly respected financier and statesman] Bernard Baruch? Or are you referring to such New York Jews as my wife?”

  The Palestine problem was turning into a make-or-break issue in the 1948 election. At one point, Truman hosted four Middle Eastern diplomatic officials who told him that the prestige of the United States was declining rapidly in the oil-rich Arab world. Truman said, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”