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

by A. J. Baime

  The idea was a program to spend billions of dollars on rebuilding Europe, for only nations with viable infrastructure, commerce, food, and political stability would be able to resist the wave of Soviet expansion. Truman later explained, “Nations, if not continents, had to be raised from the wreckage. Unless the economic life of these nations could be restored, peace in the world could not be re-established.”

  Following Marshall’s speech, the debate in Washington began. The conservative Congress had approved hundreds of millions of dollars for two small countries. But billions for Europe was a much tougher request. Behind the scenes, Truman had helped to envision the Marshall Plan, and he got behind it immediately. Vandenberg was daunted by the idea. “We now apparently confront the Moscow challenge on every front and on every issue,” Vandenberg wrote to Senator Robert Taft. “It is a total ‘war of nerves’ . . . I am sure that Secretary Marshall is alive to this fact.”

  Taft, the conservative powerhouse in the Senate, wrote a friend saying he had “no confidence whatever in [Marshall’s] policy.” Conservative Republicans would dig in and fight against such massive federal spending, Taft was sure. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “the policy of Secretary Marshall may well be the principal issue in the next election.”

  The president himself would later say that it could take decades before the world would know for sure if radical programs like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan would prove successful. To his surprise, however, powerful forces were already taking shape from within his own party to destroy them.

  * * *

  If a rogue politician wanted to make himself heard in 1947, Madison Square Garden was a good place to do it. Built by Tex Rickard for boxing matches in the heart of New York City at Eighth Avenue between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Streets,* MSG was known as “The House That Tex Built.” It held nineteen thousand seats, and on the night of March 31, 1947, every one of them was taken, every seat paid for. American flags hung between four sprawling banners that read DON’T ARM TYRANNY; FEED PEOPLE, DON’T FIGHT THEM; WE DON’T WANT A CENTURY OF FEAR; and U.N.: THE HOPE FOR WORLD PEACE.

  The crowd was noteworthy for the number of fresh young faces—youth at a political rally, not your usual crowd in 1947. But then nothing about this rally was usual. It was the birth of a new antiestablishment, and its hero was Henry Wallace of Iowa—whom Harry Truman had fired from his cabinet six months earlier.

  Warm-up speakers had no trouble getting this crowd going. There was the late president’s son Elliott Roosevelt, a US Army Air Forces officer; the astronomer Harlow Shapley, head of the Harvard College Observatory; and the actor and comedian Zero Mostel. One by one they came onstage to throw jabs at the Truman punching bag. When the keynote speaker appeared, fans went wild. Henry Wallace’s eyes peered out from under his swoop of iron-gray hair. Wearing a rumpled suit jacket that hung from his tennis-player shoulders, the fifty-eight-year-old looked younger than his years. Wallace was going to fight Truman’s new foreign policy plans with all the power he could summon. When he began his speech, an ABC radio hookup took him nationwide.

  “Unconditional aid” to anti-Soviet nations, Wallace said, will “unite the world against America and divide America against itself.” He called on the United Nations rather than the Truman administration to come to the aid of Greece and Turkey. The UN’s budget was “less than the budget of the New York City Sanitation Department,” Wallace railed. The way forward was to fund the UN, not to employ foreign policy measures that the Soviet Union would view as confrontational.

  “In the name of crisis, America is asked to ignore the world tribunal of the United Nations and take upon herself the role of prosecutor, judge, jury—and sheriff—what a role!” (Roars from the crowd.) “In the name of crisis, facts are withheld, time is denied, hysteria is whipped up.” (Woots! Hollers!) “The Congress is asked to rush through a momentous decision [on the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan] as if great armies are already on the march.

  “I hear no armies marching,” Wallace said. “I hear a world crying out for peace.”

  Soon after Wallace’s New York City appearance, he embarked on a two-week speaking tour in Europe, to argue that the Truman administration was moving the United States toward war with the Soviet Union. “The world is devastated and hungry,” Wallace said to a sizable crowd in London. “The world is crying out, not for American guns and tanks to spread more hunger but for American plows and machines to fulfill the promise of peace.”

  Washington powerbrokers were stunned. Not so long ago Henry Wallace was considered one of the most powerful New Deal Democrats, a man who nearly became president. Now he had gone abroad to attack his own country’s political administration.

  In a cabinet meeting with Truman in the White House, Attorney General Tom Clark weighed whether Wallace should be allowed to reenter the United States. On the floor of the House of Representatives, Democrats and Republicans argued about whether Wallace’s passport should be revoked, and even the possibility of prosecuting him under the 1799 Logan Act, which forbade private citizens from corresponding with foreign governments without authorization. The chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Republican J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, charged that the Logan Act “covers Wallace like a cloak.”

  When Vandenberg accused Wallace of making “treasonable utterances,” the former vice president responded with equally flammable rhetoric.

  “There is only one circumstance under which phrases like ‘treasonable utterances’ could be used to describe my speeches,” Wallace told reporters in London. “That would be when we were at war . . . The fact that such words as ‘treason’ have been used in describing my trip [to Europe] indicates that, in the minds of the men who use these phrases, we actually are at war.”

  On April 10 Truman held his weekly press conference, and a reporter asked the president if Wallace was “in good standing of the Democratic Party.”

  “Certainly,” Truman said.

  “Would you like to have him campaign on the Democratic ticket next year, Mr. President?”

  Truman said he thought Wallace “will probably campaign for the Democratic ticket.”

  From Britain, Wallace responded to Truman directly after reading of this conversation in the press. “I shall be campaigning in 1948 with all my power,” Wallace said. “But I will be campaigning for the ideals of the free world and the men who best express these ideals. I hope, but I cannot guarantee, that they will be on the Democratic ticket.”

  Back in the United States, Wallace continued on the road, holding ­anti-­Truman rallies. FBI agents began to prowl these events as rumors surfaced that Wallace’s supporters included numerous individuals with Communist sympathies. In Cleveland on May 2, Wallace drew an audience of four thousand people, with another fifteen hundred outside unable to get tickets. In Minneapolis on May 12, six thousand people paid to hear Wallace speak. In Chicago on May 14, twenty thousand people paid from sixty cents to $2.40 to hear Wallace, “filling Chicago Stadium for the first time in political history,” according to an account sent to the FBI’s chief, J. Edgar Hoover. Five days later, Wallace spoke before twenty-seven thousand rally participants at Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles.

  Increasingly, Wallace drew a line between the Soviet and American ways of thinking, and while Americans were growing paranoid of Communists abroad and rumored secret Communist cells at home, Wallace became the only major public figure in the United States pointing blame for the Cold War not on the USSR but on America and its president. Wallace warned that the Truman Doctrine was no plan for peace but rather an attempt to insert American influence into affairs abroad where it did not belong. He warned that the Marshall Plan would lead down “a road to ruthless imperialism.” He slammed Winston Churchill for his “hatred of Russia,” calling Churchill “an imperialist.”

  Far-left liberals, mostly in California and on the East Coast, found a haven in Wallace’s peace rallies. Others saw in them a strange threat; there was a wh
iff of pro-Sovietism to Wallace’s message, which made many suspicious of his motivations. In April 1947 Churchill called Wallace a “crypto-Communist” who was part of a “vast system of Communist intrigue which radiates from Moscow.” In June, the American Anti-Communist Association sought a court injunction to keep Wallace from speaking at the Watergate Amphitheater in Washington.

  Was Wallace a conduit for Communist infiltration? Even a stooge for Stalin himself ? Wallace confronted the issue head-on.

  “If it is traitorous to believe in peace,” he said at a conference in New York, “we are traitors. If it is communistic to believe in prosperity for all, we are communists. If it is red-baiting to fight for free speech and real freedom of the press, we are red-baiters. If it is un-American to believe in freedom from monopolistic dictation, we are un-American. I say that we are more American than the neo-Fascists who attack us. I say on with the fight!”

  Days after Wallace uttered these words, in June 1947, the first organized “Wallace for President” group met in Fresno, California. The “Wallace in ’48” movement was on.

  7

  “The Defeat Seemed like the End of the World”

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 29, 1947, as debate over the Marshall Plan raged in offices all over Washington and Henry Wallace was on tour battering the Truman administration, the Secret Service delivered the president to the Lincoln Memorial, to give a speech Truman knew could shatter what was left of his own party. The president was met by Walter White, head of the NAACP, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Together the three walked toward a stage set up at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, the lanky Mrs. Roosevelt awkwardly towering over both Truman and White.

  For months, Truman’s stand on race matters had become a prickly mystery in Washington. Now Truman would solve that mystery, and accept the consequences. He was going to become the first president to address the NAACP.

  All four major radio networks were set to broadcast the speech, in addition to networks overseas. Huge crowds of NAACP members were already on hand. They were young. They were old. They were in uniform. They were war veterans in wheelchairs. They made up the biggest gathering in the NAACP’s thirty-eight-year history.

  White spoke first. “There are 100,000 people here today at the foot of Abraham Lincoln in Washington,” he began. “I am told that between 30 and 40 million other Americans may be listening to the radio at this hour. Countless others listen overseas . . .”

  When it was Truman’s moment, he looked out from the podium and saw a sea of brown faces. Behind the crowd, the Washington Monument stood erect against a blue sky. Truman’s speech called for federal protection against violence and discrimination and equality in employment and education. It stressed the right to vote for every citizen as critical to the definition of Americanism. America had “reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to our citizens,” Truman said.

  “Every man,” he continued, “should have the right to a decent home, the right to an education, the right to adequate medical care, the right to a worthwhile job, the right to an equal share in making the public decisions through the ballot, and the right to a fair trial in a fair court.”

  When Truman sat back down, he turned to Walter White and told him, “I said what I did because I mean every word of it—and I am going to prove that I do mean it.”

  The next day, newspapers hailed Truman’s speech as one of the most significant moments in American civil rights history. Yet as Truman expected, the address infuriated white southern Democrats, who were incensed by what they perceived as a betrayal. Going back to the 1870s, southern politicians, though traditionally conservative, had aligned themselves with northern Democrats primarily for a single reason: race. Southerners voted Democratic, and in exchange, northerners would leave matters of race and law enforcement to state governments, even those with traditions of white supremacy and segregation going back generations.

  Now the times were changing. The war was a race reboot in America. If black Americans could be drafted to go to war and fight and die for their country, activists like Walter White argued, they should be able to vote in every state, and sit next to a white person on a bus. If black Americans were to pay the same taxes as white Americans, then they should enjoy the same benefits. Truman’s NAACP address recommended federal civil rights laws that threatened to destroy long-held southern traditions, and end the South’s allegiance to the Democratic Party in the process.

  Reaction played out in the press. The popular senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called Truman’s speech a “devastating broadside at the dignity of Southern traditions and institutions,” and warned of “disastrous results in racial hatred and bloodshed.” A group of twenty-one Southern Democrats in Congress led by Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia announced they would plan a filibuster to “stand guard” against any civil rights legislation.

  During the weeks after Truman’s NAACP speech, racial anxiety gripped the South, and a grassroots campaign of white power began to inject fear into local communities, where in many cases black residents far outnumbered whites. Cross burnings were reported. “Talmadge White Supremacy Clubs” popped up in Georgia, named for the late Eugene Talmadge, a three-term Georgia governor who for years had actively promoted segregation in the state. According to one newspaper account, the Talmadge Club’s pledge card read in part that “the rule of our Government should be left entirely in the hands of white citizens.”

  Truman’s stand on civil rights put him in a game of chicken against the southern power base of his own political party. Senators, congressmen, and governors from the South were sure that, if they put enough pressure on him, the president would back down.

  * * *

  “The world seems to be topsy-turvy,” Truman wrote Bess, who was back home in Missouri. “I can’t see why it was necessary for me to inherit all the difficulties and all the tribulations of the world—but I have them on hand and must work them out some way—I hope for the welfare of all concerned . . . All we can do is go ahead working for peace—and keep our powder dry.”

  In the spring of 1947 Truman and the Eightieth Congress clashed in their most fierce battle yet. “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft of Ohio and Fred Hartley Jr., a House Republican from New Jersey, introduced the Taft-Hartley bill, sweeping legislation aimed at pulling power away from labor unions. The bill proposed outlawing closed shops (workplaces allowing only union workers), restricting labor unions from making contributions to political campaigns, making certain kinds of labor strikes unlawful, and requiring union leaders to declare that they were not members of a Communist party.

  The bill, Truman believed, unjustly favored big business and Wall Street, and labor union members agreed. Tens of thousands of workers took to the streets in protest. On June 4, nearly twenty thousand union workers jammed New York’s Madison Square Garden to hear speakers denounce the bill; above the stage hung a sign saying, MR. PRESIDENT: VETO THE TAFT-HARTLEY SLAVE LABOR BILL. Six days later, another sixty thousand workers marched up Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. On June 17, ten thousand leather and shoe workers marched through Lynn, Massachusetts. More than 170,000 letters, 550,000 cards, and 27,000 telegrams flooded the White House mail room, mostly urging Truman to veto the bill—which he did.

  Truman’s veto message to the Eightieth Congress included words like startling, dangerous, far-reaching, unprecedented, unworkable, burdensome, arbitrary, unnecessary, impossible, ineffective, discriminatory, clumsy, cumbersome, inequitable, backward, unfair, unwarranted, interfering, drastic, and troublesome.

  In June, the Senate voted to override Truman’s veto, as Republicans joined with many Democrats including the president’s close personal friend Tom Connally of Texas. In the House, more Democrats voted for the bill than against it. Taft-Hartley was enacted on June 23, 1947. “The defeat,” recalled the Democratic National Committee’s publicist Jack Redding, “seemed like the end of the world.”

  At the same time
, Truman faced a furious backlash from liberal politicians over an executive order the White House released on March 21. Executive Order 9835 created a “loyalty board” that subjected federal employees to background checks to ensure that “maximum protection . . . be afforded the United States against infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of employees.” Suddenly, the FBI had the power to look into people’s private lives and root out those who had affiliations to organizations that were, or at least were believed to be, politically unacceptable. That is, Communist.

  Executive Order 9835 was issued in response to Cold War jitters. A 1946 spy scandal in Ottawa, Canada, that resulted in the arrest of some three dozen suspected Soviet undercover agents shocked both Americans and Canadians, and “awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and danger of Soviet espionage,” as the New York Times put it. Subsequent accusations that Communism was rife in federal agencies empowered Republicans to attack the Truman administration for being weak on Communism. Truman’s decree sought to calm nerves, but in fact, for many, it had the opposite effect.

  “It was a political problem,” Clark Clifford explained. “Truman was going to run in ’48, and that was it . . . The President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it.”

  Liberals were incensed. Henry Wallace called Truman’s loyalty board “a campaign of terror unequaled in our history, reminiscent of the early days of Adolf Hitler.” Recalled Truman’s first press secretary, Jonathan Daniels: “Not even liberty seemed simple.”