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

by A. J. Baime

  On the night Dewey arrived in Oregon, he had suggested to one of his aides the idea of challenging Stassen to a live debate. The next day, the aide wrote Dewey in a memo that such a debate could fill a thirty-thousand-seat stadium and “would be a must pick-up for the national networks.” Nothing like such a debate had ever occurred in modern American history. Dewey’s team broached the idea with Stassen’s, and after haggling over the terms, Stassen agreed to debate “the little son of a bitch.”

  When Stassen accepted, Dewey aide Paul Lockwood approached the governor and said, “I think you can take the guy to pieces.”

  Dewey responded, “All right. God damn it, let’s do it!”

  The debate would tackle a single question—the controversial issue that Stassen himself had raised when he called for a new law making Communism illegal in the United States.

  Should Communism be outlawed? Stassen believed yes; Dewey believed no.

  * * *

  The first-ever live-broadcast political debate during national election season was scheduled for the night of Monday, May 17—two days after the founding of Israel. It would take place in the studio of Portland radio station KEX with no live audience—Dewey’s demand, since the diminutive candidate did not want to have to stand beside the six-foot-three-inch Stassen in front of a crowd. Fifty reporters were allowed to attend, and they sat with their backs to the wall in the studio, facing the candidates. Nearly a thousand local stations around the country would carry the event.

  At 7 p.m. West Coast time, some forty million Americans tuned in. The two men arrived in the radio studio and shook hands—Dewey in a gray three-piece double-breasted pinstripe suit, Stassen in a two-piece suit of darker gray. The rules: twenty-minute speeches apiece, with Stassen going first, then each candidate would get an eight-minute rebuttal. The man speaking would stand at a lectern, while the one listening sat at a table ten feet away. Between the two, the debate’s moderator, Donald Van Boskirk, head of the Multnomah County Republican Central Committee, would remain for the most part silent.

  Van Boskirk welcomed listeners and introduced the candidates. Stassen then kicked off the debate, in a steady and confident tone.

  “Chairman Van Boskirk,” Stassen began, “your excellency Governor Dewey, and my fellow citizens: During the recent war I saw many young Americans killed. I watched ships explode and burn, planes crash in flames, men—our men, my friends—fall . . .”

  It was a clever opening for Stassen—highlighting his war service, knowing that Dewey had never worn the uniform. However, as the hour moved on, Stassen realized he had made a drastic mistake. Dewey had spent much of his career arguing the most high-profile cases in courtrooms. He was cool, tactical, implacable, and brilliantly prepared. He ticked off twenty-seven laws already on the books that could be used to fight Communist plots in the United States, then argued that a law making Communism a crime could never work in a free society.

  “The free world looks to us for hope, for leadership, and most of all for a demonstration of our invincible faith,” Dewey said into the microphone while Stassen looked on. “The free way of life will triumph so long as we keep it free.”

  “Stripped to its naked essentials,” Dewey concluded of Stassen’s argument, “this is nothing but the method of Hitler and Stalin.”

  Dewey spoke last, and when he finished, radio listeners nationwide heard a few seconds of silence—dead air—before the moderator, Van Boskirk, jumped in to end the night. Dewey proved the clear winner. His team was ecstatic. “Herb,” one supporter wrote Herbert Brownell afterward, “I feel that I can sense a great national tidal wave for Dewey that is cresting from Portland [Oregon] to Portland [Maine] and Hell to breakfast. That tidal wave started rolling in those few seconds of silence that you and I and a million of other guys felt when Dewey had finished that last eight minutes of the famous Dewey-Stassen debate.”

  Four days later, Dewey beat Stassen decisively in the Oregon primary. Over the course of one live broadcast, Stassen had gone from a strong contender for president to all but out of the race.

  * * *

  While Dewey ascended, Henry Wallace fell. Wallace must have known that the guru letters were going to come back to haunt him. And indeed, around the time of the Dewey-Stassen debate, the letters fell into the hands of the country’s most acidic political columnist, Westbrook Pegler, whose columns were syndicated in newspapers across the nation. Time magazine once stated of Pegler, “Mister Pegler’s place as the great dissenter for the common man is unchallenged. Six days a week, for an estimated $65,000 a year, in 116 papers reaching nearly 6,000,000 readers, Mister Pegler is invariably irritated, inexhaustibly scornful. Unhampered by coordinated convictions of his own, Pegler applies himself to presidents and peanut vendors with equal zeal and skill. Dissension is his philosophy.”

  With guru letters in hand, Pegler took aim.

  “We have had evidence,” Pegler wrote, “that Mr. Wallace is not altogether one of us in his mental and religious or spiritual makeup.” Pegler had experts compare Wallace’s handwriting to that of the Roerich letters and found that the “screwball documents were written by the same person.” Pegler quoted the letters extensively, such as this one, which ran in Pegler’s March 9, 1948, column:

  The protecting shield of the great ones has been felt under very trying conditions. The Tigers are going through various tricks but with respect to them the man now in charge at the old house is excellent. The Flaming One is softhearted toward the Tigers and I fear has made commitments of some sort. The battle against the vermin is fierce . . .

  Pegler wondered aloud before his millions of readers: “Is Wallace fit for power?”

  One after the other, Pegler’s columns raked Wallace’s reputation. In the face of extreme embarrassment, however, Wallace kept his course, exhibiting an inner strength that only served to rally his hardcore followers.

  All winter and into the spring of 1948, Wallace remained in the public eye. In highly charged testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on February 24, 1948, in the crowded caucus room in the Old House Office Building across from the Capitol, congressmen probed Wallace’s intentions with biting questions. If he were president, and his secretaries of state and defense reported to him that Soviet aggression constituted the main threat to world peace, what would he do?

  “I would tell them to get ready for war,” Wallace said. Then he added quickly that such a scenario would be impossible, as he would never have such men in his cabinet. Wallace read an eleven-thousand-word statement condemning the Marshall Plan, and accusing Truman of “laying the foundations” for war with the Soviet Union. When asked why Wallace’s condemnations of the Marshall Plan sounded markedly similar to those coming out of the Soviet Union—that the Marshall Plan was nothing but warmongering on the part of the United States—Wallace answered, “I’m not familiar with the Communist approach and am unable to discuss it.”

  A month later, Wallace appeared before the Senate Armed Forces Committee in another hearing packed with journalists and cameramen and gawkers who came to see the most controversial man in American politics. Wallace charged that the Truman administration had “deliberately created [a] crisis.” Truman’s Universal Military Training proposal would lead to a war that would result in “death and taxes for the many and very handsome profits for the few.”

  “Our country is in danger,” Wallace said. “But the danger comes from our own policies which will bring war—unnecessary war—upon our country.”

  Back out on the road, Wallace’s candidacy proved just how divided America had become. He could venture into large cities where numerous liberal intellectuals lived, and he could pack stadiums to the rafters with passionate followers. If the contest was to be held in March 1948 only among black youth in the South, Wallace would be elected president by a landslide. However, in white America far from the coasts and big cities—even in his home state of Iowa—his message seemed inexplicable and infuriating.

  Wal
lace’s tone conveyed such conviction and mistrust of the establishment, his presence was bound to incite violence. It was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  On April 6 Wallace arrived in Evansville, Indiana, for a rally at the Evansville Coliseum. As the sun set, he was in his hotel room preparing for his speech. A few miles away, a group numbering some twenty-five hundred—mostly angry white men—gathered at the event venue, pounding on doors and busting them open. Crowds of picketers swarmed into the coliseum’s lobby. Police wielding nightsticks struggled to maintain control. All the while, the candidate was quietly practicing his speech, unaware of the maelstrom awaiting him.

  Wallace’s campaign manager, Beanie Baldwin, arrived at the venue ahead of the candidate. As Baldwin approached the coliseum entrance, picketers swarmed him; Baldwin was struck on the chin. More blows landed, and by the time the fracas ended, Baldwin’s face swelled with bruises. Another Wallace campaign worker was bleeding from a cut over his eye. An usher working the event caught a shot to the face.

  Minutes later, Wallace entered the coliseum through a side door. The protest had intimidated locals; only five hundred people were in the audience to hear Wallace speak. A local philosophy professor, George F. Parker, introduced the candidate. Professor Parker had been warned by Evansville College that his presence onstage at a Wallace event would be cause for his firing. Wallace defended Professor Parker: “Our country’s heritage means nothing if it doesn’t mean our freedom to express our political views without danger of losing our jobs.” After the speech, Wallace required a police escort to get him to his car. Picketers surrounded the vehicle, and the candidate sat stone-faced for an hour, waiting for the protesters to disperse. Two days later, Professor Parker was fired.

  Wallace headed west. In Albuquerque, he told a crowd, “According to newspapers I’m getting a lot of support from the Communists, and the Communist leaders seem to think they have to endorse me every day or so. There’s no question that this sort of thing is a political liability. The Communists oppose my advocacy of progressive capitalism. They support me because I say that we can have peace with Russia. I will not repudiate any support which comes to me on the basis of interest in peace.”

  He was booed in response.

  Wallace later remembered, “I was very much shocked at the extent to which hatred had been stirred up.”

  In Indianapolis, he and his team were denied hotel rooms. When he reached Iowa, officials at the University of Iowa barred him from speaking on campus. In Detroit, the union leader Walter Reuther was shot in his home by an unknown assailant, and Reuther’s colleague, union man Pat Greathouse, accused Wallace followers of committing the crime (based on no apparent evidence). “It must be part of a communist plot,” Greathouse told reporters. “[Reuther] has enemies among Wallace’s followers.”

  In Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, Wallace’s running mate, Senator Taylor, was scheduled to speak to a black church congregation. When he attempted to enter through the front door, a white police officer stopped him.

  “This is the colored entrance,” the cop said. “The white entrance is on the side.”

  “I’ll go through here anyway,” Taylor said.

  When he pushed forward, a scuffle broke out. Officers jumped on Taylor and his head hit the concrete sidewalk. “This is it,” he was thinking. “They’re going to beat me to death.” He ended up in a jail cell, bleeding, booked for breach of the peace and disorderly conduct. In the cell a fellow prisoner said to Taylor, “They got me for pukin’ on a sidewalk. What’s your racket?”

  “I am a United States Senator,” Taylor said. “And they got me for trying to enter a meeting through a colored entrance.”

  When Wallace hit New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, however, he was once again wildly embraced. After attending a Wallace rally, the political columnist Roscoe Drummond commented, “I have never seen a pre-convention campaign tour, even those of Wendell L. Willkie and Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, command even no-paying audiences of such size.” A Chicago Daily News reporter who attended a Wallace event at Chicago Stadium wrote, “I’m here, I’ve seen it, and I still don’t believe it.”

  The actress Katharine Hepburn warmed up the crowd at a Wallace event in Los Angeles. Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson contributed money to the campaign. Former Interior secretary Harold Ickes embraced Wallace (“Thousands of people believe that Mr. Wallace possesses the qualities they are looking for”), as did the black leader W.E.B. Du Bois (“Let the mass of American negroes, north, south, east, and west, cast their votes for Henry Wallace in 1948”). Frank Lloyd Wright wrote the candidate on June 1, 1948, in support of Wallace’s campaign “to turn the rascals out.”

  Democratic Party operatives kept close tabs on the Wallace campaign. “The Third Party candidate has embarked way ahead of normal schedules, on a far-flung campaign which carries him into remote areas, unfrequented by other national campaigners,” according to a report by the Americans for Democratic Action. “By April [1948] he had made over 26 major orations since announcing his candidacy . . . Wallace, according to any reasonable estimates, will have conducted the equivalent of nearly two full Presidential campaigns by the time the major parties and the third party hold their conventions.”

  Just how real was the Wallace threat? In February 1948 a young attorney named Leo Isacson answered that question. A political novice and supporter of Henry Wallace, Isacson ran in a special election to fill a US congressional seat in New York’s Twenty-Fourth District—the Bronx—as the candidate of the far-left American Labor Party. Wallace endorsed Isacson, who was running against a Democrat, Karl Propper. The New York Times called the special election a “test of Truman-Wallace strength.” Isacson stunned the establishment by winning. Suspected of being a Communist, he was so controversial that the State Department refused to issue him a passport, because officials believed his politics could make him a dangerous voice abroad. Never before had a member of the US Congress been denied an American passport.

  The Isacson victory proved that Wallace was going to be a draw at the ballot box in places like New York City, but it further raised concern over the support Wallace was getting from Communists and fellow travelers. At a St. Patrick’s Day address in 1948, a month after Isacson’s win, Truman told a crowd in Manhattan: “I do not want and I will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his Communists. If joining them or permitting them to join me is the price of victory, I recommend defeat. These are days of high prices for everything, but any price for Wallace and his Communists is too much for me to pay. I’m not buying.”

  * * *

  On April 14 and April 30, the United States detonated two more atomic test shots over the Pacific’s Enewetak Atoll—code-named X-Ray and Yoke. X-Ray set a record for the highest yield of energy released during an atomic blast, until Yoke eclipsed it sixteen days later. Truman had authorized these operations as part of the Operation Sandstone tests. The effort to build these weapons and set them off had required more than ten thousand government personnel.

  The bombs went off in secret but soon after made front-page headlines, sparking more debate on just how long it would take for the Soviets to develop a bomb, and what would happen to an American city should it be struck by an atomic weapon. The Army Medical Corps stoked the fear by releasing information gleaned from research these nuke tests provided, warning people to stay calm if atomic bombs began raining down on American cities, because hysteria would only cause more loss of life. “There is no known method of protecting those in the immediate neighborhood of an atomic bomb when it explodes,” a Medical Corps spokesman told reporters, adding that “there is not much even a medical man can do” about radiation exposure.

  Wallace saw these test shots as more US aggression toward the Soviet Union. They further fueled his campaign to stop what he saw as a march toward war.

  On May 11, 1948, Wallace made his most controversial move yet: He released an open letter to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In it,
he called for “definite, decisive steps” to end the “international crisis” that was coming to a head in Berlin. Wallace supported the “outlawing of all methods of mass destruction.” He wrote that “peace is possible” and attacked critics who believed “the two nations cannot live at peace in the same world.”

  Even Wallace was shocked when, on May 17, Stalin responded. Wallace’s ideas were in “need of improvement,” Stalin said in a statement published around the globe. But they provided “a serious step forward,” a “concrete program for the peaceful settlement of differences.” Over the radio from San Francisco, a teary-eyed Henry Wallace declared himself “overwhelmed” by Stalin’s statement. “I am humbled and grateful to be an instrument in this crisis,” he said. “If I have done anything to further the cause of peace in the world, I shall have felt my whole campaign a tremendous success.”

  On May 18, the day after Stalin’s response was made public, an FBI investigator informed bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover that Wallace’s letter to Stalin “may be a possible violation of the Lane Act . . . an old statute passed around 1795 which prohibits a citizen in the United States from communicating with a foreign country concerning a matter bearing on diplomatic relations.”* Hoover referred the matter to the attorney general that same day. Could Wallace have opened himself up to criminal prosecution?

  No one was more suspicious and angry about Wallace’s open letter to ­Stalin than the president. “We aren’t dealing with Stalin through Wallace,” Truman snapped.