by A. J. Baime
On July 19—four days after Truman’s nomination—the president’s cabinet convened again to discuss the standoff in Berlin. Secretary of State Marshall outlined the situation for the president. General Lucius Clay was recommending the deployment of armed convoys—specifically, convoys of two hundred trucks with an engineering battalion as an escort—to push through Soviet territory to the western sector of Berlin. There would be casualties, and the potential for all-out war. General Clay’s bosses in Washington, headed by Army Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley, had countered Clay, preferring to continue the present airlift. Even as Truman sat talking with his cabinet, across the Atlantic in Berlin, thundering C-54 airplanes were landing and taking off in western Berlin, delivering hundreds of tons of food and supplies daily.
Secretary of Defense Forrestal pointed out to Truman that there was not enough manpower in the army to fight if the Soviets started a war in Berlin. Truman wrote in his diary, “We’ll stay in Berlin . . . I don’t pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make.”
The day after this cabinet meeting, on July 20, 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9979—a peacetime draft that would call for nearly ten million men to register for the military over the next two months, a draft that did not make Harry Truman any more popular among war-weary voters. The draft executive order was tantamount to political suicide four months before an election, but Truman believed he had no choice.
Everywhere, there was talk of war. “The atmosphere in Washington is no longer a postwar atmosphere,” the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote. “It is, to put it bluntly, a prewar atmosphere . . . It is now universally admitted that war within the next few months is certainly possible.”
* * *
In the days after the Democratic National Convention, Republicans reacted in shock to news that the president had called the Eightieth Congress back into an emergency session. They had followed the Democratic National Convention closely on radio and TV, but almost all were snoozing when Truman made his 2 a.m. acceptance speech.
By lunchtime the next day, the term Turnip Day was a national phenomenon—and a gauntlet. What were the Republicans going to do about the special session? With Congress in recess, many of these politicians had already left Washington to visit their families or head off on vacation.
In the Senate building in Washington, the congressional leaders of the GOP who were still in the city met to strategize—Senators Taft of Ohio, Vandenberg of Michigan, Eugene Millikin of Colorado, and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, among others. As Scott remembered the scene, Vandenberg told his colleagues that the Eightieth Congress had to compromise and give in to Truman.
“Bob,” Vandenberg said to Taft, “I think we ought to do something. We ought to do whatever we can to show that we are trying to use the two weeks [the emergency session] as best we can. Then we have a better case to take before the public.”
Taft was livid. Scott would remember him saying, “We are not going to give that fellow anything,” referring to Truman. Remembered Scott: “Anyone familiar with Bob Taft’s method of ending a conversation will know that was the end of it.”
Scott himself gave a statement to the press following this meeting: “It is the act of a desperate man [Truman] who is willing to destroy the unity and dignity of his country and his Government in a time of world crisis to obtain partisan advantage after he himself has lost the confidence of the people.”
A few days later, on July 28, Taft went on national radio to fight back. “The Constitution says that the President may convene Congress in special session ‘on extraordinary occasions,’” the senator began. “This call was announced by the President after two o’clock in the morning in the midst of a political speech to the Democratic Convention, solely as a political maneuver in the President’s campaign for his own reelection. In the same speech he denounced the 80th Congress as the worst in history in spite of the magnificent cooperation he has received in every phase of foreign policy [the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan].”
Taft urged his listeners to go to the polls. “The only way this fundamental difference can be resolved is by the vote of the people at the November election.”
Governor Dewey chose to remain above the fray. “The Special Session is a nuisance [and] no more,” he wrote his mother. His strategy was to divert attention from the special session, by reaching out to the one man who could do his campaign the most good. Reporters were notified by Dewey’s staff that on July 24, the Republican nominee was expecting a special guest at his dairy farm in Pawling, New York. Members of the press took note.
Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower arrived at the Dewey farm in Pawling after a two-and-a-half-hour drive from New York City. The Eisenhowers and the Deweys lunched together on the side terrace of the candidate’s white farmhouse. Afterward, the two men spoke privately about the face-off with the Russians in Berlin.
When reporters who had traveled to Pawling were invited to join in the conversation, Dewey faulted the Democrats for instigating the Berlin emergency. Democratic leadership had failed to ensure that Americans in western Germany would have legal rights to travel through Soviet-occupied Germany. A Republican administration could be relied upon to handle the situation in the future, Dewey argued, and the way to do that was with strength and firmness. It was time for the United States to stand up to the Kremlin, Dewey said.
“In Berlin we must not surrender our rights under duress,” the candidate said, with Ike sitting beside him. “We stay in Berlin in defense of our rights and insist on every peaceable means of defending our rights.”
Eisenhower added backbone to the candidate’s sentiments. Here was “Iron Ike,” World War II’s greatest hero. His mere presence inspired confidence, dependability, patriotism. It also raised a scintillating question: If Ike was to enter politics, what party would he represent? Democrat or Republican? When asked, Eisenhower answered, “I have not identified myself with any political party. I think I reflect the Governor’s views when I say we talked as two Americans.” When asked if Eisenhower’s visit was an endorsement of Dewey, the general remained coy.
“Let’s not fool ourselves,” he said. “Governor Dewey is a very significant person in the body politic.”
Dewey and Ike sat closely enough that their elbows touched, the scene carefully choreographed so news photographers could capture their smiling faces up close in a single camera frame. Eisenhower appeared elated, his expression revealing his belief that he was sitting next to the man who would be the first Republican president since 1932.
* * *
Meanwhile, three days after the Democratic National Convention, six thousand rebel Democrats gathered in a redbrick armory in Birmingham, Alabama. They aimed high: to chart a new course for the political future of a vast section of the United States. This crowd was aroused and thirsty for vengeance. White men pumped Confederate flags in the air. A band thumped out “Camptown Races.” Red, white, and blue bunting lined the walls. Delegates who had bolted the Democratic convention in Philadelphia now had their own convention, and a new political party: the Dixiecrats.
Not everyone was happy with the moniker; this group’s emerging leader—Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina—particularly did not like it. But the name stuck. A Charlotte, North Carolina, newspaper editor had come up with the term for the breakaway Democrats as a play on words. Dixie, after all, was the nickname for southern states that had made up the Confederacy during the Civil War. Dixiecrat was also the name of a favorite breakfast dish at Cogburn’s Grill in the capital city of Columbia, South Carolina—a greasy brown link sausage tucked into a folded slice of white bread.
The Dixiecrats’ platform would focus on “racial integrity”; among the six thousand people in the Birmingham armory, there were no blacks. It was not just a southern affair, but it was southern-dominated. Delegations were gathered on the armory floor in clusters holding signs from their states: Florida, G
eorgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Virginia, and Tennessee. Delegations came from as far away as Iowa.
All the major radio networks plus newsreel cameras were on hand for the keynote speaker—Governor Thurmond—who was escorted to the podium by men waving American and Confederate flags. The South Carolina governor wore a black suit and a thin black tie over a white shirt. He shook a pen in his right hand rhythmically while he spoke.
“I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” Thurmond snapped. “If the South should vote for Truman this year, we might as well petition the Government for colonial status . . . I can think of nothing worse for the South than to tuck its tail and vote for Truman. If we did we would be nothing worse than cowards. We are not going to do it.”
As Thurmond spoke, he grew visibly angrier until his voice began to crack and his volume peaked. “These uncalled for and these damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called civil rights . . . I’ll tell you . . . the American people . . . had better wake up and oppose such a program because the next thing will be a totalitarian state in these United States!”
The crowd responded. Thurmond was saying in plain words exactly what they wanted to hear. The governor then revealed the Dixiecrats’ campaign strategy: If they could win enough electoral votes to prevent any candidate from achieving a majority needed to capture the presidency—according to the rules spelled out in the Constitution—the election would be decided by the House of Representatives in a vote. By that time, the theory went, the Democrats could possibly have regained control of the House, and the southerners could put their man—Thurmond—straight up against Truman, whose approval rating had been plummeting for months.
“If we throw the election into the House of Representatives, we will hold the balance of power,” Thurmond shouted. “[The South has been] stabbed in the back by an accidental President with his desire to win the support of a minority bloc [black voters].”
After Thurmond spoke, Frank Dixon, the former Alabama governor, took the floor. “In Philadelphia,” Dixon shouted, “a definite decision was made to enforce Truman’s plan for a social revolution in the south. You heard the deliberate adoption of a program meant to destroy us.” With Truman’s plan, Dixon charged, blacks could go to white schools, and sit on white buses. Truman aimed to “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery.”
The South was mobilizing, and a new pro-segregation movement was born that day in Birmingham. One attendee called it “a riotous rebel convention.” For the most part, the crowd was made up of ordinary southern white men along with a few women, people who considered themselves American patriots who wanted to defend the American traditions they had known all their lives, and their parents had known all of their lives. They saw no reason why outsiders from the North should force them to change. There were also some militant extremists in the crowd, a lineup of the country’s most hardline white supremacists, including J. B. Stoner, who had been pushed out of the Ku Klux Klan for being too extreme and would later be quoted saying Hitler was “too moderate,” and Gerald L. K. Smith, a hardline anti-Semite and racist. (Smith’s extremist views got him banned from future Dixiecrat events.)
The Dixiecrats put forth a series of anti–civil rights and anti-Truman proposals—a “declaration of principles” to protect Americans “against the onward march of totalitarian government.”
“We stand for the segregation of the races and the integrity of each race,” the Dixiecrat platform stated.
Another conference was scheduled for August for the official nomination of a new presidential candidate—Thurmond, whose running mate would be Fielding Wright, governor of Mississippi. When critics suggested to Thurmond that the civil rights program embraced in the current Democratic platform was not much different from Roosevelt’s platform in 1944, Thurmond responded, “I agree, but Truman really means it.”
Officially, the Dixiecrats called themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party. The federal government, they claimed, had no right to dictate how states would police themselves, what their voting laws should be, and how their social traditions should play out. Thurmond himself claimed in a conference call from the governor’s mansion in Columbia that the States’ Rights Party was “not interested one whit in the question of ‘white supremacy.’” It was federal encroachment on the states that fueled the southern revolt, he said. But this was a transparent fiction. Thurmond’s rhetoric continued to focus on segregation. Democratic congressman Sam Rayburn of Texas—who had been a longtime Speaker of the House and was a close friend of Harry Truman’s—summed up the whole controversy before a group of fellow Texas politicians. “All your high-flown political vocabulary boils down to just three words,” Rayburn said. “Nigger, nigger, nigger!”
The political anxiety and anger among whites in the South was now aimed at one man. “The president has gone too far,” Thurmond told members of the South Carolina Democratic State Committee. “As far as I am concerned, I’m through with him.”
* * *
On July 23, a week after the Democratic National Convention, Henry Wallace arrived in Philadelphia for the first-ever Progressive Party convention, amid a political firestorm. The Progressives were gathering in the same hall where Truman and Dewey had been nominated. Before the first gavel pounded, conventioneers were on edge.
Two days earlier, the Justice Department had arrested twelve members of the Communist Party USA, charging them with a plot to overthrow the federal government. Among them were party leaders Eugene Dennis and William Z. Foster. One of the twelve was arrested in Detroit, most of the others in New York City. Progressive Party members were furious, as the timing was clearly aimed to vilify their movement. The Communist Party USA put out a statement saying the organization had been the subject of a “monstrous frame-up.”
“The American people can now see to what desperate provocations Truman is driven in an effort to win the election, by hook or crook,” the Communist Party’s statement read. “The reported indictment of the Communists is neatly timed to embarrass the new people’s party now holding its founding convention in Philadelphia.”
On the Progressive Party convention’s opening day, Wallace greeted reporters in the ballroom at the Bellevue-Stratford, unaware he was walking into a trap. Staring down two hundred reporters, the candidate began his press conference by announcing he would refuse to repudiate the support of Communists.
“So you can save your breath,” he said.
Martin Hayden of the Detroit News stunned the crowd with a very different question: “Have you ever repudiated the authenticity of the Guru letters?”
“A tense, terrible silence seeped into the room,” one attendee recalled. The cogs in Wallace’s mind turned. He knew that most of the people in the room knew about the guru letters through the lurid columns of Westbrook Pegler, who had been writing about them relentlessly. Attempting to steer the conversation from the subject of the letters, Wallace said, “I never discuss Westbrook Pegler.”
A tall man with greased-back gray hair then stood up and spoke. “My name is Westbrook Pegler,” he said. Again, a hush fell over the crowd. Pegler reiterated the guru letters question.
“I never engage in any discussions with Westbrook Pegler,” Wallace said.
Another reporter asked the same question. The tension in the room increased as two hundred reporters watched Wallace hanging on a pin. Wallace said, “Nor will I engage in a discussion with a stooge of Westbrook Pegler.”
This time, H. L. Mencken stood up—Mencken, the literary lion, the “sage of Baltimore,” one of the most famous political writers of his time. “Mr. Wallace,” Mencken said, “do you call me a stooge of Pegler? If you won’t answer th
e question as to whether you wrote those letters, tell us, at least, the reason you won’t answer it.”
“Because it is not important.”
But it was. When the Progressive Party opened its first convention, the biggest story in the newspapers the next day was the guru letters. “The American press had one of its finest hours today,” wrote the Associated Press’s Relman Morin, “in an astonishing news conference with Henry Wallace.”
The convention carried on. By this time the Progressive Party’s campaign had taken on the nickname Wallace had given it when he announced his candidacy seven months earlier: Gideon’s Army, referring to the biblical story of Gideon, who led a small army in a decisive victory over the oppressive Midianites thousands of years earlier. It was an apt allegory for Wallace for obvious reasons, and also because it reflected his deep religious thinking. Gideon’s Army turned out in force for him. The crowds packed the hall, with more outside. Folk singer Pete Seeger sang songs and played his banjo. In the crowd were the writers Norman Mailer and Lillian Hellman, the future US senator and presidential candidate George McGovern, and large numbers of war veterans and union leaders.
For the first time in history, a black man gave a keynote speech at a national political convention. Charles P. Howard, publisher of a black newspaper in Iowa, addressed the teeming crowds on opening night, pleading with voters to support cooperation with the USSR, and charging the Truman administration with fomenting “corruption . . . betrayal . . . murder.” It was “Wallace or war,” Howard said.
“What is at stake here is the very survival of Western civilization,” he told the crowd.
Over the next days, the crowds poured on the love for the Wallace movement. W.E.B. Du Bois spoke. VP candidate Glen Taylor brought out his wife and kids and played a number on his banjo. The black entertainer Paul Robeson spoke and sang. Wallace campaign manager Beanie Baldwin told reporters that the convention was not just some flash-in-the-pan movement; it was the “birth of a new party soon to be the first party.” Outside the arena, “Peace Caravans” lined streets, where Gideon’s Army members banged peace drums and slept in tents on Philadelphia’s cement sidewalks.
