Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul
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On the final night, the whole convention moved to nearby Shibe Park, home to the city’s baseball team, the Philadelphia Athletics. Wallace and his running mate Taylor accepted the new party’s nominations. Wallace whipped a crowd of thirty thousand into a frenzy. Caucasians and African Americans mixed freely, as did union workers and intellectuals. Young women danced in sundresses. Wallace told them all that, if he had been president, the Berlin crisis would never have happened.
“Berlin did not happen,” Wallace said. “Berlin was caused.” He summed up what he perceived to be happening before everyone’s eyes that night: “This convention is going to mark a great turning point not only in the history of the New Party, but also in the history of the world.” The Wallace platform supported desegregation of public schools, a nationalized health insurance program, equal rights for women, minimum wages for workers who currently did not qualify under law (such as farmworkers), immigration reform, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, support for Israel, and the rights of Communists to express their views.
“To make that dream come true,” Wallace said, “we shall rise above the pettiness of those who preach hate and factionalism, of those who think of themselves rather than the great cause they serve. All you who are within the sound of my voice tonight have been called to serve mightily in fulfilling the dream of the prophets and the founders of the American system.”
Wallace fans responded with “almost fanatical enthusiasm,” New York Times reporter James Hagerty recorded. Crowds chanted “We want Wallace!” and “One, two, three, four, we don’t want another war.” An organist struck up “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Before the night was over, a Time reporter asked Henry Wallace why the Progressive Party’s platform so closely resembled that of the Communist Party. “I’d say they have a good platform,” Wallace answered. “I would say that the Communists are the closest things to the early Christian martyrs.” At that press conference, Wallace’s running mate was asked the same question. Senator Taylor responded that he had renounced Communism, but would not renounce Communist votes.
“Nobody can stop them from voting for us,” Taylor said, “if they want.”
Despite the Westbrook Pegler debacle, Wallace’s convention was a rousing success. A new candidate, a new political party, a stadium packed to the rafters to participate in the party’s very first election convention—all of it came together quickly and unexpectedly. “It will remain a thing of awe to professional politicians that people paid hard cash to see a man baptize his own party,” the Associated Press columnist Hal Boyle commented. “This was something new.”
The Wallace campaign was flush with cash. Days earlier, a single donor—the philanthropist Anita McCormick Blaine of Chicago, an heir to the McCormick Reaping Machine Works fortune—had agreed to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wallace wrote to thank her, explaining that the money would go toward campaign literature and radio time and for party organizations in every state.
When Gideon’s Army dispersed from Philadelphia, the stage was set for a historic election. Voters now had four major candidates to choose from. The Democrats were split on the right (by the Dixiecrats) and the left (by the Progressives). Truman and Dewey, meanwhile, held similar positions on many major issues, but not all. Four campaigns were out of the starting block, charging in different directions, fueled by the base support of masses of people convinced that they were in the right and that their foes were in the wrong. The nation was divided as it had never been before, and America’s identity hung in the balance.
When Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, the nation was shocked to witness an obscure vice president from Missouri become the most powerful man on earth. Harry S. Truman spoke the presidential oath that night with his wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret, next to him. For the rest of his term, Truman’s approval rating tanked.
Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum
When he was nominated to run for president at the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, few gave him any shot at victory. Truman’s acceptance speech at 2 a.m. on July 15, 1948, set the stage for a historic David-versus-Goliath battle in the first postwar presidential election.
AP Photo
The night Thomas Dewey won the GOP nomination in Philadelphia on June 24, 1948, he laid down the gauntlet: “Our peace, our prosperity, the very fate of freedom hangs in precarious balance.”
Photo by Fred Morgan/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images
Meanwhile, breakaway Democrat Henry Wallace (campaigning in North Carolina on August 31) launched the Progressive Party with the help of an underground clique of Communists.
AP Photo/Bill Chaplis
Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina led a southern revolt from the Democrats, launching the anti-Truman, anti–civil rights States’ Rights Democratic Party (the “Dixiecrats”) at a July 17 convention in Birmingham, Alabama. Thurmond’s message of white supremacy won him an immediate base across the South.
AP Photo
As election season opened in the spring of 1948, fear of a new apocalyptic war spread. The US military conducted atomic bomb tests in the Pacific.
Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum
The day before the final test shot, on May 15, the new nation of Israel declared its independence. That night, the new Israeli flag debuted in Washington and the first Arab-Israeli War began.
Bettmann/Getty Images
A month later, on the night Thomas Dewey won the GOP nomination, the Soviets blockaded west Berlin. The Berlin Airlift began, and the Americans and Soviets stood nose to nose in the heart of Europe. “I have a terrible feeling . . .” Truman wrote in his diary, “that we are very close to war.”
Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The end of World War II saw a radical shift in race politics, resulting in Truman’s historic civil rights programs and his desegregation of the military by executive order. On June 29, 1947, Truman became the first president to address the NAACP in a speech at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.
Photo by Abbie Rowe for the National Park Service. Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.
Truman’s civil rights program provoked furious pushback across the South. Prominent politicians and the Ku Klux Klan (at a 1948 cross burning) launched their own fight to keep their states segregated, to bar black Americans from voting, and to push Harry S. Truman out of office.
Photo12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Campaign season saw both continued prosperity and mass anxiety. On July 31, Truman and Dewey met in person for the only time during their campaigns at the dedication of Idlewild Airport in New York, while the largest-ever peacetime display of airpower thundered above.
Photo by Bill Sitler for United States Army Signal Corps. Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.
That same day, the sensational news broke that Communists had allegedly infiltrated American government; Alger Hiss, a former high-level State Department figure (testifying before a congressional committee), became the story’s central figure. Meanwhile, Henry Wallace claimed that Truman was leading the country to war with the Soviets.
AP Photo
Wallace is pictured with folk singer Pete Seeger (left). Running mate Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho appears in the photograph above Wallace’s head.
George Silk/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
In the fall of 1948, the two major candidates crisscrossed the nation by train. Truman was considered all but out of the race, yet his “Give ’em Hell, Harry” speeches drew shockingly large crowds.
Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum
All the major newspapers endorsed Dewey, and throughout Truman’s campaign, his relationship with the press grew increasingly bitter.
Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum
Around the time the photo of Dewey was taken, in Laramie, Wyoming, Newsweek published an elec
tion survey: fifty political writers were asked which candidate they thought would win, and all fifty chose Dewey.
Dean Conger/Corbis/Getty Images
In the final climactic week of the 1948 election season, Truman and Dewey both visited Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and New York, with Dewey following the president from city to city in a point-counterpoint political blowout. Both held final rallies at Madison Square Garden in New York (pictured: the scene before Truman’s speech on October 28).
United States Information Agency/PhotoQuest/Getty Images
On Election Day, the First Family cast their votes in their hometown of Independence, Missouri.
Photo by Vernon Galloway. Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.
That night, Americans caught the first-ever election-night television broadcast as CBS’s Quincy Howe reported on the returns.
CBS/Getty Images
So assured was a Republican victory, news outlets across America and Europe reported on November 3, 1948, that Dewey had been elected. An early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune declared “Dewey Defeats Truman” in a banner headline, and Truman famously held the newspaper up for photographers on November 4 while passing through St. Louis.
Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum
Following the most significant political upset in American history up to that time came the most lavish Inauguration Day party, on January 20, 1949. Truman and new Vice President Alben Barkley of Kentucky were all smiles (Margaret Truman is at far left).
Lisa Larsen/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Part IV
July–September 1948
The Campaigns
It will be the greatest campaign any President ever made. Win, lose, or draw, people will know where I stand.
—Harry Truman to his sister, Mary Jane, October 5, 1948
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“A Profound Sense of What’s Right and What’s Wrong”
FOR THE ROUGHLY 150 MILLION Americans in the summer of 1948, the first postwar presidential election was a landmark like none other. Anyone over the age of ten years old could vividly recall what life had been like during the Great Depression and during a war that had killed some 60 million human beings worldwide. Now, three years after the war’s end, a vast majority of Americans were seeing signs of prosperity, despite high prices on many consumer goods, and new innovations that pointed to a future where anything seemed possible—but only if humanity could keep World War III from destroying it all.
The economy of the United States had arguably never been so strong. Unemployment was just 3.6 percent. The construction industry built $7.7 billion worth of new homes in the first half of 1948—a record high. Since the beginning of World War II, stock prices of railroad companies, utilities, and industrials had roughly doubled on average. While inflation continued to worry everyday consumers (“The prices of food products have surged upward to the highest level in history,” according to a July 1948 report from Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers), the fact remained that the economy was robust and times were good.
For years, due to wartime rationing, consumer products of all kinds had been difficult to obtain. Now a new and uniquely American consumerism was emerging. Big supermarket chains like A&P and Safeway were opening superstores in cities and towns, while department stores like Marshall Field’s and Macy’s—the largest department store, which sold over $170 million worth of retail in 1947—were reaping profits. The most popular whiskey was Seagram’s, the most popular cigarette was Lucky Strike, and the most popular car brand was Chevrolet. The appetite for these products seemed insatiable.
Americans were particularly car crazy in the summer of 1948, and motorcycle crazy too. Ford unveiled the first all-new postwar model, the 1949 Ford, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on June 8, 1948. More than a hundred thousand orders came in during the next thirty days. Cadillac debuted the first tailfin on its 1948 line. A motorsport impresario by the name of “Big Bill” France founded a series of stock car races called NASCAR. In Southern California, a group of motorcycle fanatics founded a club called the Hells Angels.
The year 1948 saw the first flying machine to break the sound barrier, at an altitude of over seventy thousand feet—a jet called the Bell X-1 in the hands of test pilot Chuck Yeager. An inventor named Edwin H. Land had debuted the first instant camera—the Polaroid—which would go on sale later in 1948. Bell Laboratories unveiled the first transistor radios. The first bikini bathing suit appeared, named for the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. The first national television nightly news program aired—Camel Newsreel Theater, named for its sponsor, Camel cigarettes, the nation’s second-most-popular brand of smokes. Americans were fascinated with flying saucers. Babies were being born in record numbers. The professor of entomology and zoology Alfred Kinsey released his study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which “stirred up the greatest biological commotion in the U.S. since Darwin,” noted the August 2 issue of Life, the nation’s most popular magazine.
Offices were full of new inventions, like the Ediphone voice-recognition dictation device and the Remington Rand electric adding machine. Office buildings in some big cities had elevators that were no longer controlled by a man in a tie who stood inside the elevator car all day working the up/down lever, thanks to the Otis Electronic Signal Control. Explained Business Week in its July 10 issue: “You can now summon an elevator by simply touching a plastic arrow in the landing fixture.”
The most exciting new technology was, of course, the television. The president of RCA, David Sarnoff, declared in the summer of 1948 that the television was going to change American life as much as Henry Ford’s Model T had. “As television grows on an international scale,” Sarnoff wrote that summer, “it will rove the globe for programs and literally make all the world a stage, as Shakespeare envisaged it.” The applications of television cameras seemed limitless. Cameras could be mounted on the noses of “robot rockets,” Sarnoff claimed. TV could also be the greatest educational tool ever known.
Television’s first big test would be the 1948 election. For the first time, Americans would get to see their candidates in real time. They would be able to see famous political writers speaking, rather than just the words that thumped out of their typewriters, making the new media instantly and immeasurably powerful. Ultimately, television would be able to capture the human experience of political victory and defeat as Americans had never seen it before.
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The Truman campaign began in earnest with a meeting on the night of July 22, at 8 p.m., in the State Dining Room of the White House. Funneling in was a motley crew of Truman friends—hardly a big hitter among them. As the former secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described this bunch: “The political figures who surround the President . . . could all be blown out by one sure breath, as are candles on a birthday cake.”
Here was Attorney General Tom Clark of Texas—a jowly, cigar-wielding Dallas lawman. Here were the young liberal political advisers Oscar Ewing and Oscar Chapman. And here was Matt Connelly of Massachusetts, Truman’s appointments secretary. None of these men had ever held any major elected political office. The only man with any bona fide clout was Judge Sam Rosenman, the fedora-sporting New Dealer and speechwriter.
The first purpose of this meeting was the subject that drives all political campaigns: money. Who would lead the finance committee? Where would funding for the campaign come from? Truman’s daughter would later recall, “The lack of money in the party war chest was literally terrifying.” Five days before this July 22 meeting, the Republican National Committee had released a compendium of quotes from high-profile Democratic figures, who were all saying that Truman could not win, and this list was going to make raising money exceedingly difficult.
Former New Jersey governor Charles Edison: “Our governmental house is choked with litter and rubbish. It needs a thorough housecleaning from top to bottom.” Leon Henderson, chairman of the Americans for Democratic Acti
on: “To my second-hand knowledge he [Truman] has been advised by friends that he can’t win and that he will be charged with the disintegration of the Democratic Party.” Congressman Mendel Rivers of South Carolina: “Harry Truman is a dead bird.” Every one of these quotes came from the lips of a Democrat and landed in the ears of potential donors. How could the party raise money if insiders and would-be donors felt that the candidate had no chance?
Even in Truman’s own Jackson County, Missouri, voters had turned against him. “My brother Vivian . . . told me all about the situation politically in my home county,” Truman recorded in his diary. “I don’t see how it can be so bad—but it is.” According to the latest numbers from pollster Elmo Roper, 64 percent of the American electorate believed Thomas Dewey would be the next president, compared with 27 percent for Truman.
In late June, one Democratic Party donor—Thomas Buchanan of the Buchanan, Wallover & Barrickman law firm in Beaver, Pennsylvania—had sent in a $100 check with a letter that put the Democrats’ position into perspective. “I would like to take this opportunity to state that the party is in bad condition, particularly because we have a weak candidate and no clear policy which we can pursue . . . It is not easy to contribute to a campaign which under those circumstances has no possible chance of success.”