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

by A. J. Baime

  In the White House on the night of July 22, the gloom was palpable. When asked who might serve as finance chairman, no one stepped forward. Truman knew morale among his staff was ebbing fast. It would be an uphill battle to establish his legitimacy, given that he had not been elected to the presidency in the first place. “The greatest ambition Harry Truman had was to get elected in his own right,” Clark Clifford later recalled. “Every president who comes in as Vice President has this feeling. Truman felt it especially because he had been so criticized and deprecated.”

  The president decided it was time for a pep talk. “We are going to win,” he told those assembled in the White House that night. “I expect to travel all over the country and talk at every whistle-stop”—alluding to his successful speaking tour back in June. “We are going to be on the road most of the time from Labor Day to the end of the campaign. It’s going to be tough on everybody, but that’s the way it’s got to be. I know I can take it. I’m only afraid that I’ll kill some of my staff—and I like you all very much and I don’t want to do that.”

  Around this time, Truman met with members of the Democratic National Committee in the East Room of the White House, to talk over the campaign itinerary.

  “The situation isn’t as bad as the newspapers make it look,” Truman said. “It is my intention to go into every county in the United States if possible. I want to see the people. This is the only way to answer the Republicans.”

  Outwardly, Truman was ever the optimist. But he knew the challenges he faced. “It’s all so futile,” he wrote his sister. “Dewey, Wallace, the cockeyed Southerners, and then if I win—which I’m afraid I will—I’ll probably have a Russian war on my hands. Two wars are enough for anybody and I’ve had two [in the European and Pacific theaters of World War II].”

  His goal was to see the people, to explore the places where candidates typically did not go, and to talk to voters face-to-face from the back of a train car. The more places he ventured, the more people he could attempt to woo, and in the process, he could share the magic of the American presidency with everyday Americans. “I’m going to make it a rip-snorting, back-platform campaign to what Taft calls all the whistle stops, but I call them the heart of America,” he was quoted as saying in the summer of 1948. “When they count the whistle stops’ votes, Taft may be in for a big surprise. I think the whistle stops will make the difference between victory and defeat.”

  Campaigns are about ideas—but also about the machinery to communicate them. Truman had surrounded himself with a ragtag group of advisers who came mostly from legal backgrounds and were like-minded in their desire to continue the legacy of FDR’s New Deal. For months, these advisers had formed a think tank that met on Monday nights in the apartment of Oscar Ewing in the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Ewing was a Harvard Law man and, until a year earlier, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his group consisted of seven or eight men, all with different areas of expertise, from civil rights to economics.

  “We would meet at six o’clock for dinner,” Ewing recalled. “My secretary would call all the members beforehand to find out if they were coming and what they would like for dinner.” On most nights, steak and potatoes were on the menu. “I was their link with the President,” recorded Clark Clifford, the rising star of the bunch.

  In 1948 no one had the president’s ear on political issues as much as Clifford, whose circuitous path to the White House was as surprising as Truman’s. Clifford had been a trial lawyer in St. Louis when he joined the US Navy during the war. A friend of his, James K. Vardaman Jr., was a naval aide to Truman and was going on leave. Clifford ended up filling in for Vardaman at the end of the war, just in time to experience the atomic bombings of Japan from within the White House inner circle. Clifford had no political background but immediately emerged as a sharp thinker and a marvelous communicator, and with his handsome face and well-tailored pinstripe suits he was straight out of central casting. By 1947, newspapers were calling Clifford the “White House Wonder” and the “Capital’s Golden Boy.”

  Within days of Truman’s nomination, the Oscar Ewing group—via Clifford—began to funnel its ideas directly into the Oval Office. These ideas were intended to supplement the policies that Truman had been pushing since the end of World War II. The ultimate thrust would be FDR-driven progressive ideology, with the recognition that a reactionary return to 1920s conservatism would be disastrous in a country that had been newly reborn after the war.

  As for organization, the Democratic National Committee moved into new headquarters in New York City a week after the Philadelphia convention. The Republicans had their headquarters in the capital city. The Democrats preferred New York—the biggest transportation hub, home to the advertising industry, and an important media base.

  Starting Monday, July 26, movers hauled desks, telephones, typewriters, and teletype machines into a fifty-room office on the Biltmore Hotel’s fourth floor, atop Grand Central Terminal on Forty-Second Street. Senator Howard McGrath of Rhode Island was a rookie boss of the Democratic National Committee, while the office would be managed by Neale Roach, who had been the chief organizer of the Democratic National Convention. From the get-go, Roach could see that spirit was lacking in the new headquarters. “Every morning when I would go into the office,” he recalled, “I would notice that these girls on the reception desk looked like they didn’t even have as much pep as somebody you would meet at a morgue. I got worried about it, because the impression was just one of defeat all the way through.”

  “The pressure was increasingly heavy,” recalled the national committee’s publicist Jack Redding, who would practically live among the thundering typewriters and telephones in the Biltmore offices in the months before the election. “Many days I didn’t leave the building, eating my meals either in the [hotel] restaurant or at my desk . . . I began to lose weight, as well as sleep, and developed a fine set of dark circles under my eyes.”

  The Democratic National Committee’s job was to map out the political territory, identify and cultivate influencers in every county in the country, and raise the funds necessary to conduct the candidate’s national campaign. “Meetings were held at the White House at least once a week, sometimes three or four times a week,” recalled Redding. “The White House meetings were concerned with campaign strategy.”

  One day at the Biltmore headquarters, Senator McGrath was speaking on the telephone while a potential campaign-finance chairman sat outside waiting to meet with him. This was Louis A. Johnson of Virginia—an attorney and former assistant secretary of war. By the time McGrath could finish his phone call and summon his guest, Johnson had grown ornery. He stormed in and halted in military style (he had served as a colonel in World War I).

  “Young man,” Johnson said to Senator McGrath, who was twelve years Johnson’s junior, “I didn’t come here to cool my heels waiting for you. I have important things to do. I came here to help the Democratic Party. I have nothing further to say to you. Good-bye!”

  As Johnson headed for the door, McGrath yelled, “Come back! Come back here!” When Johnson paused, McGrath said, “I don’t know what you’re shouting about, Colonel, but if you think I insulted you, let me tell you something. I had Jake More, the state chairman of Iowa, on the telephone when you were announced. Ed Kelly [former Democratic mayor] of Chicago was waiting for me on another line. I don’t know what you think, but in my opinion, I could not fail to complete those calls. I want you to know I’m working for the Democratic Party, too; and I’m not getting a salary to do it.”

  Johnson pivoted and took a seat. Soon it was settled: Johnson would be the new finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee. A staunch believer in Truman’s approach to military expenditures—to keep the country strong while holding the line on spending, so federal funds would be available for other programs—Johnson had his own personal desire to see Truman succeed. He wanted to be the next secretary of defense. If he could help win Truman t
he election, he hoped the president would give him the job. Johnson’s fund-raising would be crucial to the campaign’s success, and to his own ambitions.

  Along with organization and money, knowledge was key—knowledge of the communities where Truman would be campaigning, knowledge of how campaign issues affected localities across the country. Earlier in the year, the Oscar Ewing think tank came up with the idea to create a campaign research unit to unearth facts, figures, trends, and local issues that people cared about, in every town where the president would be speaking. One member of the Ewing group, David Morse, suggested an old friend named Bill Batt to head up the unit. Batt was in business in Philadelphia and was looking to get into government work, with an eye toward a future congressional run.

  Bespectacled and brilliant, William Batt came to Washington, where he met with Senator McGrath and Clark Clifford. “They asked me to go up in a back room and work up a budget, which I did and it came to about eighty thousand dollars, if I remember correctly, to run an operation of the size they wanted for the . . . months between then and the election day.”

  Batt found office space on Dupont Circle near the Hamilton National Bank building. It was “miserably noisy,” Batt recalled, as it was next to a construction site where the city was digging a roadway underpass. But it was affordable. Batt began recruiting. “We were looking for generalists,” he recorded. “We were looking for exceedingly knowledgeable guys who knew the issues before the country and who were also good at research and were good at writing.”

  For a deputy, Batt hired Dr. Johannes Hoeber, a European-born political scientist who had been working for the city of Philadelphia. “We had been told right at the beginning that this Research Division was to operate in the strictest anonymity,” noted Hoeber, “that even its existence should not be publicly known, mainly for reasons of security.”

  For living space, the researchers were given rooms at the national club of the American Veterans Committee on New Hampshire Avenue, around the corner from their office space. From July on, remembered Hoeber, “we lived, literally, a rather monastic life, locked up in this men’s club on the third floor, almost dormitory style rooms . . . We were on tap 24 hours a day, and when we went from our office around the corner to the AVC club where we lived, to eat our dinner, the work just went on.”

  All of Truman’s campaign advisers were thrilled with his performance at the Democratic National Convention. As Bill Batt put it in a July 22 memo to Clark Clifford, Truman had to show the American people “his courage, his coolness, his determination, his sincerity, and his fighting spirit—qualities he demonstrated in his magnificent acceptance speech at Philadelphia.” That set a tone, they believed, that the president had to continue going forward—bold, fearless, and relentlessly aggressive.

  Soon after the Philadelphia convention, Truman received a visit from Oscar Ewing. The Democrats had adopted a strong civil rights platform in Philadelphia, Ewing said. There was no turning back. He argued that Truman had to act now, to take the civil rights program to its logical next step. If he did not, Ewing intimated, voters would see him as waffling on the issue. If civil rights was to be an anchor of the Democratic platform, why wait?

  Truman inquired exactly what Ewing was suggesting, and Ewing dropped a bombshell: The president should desegregate the military by executive order. If Truman asked the Eightieth Congress for legislation, he could lose, and that would be that. Nothing could make a statement about the future of race in America more than desegregation of the military. And by doing so by executive order, Truman could steer the black vote to the Democratic Party, perhaps for years to come.

  The president considered the matter. It would be a dangerous move. The Southern Democrats had bolted the party, and this would be like slamming the door on them on their way out. How would America’s military leaders respond? And the soldiers themselves? Yet it was the right thing to do, Truman believed. He decided to push forward, and he handed the mechanics of the job over to Clark Clifford, who handed it over to his assistant, George Elsey.

  Normally, a White House staffer named Philleo Nash handled such matters, as Nash was the president’s special assistant on minority affairs. Elsey went hunting through the executive mansion for Nash, only to find that he was on vacation.

  “My gosh,” Elsey told Clifford, “Nash is away and he’s the only one that knows anything about this. This is his bailiwick—it’s his department.”

  Deep in northern Wisconsin, Nash was on a fishing trip when he got a phone call at his hotel summoning him back to Washington. “[I] jumped on the night train,” he recalled, “and was in Washington the next day.” He arrived on a Friday, and by Sunday night, two executive orders were drafted and finalized. Truman was ready to pull the trigger.

  On the morning of Monday, July 26, reporters were busy out in the field as the first day of the emergency special session of Congress began. But news of two executive orders quickly spread across Washington and beyond. Truman’s Executive Order 9980 created a system of “fair employment practices” within the federal government, “without discrimination because of race, color, religion, or national origin.” Simply stated: Any American who paid taxes would be as eligible for federal employment as any other, no matter the color of their skin.

  The second executive order—9981—was the historic one. With the swipe of a pen, Truman desegregated the United States military. The move was entirely unexpected; it “caught almost everyone off guard,” recalled Clark Clifford.

  Soon after issuing the presidential decrees, Truman appeared before Congress to talk about his plan for civil rights legislation. He got a cool reception; some members of Congress refused to stand when he entered the Capitol. All he wanted to fight for, Truman said, was the ideals expressed in the US Constitution. “I believe that it is necessary to enact the laws that I have recommended in order to make the guarantees of the Constitution real and vital,” he said.

  The question on everyone’s lips was about Truman’s motivation. Was he a man on a moral crusade? Or was he after votes? Or both? The president knew how unlikely it was for him to be making such earthshaking decisions in the first place. He could easily recall his life before politics. Now he was the central figure of dramas that went to the core of what it meant to be an American. “I think he was motivated by a profound sense of what’s right and what’s wrong,” observed Truman speechwriter Charlie Murphy, “and not by politics.” Truman was from a family that sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, from a family that had been slave owners, from a family where the word nigger could be spoken at the dinner table. “All I can say is that I’m sure this is what he thought was right,” Murphy said of Executive Order 9981. “His views on the subject, as you may know, did not agree with those of other members of his family, including his mother.”

  Shock spread through the offices of members of Congress from the South, who immediately began planning a filibuster on the Senate floor. The talkathon began on July 29, with twenty-one southern senators, one after the next, teeing off on Harry Truman, beginning with John C. Stennis, a Jim Crow zealot from Mississippi. The filibuster got nowhere, but it proved that the Southern Democrats were going to continue to turn up the heat on Truman, right up until Election Day.

  * * *

  Roughly two weeks later, the Eightieth Congress’s special “Turnip Day” session ended, with almost no new legislation on the books. Congress approved a $65 million loan to create a permanent home for the United Nations, in Manhattan. Two bills reached the president’s desk—one on housing, one on inflation. While Truman called them inadequate, he signed them both, and the fight over the special session’s legacy began. At the conclusion of the session, a reporter asked the president, “Would you say it was a do nothing session, Mr. President?”

  “I think that’s a good name for the 80th Congress.”

  The name stuck, and Truman would be hammering on the “do-nothing Congress” for the next three months.

  Truman la
ter admitted that he knew Congress would get almost nothing accomplished in the special session. “I felt justified in calling the Congress back to Washington to prove to the people whether the Republican platform really meant anything or not,” he wrote in his memoirs. Republicans attacked the administration, saying the special session was a waste of money for American taxpayers. Republican senator Styles Bridges called Truman “a petulant Ajax from the Ozarks.” One columnist, Fred Othman of the Atlanta Constitution, described the session as “the most expensive advertising campaign in the history of the vegetable business,” as Americans were now desirous of turnips as never before.

  “They sure are in a stew and mad as wet hens,” Truman wrote Bess in Missouri, regarding the “ ‘Hypercrits’ known as Republicans.” “If I can make them madder, maybe they’ll do the job the old gods used to put on the Greeks and Romans . . . My best to everybody, kiss my baby [Margaret], lots of love to you, Harry.”

  17

  “What Exciting Times You Are Having!”

  THE MONTH OF JULY FOUND Thomas Dewey at Dapplemere, his fifty-two-cow dairy farm outside Pawling, New York. Dewey had owned this farm since 1938 (he’d put $3,000 down on the $30,000 property). He roamed the rolling hills with his two boys, making campfires and cooking eggs over open flames in a cast-iron skillet. “I am having a ‘holiday’ which consists of about two-thirds work at my farm,” Dewey wrote one friend. Meanwhile his press team made the most of his vacation, putting out statements on the candidate’s farming expertise, about the Dewey farm’s “principal innovations in artificial insemination and pen stabling,” on how the bacteria count in the milk at Dewey’s farm was “the lowest of any of the dairy farms in the State.” Dewey needed to keep farmers voting Republican, as they traditionally did.