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

by A. J. Baime

  He would not be wearing Indian headdresses or ten-gallon hats. No gimmickry, no wisecracks, no policy bashing. Just unity.

  * * *

  Many of the journalists traveling with Dewey had also ridden aboard the Truman train, and they were struck by the contrast between the two campaigns. At overnight stops on the Dewey train, riders were invited to leave their laundry in marked bags in the train hallway. It was picked up by porters and delivered clean the next morning. No such luck aboard the Truman Special. Dewey speeches were mimeographed and distributed to the press well in advance, and the candidate did not deviate from them; most of Truman’s speeches were impromptu.

  Dewey strove to be high-toned and dignified in his public presentations, his speeches a mix of Lincolnesque rhetoric and Madison Avenue slickness. Truman, noted one journalist, “spoke the language of Robespierre in the mild tones of the Kiwanis Club of Independence, Mo.” Dewey’s appearances were perfectly choreographed, and held generally only after 9 a.m. Truman was not above speaking in his pajamas, sometimes in the rain at sunrise.

  On Truman’s train, it was whiskey and poker. On Dewey’s, martinis and bridge. Truman’s inner circle liked to crack jokes at Dewey’s expense (a common quip was, “You really have to get to know Dewey to dislike him”). On Dewey’s train, the name Truman was rarely spoken at all.

  “The Truman show was threadbare and visibly unsuccessful, getting hardly more response than politeness demanded,” columnist Joseph Alsop wrote from aboard the Dewey Victory Special. “The Dewey show was opulent. It was organized down to the last noise-making device. It exuded confidence. And it got a big hand. The contest was really too uneven . . . One felt a certain sympathy for the obstinately laboring President.”

  On both campaign trains, however, riders were inevitably vexed by the endless miles, the galaxies of faces at each stop, the shrill whistles of train porters, the uncomfortable humidity of the train cars. Aboard Dewey’s train, Frank McNaughton of Time magazine captured the experience in a cable he sent out at one stop in Wyoming.

  Life begins at nine o’clock with a five-minute layover at some Tanktown . . . There are about a hundred out to see the candidate . . . The loudspeaker just broadcast, ‘All interested in seeing Governor Dewey please walk to the rear of the train.’ You listen to the cut and dried back platform speech on the wonders of the country, the future of the west, unity, and all the stock phrases until at each stop you are ready to scream for mercy. Thus it goes all day long. At night stops, you hustle into a hotel room . . . and try along with a hundred others to get a crack at a shower bath, a bit of dinner, a bit of battery fluid for your dynamo, before covering the major show. You wave and flirt with the girls along the parade route, but your heart isn’t in it. Anything to relieve the boredom . . .

  Winslow, Arizona. Flagstaff, Ash Fork, Prescott, Phoenix. Dewey stumped for Republican members of Congress, touching on issues without making commitments, always ending with: “And now, I want to introduce you to Mrs. Dewey.” The crowds seemed perfectly satisfied. The Republican National Committee’s Barak Mattingly summed up the Dewey campaign with five simple words: “Things are looking good everywhere.”

  * * *

  In mid-September, from the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, Strom Thurmond announced the Dixiecrats’ campaign itinerary. There would be no trip to California, no visit to Chicago or Boston, no appearance anyplace that would not welcome Thurmond’s pro-segregation message. Thurmond was headed back to the nation’s capital, then to Baltimore, followed by a tobacco festival in La Plata, Maryland, then on to Virginia and North Carolina.

  From his office, Thurmond read a statement for reporters, admonishing Truman for not campaigning in South Carolina. “I had hoped,” Thurmond said, “that he would come to our State and explain to our people why he saw fit to betray the principles of Jefferson and abandon the historic position of the Democratic Party on States’ Rights by sending his so-called civil rights message to Congress.”

  Thurmond’s campaign still stood on a single-issue platform: the ability of states to make their own laws regarding race and segregation. He took no stance on the Berlin crisis, nor on inflation, the Taft-Hartley law, or housing or tax reform. He had huge support in his home state, where George Gallup had him running at 52 percent of the vote as of mid-September, with Truman in second at 26 percent. Numerous newspapers had embraced Thurmond, papers like the Charleston News and Courier in South Carolina, which defended “the white man’s party,” and the Nashville Banner of Tennessee, which stated in an editorial, “The Democratic South finally is moving to cleanse the party temple. As did Hercules, at work on the Augean stables, it can be done in a day. That day is November 2.”

  Thus far, the polls outside of Thurmond’s base showed little enthusiasm for him. In Texas, where he had hoped his campaign would gain traction, Gallup had him with only 6 percent of the vote. In Kentucky—another state where Thurmond was hoping to do well—Gallup gauged him at only 5 percent. In North Carolina, he was running at 13 percent. The numbers were far below what the Dixiecrats had hoped. Only in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and potentially Florida was the Thurmond phenomenon catching on.

  For Democrats, however, Thurmond represented a threat that went beyond the electoral votes in 1948. What would be the ultimate consequences of the southern revolt?

  For the first time in well over half a century, the GOP was seeing real opportunity in these southern states. One document that began to circulate among Truman operatives in September was a memo called “Analysis of the Southern Democratic Revolt.” It predicted that the Dixiecrats were going to cost Truman a sum of thirty-two electoral votes, from Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina. Beyond 1948, however, it appeared that Republican candidates could gain a foothold in these states.

  In North Carolina, which the GOP had carried only once going back to 1872, “the Republicans [have] an excellent chance to capture 14 electoral votes,” the analysis concluded. In Florida the election was “considered fertile territory for a Republican campaign.” The entire region—what had been the Solid South of the Democratic Party—could present a new conservative GOP alignment going forward. The analysis concluded:

  A grass roots sentiment against Truman and the National Democratic Party exists. A part of the sentiment is based on the racial issue . . . The situation indicates both a regional party and a fight by the Republicans to gain a permanent foothold. The day calls for bold action. Alabama and Mississippi Democrats have broken a tradition of 80 years. If the Republican party campaigns in North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida, there may well be the commencement of new party alignments in the United States.

  (That realignment would eventually happen, but not until the 1960s and ’70s. No evidence exists that Thurmond understood the irony of his campaign: He wasn’t creating a lasting new party; he was setting up a new power base for Republicans—and would eventually become one, himself, in 1964.)

  Thurmond arrived in Washington, DC, by train with his wife, Jean, on the final day of September. Trailed by a noticeably small group of reporters, he lunched at the Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from the White House, then made a symbolic visit to the Alexandria, Virginia, home of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Thurmond next visited Gunston Hall, the home of the founding father George Mason. The next day, he hit Baltimore, where only about a thousand people were present in a theater that could accommodate twenty-seven hundred. He accused all three of his opposing candidates of promulgating a false message that was “spreading like wildfire,” of “dishonest bargaining” for votes.

  “In their traitorous bids for power, the three candidates—Dewey, Truman and Wallace—have endorsed force bills which they falsely call ‘civil rights,’” Thurmond said. “We hereby put those three politicians on notice. American democracy cannot be bartered away like piece goods, and the Presidency of the United States is not for sale!”

  * * *

  “All agree that
the Russians appear anxious to settle the real issues between us,” Henry Wallace told an audience from atop a stage in Rochester, New York, on September 17. “I regretfully predict that the present negotiations between the United States and Russia will be interrupted by another war scare, unless the American people say ‘no’ in such uncertain terms that the negotiations will not dare to fail.” The sponsors of World War III were “few,” said Wallace, “but they are in the seats of power.”

  While Truman and Dewey both headed toward California, and Thurmond appeared in the nation’s capital, Wallace took his message to New England and then to the Pacific Northwest, in an attempt to ratchet up publicity. But he faced surprising amounts of vitriol in places where he did not expect to find it. In Boston, a parade of marchers turned out carrying signs reading WHY NOT CONDEMN RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM TOO? The taunts of “Go back to Russia!” continued. Due to the threat of another outbreak of violence, Wallace required forty bodyguards when he attended a Boston Braves game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Sitting in the stands, he could hear the fans booing and hissing at him.

  The crowds attending his rallies were beginning to thin, and Wallace’s tone began to change. He was nearing the end of one of the longest presidential campaigns any candidate had ever run, and he was growing exhausted. The people working against him were no longer just his opponents. They were his “enemies,” he said. His message became less about policy and more about imminent calamity. The banks, the major corporations, the major political parties, all the powers that be were bullying the American public into war with the Soviet Union, and getting away with it, he believed.

  “Their real intention is to surrender this country,” he told a crowd in Portland, Oregon, “its resources—its people—our earnings—our children—to a chosen few who will march us either to slavery or to war—or to both.”

  Wallace’s rhetoric was laced with an increasingly spiteful tone toward Truman—the man who had usurped Wallace’s vice presidency during the 1944 election, the president who in 1946 had fired Wallace from the cabinet. Truman would “live in history as the worst defeated Democratic candidate who ever sought the Presidency,” Wallace said.

  The people working with Wallace were becoming more in tune with his idiosyncratic thought processes. He could steer from political policy into the metaphysical and back again seamlessly, though not always with convincing effect. “Wallace did not come without his own problems,” remembered John Abt. “He was, quite literally, a mystic, and it was often impossible to appeal to his practical sense.” One campaign staffer recalled Wallace talking about some issue and interrupting himself “to talk about the emanations he was receiving from the sky.” When this staffer approached campaign manager Beanie Baldwin about the conversation, Baldwin said, “Of course. Didn’t you know that about Wallace?”

  As the election drew closer, the most uncomfortable truth about Wallace’s campaign continued to play out before the American public. Wallace had said over and over again that he was not a Communist, and that he had no designs to inject Soviet influence into American policy. But the evidence linking his campaign to Communist causes had become blatantly obvious. At one point the New York Times ran the Communist Party USA’s 1948 political platform and Wallace’s Progressive Party platform side by side, to illustrate their striking similarities. Commented the writer William Henry Chamberlin: “It could reasonably be suspected that the same brain trust composed both.”

  “There was no secret about Communist support,” Abt later said. “It can be said that the Communists did the bulk of the nitty-gritty work in the campaign and that, without them, there would have been no campaign to speak of . . . Wallace and [his running mate Glen] Taylor knew this, never tried to hide it and couldn’t if they wanted to.”

  Abt, like many in the organization, looked at the matter almost patriotically. “Why shouldn’t the Communists have every right—the same as all other U.S. citizens—to participate openly in a political campaign? Communists throughout Europe and Japan and Latin America were a legitimate part of the political landscape, winning seats in parliament and holding offices in city halls around the world.”

  Not a single person of public renown had gone on record saying that Wallace could win. His candidacy had become one not of hope but of protest. His staff was struggling to get his name on state ballots. Wallace was expecting his best results in New York, California, and Illinois, the states with the largest cities (and largest concentration of Communists and far-left-wing voters). But in Illinois, a state electoral board had voted to strike his name from the ballot. Abt had filed a lawsuit that, within a month, would reach all the way to the US Supreme Court (Wallace would lose in a 6–3 vote).

  Wallace soldiered on, but he was becoming increasingly isolated. Even his wife refused to remain by his side on the campaign trail. She remained secluded at their farm in South Salem, New York. “She has always been very violently anti-communist,” Wallace explained, “and I suppose she picks up gossip from her lady friends who are usually quite conservative.” Added Abt: “Mrs. Wallace was particularly suspicious of Beanie Baldwin and myself.”

  Westbrook Pegler continued to print acidic attacks on Wallace. On September 21, Pegler claimed in his column to have obtained two more of the guru letters that Wallace had allegedly penned to Nicholas Roerich years earlier. “I am now ready,” Pegler wrote, “to take care of Wallace any time he dares to deny that he wrote this historic nonsense.” Pegler quoted these humiliating letters copiously, including this line: “I have hard fighting ahead which I can survive only by keeping close to the great ones.” By this time Wallace was close to almost no one. All the powerful figures of his past—from Eleanor Roosevelt to the powerhouses of the New Deal to Harry Truman himself—had abandoned him.

  24

  “You Will Be Choosing a Way of Life for Years to Come”

  ONE NIGHT ABOARD THE Ferdinand Magellan after another grueling day of whistle-stops, Truman sat reading over a speech he would be making in Denver the following day—a speech that would be aired nationwide on radio. The clatter of rail wheels formed a background drumbeat. Bess was in the train car’s galley talking over the menu for the next day’s meals (she was on a low-salt diet).

  “It was a typical Truman family evening,” recalled Margaret, who was sitting across from her father, “unchanged by the admittedly unique circumstances surrounding it. We were hurtling into the climax of the wildest presidential campaign in history. My father was fighting for his political life, and for something even more important—his political self-respect as a man and President. Yet the atmosphere in the Ferdinand Magellan was calm, tranquil to the point of serenity.”

  The train would be stopping at 11:05 p.m. in Junction City, Kansas, where Truman would make another whistle-stop speech. Sitting quietly in his chair—probably clutching a bourbon and water—his eyes rose from the page he was reading to the speedometer mounted on the wall right above Margaret’s head.

  “Take a look at that thing,” Truman said.

  Margaret turned and looked. The speedometer read 105 mph. “Wow,” she said, concern clouding her face. She moved over to the window to look out at the blur of darkness—the vast Kansas prairie at night—rushing by.

  Truman said, “Do you know what would happen if that engineer had to make a sudden stop?” He paused. “If he had to stop suddenly, we would mash those sixteen cars between us and the [locomotive] engine into junk. Don’t say a word to your mother. I don’t want her to get upset.”

  The door opened and press secretary Charlie Ross walked in. Truman had known Ross since grade school; Charlie had in fact been valedictorian of Truman’s graduating class at Independence High School in 1901. Now, forty-seven years later, Ross was one of Truman’s most trustworthy advisers. He wanted to know how the president was doing with the Denver speech. Truman said it was fine, then he said, “Charlie, send someone to tell that engineer there’s no need to get us to Denver at this rate of speed. Eighty miles an hour i
s good enough for me.”

  The next morning, the Trumans awoke and looked out their windows to see stunning views of the Rocky Mountains. “We arrived in Denver at 8:50 a.m.,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “Dad made a speech to about 25,000 people after a parade with thousands of people on the street.” On the following night, in a national radio speech from within Colorado’s State Capitol building, Truman threw his campaign into the next gear. From here on out, there would be more anger, more sarcasm, more all-out attack on the “do nothing” Eightieth Congress.

  “Election day this year, your choice will not be merely between political parties,” he said, with Colorado governor William Lee Knous standing beside him. “You will be choosing a way of life for years to come. This is a fateful election. On it will depend your standard of living and the economic independence of your community.” The Republicans were “puppets of big business,” “the same breed that gave you the worst depression in history.”

  “Today,” he told his crowd, “I want to talk to you about what the Republican Congress has been doing to you, and to your families, and to your country.” Over and over, he accused the Republican Congress of selling out the American people to the “profiteers.” Six times, Truman denounced Wall Street. If the Republican Congress was not stopped, he said, it was going to turn the western part of the country into “an economic colony of Wall Street.” If the Republican Congress was not stopped, he said, it would destroy the West’s natural resources—its forests, its water.

  His message in Denver aimed to incite anger and perhaps stoke fear. “We shall have to fight the undercover Republican sabotage of the West,” Truman railed.