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

by A. J. Baime

  Whistle-stops brought the train into small towns that looked like scenes from an old western movie. “I remember we stopped at one little place,” recalled Donald Dawson. “There must have been 200 or 300 people there . . . A cowboy was on a bucking horse showing off for the crowd and trying to act smart.” Truman finished his impromptu talk, climbed off the train platform, and approached the man. Holding the horse by the head, he opened its mouth, as only a seasoned farmer would be able to do.

  “Your horse is eight years old and he’s not a very good horse,” the president joked.

  The crowd roared with laughter as the man sheepishly turned and rode away.

  Truman did not mention civil rights in Texas, but his integrated audiences spoke for him. Small numbers of black Americans showed up to hear him speak. At one whistle-stop, Truman shook the hand of a black woman, ignoring the boos from hostile whites. “In some towns,” remembered Dawson, “they didn’t even want the black voters to come down to the train. We just told them they were going to come. The President wanted them there.”

  On Sunday, September 26, John Nance Garner—former vice president under FDR—hosted the Truman campaign in tiny Uvalde, Texas. When Truman arrived, a marching band played for him and four thousand citizens turned out—at 5 a.m. “Cactus Jack” Garner hosted what Margaret called “the most tremendous breakfast in the history of the Truman family.” There was white-winged dove, bacon, ham, fried chicken, scrambled eggs, rice in gravy, hot biscuits, local honey, and peach preserves. Truman gave Garner a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. “Medicine,” the president said, “only to be used in case of snakebites.”

  In Bonham, Texas, the hometown of Sam Rayburn, the congressman and former Speaker of the House arranged a reception with the current Texas governor, Beauford Jester, who had courageously come out in support of Truman’s civil rights efforts. In between handshakes and another parade, Truman met aboard the train with the ambassador to the Soviet Union, Walter Bedell Smith, who had flown in to confer with the president about the emergency in Berlin. When asked if there was going to be war, Smith answered, “That question is too deep for me to answer.” By the time Truman made it to the stage that night in the hamlet of Bonham, twenty-five thousand people were out in the streets to hear Truman blast the Dewey campaign for serving up “unity” speeches without defining what he meant by the term.

  “If we did have unity,” Truman asked, “what kind would it be?” He answered his own question: “It would be unity in giving tax relief to the rich at the expense of the poor . . . Unity in refusing to give aid to our schools . . . Unity in letting prices go sky high in order to protect excessive profits . . . Unity in whittling away all the benefits of the New Deal.”

  By the time the Truman Special crossed the Oklahoma border, Truman had given twenty-two speeches in Texas, most of them extemporaneously. The Texas visit had been riotously successful and the campaign was depending on the state’s twenty-three electoral votes, but once again, news came in that the money had run out. “We were headed for Oklahoma City,” recorded correspondent Robert Nixon. “There was a lot of oil wealth aboard. The Democratic Party was down to its last cent . . . Word got around that we were going to have to call off the campaign trip. The train would be broken up, and we would have to make our way back to Washington on our own. That’s how desperate it was.”

  The socialite Perle Mesta, known as “the hostess with the mostest” for the parties she threw in Washington, DC, was aboard. She went into the bar car where the wealthy oil men were drinking cocktails and made an announcement: The campaign was running out of cash. Mesta waved a check of her own. “And to keep this from happening,” she said, “here’s my check for $5,000.”

  Donors pulled out their checkbooks. The train was able to continue forward. But for how long, no one could say.

  In Oklahoma City—the last major stop of this cross-country trip—Truman arrived late for his speech. “The President and everybody else piled off of the train into cars at the station,” recalled one of the newspapermen on board. “We had motorcycle police and we went roaring through downtown Oklahoma City at 80 miles an hour, sirens screaming. Why somebody wasn’t killed you often wonder. We roared into the fair grounds with dust flying, brakes screeching, and tires skidding.” Onstage, Truman took aim at his opponents again. The Republicans had attacked him relentlessly for his “red herring” comment, claiming that he was responsible for Communists who had infiltrated American government.

  I should like the American people to consider the damage that is being done to our national security by irresponsible persons who place their own political interests above the security of the Nation. I regret to say that there are some people in the Republican Party who are trying to create the false impression that communism is a powerful force in American life. These Republicans know that this is not true. The time has come when we should take a frank and earnest look at the record about communism and our national security . . .

  Our Government is not endangered by Communist infiltration . . . The FBI and our other security forces are capable, informed, and alert . . . The Republicans ought to realize that their failure to deal with the big practical issues of American life, such as housing, price control, and education, is too plain to be hidden by any smoke screen. They ought to realize that their reckless tactics are not helping our national security; they are hurting our national security. I am forced to the conclusion that Republican leaders are thinking more about the November election than about the welfare of this great country.

  Eighteen times, Truman was interrupted by applause from an audience of roughly twenty thousand people. When it was over, he headed back to his train. But the Truman Special was going nowhere. The Democratic National Committee had spent the campaign’s last funds on the Oklahoma City radio broadcast. “We ran out of money, and we didn’t have enough to get the train out of the station,” Truman later explained. “I had to get on the phone and raise the money to get out of there.”

  Consternation spread through the train cars as the president of the United States made phone calls. His staff joined in. It was not only money that was short. The staffers were out of energy also. Clark Clifford called the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, from Oklahoma City, saying that he was “ready to crawl into a hole and die, but working on a second wind.” On the final night aboard the train on this campaign swing, Clifford’s assistant George Elsey wrote that he was “more dead than alive.”

  The Truman Special finally pulled into Union Station in the nation’s capital at 10 a.m. on October 2. Another marching band. Another parade. Truman’s campaign swing had made for endless newsprint, but few believed it had done the candidate any good. On the day the president returned to Washington, the nation’s most influential newspaper—the New York Times—came out in favor of Dewey. The Times had endorsed only three Republicans in the past seventeen presidential elections and had gone against Dewey four years earlier. On this same day, the betting commissioner in Truman’s home state of Missouri, James J. Carroll, set the odds of Truman winning at 15 to 1.

  When the First Family arrived at the White House—then under construction and filled with scaffolding—the British ambassador to the United States, Sir Oliver Franks, was waiting for the president, wanting to debate solutions for the Berlin emergency. For Truman there would be no rest. The First Lady and the First Daughter went to their rooms and collapsed. They had just a few days to rest before their final campaign trip aboard the Ferdinand Magellan—this time across the northern United States.

  “It’s all over,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “Until next week!”

  Part V

  Election Climax

  For six to eight weeks the voters had been increasingly aware that something out of the ordinary was going on . . . It was so far from the ordinary that every rule in the lexicon was violated, political contradictions became the order of the day, and all laws of human nature blew sky high.

  —​Robe
rt C. Albright, Washington Post, October 31, 1948

  26

  “This Was the Worst Mistake of the Truman Campaign”

  THE GLAMOUR OF POLITICAL SPARRING in Los Angeles, Truman’s thrill ride through Texas, the sense that the Republicans were about to take power for the first time in sixteen years—the nation was in the grips of election fever as never before. “Beyond any election in the nation’s history, the verdict . . . will monopolize the interest of the world,” wrote columnist John G. Harris in the Boston Daily Globe. “Many nations feel their destiny, too, is involved.”

  The 1948 campaign featured some historic firsts. There was the surging power of the pollster. The newly born television pundit. One in eight US families now owned a TV. Radio was ubiquitous as never before, even in rural backwaters. Circulation of daily weekday newspapers was well over fifty-two million, the highest in the history of any nation. Madison Avenue advertising agencies were richer and more powerful than ever. Never had candidates for major office had so many weapons at their disposal, so many ways to spread their truths and falsehoods and to spin the words of their opponents.

  Both major parties were in the process of painful rebirth—Dewey leading the charge to liberalize the GOP, and Truman leading his own charge to keep the Democratic Party from coming undone. The fate of the Jews in the Middle East, the fate of African Americans in the South, the fate of helpless war refugees in Palestine and all over Europe, the emergency in Berlin, the new Cold War, fear of Communism abroad, fear of Communism at home, the threat of atomic bombs—all of it seemed wrapped up in the ’48 election.

  The irony remained that—as fiercely dedicated as both major candidates were to their fight against the other—their platforms remained similar. They clashed on tax cuts and the Taft-Hartley labor law. But they agreed on increased government spending for Social Security and education. Both supported the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan—the overriding internationalist concept that the United States had a duty to provide world economic and moral leadership. Both supported a strong stand against the Soviet Union and a bipartisan foreign policy. Both supported programs to root out Communist conspirators at home without employing “thought police” tactics and the outlawing of political beliefs in a free society. Both wanted to raise the minimum wage, to use federal funds to confront the housing crisis and clear urban slums, and to develop hydroelectric power.

  Both Truman and Dewey supported the partition of Palestine and the formation of a Jewish state. Both supported immigration reform—the admission into the United States of “displaced persons,” refugees of war and from politically unstable nations. Both supported civil rights programs.

  In terms of policy, the Eightieth Congress clashed with many of these ideas. But for the two candidates, the most obvious thing that separated them was that one was considered a shoo-in and one, by public opinion, had no chance. The choice for voters was, in large part, in the fabric of the man, and which party was going to control the Eighty-First Congress.

  Dewey’s first major campaign swing seemed to uphold his commanding lead, and he had stayed true to his strategy. He would make few commitments and keep his campaign on a high plane.

  Truman, on the other hand, was doing something wholly unexpected. He was painting a portrait for the public of a David-versus-Goliath fight, and of himself as a leader who had come from common folk. His language was the language of the common man—stripped bare of “two-dollar words,” in Truman’s parlance. He was out to protect the hundreds of millions of Americans powerless against the forces of greed that unrestricted capitalism could sometimes foster, to keep power in America where he believed it belonged: in the hands of the people. In doing so he was becoming more than a political candidate. He was becoming an American folk hero, and he was incessantly warning voters that the stakes of a presidential election had never been higher.

  At one rally in San Antonio, Texas, Truman told a crowd gathered in the Gunter Hotel:

  Our government is made up of the people. You are the government. I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants . . .

  I believe that if we ourselves try to live as we should, and if we continue to work for peace in this world, and as the old Puritan said, ‘Keep your bullets bright and your powder dry,’ eventually we will get peace in this world, because that is the only way we can survive with the modern inventions under which we live.

  We have got to harness these inventions for the welfare of man, instead of his destruction. That is what I am interested in. That is what I am working for. That is much more important than whether I am President of the United States.

  The day Truman arrived back at the White House in early October, he found out that he and his family were going to move out whether he won the election or not. Two days earlier, the White House architect Lorenzo Winslow had announced that the entire second floor of the building—the space in which the president lived with his family—would have to be rebuilt. The “structural nerves” were in alarming decay, Winslow said. How long the Trumans needed to vacate, Winslow could not say. The work would cost somewhere between $750,000 and $1,250,000.

  The president was home for just four days. Democratic leaders came to greet him in the White House, and the first question they asked the sixty-four-year-old was about his health and his stamina.

  “Vitamin C stands for campaigning as far as I’m concerned,” Truman said. “When I left town on this trip I had a cold and a sore throat. Now I’m rid of both and I gained 10 pounds while making 120 speeches.”

  “What do you think of those Texans tossing eggs at Henry Wallace?” asked Al Wheeler, the head of the Democratic Committee in the District of Columbia.

  “I was sorry to hear about that—I really was,” Truman said. “I guess the incident was building up for a long time. Some of those Texans have never liked Wallace . . . Add to that Wallace’s Commie connections and you get some idea why those eggs were thrown. Those Texans couldn’t hold out any longer. But I don’t like that kind of a demonstration in a democratic country, regardless of the circumstances behind it.”

  Truman hosted the Democratic National Committee’s research division at the White House, which officially ended its work on October 1. There was no more money to pay the team. Truman wanted to thank these dozen or so individuals personally. At roughly nine o’clock on a warm autumn night in the White House Rose Garden, Truman went from one campaign worker to the next to shake each hand personally.

  “On election day,” he said over and over, “we’ll all celebrate together.”

  Dr. Johannes Hoeber, who had served as number two under Bill Batt in the division, remembered the moment the president shook his hand, and the confidence Truman displayed in his expression. Truman, Hoeber realized, truly believed he was going to win. “I remember catching the expression on Mrs. Truman’s face at that moment, which was quite clear, that she herself didn’t think this would happen,” Hoeber recalled. “And on Margaret’s face there was the same thing.” But Truman seemed utterly sure. “There was no doubt in the President’s mind,” Hoeber recalled. “This is a memory which will stay with me always.”

  * * *

  On Sunday, October 3, Truman met with campaign officials to discuss strategy. “What was most urgently needed, I felt, was a totally new approach,” Truman later wrote in his memoirs. “We were pretty desperate,” added Jonathan Daniels, Truman’s first press secretary, who was at the White House that day. “We wanted something that would be a dramatic gesture of the President’s effort for peace and security in the world.”

  Truman had the idea of sending an emissary to meet with Joseph Stalin in person, in a grand gesture of peace. Something had to be done to iron out the differences between the United States and the USSR, before it was too late, and a diplomatic effort would generate positive publicity, Trum
an believed. Back in 1945, he had tried a similar approach with Harry Hopkins, who had been one of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers before FDR had died. Hopkins had spent a week with Stalin in the Kremlin; Truman had asked Hopkins “to use diplomatic language or a baseball bat.” The results had been good, and the American people were pleased. Truman thought now was the time to try again.

  Hopkins, however, had since died of cancer. In a meeting with Truman’s advisers, the president suggested sending the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Fred Vinson, to Moscow. Clark Clifford and his assistant George Elsey argued against the idea but Truman could not be swayed. He telephoned Vinson and asked him to come to the White House immediately. When Vinson arrived at the Oval Office, he had no idea why he had been summoned.

  “I outlined to him what I had in mind,” Truman later wrote. The president wanted the chief justice to go to Moscow on a special mission in an attempt to negotiate an end to the Cold War. “I asked Vinson to point out to Stalin that the folly and tragedy of another war would amount to an act of national suicide and that no sane leader of any major power could ever again even contemplate war except in defense. Surely the next war—an atomic war—could have no victors, and the total annihilation of vast areas was unthinkable.” The president wanted “to go to any practical lengths to insure the future survival of the world,” as he put it. The political reality—that Truman thought such a mission would be good for his campaign—was likely left unsaid.

  Vinson sat listening quietly to the president’s pitch. He had a face that registered little emotion, somber eyes unmoved under a pair of bushy gray eyebrows. The Kentucky-born justice was a towering figure and highly trusted by the president; Vinson had served as secretary of the Treasury before Truman had appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court, and he had a calm, agreeable disposition. If anyone could talk sense into Stalin, Truman figured, Vinson would be a good choice.