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

by A. J. Baime

  The president rattled off each of the forty-eight states, knowing by heart how many electoral votes came with a win in each. Elsey scribbled in pencil as the train swayed back and forth. In the corner of the page, Elsey jotted: “13 Oct 1948 between Duluth + St. Paul Minn.” When Truman was done listing states and their respective electoral college votes, he said, “George, how many do I have?”

  “Three-hundred-forty, Mr. President.”

  Truman smiled; that was more than enough to win. Elsey later remembered the moment: “The fact is, I thought Truman would lose.”

  At Democratic National Committee headquarters in New York’s Biltmore Hotel, campaigners were desperately manning phones to find donations, and pulling all-nighters attempting to dream up out-of-the-box ideas. The committee had come up with novel strategies to spread the Truman message, but they cost money.

  In mid-October, the committee released a comic-book version of a Harry Truman biography—sixteen pages of colorful drawings with captions. The Story of Harry S. Truman had a tagline on the bottom of the cover: “Farm boy, Soldier, Statesman, President!” Demand for the publication stunned committee officials. Over 3.3 million copies were printed. “Workers at the precinct level reported it as the most effective piece of campaign material they had,” noted the committee’s publicist, Jack Redding, who had a hand in writing the book’s copy.

  The committee had created a women’s division with a budget of $50,000, to be headed up by India Edwards, later to become vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. The women’s division was tasked with creating the first-ever political radio program aimed specifically at women voters. The show would be called Democratic Record, and it would air three times a week starting October 11, on ABC, nationwide, at 3:45 p.m. on the East Coast, when it was believed the largest audience of women would be at home with their radios on.

  Each episode opened and closed with “The Missouri Waltz,” in honor of Truman’s home state, and it featured radio broadcaster Galen Drake interviewing women on important issues, with plenty of music and wisecracking woven in. Truman was campaigning through the Midwest when the first episode ran. The show was an instant hit. Variety, which covered the entertainment industry, reported on its success: “The ‘Democratic Record’ show is the best election pitch ever made on radio.”

  At one point, publicist Jack Redding called Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in Paris in negotiations with the Soviets, as a member of the US delegation to the United Nations. Mrs. Roosevelt had thus far remained silent on the election.

  “I think, Mrs. Roosevelt, that you are the key to the situation,” Redding told her over the phone. “I think your influence in America could elect President Truman. Without you . . . we may fail.”

  The former First Lady replied without hesitation. “I have been reluctant to be part of this campaign because of my United Nations responsibilities. You know that?”

  Surely Redding figured that Mrs. Roosevelt was making an excuse; she was reluctant to get behind a losing cause. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “But if it’s as close as you say, and if you think I can help, I’ll do it. But how?” The Democratic National Committee drummed up an idea to have Mrs. Roosevelt give a speech over ABC radio on the night of October 31, two days before Election Day. ABC officials, however, demanded a hefty fee: $25,721. The scramble for the money began.

  The Republican campaign’s short film, The Dewey Story, was set to debut on movie screens before feature films three days before Election Day. When the DNC staff heard about it, a committee official made a desperate call to the Universal Newsreel company. Universal had plenty of existing film capturing Harry Truman in various important scenes, for its newsreels over the past years, so a deal was struck to make a ten-minute Truman documentary. The Dewey team had shot its own movie with a $35,000 budget; Truman’s film would have to use already-existing footage, and the Universal Newsreel company agreed to produce it for free. It would be released right before the election—if Universal could get it done in time.

  Meanwhile, Truman himself moved from town to town, speaking extemporaneously, attempting to make personal connections with as many voters as possible. On October 13, at 7:55 a.m. in Adams, Wisconsin, Truman spoke to a group of children who were given permission to show up late for school so they could see the president on the back platform of his train. “The country is going to be in your hands in the next generation,” he said, “and you ought to inform yourselves on all the things that affect your country, and the world, because the United States has assumed the leadership in the world unequaled in the history of the world, and we have got to assume that responsibility.”

  “On November 2,” Truman said two hours later, in Spooner, Wisconsin, “you are going to make the most important decision that has been made in a generation, and that will be made for another generation, as to how this country shall be run.”

  In nearly every town, the crowd was bigger than expected. What did it all mean? On the night of October 16, from aboard the Truman train, the Washington Post’s Robert C. Albright typed four prophetic words onto a sheet of paper, as the train rolled through West Virginia: “Could we be wrong?”

  28

  “The Campaign Special Train Stopped with a Jerk”

  THUS FAR, DEWEY HAD EXECUTED his plan perfectly. He appeared the apotheosis of composure. All he had to do to get elected, he believed, was to not make any mistakes. On October 13, however, he made a major one.

  Dewey was speaking on the back platform of his train in the farming town of Beaucoup, Illinois, when, inexplicably, the train lurched backward straight toward the crowd of spectators. Dewey braced himself as frightened shouts came from the crowd, from spectators who thought for a moment that they might get crushed by a campaign train car weighing hundreds of tons. Dewey’s temper got the better of him.

  “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” he said into his microphone. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise, but I guess we can let him off because nobody was hurt.”

  The next day’s newspapers recounted the event. One pun slipped past the news-desk editors: “The campaign special train stopped with a jerk.” The train’s engineer, a thirty-year-old war veteran named Lee Tindle, was not happy about being called a “lunatic” by the Republican nominee for president of the United States. He said he was not going to vote for Dewey anyway. “I think as much of Dewey as I did before,” he said.

  What seemed like a minor moment blew up into something bigger. Dewey’s comment was interpreted as cold and uncaring toward working people, an accusation the Republicans had heard before. Dewey had in fact offended the biggest block of voters in the country: unionized labor. Truman saw an easy opportunity to rally railroad unions to his cause, accusing Dewey of insensitivity toward the plight of workers. From the back platform of the Ferdinand Magellan, in the town of Logansport, Indiana, the president praised his own “wonderful train crews” that had carried the campaign all around the country. “They’ve been just as kind to us as they could possibly be.” Railroad workers painted LUNATICS FOR TRUMAN on the side of boxcars.

  Dewey tried to ignore the barbs. But he was also seeing the newspaper stories about the spectacular crowds turning out for his opponent. He too sensed that something amazingly unlikely might be happening. On October 18, five days after the train-jerk debacle, Dewey’s train pulled into Buffalo. He sought out a campaign aide named John Burton.

  “Johnny,” Dewey said, “we are slipping, aren’t we?”

  Burton agreed; there was cause for worry. He explained that Truman had recently lured a crowd of ten thousand people soon after sunrise in a pouring squall, in Albany of all places—practically in the backyard of the New York governor’s mansion.

  One thing that had become clear on the campaign trail: No matter how hard the candidate tried, Dewey could not turn on the charisma the way Truman could, the way Roosevelt had. “He didn’t really like handshaking,” remembered Herbert Brownell. “He wasn�
�t good at it . . . He worked harder, studied longer than anyone else . . . He organized people. He was a really good fighter.” But the handshaking? The ability to create human connection? “He just could not do.”

  Even so, all the data continued to show Dewey way out in front. The New York Times polled twenty correspondents in twenty states, and published the results on October 4. Dewey, it was predicted, would carry fourteen of those states, many of them by wide margins, including the big prizes of California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. The latest Gallup poll of sixteen states showed Dewey ahead in all but one, while another survey of New England states showed Dewey carrying all of them but Rhode Island. The day after the train-jerk incident, the columnist Richard Strout wrote that Dewey’s election was “as certain as anything can be in the course of American politics.”

  Dewey continued onward, pounding away on his unity theme. He campaigned through Minnesota for GOP senator Joseph H. Ball, who was locked in a critical race against the thirty-seven-year-old Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey (later to serve as vice president in Lyndon Johnson’s administration). In Indiana, Dewey visited with the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Charles Halleck. Dewey was beginning to court the powerful right-wing faction of the GOP in Congress, of which Halleck was a pillar, in hopes that he would have friends on Capitol Hill, once he became president.

  But Dewey’s staff was getting jittery. Letters continued to flood into the Albany mansion and campaign headquarters in Washington, urging the candidate to change his course. “I am worried,” wrote Helen Brigham of Hollywood, California. “Truman, with his barnstorming, name calling, and harping on one string—the 80th Congress—is winning friends from the largest class he appeals to. So I should like to ask why Mr. Dewey and Mr. Warren don’t reply to him.”

  “Don’t float in, fight your way in by slugging (as well as the Democrats are doing),” wrote Grace Burdick of San Diego, California, on October 21. “For heaven sakes fight!!”

  It was still not too late for Dewey to change course, and finish out the campaign with an all-out attack. But he thus far refused to do it, and his wife, Frances, supported him in that decision.

  Dewey’s team announced the final itinerary of the campaign’s climactic weekend before Election Day. The governor would speak in Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and New York, in that order. His final campaign push followed a path identical to Truman’s; Dewey would be close on Truman’s heels in each of those four cities.

  * * *

  Henry Wallace refused to let up. His whole campaign had become about increasing the pressure on Truman. “I tell you,” Wallace told a crowd in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 19, “Harry S. Truman has abdicated . . . He still sleeps in the White House, and that’s about all.” Wallace demanded that General George C. Marshall—one of the world’s most respected men—be fired from his post as secretary of state. The Marshall Plan was “one of the most sinister and dangerous proposals to come out of this or any other country,” he said. “It is a step toward war.” The next night in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Wallace said of Truman, “He’s going to take the worst licking any Democratic candidate has ever taken . . . We’re going to take our country back from the bankers and the generals and give it back to the people where it belongs.”

  The state where Wallace had the most traction was New York, where he was expected to earn 11 percent of the vote, a number that most analysts believed would guarantee Dewey’s victory. Without Wallace on the ballot, those 11 percent of mostly liberal voters could have been expected to cast their votes for Truman. Which meant that Wallace was likely to cause Truman’s defeat in one of the most critical states. The Wallace campaign still mattered—a lot.

  Nevertheless, outside of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Wallace was now all but ignored. At one point, he reached St. Louis and entered a room to find an audience of only a hundred people to hear him speak. The chairman of this event, Reverend Charles G. Wilson, was on hand to introduce Wallace. The mood was dark.

  “I see a lot of faces that aren’t here, faces of people who were with us a year ago,” Wilson said. The reverend openly called himself “a tired liberal” and “confused.” He told his small audience that he was ready to “sit this one out” and “crawl into a hole.”

  It was hardly the introduction Wallace desired. When he spoke, he tried to blow life into the room. “I’m not tired,” he said. “I’m not confused, and I’m very happy to be here.” He waited for applause, but very little of it came.

  Wallace admitted that supporters were abandoning him. “I can’t help feeling that their chief governing motive is that they hate Henry Wallace,” he told his audience. “I don’t know why they hate me. I’m still holding the door open for them. I used to say they’d come along after Truman was nominated. But they didn’t come flocking to us the way I hoped.” Again, he refused to repudiate the Communists who supported him—especially in the fight against segregation. “If they want to help us out on some of these problems, why, God bless them, let them come along.”

  Wallace called on his Gideon’s Army to keep on marching. But so few marchers were left. The following week, Gallup’s latest numbers showed Wallace polling at just 3.5 percent of the national vote, half of what it had been at the beginning of 1948.

  * * *

  On October 18, with two weeks to go until Election Day, Truman’s airplane landed in Miami. It was as close as he would come to Strom Thurmond’s base movement. Truman would avoid entirely the four states where Thurmond was now expected to win—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The First Family was set to attend the thirtieth National Convention of the American Legion, so Truman could write off the trip as nonpolitical and pay for it out of the president’s travel fund, as the campaign coffers were once again running on empty.

  “There was a parade through Miami and Miami Beach to the Roney Plaza Hotel, which is really gorgeous, all mirrors and antique white furniture,” Margaret wrote in her diary. Along the route, roughly two hundred thousand Floridians came out. In an airplane hangar with twelve thousand Legionnaires on hand, Truman tried to put into perspective what it was like to be an American president, facing the possibility of yet another war, feeling the responsibility for the lives of American soldiers and so much more.

  Let me say here again, and as plainly as I can, that the Government of this country, like the American people as a whole, detests the thought of war. We are shocked by its brutality and sickened by its waste of life and wealth . . . The use of atomic weapons and bacteriological warfare, in particular, might unleash new forces of destruction which would spare no nation . . . We shall spare no effort to achieve the peace on which the entire destiny of the human race may depend.

  Nowhere in Florida did Truman mention civil rights. Below the Mason-Dixon line, stumping for civil rights would have come across as tone-deaf. For over a year now, the influential Democratic politicos from the South had pressured Truman to drop his stance on civil rights, and among them was Florida’s governor, Millard F. Caldwell. Yet it was clear that Truman was going to push this issue as far as it would go. Even if he did not campaign for civil rights in Florida, the people knew where he stood.

  At one point during the campaign, Truman got a letter from an old friend named Ernest Roberts, who was close enough to the president to address him as Harry, and whose missive put the civil rights issue into a perspective that many Americans, and especially southerners, at this time embraced.

  “You can win the south without the [civil rights program],” Roberts wrote Truman, “but you cannot win the south with it. Just why?? Well, you, Bess and Margaret, and shall I say, myself, are all Southerners and we have been raised with the Negroes and we know the term ‘Equal Rights.’ Harry, let us let the South take care of the Niggers, which they have done, and if the Niggers do not like the Southern treatment, let them come to Mrs. Roosevelt.

  “Harry,” Roberts continued, “you are a Southerner and a D�
�� good one so listen to me. I can see, you do not talk domestic problems over with Bess??? You put equal rights in Independence and Bess will not live with you.”

  Truman wrote back, listing recent lynchings that had occurred in the South in which no justice was ever served. “I can’t approve of such goings on and I shall never approve it, as long as I am here, as I told you before,” Truman wrote. “I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause.”

  * * *

  After his trip to Florida—and a brief stop in North Carolina—Truman headed back to the White House. With every day leading up to the election, it seemed, the superpowers were moving closer to war, and one could only wonder if this was by the Kremlin’s design.

  At 11 a.m. on October 21, eleven days before Election Day, General Lucius Clay arrived in the Oval Office along with Secretary of Defense Forrestal and Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall. Clay was in Washington for only twenty-four hours; the threat of war with the Soviets was so real, he needed to get back to Germany. He had crossed the Atlantic to speak to Truman.

  The airlift was carrying five thousand tons of supplies into Berlin daily in good weather, and three thousand tons under poor conditions, Clay reported. Winter weather would soon put the pilots flying the supply missions at greater risk. No progress had been made with Soviet negotiations to end the blockade. Undersecretary of the Army William H. Draper Jr. was in the room during this meeting. He later described the hostile environment in which the airlift was being conducted: “At almost any point in Berlin, you could see three planes in the air, two on their way in and one or two on the way out . . . The Russians were buzzing the planes. They didn’t shoot any down, but they came right near us. It’s a wonder there weren’t any accidents, and so starting a war, because that would have probably done it.”