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

by A. J. Baime

  On the stage at Madison Square Garden, when Dewey appeared, he was flanked by a forty-by-twenty-five-foot statue of the United States Capitol. Huge portraits of Dewey and Earl Warren hung from the rafters. Every seat was filled, and the roar was the loudest Dewey had heard his entire campaign.

  “It is great to be home again,” Dewey said, “and you have given me a perfectly wonderful homecoming. It is all the more wonderful because it is a homecoming on the eve of victory.”

  In Dewey’s final major campaign appearance, he stayed the course, speaking philosophically on unity, attacking the Democrats without singling out particular issues. The Democratic Party “has been divided against itself for so long that it has forgotten the meaning of unity, and it never did know the meaning of teamwork or competence,” Dewey said. He punctuated his remarks by punching his open palm with his fist as he criticized his opponent’s “desperate tactics” and the failure of the administration to bring peace to the world. Dewey did not mention the Jews, Israel, or Palestine. Nor did he mention what his plans were regarding taxes, immigration, or the Taft-Hartley law. He said, “We will follow strong, clear policies,” without saying what those policies would be.

  To end his final campaign appearance, he expressed satisfaction with what his team had accomplished: “I am very happy that we can look back over the weeks of our campaigning and say: ‘This has been good for our country.’ I am proud we can look ahead to our victory and say: ‘America won.’”

  Later that night, back on the Dewey Victory Special, the candidate headed for Albany. As the train traveled north along the Hudson River, Dewey engaged members of the press with an unexpected, impromptu talk. “On that trip . . . he came into the press car and told his plans—all off the record,” recalled Raymond P. Brandt, the Washington bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He was positive as to whom he was going to have in his Cabinet. They were really confident. I have to admit that I thought he was going to be elected.”

  “He assumed in ’48 that he was already President,” remembered Jack Bell of the Associated Press, who was aboard the train. “And he even gave us, at one point, the makeup of his Cabinet—off the record as it were—going back to Albany.”

  Even before Election Day, congratulatory mail poured into the Dewey offices. Senator Vandenberg of Michigan wrote Dewey on November 1, “I am ‘jumping the gun’ to send you my heartiest congratulations upon your inevitable Tuesday victory. As you move into this new responsibility, I offer you every cooperation within my power . . . Again, I congratulate you upon your victory in advance.”

  The president of the Fitchburg Paper Company, George R. Wallace, wrote his friend on November 1, “By the time you receive this letter you will be our next President and first of all, I want to congratulate you on winning the election and for the splendid campaign you conducted.” Another of Dewey’s friends, Clellan Forsythe of Syracuse, wrote Dewey on November 1: “Since knowing you I have been certain that one day you would be our President and now that the time has arrived it is my earnest prayer that God will grant you in these troubled times the strength and wisdom to become our greatest president . . . Good luck—and Godspeed!”

  * * *

  Throughout the night of October 28, Jews filled the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, where the president was staying. One Truman campaigner recalled that, around sunrise on the twenty-ninth, “I could hardly get through the lobby. The situation over Palestine was so tense that the Zionists were holding an overnight vigil. There were groups of Jewish war veterans and some young Zionist people that had really filled the lobby shoulder to shoulder. They were praying and singing, and at regular intervals, about fifteen minutes, calling the President’s suite to demand an answer as to what he was going to do about the U.S. position before the U.N. in Paris.”

  Upstairs, after breakfast, Truman gathered about a dozen of his aides to go over the day’s speeches, at the table in his suite’s dining room. Among those present was Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s former haberdashery partner and now owner of Westport Menswear in Kansas City. Jacobson had the president’s ear on the Zionist issue; he had been lobbying for months in support of the Israeli cause.

  Present also was Philleo Nash, Truman’s special assistant for minority affairs. It had been Nash who had fought for the idea of Truman making an appearance in Harlem. He had been in Washington the night before and had gotten a call demanding his presence in New York immediately. Everyone in the Truman camp had been working on the Madison Square Garden Palestine speech for the twenty-eighth, and so no one had gotten to writing the final draft of the biggest speech of October 29—a civil rights address Truman was scheduled to give in Harlem at 3:50 p.m.

  Nash arrived in New York at 5 a.m. Now he was at the table with Truman. “Mr. President,” he said, “I brought up a draft of a speech on civil rights for the Harlem rally.”

  “Well, I’ve been waiting a long time to get this taken care of,” Truman responded, according to Nash’s account. “We should have done it sooner.”

  Nash handed over the speech, and Truman read the whole thing aloud—a hard-hitting civil rights polemic. When he finished, he looked around the room and said, “Well, anybody who isn’t for this ought to have his head examined.”

  Some at the table raised concern over the speech. Was it going too far? The race was tight in states like Tennessee and Kentucky, where many voters were against Truman’s civil rights stand. Should Truman go so far out on a limb?

  “Of course we have to do it,” he said. “We should have been doing it all along.”

  Nash raised the idea of using the term unity in the speech, picking up on Dewey’s theme and making it their own. “Unity is basically a weak concept,” the president said. “It isn’t only the way Mr. Dewey’s been handling it and has been talking about it. We should be doing what’s right even if we can’t be united about it. And this speech is about what’s right.”

  * * *

  Just before noon, Truman exited the Biltmore Hotel, surrounded by Secret Service agents. He climbed into an open car and his motorcade moved down Forty-Third Street, making a left on Fifth Avenue, where the crowds were thick on either side. Truman’s tour would carry him sixty-six miles on this day. According to police accounts, 1.245 million people would see the president.

  At Larkin Plaza in Yonkers, New York, he blamed the Republican Congress for the current housing shortage. Congress was controlled by the real estate lobbyists, he said. In the Bronx, he taunted Dewey as his “little shadow.” Then the motorcade moved over a bridge and pulled up to Dorrance Brooks Square at St. Nicholas Avenue and 136th Street, a park named for an African American soldier from Harlem who had died fighting for his country in World War I. Harlem’s black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, estimated the crowd in the park at half a million people. Harlem had crime issues, and the Secret Service agents were concerned for the president’s safety.

  A speaker’s platform had been built on the edge of the park, and a group of black ministers from the Ministerial Alliance welcomed Truman to the stage. Truman had been invited to Harlem to accept a humanitarian award. People were shouting “Pour it on, Harry!” A group of students from the City College of New York led a chant of “Give ’em hell, Harry!” The Amsterdam News had officially endorsed Dewey, but one would never know it from the enthusiasm of this crowd.

  The ministers led a lengthy prayer, and then a strange silence fell over the scene. Philleo Nash was unnerved. “All of a sudden, there was a big crowd, but a silent crowd,” he recalled. “Well, this is rather ominous, rather frightening. I had my back to the crowd and I just wondered whether I’d been wrong in urging that this [Harlem speech] be done and that the people who said it wasn’t safe were right.” He turned around and what he saw stunned him. “I saw why they were silent . . . Almost everybody in that crowd was praying, and they were praying for the President, and they were praying for their own civil rights . . . They thought it was a religious occasion.”

  A ministe
r named Dr. C. Asapansa-Johnson spoke first, followed by New York’s mayor, William O’Dwyer. Truman sat listening, against a backdrop of red, white, and blue bunting, while the mayor urged the crowd to vote for Truman. This was a turnaround for O’Dwyer, who just three months earlier had been one of the many Democrats seeking to draft Dwight Eisenhower to take Truman’s place at the top of the party ticket.

  Harlem was not going to get Give ’Em Hell Harry. Truman was going to give this crowd something different entirely—a sober speech on an issue that touched on the very essence of Americanism. When it was his time, Truman approached the microphone and began to speak, thanking the ministers for honoring him with their invitation.

  “This, in my mind, is a most solemn occasion. It’s made a tremendous impression upon me,” Truman said.

  He recommitted himself to his civil rights platform, a plan that—if successfully put into action—would change the course of history. “Eventually, we are going to have an America in which freedom and opportunity are the same for everyone,” he said. “There is only one way to accomplish that great purpose, and that is to keep working for it and never take a backward step.” Truman said he was going to fight for equal rights for all races “with ­every ounce of strength and determination I have.” In America, Truman said, everyone should have an equal chance at a job, every child should have an equal chance for an education, every person should have the right to vote and to be free of “mob violence and intimidation.”

  “It was the authors of the Declaration of Independence who stated the principle that all men are created equal in their rights, and that it is to secure these rights that governments are instituted among men,” Truman said. “It was the authors of the Constitution who made it clear that, under our form of government, all citizens are equal before the law, and that the Federal Government has a duty to guarantee to every citizen equal protection of the laws.”

  The speech was the culmination of Truman’s 1948 civil rights campaign. “Immediate and far-reaching repercussions were expected from the South,” wrote the New York Times’s Anthony Leviero. “The President and his advisors apparently had weighed whatever risks were involved in his dec­laration.”

  * * *

  Just hours after Truman’s Harlem speech, Henry Wallace made his own address there, appearing at the Golden Gate ballroom at the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, for the final speaking engagement of his campaign. It was perhaps his angriest. Wallace looked out from his podium and saw a predominantly black audience. He said that Truman’s civil rights agenda was nothing but “shallow, hollow, worthless promises.”

  In the past, Truman had supported the congressional campaigns of Democrats from the South, Wallace said—men who supported white supremacy. Thus, Wallace claimed, the president had “invited the Dixiecrats, the race-haters, the lynch boys, the poll-taxers right back into the camp. And they’re coming back.”

  When Wallace finished, he walked off the stage and headed back to his farm in upstate New York, where he would be voting two days later.

  Strom Thurmond held a rally in Austin, Texas, that day, nearing the end of a sweep that had taken him throughout the state and to Louisiana. Thurmond’s drumbeat had not changed. He called Truman’s civil rights program “a Federal horsewhip to sting us into line.” Dewey’s campaign had been all about “soothing and meaningless” platitudes. While Thurmond had no chance of national victory, he still insisted that his efforts were not in vain.

  “Our campaign is based on the belief that we can prevent either Truman or Dewey from winning a majority of the electoral votes,” he told a crowd in Beaumont, Texas, on October 31. “In that event, the House of Representatives will choose a President who is dedicated to the preservation of local self-government.”

  Truman’s civil rights proposals were “un-American,” Thurmond said. Even if the States’ Rights Democratic Party campaign failed on Tuesday, he went on, it had “accomplished our most important objective . . . to restore the Southern States to a position of respect from every political party.”

  * * *

  On the morning of October 30, the Truman Special pulled out of Grand Central Station, bound for Missouri. Truman napped in his berth. Bess and Margaret had reached the end of their patience. They wanted the campaign to be over.

  As the train barreled west, Truman’s speechwriters met to put together an address for the president’s final campaign appearance, at the massive Kiel Auditorium that night in St. Louis. Events had been so pressing, there had been no time to draft the speech, so it was a last-minute effort. The race in Truman’s home state of Missouri was a nail-biter; this St. Louis event had to go well. “On the last long ride . . . ,” recorded speechwriter John Franklin Carter, “all of us had picked some pieces of lovely speeches which we had composed from time to time during the campaign, and for one reason or another, hadn’t been delivered. We got together a final script for St. Louis.”

  That afternoon, Truman was back at his table in the Ferdinand Magellan, reviewing the speech that his writers had prepared. By this time, his old friend John Snyder, the secretary of the Treasury, was aboard, bound for his hometown of St. Louis. Truman told Snyder that he was “considerably amazed at the lack of punch” in the speech his aides had given him.

  Snyder asked, “Are you going to deliver this speech in St. Louis?”

  “I am not,” Truman answered.

  There was no backup. Truman would speak entirely off the cuff, with no script, to the entire nation via radio.

  By this time, the speech he was not going to use had been mimeographed and distributed to the journalists on board the train. They too were intensely weary and had already typed out their stories for the next day’s papers.

  “We got to St. Louis and there was a cold, nasty rain falling,” recalled Carleton Kent of the Chicago Times, “but Kiel Auditorium was jammed to the gunnels.” “There were so many people there,” noted Robert Nixon of the International News Service, “that the firemen had to clear the aisles because of the regulations. There was a large overflow crowd outside the auditorium where loudspeakers had been set up so that people could listen to the President’s speech.” When Truman appeared, radio men hit a signal and took the broadcast nationwide.

  “Thank you my friends,” Truman yelled over the noise of the crowd. “I appreciate most highly this reception in St. Louis, but bear in mind that I have got to talk to the whole United States tonight . . .”

  Again, the crowd roared.

  “I can’t tell you how very much I appreciate this reception on my return to my home State. It touches my heart—right where I live . . . I know that when Missouri feels this way, we are on the road to victory.”

  Truman had seen a lot of enthusiasm throughout the campaign, and the crowd in St. Louis brought it to a climax. “The country was aware of the fact that Truman had conducted a one-man battle,” recalled Robert Nixon. “Americans have an affection for people who fight for what they believe in . . . [St. Louis] was his last speech of the campaign, the grand finale . . . There was a fist in almost every word and a fight in every sentence.” Meanwhile the reporters began to realize that Truman was not giving the speech they expected; they would have to scramble to rewrite their stories.

  I have been in many a campaign, my friends . . . But never in my lifetime have I been in a campaign, nor seen a campaign, such as I have been through recently. I became President of the United States 3 years, 6 months, and 18 days ago, and we have been through the most momentous period in the history of the world in that time. Twenty-six days after I became President, Germany surrendered unconditionally. Four months and 21 days after I was sworn in as President of the United States, Japan folded up and surrendered unconditionally, thus ending the greatest war in the history of the world . . .

  Four days after Japan surrendered on September the 2d, my first policy message went to Congress. That message contained 21 points . . . When that message went to Congress, the smear campaign on your Pres
ident started in all its vile and untruthfully slanted headlines, columns, and editorials.

  This was the ultimate Give ’Em Hell Harry speech. The audience “applauded for about two and a half hours,” recorded John Franklin Carter. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a wild, wild reception.”

  Truman railed against the “saboteurs and character assassins” of the press. He attacked his old foe—the “do nothing” Eightieth Congress—for failing to pass the administration’s housing bill during a housing crisis, for failing to pass health-care reform, for failing the farmers of America by taking away their grain-storage bins. After a half hour, he brought the speech to an extemporaneous end.

  People are waking up that the tide is beginning to roll, and I am here to tell you that if you do your duty as citizens of the greatest Republic the sun has ever shone on, we will have a Government that will be for your interests, that will be for peace in the world, and for the welfare of all the people, and not just a few.

  With those final words, the president turned and walked off the stage. It was the last appearance Harry Truman would ever make in a campaign of his own. Later that night of October 30, he recalled, “I returned from the bedlam of the longest and hardest political campaign of my career to the restful quiet of my home in Independence.”

  “The campaign is all over,” Margaret wrote in her diary on November 1. “Now we wait until tomorrow is done to see how the voters decide. We can take whatever comes, but I wonder if the country can.”

  On the night of November 1, both Truman and Dewey made final “get-out-the-vote” radio speeches—Truman from his living room in Independence, and Dewey from the Manhattan studios of NBC.