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

by A. J. Baime

  Was America really going to kick an administration out of office when paychecks were so high and unemployment so low?

  The White House staff was all abuzz. “I had a feeling that perhaps the good Lord was not on the President’s side this time,” remembered head butler Alonzo Fields, “though my wife kept saying that, despite the papers, he was going to win . . . I do not recall when there was ever as much excitement and open discussion as went on around the place during this election.”

  Fields kept a radio tuned in, and in the Oval Office, the television was on, as the early returns began to come through.

  * * *

  Clark Clifford was back in Washington on Election Day. He spent much of the day in his office. At one point, his phone rang, and when he picked up, he heard the familiar voice of Robert Lovett, the State Department’s second-in-command under George Marshall. Lovett wanted to know if Clifford would help him work on an orderly transition if Dewey were to win, as everyone believed would be the case. Lovett was concerned that the Soviet Union could benefit from the “terrible uncertainty” that would exist between the election and inauguration day, six weeks later.

  Lovett, Clifford would later learn, was a front-runner to become secretary of defense in the Dewey administration. Clifford assured Lovett politely that he would do whatever was needed.

  That night, Clifford and his wife ended up in the home of a friend, Washington correspondent Jay Hayden of the Detroit News, because the Hayden family was one of the first among Clifford’s friends to have a television. They settled in and stared at the huge machine with its fuzzy screen.

  “We had planned to stay only about an hour,” Clifford remembered. “Almost everyone expected the result to be settled early.”

  * * *

  In Moscow, the city’s three major newspapers printed the exact same report on the end of Henry Wallace’s election campaign, painting an inaccurate portrait of Wallace’s return to New York City. From the Russian point of view, Wallace was entering the city as if he were Caesar returning to Rome.

  “Police said at least half a million people greeted Wallace, who rode about 80 miles through the Brooklyn district in an automobile accompanied by 50 machines decorated with banners and posters appealing for support of the Progressive Party,” read the Russian report. “Several times groups of people pushed through the police and rushed up to Wallace in order to shake his hand.”

  The truth was far different. Wallace headed quietly to party headquarters in the brownstone on the corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street. “Wallace seemed to be in good spirits,” recalled campaign manager Beanie Baldwin, “and I don’t think I detected how hurt he was.”

  * * *

  As the first returns came in, the Republican National Committee’s chief Herbert Brownell issued a statement from his command post on the sixth floor of the Hotel Roosevelt in New York:

  “Early reports reaching us from Republican State organizations in all parts of the country indicate what may well be a record breaking popular vote, and from the indications thus far available, the Dewey-Warren Ticket will be overwhelmingly elected.”

  At the Muehlebach Hotel, the teletype machines continued to crank out returns while waiters carried trays with Missouri ham sandwiches and pitchers of orange juice and black coffee. Truman was ahead in New York City, but the tide was turning on him as the rural votes poured in. New York looked dubious for the Democrats. As expected, Philadelphia voters went for Truman, but not by as much as was hoped—not by enough to counter the rural Pennsylvania votes that would follow from the western part of the state. An early lead in Maryland was slipping away. It looked like Truman would carry Virginia, but South Carolina was going to go to Strom Thurmond.

  By nightfall, much of the eastern vote was in. Dewey carried both New York and Maryland. It was Henry Wallace who had cost Truman those states; Wallace voters had made the difference. Both states had gone to FDR and the Democrats in four straight elections, but both went for Dewey in 1948 by slim margins. Now the Midwest would follow. Truman had an enormous lead in Chicago as expected, but the rest of the state was a mystery. Ohio was looking bright, but who knew? The Wallace vote in Ohio could be strong too.

  As the Midwest votes were tallied, Truman and Dewey were running neck-and-neck in the popular vote, but not in the electoral college, where Dewey was still ahead.

  All the while, some 150 to 200 reporters were milling about the hotel, flabbergasted that they had no idea of the president’s whereabouts.

  Where was Truman?

  Bess and Margaret were at home on Delaware Street. Outside, a crowd of two hundred locals were in the street, singing “Missouri Waltz” and “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” They chanted “We want Harry”—but Harry was nowhere to be found. Around 9 p.m., radio networks began to report that Truman—while still behind in the electoral college—was pulling ahead in the popular vote. Due to the strange rubric the founding fathers had built into the Constitution, Truman was winning more votes nationwide than Dewey, but losing in the official tally that would ultimately decide the outcome. Reporters outside the Truman home were growing “frantic,” as Margaret later put it. “I am not using the word ‘frantic’ loosely either,” she recalled. “It became more and more apropos as the votes began to come in. At first everyone was told there would be a Dewey victory message at nine p.m. But Harry Truman seemed to be winning at nine p.m.”

  Wearing her favorite black dress and ballet slippers to keep her feet comfortable for the long night ahead, Margaret came out the front door and, standing under a porch light, she announced: “Dad isn’t here. I don’t know where he is.”

  * * *

  From Republican headquarters at the Roosevelt, Herbert Brownell released his next statement: “At this moment the polls have closed in 12 of the 48 states . . . On the basis of reports which I have been receiving from organizational leaders throughout the country, I am confident that the Dewey-Warren Ticket has already carried 10 of these 12 states . . . It is now apparent that we will wind up by sweeping two-thirds of the states for the Republican Ticket. This is definitely a Republican year. The people have made up their minds and have registered their decision in many of the States.”

  Perhaps even Brownell knew his estimates were overly optimistic. The night was young, and nothing was going as planned. In homes all over the country, Americans who had expected an early result and an early bedtime were adjusting to the idea of a long night. Truman’s first cousin Mary Ethel Noland would remember sitting in a room in her modest house in Independence, not interested in hearing the election returns because she believed they would be depressing. Others in the residence were huddled around a radio; Noland wanted no part of it. She lived across the street from the Truman home and could see out the window the crowds out front.

  “Along in the evening,” she remembered, “the returns had begun to come in. We were sitting in the next room trying to read our paper or something because we hated to hear that everything was going against him. One of the men [at the house] said, ‘Don’t you want to hear this? It’s getting better. You’d better come in.’”

  Soon friends began to drop by the house and coffee was brewing. The excitement became tangible. Suddenly, the news over the radio was completely gripping. “That went on all night long,” Noland recalled.

  32

  “Under No Circumstance Will I Congratulate That Son of a Bitch”

  AT THE BEGINNING OF THE night, the Biltmore Hotel ballroom—the Democrats’ campaign headquarters in New York—was nearly empty. “The halls leading to the Biltmore’s grand ballroom, and the ballroom itself, had been bare of campaign posters and pictures early in the evening,” remembered one reporter that night. “But, as optimism grew, one party worker dashed upstairs to the nineteenth floor [Democratic National Committee headquarters] and brought down several dozen pictures of Mr. Truman and Sen. Alben Barkley. They were hastily tacked up.” Soon the room was “jammed with television cameras, klieg lig
hts and radio microphones and cables.”

  Dewey remained secluded in suite 1527 at the Roosevelt. He had won most of New England, as expected, but lost Massachusetts. That was sixteen electoral votes predicted to go his way. He had pulled out the pivotal states of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, but Ohio was dangerously tight. Dewey had been expected to carry this critical state. Ohio had a Republican governor. Both of Ohio’s senators were Republicans. One of them was John W. Bricker, the vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket in 1944; the other was “Mr. Republican,” Robert Taft. Now Dewey and Truman were running neck-and-neck in Ohio.

  For Dewey, this was getting downright scary.

  He left his family for the quiet of a bedroom, and shut the door so he could be alone, jotting notes on a yellow legal pad. Things were not going as planned, but elections often followed this pattern. East Coast returns tended to favor Democrats. As the farm vote of the Midwest began to roll in, the tide would turn. Midwest farmers from Ohio to Iowa were expected to vote Republican.

  What was going through Dewey’s mind during these solitary moments no one will ever know. Did he fear the sting of embarrassment? Was he struggling to come to terms with the idea that his entire campaign strategy might have been wrong all along?

  At 11:15 p.m. Brownell issued the latest statement from campaign headquarters: “We are now getting into the stage of the election returns which permit a definite appraisal of the prospects of the respective candidates and I am convinced, as I stated earlier, the election of the Dewey-Warren Ticket is assured . . . We conclude here at Republican Headquarters that Dewey and Warren are elected.”

  * * *

  At midnight, at the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Truman awoke from a slumber and fumbled with the knob on a radio. He heard broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn’s voice clearly over NBC radio. Kaltenborn was saying that Truman was in the lead in the popular vote by 1.2 million, but it was early; he could not possibly win.* He was “undoubtedly beaten,” Kaltenborn said. Truman went back to sleep.

  At 1:45 a.m. Herbert Brownell released another statement: “We now know that Governor Dewey will carry New York State by at least 50,000 votes and will be the next President of the United States.”

  At about 2:30 a.m. Truman was awoken by a jingling telephone. It was his friend Tom Evans, calling from the Muehlebach.

  “Well, Mr. President,” Evans said with excitement, “you’re just about in this position that you’ve got to carry either Ohio, Illinois or California.”

  “That’s good,” Truman said. “Don’t bother me anymore. I’m going to bed. Don’t call me anymore.”

  “What the hell do you mean you’re going to bed,” Evans said. “You can’t go to bed until you carry one of those states.”

  “Why, I’m going to carry all three,” Truman said.

  As the returns continued to come through, the suite at the Muehlebach became, as one present put it, “a churning madhouse of newsmen, staff workers and political friends.” Hour after hour, the returns kept showing that Truman was ahead in the popular vote. The electoral vote was too close to call. Nerves began to fray; eyeballs were turning red. There was no alcohol on hand; only coffee and cigarettes.

  Truman press secretary Charlie Ross took a break to escape the pressure at one point, heading down to the hotel coffee shop. Frank Holeman of the New York Daily News approached him and asked how the night was looking from Ross’s perspective.

  “We don’t say that we’re going to win this election,” Ross said. “But it’s going to be a lot closer than anybody ever thought. And win, lose or draw, there’s a lot of sonsobitches we don’t have to be nice to any more.”

  The hotel’s manager Barney Allis walked in. Allis was holding telegrams, and he explained that telegram after telegram was arriving in the hotel’s communications office. People wanted rooms at the Muehlebach. People were scrambling to leave Dewey headquarters in New York, wanting to head to Kansas City. Allis started reading the telegrams aloud.

  “Dear Barney, I need a room.”

  “I need two rooms.”

  Ross could not believe his ears.

  Twelve hundred miles away, at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Biltmore in New York, the crowds kept getting bigger and bigger. “As the night wore on people who had never bothered to get accredited [at] our headquarters came over because the Dewey headquarters were silent,” remembered the committee’s assistant publicity director, Samuel Brightman. In his office Chairman McGrath tabulated reports as they arrived, talking on the phone to Jake Arvey, a powerful Democratic political operative out of Chicago, about the action in Illinois. It was 5:40 a.m. on the East Coast. Truman was ahead in Illinois, but his lead was diminishing. Illinois was critical. The state’s twenty-eight electoral votes were caught in a tug-of-war between the typically Republican farming communities and Chicago, the nation’s second-most-populous city. In the state’s highly competitive gubernatorial race, the rookie Democrat Adlai Stevenson was running against the virulently anti-Truman incumbent, Republican Dwight H. Green.

  Standing by the teletype machines, a Democratic campaign staffer named Jim Sauter was pulling the returns out as they came in. One campaigner would remember watching him in the moment: “He was sweating, his face was flushed, his hand shook.” Sauter would glance at the reports, then hand them to Chairman McGrath.

  Suddenly, McGrath’s face brightened. He looked at his wristwatch. Then he said to Sauter, “Jim, you can take it easy on those Illinois returns. We’ve got Illinois. Close, but we’ve got it for Truman and it’s a landslide for [Paul Douglas, running for Senate] and Stevenson.” (Adlai Stevenson would go on to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, losing both times to Dwight Eisenhower.)

  Truman had been ahead in the popular vote. But for the first time, he was charging out front in the electoral vote too.

  At the Muehlebach, reporters and campaign officials were making meals of their fingernails. Suddenly, over the radio, they heard the unmistakable voice of Drew Pearson. Truman’s longtime friend and campaign official Bill Boyle stopped what he was doing and said, “What is Drew Pearson ­saying?”

  The reply was, “He is devouring his young. He is conceding that Truman is going to win.”

  * * *

  In the Muehlebach Hotel suite, the focus turned to Ohio, where the final tallies were imminent. The sun was rising on Kansas City. “We were all trying to pull in Ohio, definitely using a combination of prayers, pleas and profanity,” remembered Truman friend Jerome Walsh, a Kansas City lawyer.

  When Ohio fell into the Truman column, “there was pandemonium” at the Muehlebach, recalled journalist Carleton Kent. “The Ohio vote finally came in and finally decided the election,” recalled Robert Nixon of the International News Service, who was at the president’s suite in the hotel. Nixon would remember wiring his news service’s bureau chief in Washington: “Bill, stop writing that Dewey is the victor. You’re going to find yourself dead wrong.”

  In the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, where campaigners had set up for the Dewey victory party, campaign staff and high-level officials could be seen with tears streaking their faces. The unthinkable had occurred. “It’s awful,” one sobbing twenty-two-year-old stenographer was heard saying. “It was my first vote.”

  In suite 1527, Dewey finally emerged from his bedroom and faced his wife and the small crowd of friends in his suite. Their expressions showed awe and heartbreak, but Dewey remained composed—ever the politician.

  “What do you know?” he said. “The son of a bitch won.”

  * * *

  At the Elms Hotel, the Secret Service men guarding Truman had stayed up all night listening to the radio. “And all of the sudden . . . ,” remembered the man in charge, Jim Rowley, “comes this thing that the tide has changed. And so I figured, ‘This is important!’ And so I went in and told him. ‘We’ve won!’ And he turns on the radio.”

  Truman was up now, in every way po
ssible. His phone rang and it was H. Graham Morison on the line, an assistant attorney general calling from Washington. He had gotten the direct telephone number from Truman’s appointments secretary Matthew Connelly.

  “Mr. President,” Morison said. He struggled for words. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, don’t worry about that,” said Truman.

  “This is the greatest event that ever happened in my life.”

  “Well, we did skunk ’em, didn’t we?”

  “We didn’t. You did!”

  Truman told his Secret Service men, “We’ve got ’em beat.” He asked them to get his car ready. “We’re going to Kansas City.”

  * * *

  At Wallace headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, the singer and black activist Paul Robeson had been leading Gideon’s Army in a sing-along for hours. But now, the singing was over. Wallace refused to exhibit any disappointment, but his wife wore an expression of defeat. With tears running down her face, she could be heard saying, “I told him so all the time. He should never have done it.”

  Wallace gave his staff a pep talk. “Tonight we have had an extraordinary victory,” he announced, “because nothing can beat a spirit of this kind. You cannot do the impossible at once; we have done extraordinary wonders in the last ten months . . . This crusade is going ahead with renewed vigor.”

  After Wallace’s speech, the Progressive Party’s legal counsel John Abt approached the candidate with a draft of a concession message he had written. It was not your usual concession. Wallace held the page in his hand and read it closely.