by A. J. Baime
Meanwhile the condolence letters poured into Dewey’s mailbox. “I think the future historians will regard your defeat as one of the most important turning points in American history,” Alf Landon—the 1936 Republican nominee—wrote Dewey on November 19, 1948. An uncle of Dewey’s wrote him on November 4, “Aunt Marsh and I want you to know that we are very sick over the election, all day yesterday we went around feeling as if something inside had died, and I guess it has when we realize that the voters of this great country would select such a man as a leader.”
One Republican named Thomas W. Pierce wrote his friend Dorothy Bell Rackoff, who had been a delegate from New York at the Republican National Convention, five days after the election: “I have been like many other Republicans—literally picking up the pieces scattered about us by the ceiling that began crashing down on us late Tuesday night. Outside of Pearl Harbor itself I do not know of another single great event that has quite so much disturbed my mental equilibrium.”
The overwhelming surprise left innumerable millions of people, at home and abroad, with a question on their lips that would baffle historians for generations to come.
How could the pollsters and the press have been so wrong?
What actually happened?
* * *
Following Election Day, the New Dealer Harold “Old Curmudgeon” Ickes wrote a friend, “It was not an ‘election’ but a ‘revolution.’” The ballot box had revealed newly crystallizing power bases, new campaign processes showing effective results, and a renewed sense that, in America, anything could happen. The final tally had Truman with 303 electoral votes and twenty-eight states to Dewey’s 189 and sixteen states, with Strom Thurmond carrying four states—Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama—and 39 electoral votes (one breakaway electoral vote in Tennessee also went in the Thurmond column). The popular vote went to Truman, 24,105,810 to 21,970,064. While Henry Wallace picked up zero electoral votes, he earned roughly 1,156,000 votes nationally, about 13,000 less than Thurmond.*
According to a postmortem statistical analysis done by the Republican National Committee, the election was the closest since 1916, and just twenty-nine thousand votes could have changed the entire outcome, if properly distributed in the states of Ohio, Illinois, and California.
The Democrats picked up seventy-five seats in the House of Representatives and nine in the Senate, regaining majority control of both. Thus the Eighty-First Congress was recast, creating what all believed would be a far more Truman-friendly Washington.
Shortly following the election, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Republican of Massachusetts, brought a resolution to abolish the electoral college in favor of a new system. It was an antiquated algorithm that functioned clumsily, he argued, and the major example in 1948 was Tennessee. The state had given Truman eleven of its electoral votes, Strom Thurmond one rogue vote, and Thomas Dewey zero, even though Dewey had drawn well more than twice as many votes in the state than Thurmond did. How was that fair? Still, Senator Lodge’s resolution to alter the system got nowhere. The highly controversial electoral college system remains in debate today.
Monday-morning quarterbacks claimed that Dewey was simply the wrong guy. “We should have known he couldn’t win,” Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth said. Referring to Dewey’s 1944 campaign, she famously added, “A soufflé never rises twice.” “My own opinion,” Speaker of the House Joe Martin later wrote, “is that Taft, if nominated, could have won in 1948, and he could have won in 1952.” Richard Nixon, at the time a freshman congressman, later told an interviewer that Harold Stassen was “the most interesting candidate.” “Stassen, if he could have been nominated, would have been the strongest candidate,” Nixon said in 1983. “I think he would have won.”
Numerous voices called out Dewey for running a campaign that was a monument to hubris, claiming that if he had come out swinging and if he had spoken more on specific policy, the result would have been the landslide that nearly everyone expected. This was a logical conclusion, though impossible to prove.
After digesting the events and the shock of it all, Dewey himself came to a simple and poignant conclusion. “The short answer on the election was that the farmers switched and that’s that and I am going to go ahead and enjoy life and live longer,” he wrote his uncle George Thomas of Whittier, California, five weeks after the election. “The farmers switched in the mid-West,” he wrote to Joseph Robinson of San Francisco, in January. “We carried the industrial East and lost the farm vote. That is the entire answer to the election.”
According to statistical analysis, Dewey was correct that the farmers had delivered a mighty blow—particularly in Ohio and Illinois, two states that had huge weight in the ultimate outcome. Truman had effectively campaigned on the issue of the Commodity Credit Corporation’s failure to supply storage bins to farmers. As the election was progressing, farmers found themselves with a bumper corn crop and record-high wheat and oat crops; they were crippled by lack of storage, and very angry about it. In the end, Truman carried the farming states of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even Iowa, which had voted Republican in all but three presidential elections going back to 1856. “It had been taken for granted generally that this area [farmers] was still staunchly Republican,” commented the columnist Thomas L. Stokes. “That is, taken for granted by all but a few which included a fellow named Harry S. Truman.”
Others chalked up Truman’s victory to laborers and the president’s fierce opposition to the Taft-Hartley Act, which stripped away power from labor unions and was passed by the Republican Eightieth Congress over Truman’s emphatic veto. Reportedly, the first words out of Truman’s mouth when he entered the presidential suite at the Muehlebach on the morning of November 3 were: “Labor did it.” The Taft-Hartley law provided Truman with an easy opportunity to inflame the passions of working people against Wall Street and the Republican Party.
Then there was the “Negro vote.” Four days after the election, Philleo Nash sent the president a memorandum, for “some light reading on your vacation,” as Truman was off for a break at his favorite vacation spot—Key West, Florida. “Over the country as a whole,” Nash wrote, “your majority in the Negro districts is the highest ever. The average will be above 80%.” In Philadelphia, nine out of ten black voters went for Truman. In Harlem, he won 65 percent of the vote, to Dewey’s 19 percent (Wallace claimed 16 percent). More importantly, the black vote went heavily to Truman in two of the most decisive states: Ohio and Illinois. In both cases, Truman came out on top. His success among black voters in Los Angeles and Oakland also gave him a boost in California, which he won by the narrow margin of roughly eighteen thousand votes out of a total of over four million.
Truman would forever argue that his civil rights stance was not about politics but about morality. Nevertheless, in terms of votes, it had helped him at least as much as it may have hurt him.
Counterintuitively, the president also gained momentum due to the many crises he was facing throughout 1948. When the Berlin Blockade began, many Americans were sure it would lead to war. Newsweek called the blockade “the greatest diplomatic crisis in American history.” The Truman administration was vastly credited with the success of the Berlin Airlift. At the time of the election, no war had started, and the airlift was working.
And what of Truman’s attack on the Eightieth Congress? Was this strategy coldhearted and misleading, as the Republicans had charged throughout? After all, the Eightieth Congress had passed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. “It always galls me to think that Harry Truman won in 1948 by attacking the Congress which gave him his place in history,” the conservative Republican senator Charlie Halleck of Indiana later said. The truth was, though Truman and the Eightieth Congress were allies in foreign policy, in domestic policy, they were far from it, and that was the root of Truman’s ire. He could not attack Dewey on policy matters, but Congress was fair game. The strategy worked.
And what of economics?
A huge majority of Americans were happy with their incomes in 1948. Just days before the election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new numbers showing that the rise in living costs had stopped, at least momentarily, and retail food prices had actually shown a modest decline—all good news for the economy. When the war had ended, the Labor and Treasury Departments were apoplectic with fear over unemployment dangers; but in 1948 unemployment was near nonexistent. “It is almost impossible to put an administration out of power at the very peak of a prosperity boom,” commented Senator Taft.
Others drew a different conclusion. Truman had, some astute observers noted, done much to win the election way back at the Democratic National Convention in July, when he called Congress back into a “Turnip Day” emergency session. The plan was to put a spotlight on the Republican schism between the conservative Congress and the more liberal politics of Thomas Dewey. After the election, Dewey refused to relinquish his fight for a more liberal GOP. In a speech three months later, he addressed straight-on the ideological split that plagued his party. Some Republican members of Congress boycotted the speech. Others praised the failed 1948 candidate for pulling the curtain off the party’s dark secret, which was in fact no secret at all.
“The Republican party is split wide open,” Dewey told a crowd in Washington early in 1949. “It has been split wide open for years, but we have tried to gloss over it . . . We have in our party some fine, high-minded patriotic people who honestly oppose farm price supports, unemployment insurance, old age benefits, slum clearance, and other social programs. These people consider these programs horrendous departures into paternalism . . . These people believe in a laissez-faire society and look back wistfully to the miscalled ‘good old days’ of the 19th century.”
If the Republican Party did not start looking forward and embrace some measure of New Deal thinking, Dewey said, “you can bury the Republican party as the deadest pigeon in the country.” From the perspective of many decades later, Dewey’s words do not hold up, as the presidency of Donald Trump can attest.
And what of the pollsters themselves? George Gallup’s first reaction was that the people who accounted for his polling numbers did not show up at the voting booths, because they assumed Dewey had it won. “Which voters stayed home?” he asked his readers, rhetorically. Elmo Roper was the pollster who stopped polling altogether weeks before the election because, he claimed, Dewey was “as good as elected,” so there was no more point in taking polls. Now Roper had this to say: “I could not have been more wrong and the thing that bothers me at the moment is that I don’t know why I was wrong.”
One theory emerged that the pollsters erred in their sampling process, that they failed to do enough to tally the opinions of low-income voters who were less approachable and more likely to be suspicious of poll takers. In the end, these voters came out for Truman. Another, more valid theory supported Gallup’s excuse: that Dewey voters were so confident, they did not bother to vote. Numbers backed up this claim; Dewey drew about forty thousand fewer total votes than he had four years earlier against FDR. The logical conclusion was that some Republican voters stayed home because they thought their vote did not matter. How many of them later regretted that decision?
“It’s open season on the pollsters,” Edward R. Murrow said over CBS radio. “But it ought to be pointed out that they are accused of nothing except being wrong. No one claims, so far as I know, that they were ‘bought’ or that they deliberately attempted to influence the outcome by contributing to despondency and alarm, or by inducing complacency in the Republican ranks. They were just wrong, and in the field of information and ideas this is no crime.”
Ultimately, the story of the election—and of its outcome—centers on its main character. On November 3, Senator Vandenberg was in his Washington office chewing on a cigar when a member of his staff asked him what he thought about Truman’s victory. Vandenberg stopped, pulled the cigar from his lips, and said, “You’ve got to give the little man credit. There he was flat on his back. Everyone had counted him out but he came up fighting and won the battle. He did it all by himself. That’s the kind of courage the American people admire.”
Epilogue
AFTER THE 1948 ELECTION, Thomas Dewey finished out his second and then third terms as governor of New York before retiring from public service at the end of 1954. He was highly instrumental in convincing Dwight Eisenhower to run for president in 1952, and helped Ike secure the Republican nomination over Robert Taft. During the 1948 campaign, when Dewey and Ike had famously sat together for the surprise photo op on the porch of Dewey’s farmhouse in upstate New York, both men believed that one of them was going to become the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover. They were right, but ironically, wrong about which of the two of them it was going to be.
For the rest of his life, Dewey kept a cordial relationship with Truman. When, in 1950, Truman made the highly controversial decision to send US troops to fight on the Korean peninsula as part of United Nations armed forces, without the official consent of Congress, Dewey cabled the White House: “I whole-heartedly agree with and support the difficult decision you have made today to extend American assistance to the Republic of Korea in combatting armed communist aggression.” When six months later Truman survived an assassination attempt that left a Secret Service man and a would-be assassin dead, Dewey sent Truman a note expressing “heart-felt gratification that no harm came to you or to your family.”
Dewey had said before he ran in 1948, “I deliberately decided that I was not going to be one of those unhappy men who yearned for the Presidency and whose failure to get it scarred their lives.” After retiring, he led a seemingly contented life. Nevertheless, more Americans today are likely familiar with the phrase Dewey Defeats Truman than they are with Thomas E. Dewey. If Americans know of Thomas Dewey, it is mostly because he lost to Harry Truman in 1948.
On March 16, 1971, Dewey was in Florida, golfing with the Boston Red Sox slugger Carl Yastrzemski. Dewey was scheduled to fly out that night to attend the engagement party of President Richard Nixon’s daughter, at the White House. Instead, he died of a heart attack in his Miami hotel room. He was sixty-eight years old.
* * *
After the 1948 election, Henry Wallace left the Progressive Party, which did field a candidate in 1952, only to win less than a quarter of a percent of the national vote. After that, the party disintegrated and Henry Wallace faded into obscurity.
Throughout 1948 Wallace had led an antiwar, anti–Truman Doctrine, anti–Marshall Plan campaign that attempted to blame the Cold War not on the Soviets but on US policy. After 1948 he had an about-face. He came to the opinion that the Soviets were in fact a Cold War enemy. In 1950 he concluded, “Today, I am convinced that Russia is out to dominate the world.” As for his Gideon’s Army antiwar stance, that too disappeared. Wallace also endorsed Truman’s decision to send troops into Korea in 1950. In an article published in 1952 called “Where I Was Wrong,” he called the USSR “utterly evil.”
In 1964 Wallace was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. He died a year later.
* * *
Strom Thurmond won well over a million votes in the 1948 election. A month after the election, Thurmond visited his daughter Essie Mae at the college she was attending in South Carolina. They met secretly in the office of the college’s president.
“How could you have said all those terrible things?” she asked him, according to her recollection of the conversation.
“What things?” he responded.
“About Negroes.”
“Essie Mae,” she remembered him explaining, “there is no man in the country who cares more about the Negroes than I do. I think you know that.”
She kept probing him, and as she recalls, he told her, “It’s the South, Essie Mae. It’s the culture here. It’s custom. It’s the way we live. You don’t go to England and tell them to get rid of the Queen and the royalty. That’s not fair, either,
but it’s the custom. They got rid of the royalty in Russia, and what do you have? Communism! A police state. It’s no different from Hitler.”
Thurmond’s career in government remains unprecedented. In 1954 he became a Democratic senator from South Carolina. In 1964 he mirrored his state of South Carolina and much of the South by switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Thurmond supported Barry Goldwater in 1964, against the Democrat Lyndon Johnson, in large part due to the civil rights issue. While Johnson supported the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, Goldwater was against it.
Thurmond went on to become the first and only man to remain in the Senate at the age of one hundred, and he is still one of the longest-serving senators in US history. He died in 2003, in the town where he came from—Edgefield. Six months later, seventy-eight-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams revealed that Strom Thurmond was her father. She published Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond in 2005, revealing the intimate details of her relationship with Thurmond. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
