As the majority report of the platform committee was being read before the convention and Humphrey sat near the rostrum waiting his turn to speak, Boss Ed Flynn beckoned Humphrey to show him the minority report, and having looked it over, Flynn said, “Young man, that’s just what this party needs.”
Unlike Jake Arvey and Frank Hague, Flynn had thought the whole Eisenhower idea silly, and that those who imagined otherwise were hacks and amateurs, blind to his own favorite political maxim: “Never confuse wishes with facts.” There was no question that Harry Truman would be nominated, Flynn had been saying, and he wanted to see Harry Truman win.
Humphrey stepped to the podium, his face shining, the audience suddenly hushed. He spoke less than ten minutes and he made history. It was time for the Democratic Party to move forward. “There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years late…. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
As the convention roared its approval, the California and Illinois delegations marched into the aisles. Others followed, joined by a forty-piece band led by James C. Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, while here and there glum, silent southern delegations kept their seats. At the podium Sam Rayburn of Texas, permanent chairman of the convention, looked down disapprovingly, fearing a southern “walkout” would destroy whatever slim chance Truman might have in November and devastate the party, possibly forever. Rayburn tried to stall a vote, but when it came the Humphrey forces won a resounding victory.
Told the Alabama delegation intended to lead a walkout that night, on the final roll call, Rayburn ordered a voice vote instead and the convention again thundered its approval.
At the White House, angered by the turn events were taking, Truman spoke of Humphrey and his followers as “crackpots” who hoped the South would bolt. But the fact was the convention that seemed so pathetically bogged down in its own gloom had now, suddenly, dramatically, pushed through the first unequivocal civil rights plank in the party’s history; and whether Truman and his people appreciated it or not, Hubert Humphrey had done more to reelect Truman than would anyone at the convention other than Truman himself.
There were television cameras at Union Station for the President’s departure that evening and there would be more cameras at the Philadelphia station when he arrived. “No privacy sure enough now,” he wrote, though he remained calm and composed. He had a surprise for the convention and he knew what the effect would be. On their home screens, those still relatively few Americans who owned television sets in 1948 saw him sitting quietly at the window of his private railroad car waiting to leave the station.
The First Lady, Margaret, Charlie Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Ayers, Connelly, and Sam Rosenman were’on board with him, and had dinner en route, while Truman kept to himself in his room going over his notes. It was by radio, approximately halfway to Philadelphia, that he heard the Alabama delegation and part of the Mississippi delegation stage their walkout. “Hard to hear,” he noted. “My daughter and my staff try to keep me from listening. Think maybe I’ll be upset. I won’t be.”
At Philadelphia, where a fine rain was falling, he stepped from the train at 9:15, looking relaxed and spotless in a white linen suit. From the station he was driven directly to the convention hall, now packed to capacity, the crowd noisy and full of anticipation—and suffering intensely from the heat, suit jackets long since discarded, ties and collars undone, shirts stained dark with perspiration.
The seconding speeches had begun and as they dragged on, Truman was kept out of sight, first in McGrath’s so-called “office,” a stifling room with no windows, then in the somewhat cooler air on an outdoor ramp near the stage entrance, overlooking an alley and the railroad tracks. He was joined by Alben Barkley and together they sat chatting side by side hour after hour, Truman in a straight-backed wooden chair, Barkley in a more accommodating red leather armchair that someone had borrowed from the speaker’s platform.
To many who had attended other national conventions over the years, this one was as bungled, as badly managed as any in memory—Newsweek called it the worst-managed, most dispirited convention in American political annals—and the idea that a President of the United States had to wait his turn as Truman did, under such conditions, seemed the final straw. The scene would be portrayed in some accounts as one of the extreme low points of Truman’s career. However, neither Truman nor Barkley saw it that way. Barkley would remember having “a very agreeable visit,” during which they talked about “many things: politics, trivia, how to bring up daughters….” To Truman, too, it was “an interesting and instructive evening,” as he recorded in his diary. Tom Evans, remembering the “hot, horrible night,” would describe Truman sitting calmly in his white suit, “and I give you my word of honor, there wasn’t a wrinkle in it—he was cool…collected…it didn’t seem to bother him at all.”
To be a professional in politics required patience, often great patience, and the strength not to take things too personally, and Truman and Barkley were two veteran professional politicians.
“They did what you do under such circumstances,” recalled George Elsey. “They waited.”
Nearly four hours went by, as the seconding speeches were followed by the balloting for President. At 12:42 Truman was finally nominated, receiving 948 votes, while 263 votes went to Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the last-minute candidate of the South. Then, by acclamation, Barkley was nominated for Vice President.
So it was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Truman and Barkley at last made their entrance, striding onto the platform as the band played “Hail to the Chief.”
Considering the time, the fatigue of the crowd, it was a scene made for failure. Any radio or television audience that Truman might have hoped for was long since asleep. To make matters a little worse, the sister of a former Pennsylvania senator suddenly released a flock of white pigeons—“doves of peace” supposedly—from a floral Liberty Bell, where they had been held all night, cooped up in the heat. The distraught birds careened desperately into the air every which way, smashing into the balcony, the lights, bombarding spectators, and swooping so low over the rostrum that Chairman Rayburn had to fend off several at once, to the delight of the crowd as well as Truman and Barkley who were laughing uproariously. (Years later Truman would describe how one pigeon had actually landed on Rayburn’s bald head, a claim that Rayburn, who saw nothing funny in the situation, stoutly denied, telling an interviewer, “Harry Truman’s a goddamn liar. No pigeon ever lit on my head.”)
Barkley spoke first, and briefly. Then came Truman’s turn.
He advanced to the microphones, his natty white suit gleaming now in the full glare of the lights. And despite the hour, the heat, the discomfort and weariness of his audience, he did what no one would have thought possible. Wasting no time with pleasantries or grand phrases, his head up as he spoke without a script, his voice strong, hands chopping the air, he brought the convention immediately to its feet cheering.
“Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that.” Not until this moment had anyone used the word “win” as though he meant it.
The Democratic Party would win in November because the Democratic Party was the people’s party. The Republicans were the party of the privileged few, as always.
For the first time since 1945 he was speaking not as a leader by accident, by inheritance, but by the choice of his party. He was neither humble nor elegant nor lofty. The contrast with Dewey’s stilted acceptance speech from the same platform could not have been greater. In manner as well as content he was drawing the line so there could be no mistaking one candidate for the other. Mere victory was not the purpose, Dewey had proclaimed, as if he had already been elected. “Our task,” Dewey had said, “is to fill our victory with such meaning t
hat mankind everywhere, yearning for freedom, will take heart and move forward….” Truman declared: “Now it is time for us to get together and beat the common enemy.” He was cracker-barrel plain, using words like “rotten” (for the Republican tax bill) and “poppycock” (for the Republican platform promise to increase Social Security benefits). Life magazine called it his “Li’l Abner Ozark style.” It was exactly in the spirit of the vehement backcountry politics he loved, and where he knew he belonged, the tradition of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, alive and full of fight.
He listed the gains for farmers, for labor and the poor achieved under sixteen years of Democratic leadership, and he tore into the Republican-dominated 80th Congress for holding up progress on housing, aid to education, medical care, and yes, civil rights.
Everybody knows that I recommended to the Congress the civil rights program. I did that because I believed it to be my duty under the Constitution. Some of the members of my own party disagree with me violently on this matter. But they stand up and do it openly. People can tell where they stand. But the Republicans all professed to be for these measures. But the Congress failed to act….
Indeed, he said, there was a long list of promises in the new Republican platform, things of great importance that the Republicans claimed they wanted but that the Republicans who controlled Congress had prevented his administration from doing.
It was then he unveiled his surprise, his bombshell, and speaking so rapidly the words seemed to run together, as though all joined by hyphens.
I am, therefore, calling this Congress back into session July 26.
On the 26th of July, which out in Missouri we call “Turnip Day,” I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis—which they are saying they are for ‘in their platform…. I shall ask them to act upon…aid to education, which they say they are for…civil rights legislation, which they say they are for….
The cheering and stomping in the hall was so great he had to shout to be heard.
Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind the Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the 80th Congress. They can do this job in 15 days, if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office.
He was calling the Republicans’ bluff—“Let ’em make good!”—and the delegates were ecstatic. He had “set the convention on fire,” said The New York Times. “He walked out there,” remembered Clark Clifford, “and reached down within himself, found the strength and the inspiration to make that fiery speech which was necessary to put him over.”
Critics on the left and the right found themselves grudgingly moved by such nerve and audacity in the face of the odds and by his effect on the crowd. “They sensed,” wrote Max Lerner, “that this was the most militant Presidential acceptance speech in either party since Bryan. They liked the fact that he came out of his corner fighting…. It was a great speech for a great occasion, and as I listened I found myself applauding.”
Even The New Republic bestowed the ultimate compliment: the speech was as “cannily suited” to the time and setting as any Franklin Roosevelt might have made. “For that night at least, Harry Truman was a real leader.”
“You can’t stay cold about a man who sticks out his chin and fights,” Time reported one delegate exclaiming.
Truman was likened to the brave sea captain who rallies the crew to save the sinking ship. In fact, he was exactly like the Missouri artillery captain in the Vosges Mountains in 1918 who when his battery panicked under enemy attack stood by his guns and with a fierce harangue got his men back in order again.
The Republicans charged him with crude politics. The call for a special session of Congress was “the act of a desperate man,” “the last hysterical gasp from an expiring administration.”
“Of course, it was politics,” wrote Jonathan Daniels, “and effective politics, tough and native.”
What it did above all, as Truman intended, was to put the focus on Congress and thus on the split between those Republicans who, like Dewey and Earl Warren, favored much that had been set in motion since the 1930s by the New Deal, and those Republicans who remained obstructionists. It made the 80th Congress the issue, put the Republicans on the defense, and left Dewey with the dubious choice of either standing up for the 80th Congress, and thereby assume a share of responsibility for its failings, or remain aloof, which would seem less than courageous for a standardbearer.
As a political strategist Truman had been “devilishly astute,” Speaker of the House Joe Martin later conceded. No President had called an emergency session of Congress in an election year since 1856. “On the 25th of July,” went an old Missouri saying, “sow your turnips wet or dry.” The Congress that met on the 26th (the 25th was a Sunday) would be known as the Turnip Congress.
“Arrived in Washington at the White House at 5:30 A.M., my usual time getting up,” Truman jotted on his calendar for July 15, after the return from Philadelphia.
But go to bed at 6:00 and listen to the news. Sleep until 9:15, order breakfast and go to the office at 10:00. I called a special session of the Congress. My, how my opposition screams. I’m going to attempt to make them meet their platform promises before the election. That is according to the “kept” press and the opposition leadership “cheap politics.” I wonder what “expensive politics” will be like!
In a red-brick auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, two days later, a hurriedly assembled conference of states’ rights Democrats, “Dixiecrats” as they now called themselves, waved Confederate flags and cheered Alabama’s former Governor Frank M. Dixon as he denounced Truman’s civil rights program as an effort “to reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race,” then unanimously chose Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to be their candidate for President, and for Vice President, Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi. The Dixiecrat platform called for “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” Their hope was to deny both Truman and Dewey a majority and thus throw the election into the House of Representatives.
Asked why he was breaking with the Democratic Party now, when Roosevelt had made similar promises as Truman on civil rights, Strom Thurmond responded, “But Truman really means it.”
On July 27, once again at the Philadelphia Convention Hall, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Citizens of America, with more than three thousand delegates—far more than at either the Republican or Democratic conventions—rallied to acclaim Wallace their candidate for the presidency, and Senator Glen H. Taylor, the “Singing Cowboy” of Idaho, as their improbable choice for a running mate. (Taylor, a Democrat, had campaigned for the Senate in 1944 singing, “Oh, Give Me a Home by the Capitol Dome.”)
Black delegates were present in impressive numbers. Nearly a third of the delegates were women. Youth predominated. The average Progressive on hand in Philadelphia was described as twenty years younger and 30 pounds lighter than his or her Democratic or Republican counterpart. Comparably little alcohol was consumed and there were no “smoke-filled rooms” this time. But there was also a noticeable absence of political experience on hand, and though neither Wallace nor Taylor, nor any but a small minority of delegates, were Communists, the conspicuous presence of such celebrated pro-Communists as Paul Robeson and New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, plus the obvious dominating presence of Communists throughout the whole new helter-skelter Progressive organization, was to many observers and much of the country deeply disturbing.
As he had from the start of his “crusade,” Wallace refused to repudiate his Communist support. He would not repudiate any support that came to him, he said, “on the basis of interest in peace.” Senator Taylor stressed the distinction between “pink” Communists and “red” Communists, telling reporters that the pink variety wished to change the American system through evolution rather than revolution, and that they would support the Progressive cause. In contrast, the red va
riety would be backing Dewey on the theory that revolution would inevitably follow another Hoover-style administration.
The Progressive platform that emerged from the convention was virtually no different from the Communist Party platform in its denunciation of the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the new draft law, and called for the destruction of American nuclear weapons, which were still the only nuclear weapons known to exist. When a Vermont farmer named James Hayford introduced an amendment saying it was not the Progressive Party’s intention to endorse the foreign policy of any other country, the idea was denounced as “the reflection of pressure from outside” and voted down—which Wallace knew to be a mistake but did nothing to stop.
Wallace delivered his acceptance speech at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park before an exuberant crowd of more than thirty thousand people who had paid for their seats, a Progressive innovation to meet expenses. He blamed American policy for most of the world’s troubles and tensions, never once criticizing the Soviet Union. Concerning Berlin, he said, there was nothing to lose by giving it up in the search for peace. “We stand against the kings of privilege who own the old parties…[who] attempt to control our thoughts and dominate the life of man everywhere in the world.”
IV
In the stifling, relentless heat of summer in Washington, the Turnip Congress got reluctantly under way. Tension over Berlin increased almost by the hour. And to Truman’s extreme annoyance, James Forrestal launched a campaign behind closed doors to turn custody of the atomic bomb over to the military chiefs.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 497