At both Grand Junction, Colorado, and the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he reminisced about Grandfather Solomon Young and his journeys over the plains, his friendship with Brigham Young. “Oh, I wish my grandfather could see me now,” he said spontaneously at Salt Lake, and the audience first laughed, then broke into prolonged applause. “Those pioneers had faith and they had energy,” he said, seeming himself to embody an excess of both qualities.
Though he refused to put on Indian war bonnets or to kiss babies, he was thankful always for the gifts ceremoniously presented at stop after stop—hats, spurs, baskets of fruit (“I’ll be eating peaches from now until I get to Washington”). And nearly always he had something to say about the local scenery, local history, local achievements and interests.
They tell me [he said at Mojave] that in 1883—that was the year before I was born—that a gentleman by the name of Webb built ten grand, big wagons here in this town, bought himself a hundred head of mules, and began to haul borax out of the Mojave Desert—and that was the origin of Twenty-Mule Team Borax which we always kept in the house when I was a kid. I never thought I would be here as President at the place where it originated and talking to you people about your interests in the welfare of the country.
He expressed love of home, love of the land, the virtues and old verities of small-town America, his America. “Naturally, if we don’t think our hometown is the greatest in the world, we are not very loyal citizens. We all should feel that way,” he told the loyal citizens of American Fork, Utah.
“You don’t get any double talk from me,” he declared from a brightly decorated bandstand first thing in the morning sunshine at Sparks, Nevada. “I’m either for something or against it, and you know it. You know what I stand for.” What he stood for, he said again and again, was a government of and for the people, not the “special interests.”
He was friendly, cheerful. And full of fight.
“You are the government,” he said time after time. “Practical politics is government. Government starts from the grass roots.” “I think the government belongs to you and me as private citizens.” “I’m calling this trip a crusade. It’s a crusade of the people against the special interests, and if you back me up we’re going to win….”
“The basic issue of this campaign is as simple as can be: it’s the special interests against the people.” “I’m here on a serious mission, and because it is so serious, I propose to speak to you as plainly as I can.” “In 1946, you know, two-thirds of you stayed home and didn’t vote. You wanted a change. Well, you got it. You got the change. You got just exactly what you deserved.” “Now use your judgment. Keep the people in control of the government….” “I not only want you to vote for me but I want you to vote for yourselves, and if you vote for yourselves, you’ll vote for the Democratic ticket….”
The crowds would be gathered at station stops often from early morning, waiting for him to arrive. Men and boys perched on rooftops and nearby signal towers for a better view. There would be a high school band standing by, ready to play the national anthem or “Hail to the Chief,” or to struggle through the Missouri Waltz, a song Truman particularly disliked but that it was his fate to hear repeated hundreds of times over. His train would ease into the station as the band blared, the crowd cheered. Then, accompanied by three or four local politicians—usually a candidate for Congress or state party chairman who had boarded the train at a prior stop—Truman would step from behind the blue velvet curtain onto the platform, and the crowd, large or small, would cheer even more. One of the local politicians would then introduce the President of the United States and the crowd would cheer again.
At the ten-minute stops, he would speak for five minutes, beginning with praise for the local candidate for Congress or some issue of local interest, then moving quickly from the general to the particular. He would lambaste the Republican Congress for the high cost of living or failing to vote the grain-storage bins, for the Taft-Hartley Act or the “rich man’s tax bill,” for slashing federal support for irrigation and hydroelectric power projects in the West. It was the Republicans in Congress who were holding back progress in the Central Valley of California. Republicans at heart had no real interest in the West—not in water, not in public power. The Republicans who controlled the Appropriations Committees in the House and Senate, those upon whom the future of federal projects in the Central Valley depended were not Californians, they were not westerners: “They are Eastern Republicans.”
“Give ‘em hell, Harry!” someone would shout from the crowd—news accounts of his promise to Barkley to “give ‘em hell” having swept the country by now. The cry went up at one stop after another, often more than once—“Give ‘em hell, Harry!”—which always brought more whoops, laughter, and yells of approval, but especially when he tore into the 80th Congress.
(“I never gave anybody hell,” he would later say. “I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”)
At the close, he would ask if they would like to meet his family and the crowd never failed in its response. The routine became standard. He would first introduce Bess—“Miz Truman”—who would step out from behind the blue curtain, looking pleased and motherly. He would take her hand and she would stand at his right, saying nothing. If the crowd was small and especially friendly, he would refer to her as “the Boss.” Then, proudly, he would present “Miss Margaret,” whose appearance nearly always brought the biggest cheer of all, and to the obvious delight of her father. She would be carrying an armful of roses, a few of which she would throw to the crowd. Truman would lean over the brass rail to grasp one or two outstretched hands. Someone would signal the local band to start playing again, and with warning toots of the whistle, with reporters scrambling to get back on board, the crowd cheering and the three Trumans waving, the train would pull slowly out of the station.
No matter what the outcome of the campaign, wrote Richard Rovere, millions of Americans would remember for the rest of their lives this final tableau of the “Three Traveling Trumans.”
It will be a picture to cherish and it will stand Harry Truman in good stead for the rest of his life. Travelling with him you get the feeling that the American people who have seen him and heard him at his best would be willing to give him just about anything he wants except the Presidency.
It could be said also they had seen and heard for themselves a President who was friendly and undisguised, loyal to his party, fond of his family, a man who cared about the country and about them, who believed the business of government was their business, and who didn’t whine when he was in trouble, but kept bravely, doggedly plugging away, doing his best, his duty as he saw it, and who was glad to be among them. He wasn’t a hero, or an original thinker. His beliefs were their beliefs, their way of talking was his way of talking. He was on their side. He was one of them. If he stumbled over a phrase or a name, he would grin and try again, and they would smile with him.
“There is an agreeable warmheartedness and simplicity about Truman that is genuine,” wrote Richard Strout for his column in The New Republic. A presidential train was probably the worst of all places to gauge public opinion, he added. “Nevertheless, reporters keep pinching themselves at the size of the crowds and their cordial response.”
At Los Angeles, at Gilmore Stadium, with screen stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan—all ardent liberal Democrats—seated prominently on stage beside him, Truman hit hard at Henry Wallace, warning liberal Democrats to “think again” if they thought a vote for the third party was a vote for peace. With Communists “guiding and using” it, the third party did not represent American ideals. A vote for Wallace only played into the hands of the Republican “forces of reaction.” Now was the hour for the liberal forces of America to unite. “Think again. Don’t waste your vote.
At San Diego, ten thousand turned out, despite threatening skies and the early hour of 9:00 A.M., and gave him the most enthusiastic welcome thus far. After
the stop at Oceanside, California, where the train pulled within sight of the rolling surf of the Pacific, the route was east again.
By then, Friday, September 24, he had been on the road a week, and while some on board had already begun to show signs of strain, Truman, who bore much the heaviest burden, remained steady as a rock. Nor had he left the duties and concerns of the Oval Office. A White House pouch arrived daily—papers requiring his signature, letters to be signed, letters to be read, reports from department heads, reports to Congress, sealed manila envelopes marked “Confidential,” as well as copies of the Kansas City Star and the Independence Examiner. A memorandum from Head Usher Howell Crim reported on the quantity of plaster descending in the East Room.
The Berlin crisis and the risks involved in the airlift weighed heavily on Truman. Though the quantity of supplies being flown into the city had increased since August, the disturbing truth was that the airlift was supplying less than half of what Berlin needed. “We are not quite holding our own,” General Clay had cabled. In another few days, in Dallas, at Truman’s request, General Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to Moscow, would come quietly aboard the train to give his assessment to Truman of Stalin’s mood and the chances of war.
Staff work on board had acquired a pattern of a kind, though little about it was systematic or efficient or ever very formal. Of the major speeches only the one at Dexter, Iowa, had been prepared well in advance. The rest—for Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles—were produced under way, with the combined efforts of Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Murphy, and the new writers Noyes, Carr, and Carter. No speech was ever the work of one writer, and no speech failed to go through several drafts. Truman himself went over every line, worked “painstakingly” on every draft, and was the first to approve suggested deletions. “That’s good,” he would say. “Never use two words when one will do best.” Convoluted structure and highblown or evasive phrases greatly annoyed him. “That’s not the way I would say it,” he would remark as the group sat around the mahogany table in the dining room of the Magellan, working late into the night. “Let’s just say what we mean.”
“Nobody had any special pride of authorship, but we did get into heated arguments now and then,” wrote Ross. “The President would grin and say, ‘All right, you fellows fight it out and I’ll decide.’ ” Ross wanted Truman to ease up on the abusive language and state his case in more dignified fashion. But Truman was determined to keep the heat on. He had also introduced a new line about the housing shortage that made the others wince. If they went to the polls and did their duty on November 2, Truman would tell the crowd with a smile, then he wouldn’t have to go “hunting around in this housing shortage.” He could stay right in the White House. It was a line he liked and that he was sure the people liked. So he kept it.
Background material, particularly material useful for the rear platform appearances, was provided by a “Research Division” of the Democratic National Committee—three or four “bright young men” who had been holed up in a small office off DuPont Circle in Washington and who, according to George Elsey, “worked like dogs and ground out an incredible amount of material. All kinds of historical, literary, political and economic data flowed through them, and news clippings, photostats of useful documents, anything that would give spark and vitality and originality and vigor to President Truman’s campaign effort.”
Elsey’s task was to sort and edit it all, then keep the President supplied with pertinent items to choose from, and in proper order as they sped along. “I was the ‘whistlestopper’ on the job doing the outlines, getting the stuff together, and feeding these back to him,” he remembered. “I felt I got twenty-five years exercise walking from my car to his car in the weeks of the campaign.”
Bill Boyle would be credited with “planning every inch” of Truman’s itinerary. Constantly in touch with state party leaders, he advised Truman on which towns mattered, and why.
Traveling ahead of the train, as “advance men,” were Oscar Chapman, the Under Secretary of Interior, and Donald Dawson, of the White House staff. They were responsible for all the details of local ceremonies, to make sure the local politicians knew where and when to come on board Truman’s train, and that no such fiasco as the empty hall at Omaha in June ever happened again.
Between stops, in the comparative quiet and privacy of the Magellan, the candidate himself remained even-tempered and steadfastly confident. The strain on him was unrelenting. Yet he showed no signs of wear-and-tear or faltering expectations. He knew he was behind and in private said so. But he was also sure he would catch up and move ahead by November, when it would count—a view shared by almost no one else on board, though few, other than the press, ever talked about it.
Once, late in an especially long day, a noticeably weary First Lady asked Clark Clifford if he thought the President really believed he could win and Clifford said yes. “He gives every appearance under every condition,” Clifford answered.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know where it comes from.”
Though several of his staff were gravely concerned about the split in the Democratic ranks—the campaigns under way by the Progressives and the Dixiecrats—Truman seems never to have taken the candidacies of Wallace and Thurmond as serious threats.
Henry Wallace was running hard. In August he had bravely campaigned through the South, decrying segregation and refusing to stay in hotels that enforced discrimination. In North Carolina angry crowds pelted him with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Traveling the rest of the country mainly by plane, he would eventually roll up more mileage even than Truman, his main theme remaining constant throughout: the Progressive Party was “the peace party” that could end the Cold War through direct negotiations with the Soviet Union. At Los Angeles, speaking at the same stadium where Truman had, Wallace drew a larger crowd than Truman had, and it was a paying crowd. But attendance overall at Wallace rallies and speeches was falling off, the excitement of his Progressive “crusade” plainly in decline, as he was perceived—and portrayed more and more in the press—as “playing Moscow’s game.” Of the Republicans and Democrats, he said they were “equally sinister” in their policies, both being in the grip of Wall Street and the Pentagon.
Strom Thurmond kept harping on states’ rights and demanding that the “evil forces” in control of the Democratic Party be “cast out.” He called Truman’s Fair Employment Practices Committee “communistic.” Racial integration of the armed services was “un-American.” The South must hold the line. “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” He and the Dixiecrats would win 140 electoral votes in the South, Thurmond said, more than sufficient to force the election into the House. But almost no one took the claim seriously, and Truman least of all.
In his speeches, Truman never mentioned Wallace or Thurmond by name. But then never in the major addresses or in any of his largely extemporaneous remarks to small crowds in out-of-the-way places did he speak of Dewey by name. Dewey was always “my Republican opponent,” or “the other fellow.”
He never criticized or ridiculed Dewey in a personal way. Interestingly, Dewey was never even a subject of discussion on board the Ferdinand Magellan. There was no talk of Dewey’s personality or failings, no gossiping about him, or ever any consideration of attacking him on personal grounds. It would not be recalled that the President ever even mentioned Dewey.
II
Governor Thomas E. Dewey had gone aboard his own campaign train at Albany on Sunday, September 19, two days after Truman left Washington, and Dewey, too, delivered his first major speech in Iowa, at Des Moines on Monday the 20th, two days after Truman spoke at the Dexter plowing contest. Starting later than Truman, Dewey would travel nowhere near so far, and at a much more leisurely pace. And he would deliver far fewer speeches—all this, like everything about the Dewey campaign, having been carefully thought out in advance. As the cand
idate and his advisers proudly informed the press, nothing was to be left to chance.
Press coverage of Dewey’s advance across the country was also to be far greater than that Truman received. There were ninety-two reporters riding the “Dewey Victory Special”—ninety-eight by the time the train reached California—roughly twice the number traveling with the President, and they were catered to, their everyday needs handled with a skill and efficiency unknown on the Truman train. Copies of the candidate’s speeches were nearly always available twenty-four hours in advance, as they seldom ever were on the Truman train. An internal public address system fed Dewey’s remarks directly to the press car and dining cars, so reporters need not bother leaving their air-conditioned comforts. Coffee and sandwiches were provided to reporters at odd hours, their laundry attended to, their luggage moved from train to hotel for overnight stops. To those who had traveled with both candidates, the Truman operation, by comparison, was forty years behind the times.
“If you wanted anything laundered [on the Truman train], you did it yourself, in a Pullman basin,” Richard Rovere informed his readers in The New Yorker.
When you detrained anywhere for an overnight stay, it was every man for himself. You carried your duffel and scrambled for your food. If a man was such a slave to duty that he felt obliged to hear what the President said in his back-platform addresses, he had to climb down off the train; run to the rear end, mingle with the crowd, and listen. Often this was a hazardous undertaking, for the President was given to speaking late at night to crowds precariously assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew the contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment.
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