The sprawling three-story stone-and-timber hotel was the latest of several that had occupied the site since mineral springs were discovered there in the 1880s. Its chief attractions were seclusion, peace, and quiet. Franklin Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and Al Capone were all known to have escaped from public view at the Elms. On this November night the place was nearly deserted.
The rooms picked by the Secret Service were on the third floor rear, at the end of a long hall. Truman, who had left home without baggage, borrowed bathrobe and slippers from the hotel manager and went for a steambath and a rubdown, after which, at 6:30, he had a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of buttermilk sent up to his room. As he ate, he switched on the bedside radio.
The first final returns were from a town in New Hampshire called Hart’s Location, where the vote, including two absentee ballots, was Truman 1, Dewey 11. By eight o’clock Missouri time, Dewey was ahead in such key eastern states as New York and Pennsylvania, but Truman was leading in the popular vote overall, nationally.
About nine, Truman called Jim Rowley into the room. He was going to get some sleep, Truman said, but Rowley was to wake him if anything “important” happened.
“We all, of course, stayed awake,” remembered Agent McCann. “There was nothing to do but stay awake.”
The head of the Secret Service, James J. Maloney, was in New York, having decided Governor Dewey was certain to be the next President. Maloney and five of his men had taken up positions outside an upper-floor suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, where Dewey was relaxing with family and friends waiting to go down to the packed Roosevelt ballroom to announce his victory.
The crowd outside 219 North Delaware had grown larger, filling the sidewalks on both sides of the street and much of the front lawn. A stream of automobiles passed steadily by, their drivers slowing to see the excitement or to call to friends. Newspaper and radio correspondents had set up headquarters across the street, on the porches of the Luff and the Noland houses.
The night air was cool. Lights burned in every window of the Truman house, though the shades were all drawn except in the window of the upstairs hall, where a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt could be plainly seen.
Reporters were counting on the President to make an appearance. “We waited and waited and waited,” remembered Sue Gentry of the Examiner, for whom, like others who lived in the neighborhood, it was turning into one of the most exciting nights ever in Independence. For by 11:00 P.M., though several commentators and the Republican chairman, Brownell, were still predicting a Dewey victory, Truman, incredibly, was still ahead in the popular vote. The crowd on the lawn began singing—“For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
Then the porch light went on and Margaret came out. She stood on the porch smiling and making a hopeless gesture with both arms.
“Dad isn’t here,” she announced. “I don’t know where he is,” she said, which wasn’t true.
The reporters were incredulous. “We couldn’t believe it,” remembered Sue Gentry. Some of the crowd began drifting away.
The lights in the windows remained on all night, as they would remain on in houses all over town and all over the country.
“What a night,” Margaret wrote in her diary, conscious that she was at the center of history in the making. By midnight Truman was ahead in the popular count by 1 million votes.
I haven’t been to bed at all. I’ve been running up and down the stairs all night answering the phone on the direct-line telephone [to the Presidential Suite at the Muehlebach] to Bill Boyle who gave me the returns. We are ahead, but at about 1:30 A.M. we hit a slump—then gradually came up again. Dad has slipped away to Excelsior Springs and the reporters are going crazy trying to find him. They have offered me anything if I’ll just tell them in which direction he went.
Sometime near midnight, Truman awoke and switched on the radio, picking up NBC and the clipped, authoritative voice of political commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, the voice that had reported Munich in 1938 and that to much of America was the very sound of the news. Though the President was ahead by 1,200,000 votes, Kaltenborn said, he was still “undoubtedly beaten.” Truman switched him off, turned over, and went back to sleep.
Through their vigil over the next several hours, Agents Rowley, Nicholson McCann, and Barry also stayed tuned to NBC. “And all of a sudden,” remembered Rowley, “about four in the morning 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, Kaltenborn was saying, was ahead by 2 million votes, though Kaltenborn still did not see how Truman could possibly be elected, since in key states like Ohio and Illinois the “rural vote,” the Dewey vote, had yet to be tallied.
“We’ve got ‘em beat,” Truman said. Rowley was told to get the car ready. “We’re going to Kansas City.”
IV
The black Ford pulled in front of the Muehlebach a few minutes before six o’clock, just as it was getting light. The street was empty.
At presidential headquarters, the penthouse on the seventeenth floor, Truman found only four who were up and about—Matt Connelly, Bill Boyle, and two Kansas City attorneys, Jerome Walsh and young Lyman Field, who had been barnstorming for Truman on his own all across Missouri, and who now, as the one nearest the door, had the honor of being the first to shake the President’s hand and wish him congratulations.
Charlie Ross, sprawled across one bed, appeared to be dead drunk, but 1 he was only exhausted. It had been a rough night for all of them, but for Ross especially. The press had been furious with him for not saying where Truman was, and Ross, finally, had lost his temper, showing “his first case of nerves” since the campaign began. He didn’t know where the President was, nor did Matt Connelly. None of them knew.
The rooms were a shambles. “The`re wasn’t a drop of liquor around, by the way,” wrote Jerome Walsh later, trying to describe the scene. “It was all black coffee and cigarettes and four telephones jangling…. At 6:00 we were out on our feet.”
Truman, though unshaven, appeared rested and bright-eyed, “as refreshed as a man with two weeks’ vacation behind him.” Shedding his coat, he sat down on the couch and asked “how things were going.”
Though Dewey had carried New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Truman had won in Massachusetts, carried all the Old South but four states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which had gone to Thurmond—and was leading in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado. He was ahead by slim margins in Illinois, Ohio, and, so far, crucially, in California. In the popular count he was ahead by nearly 2 million votes. Dewey had yet to concede.
But what most impressed those in the room was Truman’s perfect calm at such a moment. To Lyman Field, the President seemed “wholly unconcerned.” Here, by every sign, was a man on the verge of pulling off the biggest political upset in American history. He had confounded the experts, the professionals in both parties, not to say a nationwide chorus of columnists and poll takers. The President who had had to fight just to get the nomination from his own party was beating the opponent everybody had said was unbeatable. It was not only a supreme moment of triumph in a long political life, but one of the greatest personal victories of any American politician ever. Yet here he sat as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “He just seemed the same old Harry Truman,” Field would say forty years later, the memory of that morning still a wonderment to him.
Jerome Walsh was so moved by Truman’s total composure that he decided to record the scene while everything was still fresh in his mind, in a letter to a friend written just days later:
He displayed neither tension nor elation. For instance someone remarked bitterly that if it hadn’t been for Wallace, New York and New Jersey would have gone Democratic by good majorities. But the President dismissed this with a wave of his hand. As far as Henry was concerned, he said, Henry wasn’t a bad g
uy; he was doing what he thought was right and he had every right in the world to pursue his course. Someone else pointed to a Kansas City Star headline which read, “Election in Doubt” or something like that. The President grinned. “Roy Roberts will change that in a few hours,” he said. I did not hear the name Dewey mentioned by the President.
I am trying to give you…a sense of the astonishment we all felt at the unbelievable coolness with which the President faced up to the whole situation, the manner in which he took the thing for granted, as if he had read the answer in a crystal ball two weeks before. At 6 A.M. there still was plenty of reason for Governor Dewey to refuse to concede. Conceivably Ohio might have switched in late returns. California or Illinois might have toppled and the President’s lead been sharply reversed…. Actually, Mr. Truman, at 6 A.M., hardly seemed interested in the matter. To him the election was won, had always been won since the day he began carrying his fight to the people, and his mind was already turning to other aspects of his program…. The serenity of the President…suggested to all of us, I think, that his years of crisis in office have equipped him with a very large reserve of inner strength and discipline to draw upon.
Walsh, as he further wrote, could not help but think of Abraham Lincoln. “Is this sentimental outpouring?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”
Charlie Ross would remember being awakened by somebody shaking him at 6:30. “I looked up and there was the boss at my bedside—grinning. We all started talking at once.”
Truman put through a call to Bess and Margaret, both of whom burst into tears at the sound of his voice.
He called in a barber, had a shave and a trim, then changed into a fresh white shirt, blue polka-dot tie and double-breasted blue suit.
By 8:30, Ohio went for Truman, putting him over the top with 270 electoral votes. A celebration broke out in the Presidential Suite. Vivian Truman, Ted Marks, Eddie Jacobson, Al Ridge, Tom Evans, and Fred Canfil arrived. The hall outside was jammed with exuberant well-wishers.
At 9:30 Truman was declared the winner in Illinois and California. By now, too, it was clear the Democrats had won control of both houses of Congress.
At 10:14 (11:14 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York), Dewey conceded the election. A wild cheer went up on the seventeenth floor of the Muehlebach, and as the doors to the suite were thrown open, more friends, politicians, and reporters pushed their way in.
“Thank you, thank you,” Truman kept saying, shaking hands, and behind the thick glasses there were tears in his eyes.
At Independence, minutes later, every bell, whistle, siren, and automobile horn seemed to go off at once. It had never occurred to anyone in town to plan a victory celebration, but now Mayor Roger Sermon quickly declared a holiday. Schools were let out and at day’s end in a roaring spontaneous outpouring of pride and goodwill forty thousand people jammed the Square to see and honor the victorious native son.
Speaking from a small podium, visibly touched by what was the biggest crowd in the history of the town, with his courthouse behind him, Truman called it a celebration not for him but for the country.
V
The country was flabbergasted. It was called a “startling victory,” “astonishing,” “a major miracle.” Truman, said Newsweek on its cover, was the Miracle Man.
He had won against the greatest odds in the annals of presidential politics. Not one polling organization had been correct in its forecast. Not a single radio commentator or newspaper columnist, or any of the hundreds of reporters who covered the campaign, had called it right. Every expert had been proven wrong, and as was said, “a great roar of laughter arose from the land.” The people had made fools of those supposedly in the know. Of all amazing things, Harry Truman had turned out to be the only one who knew what he was talking about.
Actress Tallulah Bankhead sent Truman a telegram: “The people have put you in your place.” Harry Truman, said the radio comedian Fred Allen, was the first President to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk.
A few papers had predicted a close election. A Washington correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black paper, had also described how, in theory, Truman might win. John L. Clark of the Courier had traveled with the Truman train part of the time and had taken seriously the size of the crowds. Victory for the President in twenty-three states outside the South, plus a break in the South, or an upset in California or New York, could spell victory for the President, Clark wrote, though he did not predict this would happen. Nor did the author Louis Bean, who, in a book published in July, How to Predict Elections, also offered the theoretical possibility of a Truman upset.
As it was, Truman carried 28 states with a total of 303 electoral votes, and defeated Dewey in the popular election by just over 2,100,000 votes. In the final tally, Truman polled 24,105,812, Dewey 21,970,065.
Dewey, who won in 16 states, had 189 electoral votes. Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond each polled slightly more than 1,100,000 votes. Thurmond, with his victory in four southern states, had 39 electoral votes. Wallace, who failed to carry a single state, thus received no votes in the Electoral College.
The outcome in the congressional races was 54 Senate seats for the Democrats, 42 for the Republicans. In the House the Democratic victory was overwhelming, 263 seats to 171.
Though Dewey had carried the three industrial giants of the Northeast, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as his own home state of Michigan, Truman had defeated him soundly in thirteen of the country’s biggest cities and captured the Republican stronghold of the rural Midwest, carrying Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Iowa, “the very citadel of Republicanism.” Truman held on to seven states in the South, despite Strom Thurmond. He carried the four border states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and his own Missouri, where he won by more than a quarter of a million votes. In the West, where at the start only Arizona had looked safe for the Democrats, he took every state but Oregon.
Truman also held Dewey to a smaller part of the total vote nationwide (45.1 percent) than Dewey had in 1944 running against Roosevelt.
As would be pointed out, Truman’s margin of victory in such key states as Ohio, Illinois, and California had been narrow. He won Ohio by a bare 7,000 votes, Illinois by 33,000, California by 17,000. A switch in any two of these three states would have left him with less than a majority in the Electoral College and thrown the decision to the House of Representatives. Had Dewey won in all three states, then Dewey would have eked out victory in the electoral vote and thus won the presidency, while Truman finished in front in the popular tally. A cumulative shift of just 33,000 votes apportioned to the three states would have done it.
But it was also true that a similar shift in other states would have made Truman an even bigger winner. Truman very nearly won in New York, for example, and unquestionably would have had it not been for Henry Wallace, who rolled up half a million votes in the state (which was half Wallace’s national total). “I think the mistake was not giving more time to New York. We should have carried New York,” Clark Clifford would say. Dewey won there by only 61,000—in his own state—and New York meant 47 electoral votes. Had there been no Henry Wallace, or a Strom Thurmond, Truman might well have gained another 85 electoral votes, giving him an Electoral College landslide.
Efforts to explain why the impossible had happened began at once, as did, understandably, a great deal of soul searching among reporters, editors, and broadcasters who had fallen down on the job so very conspicuously.
To H. L. Mencken, who delighted in the outcome exactly because it “shook the bones of all…[the] smarties,” the answer was simply in the contrast of the two contestants as they presented themselves to the voters. “Neither candidate made a speech on the stump that will survive in the schoolbooks, but those of Truman at least had warmth in them,” wrote Mencken in one of his last columns, at the close of a long career of appraising the American political scene. “While Dewey was intoning essays sounding like the worst bombast of u
niversity professors, Truman was down on the ground, clowning with the circumambient morons. He made votes every time he gave a show, but Dewey lost them.”
To Dewey himself, it had all turned on the farm vote. “The farm vote switched in the last ten days,” he claimed in a letter to Henry Luce, “and you can analyze figures from now to kingdom come and all they will show is that we lost the farm vote….”
Joe Martin, who with the new Democratic majority in the House was to be Speaker no longer, said the fault was with the Republican Party, which had “digressed” too far from the people. Like many of the old guard, Martin and Taft both thought Dewey had run an abysmal campaign. “You’ve got to give the little man credit,” said Arthur Vandenberg, in a somewhat patronizing tribute to Truman. Taft, furious, said, “I don’t care how the thing is explained. It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House.”
To the surprise of many, it would turn out that the Democrats had spent more on the campaign than the Republicans, the common impression to the contrary, $2,736,334 compared to $2,127,296—though many of the largest donations to the Democrats came pouring in after the fact, after November 2, some $700,000 in postdated checks.
A special study drawn up by the Republican Policy Committee would conclude, in essence, that the Republicans had only themselves to blame. They had “muffed” their best chance in sixteen years to win the presidency and keep control of Congress. The fault was mainly with the Dewey strategy and the Dewey performance, his “aloofness,” speeches “high above the voters’ heads,” the mistake of “swallowing uncritically the Democratic propaganda.” Dewey, said the report, had been “drugged” by the polls, and thus “sacrificed the initiative.” Truman’s hard-hitting assault on the 80th Congress, “however unprincipled and demagogic,” had been “brilliant” since it had enabled him to “divert the battle” away from his own and his party’s record. “He succeeded in arousing public indignation…. The Democratic sweep in Congress and its retention of the presidency is eloquent testimony to the brilliance of their strategy.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 506