The crowd at Ardmore was somewhere near forty thousand, more even, it was said, than for Gene Autry. At remote stations where no stops were scheduled people waited just to see the train go through. At Paul’s Valley, Truman asked if it was true they grew taller corn than in Iowa and five thousand people happily roared yes. “Hello Harry,” came shouts from the throng at Norman.
At Oklahoma City 100,000 turned out; 20,000 were at the State Fair Grounds for his speech. He had chosen Oklahoma as the time and place to answer Republican charges of communism in government and he was “strictly on the offensive.” Such Republican tactics were only a “smoke sreen” to hide their failure to deal with housing, price controls, education—real problems. His own Loyalty Program, he claimed, had proven the loyalty of 99.7 percent of all federal workers. It was not Republican talk that checked the Communist tide, but programs like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and that was “a plain and unanswerable fact.” The government was not endangered by Communist infiltration. Publicity-seeking, electioneering Republicans with their irresponsible charges were doing more to damage national security than to strengthen it.
The speech was considered so important that for the first time the Democratic National Committee had dipped into its slim resources to pay for nationwide radio time.
But by then the money had run out. There was not enough even to move the train out of the station.
The crisis was resolved when Governor Roy J. Turner of Oklahoma, and a businessman from Shawnee, W. Elmer Harber, organized an emergency collection party on board the Ferdinand Magellan and raised enough contributions—“a substantial sum”—to keep the train rolling for another several weeks. But even so, remembered Charlie Ross, the campaign was never more than “one jump ahead of the sheriff.”
The day following, Wednesday, September 29, was one of the biggest of the campaign. At Eufaula, Oklahoma, Truman gave his one hundredth speech. Before the day ended, he spoke sixteen times. There were crowds at Shawnee, Seminole, Wewoka, Muskogee, “tremendous” crowds at Tulsa. Crossing into Missouri, Truman told the throng at Neosho that he had already talked to 500,000 people that day—an understandable overstatement, given all he had seen. And so it went the rest of the journey through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. At Mount Vernon, Illinois, leaving his train to travel by motorcade, he stumped the down-state mining country for 140 miles, through five counties that had not gone Democratic in fifty years. “Mr. Truman [reported The New York Times] was the first Chief Executive to campaign in southern Illinois and the people turned out by the thousands, breaking through police lines, swarming around and through the procession of cars and yelling a noisy greeting.”
With his headlong lambasting of Wall Street and “the special interests,” the constant harkening to grim memories of the Depression, he sounded often as if he were running against Herbert Hoover. But at Carbondale, the sixth of nine stops in southern Illinois, he talked as he had not until now of the postwar era, of the “history” he himself felt responsible for and proud of, knowing how many in his audience remembered how differently things had gone after the first war.
A Democratic administration working with a Democratic Congress had seen to a swift reconversion in 1945, not only avoiding a postwar recession but achieving
a peak of more jobs, a higher civilization, and better standards of living than ever before.
There is nothing like that in the history of the world after a great war. Bear that in mind…. Not very much has been said about that, but we had no riots and no bloodshed. We didn’t have people crying for jobs. We didn’t have farmers marching on Washington. We didn’t have returning soldiers marching on Washington, because we took care of them in educational institutions and absorbing them back into the economy of the country without a debacle.
We enacted the Employment Act of 1946, pledging all our resources and efforts to the maintenance of prosperity.
We brought the United States to a position of unquestioned leadership in world affairs. Don’t let anybody tell you anything different.
A warm reception in Kentucky had been anticipated, if for no other reason than Alben Barkley’s presence on the ticket. But the crowds there surpassed all predictions. Truman was “never more human,” reported the Louisville Courier-Journal. “He got down to earth and talked the language of the people….” At Shelbyville, where a banner stretched ln front of a wood-frame depot said: “Welcome Home President Truman and Family, Grandchildren of Shelby County,” he talked of his grandfather, who had been married there. At Lexington, heart of the Bluegrass horse country, he reminded everyone that it didn’t matter which horse was ahead or behind at any given moment in the race—it If was the horse ahead at the finish that counted. To the several thousand gathered on the tracks at Morehead, Kentucky, pressing as close as possible to the rear platform of his car, he left no doubt what he expected of them:
Now, whatever you do, go to the polls early on election day, and don’t waste any time. Just take that ticket and vote the Democratic ticket straight down the line, and you will be helping your country, and helping yourselves. You will not only be voting for me…but you will be voting for yourselves and your best interests. And I believe that is exactly what you are going to do.
At Montgomery, West Virginia, the final stop at 10:45 that night, Truman was so stunned by the size of the turnout at such an hour that before beginning his remarks he asked the photographers to turn their cameras around and take a picture of the people. That was the real news to show he country, he said.
But what to make of the phenomenon of the Truman crowds?
Most correspondents attributed it to ordinary curiosity. Truman had made his campaign a vaudeville act, said Time, so naturally people would come out to see the show. The American people had a high regard for the office of President and so naturally wanted to see the man who occupied it, wrote Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, who had been on the train from the beginning. Fletcher Knebel of the Cowles papers would remember in particular the stop at Shelbyville:
The early morning haze was still hanging over the hills, and the sun wasn’t up. But gathered around the railroad tracks, as far as you could see in any direction, was this incredible crowd of people—men holding kids up on their shoulders so they could see, little boys climbing trees and roofs, old grandpappies and men in overalls. Of course, we experts in the press car talked about the crowd, and we finally decided it didn’t mean a damned thing. “Anybody will come out to see a man who is President of the United States, just to say they’ve seen one in the flesh. But that doesn’t mean they’d vote for Harry Truman.” He was going to lose. We believed it, because we wrote it every day.
Some correspondents, Jonathan Daniels noted, had convinced themselves that Truman’s crowds were not Truman followers at all, but people wishing to see a very nice man on his way to oblivion.
To Walter Lippmann, who, as usual, was observing the world from his ivy-covered home in Washington, all such speculation was immaterial. Lippmann deplored the whole spectacle of a President chasing about the country devoting himself to parades and hand shaking, trying to “talk his way to victory.” To Lippmann, who was secretly offering Dewey advice on foreign policy and who shared Dewey’s contempt for Harry Truman, this was no time for a President to be away from his duties, and this President had been gone sixteen days. Unwittingly, wrote Lippmann, Truman had proven how little he mattered.
He had only begun to fight, Truman told the crowd waiting to welcome him at Union Station in Washington, Sunday morning, October 2. He would be heading off again in another few days. Others—his wife, daughter, his press secretary—looked exhausted, but not the President.
To his sister he wrote, “We made about a hundred and forty stops and I spoke 147 times, shook hands with at least 30,000 [people] and am in good condition to start out again….” It would be the greatest campaign any President had ever made, he promised. “Win, lose, or draw people wil
l know where I stand….”
So much would be written and said about the Truman campaign of 1948, about the scrappy “Give-’em-hell-Harry” style that evolved, the headlong vigor and determination of the folksy, doomed candidate, that other factors bearing on the outcome were often overlooked. Truman was and remained his own show. Nor had any President ever worked harder at running for reelection. But other efforts behind the scenes were of considerable importance. Like all campaigns, his was a combination of many elements besides the candidate himself. Jack Redding, publicity director for the Democratic National Committee, would later write of the “classic unities of politics,” saying they were as vital to a campaign as were the unities of time, place, and action to a successful drama. “When the unities fuse, the results achieved are far in excess of the sum of the parts.” That Redding, Howard McGrath, and others worked as hard and effectively as they did was all the more remarkable given that they, too, knew perfectly what the odds were against them.
It was Redding, for example, who enlisted the services of the manager of a Polish-language newspaper in New York, Michel Cieplinski, who saw that all Truman press releases were translated into various foreign languages before being sent to foreign-language papers and radio stations around the country. Later, this would seem an obvious idea, but no one else had done it until then, and as Redding recalled, acceptance of the material was immediate. Truman stories were carried substantially as written—in Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Swedish—and with 35 million people of foreign birth in America, or roughly 25 percent of the population, of whom 11 million were eligible to vote, this was no small break.
McGrath appreciated particularly the political importance of foreign-born Americans—it was with their support that he had been elected governor three times in Rhode Island—and he understood how greatly the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as Truman’s policy on immigration, mattered to such groups, that for no other reason than his stand on foreign policy, Truman had an excellent chance of winning their support.
It was arranged for the President to have his portrait painted by a beloved Polish artist, Tadé Styka, who, though an avowed Republican, became an immediate convert after hearing Truman speak to a group of Polish editors about the problems of the world as they affected Poland. (“Another hell of a day. I’m sitting for an old Polish painter, and I don’t like to pose—but it’s also part of the trial of being President,” Truman had written in his diary on September 14. “He’s painted a nice stuffed-shirt picture.”) In October, after Styka presented the portrait at a formal ceremony at the White House, all seventy-two Polish papers in the country ran a picture of the painting, as well as Styka’s personal praise for the President. To publicist Redding, it was a “political triumph.”
Meantime, for the amusement of the press, a selection of the platitudes and banalities of the Dewey speeches was prepared and distributed:
“Our streams abound with fish.”
“The miners in our country are vital to our welfare.”
“Everybody that rides in a car or bus uses gasoline and oil.”
“Ours is a magnificent land. Every part of it.”
A sixteen-page, four-color comic-book biography was produced, The Story of Harry Truman, which, panel-by-panel, portrayed the Independence boyhood, the courtship of Bess Wallace, Truman’s time on the farm, and how the neighbors judged him (“By crackies, in spite of Harry Truman’s newfangled ideas about farmin’, he’s a durned good ‘un!”). His part in the war took up two and a half pages, followed by his business failure (“You’d think the Republican Administration would do something to help small businessmen”), and the high points of his public service, including the presidency. To many the comic-book format seemed highly unfitting for a President. Several at the White House complained that it should never have been permitted without Truman’s knowledge. But he had known and approved, and the book was a success. Three million copies quickly disappeared. In some places schools permitted distribution among students, who took the books home. Time, in a special feature, hailed it as “something new in ‘campaign literature’,” while regretting that it made no mention of “the late, great-bellied” Tom Pendergast.
Even more important and effective was a ten-minute Truman film, a “short” to be shown in movie theaters. (With approximately 20,000 theaters in the country, the weekly movie audience in 1948 was about 65 million.) Hearing that a Dewey film was being produced and paid for by the Republicans, Jack Redding, with no money available for films, threatened to have theaters picketed as unfair unless a “balancing” Truman story were made available. In response, the movie industry decided to produce a Truman film for nothing—Universal Newsreels lost the flip of a coin and did the work. With so little time left, and to keep costs to a minimum, The Truman Story was put together almost entirely from available newsreel footage, with the result that the finished production had a feeling of authenticity missing in the Dewey film, most of which had been staged. The candidate was seen as “neighbor Truman,” shaking hands with people on the streets of Independence (including a black man in bib overalls). He was shown visiting Eddie Jacobson in his store, at Grandview with his mother, but above all as the President, signing the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, addressing Congress, reviewing troops, conferring with Secretary Marshall beside the large globe in the Oval Office.
The two-reel film that had cost the Truman campaign nothing and was considered much more effective than its counterpart on Dewey would, in the final week before the election, play in theaters in every part of the country. “Thus, during the last six days of the campaign no one could go to the movies anywhere in the United States without seeing the story of the President,” boasted Redding, who considered it the most important publicity break of the campaign.
Seventy-one-year-old Alben Barkley, meantime, was crisscrossing the country in a chartered DC-3 called The Bluegrass. In contrast to his much younger Republican counterpart and rival, Earl Warren, who was touring by train, Barkley had initiated what he called history’s first “prop-stop” campaign. He flew 150,000 miles and delivered 250 speeches, mostly in small cities, farm towns, coal and railroad towns, labor halls, and small hotel dining rooms, his audiences sometimes numbering only in the hundreds. The press called him “the poor man’s candidate,” and Barkley enjoyed himself hugely, telling stories, speaking extemporaneously at almost any length, and giving no sign of wanting anything for himself, only to help the President and any number of local Democratic candidates. His own best help, he liked to say, came from the Republicans. Dewey’s speeches reminded him, Barkley said, of an old Tennessee politician known as “Fiddlin’ Bob” Taylor, who, in the era of the free silver issue, ran for governor by playing a violin and using his magnificent speaking voice to say as little as possible about anything specific, until finally he was pressed to state where he stood on the money question. “He paused dramatically,” Barkley would say, savoring the story, “and he said, ‘Here is where I stand. I am for a little more gold, a little more silver, a little more greenback—and a sprinkling of counterfeit.’ ”
When a reporter in New Haven, Connecticut, asked Barkley if he honestly thought the Democrats had a chance, Barkley replied, “Certainly. What do you think I’m running around for?”
One idea hatched behind the scenes by two of the new speechwriters proved a major embarrassment. David Noyes and Albert Carr, who were partial to the dramatic phrase or gesture—it was they who contributed the “pitchfork-in-the-back” line at Dexter—had concluded that the President needed to announce a bold move to dramatize his desire for world peace, and soon.
They proposed he send the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, on a special mission to Moscow to see Stalin. That Vinson, as a member of the Supreme Court, had no connection with the diplomatic role of the executive branch, that Vinson knew nothing of the crisis in Berlin beyond what was in the papers, or had any experience in Soviet affairs, or in dealing with Stalin, were apparent
ly not considered serious drawbacks.
Truman agreed to the scheme—a decision that suggested as nothing else would that for all his show of confidence he knew perfectly how desperate his situation was and was therefore willing to try almost anything. Undoubtedly, too, he hoped that so daring and unorthodox an approach might just give Stalin the chance to “open up,” as he later wrote. He still thought Stalin could be reached, reasoned with, man-to-man. “If we could only get Stalin to unburden himself to someone on our side he felt he could trust fully, I thought perhaps we could get somewhere.”
On his second day back at the White House, Sunday, October 3, without notifying George Marshall, who was at a United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris trying to deal with the Berlin crisis, Truman called the Chief Justice to his office and asked him to make the trip.
Vinson was astonished. Members of the Court, he said, should confine themselves to their Court duties, and especially in an election year. But then, dutifully, Vinson consented to go.
The plan was for Truman to announce the mission on a special radio broadcast to the nation. Charlie Ross was instructed to arrange with the networks for a free, nonpolitical half-hour, for a statement of “major importance.” The State Department was alerted, to make the necessary clearances with Stalin. Truman would remember requesting also that “every possible precaution” be taken against premature leaks.
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