Now, that will be entirely to your interests. You will have a Congress who believes in the people, and you will have a President who has shown you right along that he believes in the welfare of the country as a whole, and not in the welfare of just a few at the top.
Akron, heart of the rubber industry, a big labor town, solidly Democratic, had been expected to give the Democratic standardbearer a good reception, however dismal his prospects. But the welcome at Akron was “tumultuous,” everything that Cincinnati failed to provide, and more. People jammed the streets three and four deep, an estimated sixty thousand, in what was reported in the national press as “the biggest political show in the city’s history,” everyone “cheering wildly” as Truman passed. The Akron Armory was packed. It was the perfect, grand finale for the day and Truman was radiant.
“I have lived a long time—64 years—and I have traveled a lot,” he told the crowd, “but I have never seen such turnouts as I have seen all over this great country of ours…. The Republicans have the propaganda and the money, but we have the people, and the people have the votes. That’s why we’re going to win!”
Reporters traveling with Truman agreed it had been one of if not his best day of the campaign. By conservative estimates, the day’s crowds totaled 100,000 people, even before Akron.
By eleven that night he was back on the train and heading west again. At 8:00 A.M. the next morning, at Richmond, Indiana, he was out on the rear platform ready to start another day.
It had been known for some while that Newsweek magazine was taking a poll of fifty highly regarded political writers, to ask which candidate they thought would win the election. And since several of the fifty had been on the train with Truman during the course of the campaign—Marquis Childs, Robert Albright of the Washington Post, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune—there had been a good deal of speculation about the poll. It appeared in Newsweek in the issue dated October 11, and on the morning of Tuesday, October 12, three weeks before election day, at one of the first stops in Indiana, Clark Clifford slipped off the train to try to find a copy before anyone else. The woman at the station newsstand pointed to a bundle wrapped in brown paper, telling him to help himself. “And there it was!” remembered Clifford years afterward.
Of the writers polled, not one thought Truman would win. The vote was unanimous, 50 for Dewey, 0 for Truman. “The landslide for Dewey will sweep the country,” the magazine announced. Further, the Republicans would keep control in the Senate and increase their majority in the House. The election was as good as over.
Returning to the train, Clifford hid the magazine under his coat. With the train about to leave, the only door still open was on the rear platform.
So I walked in. President Truman was sitting there, and so I cheerily said, “Good morning, Mr. President.” He said, “Good morning, Clark.” And I said, “Another busy day ahead.” “Yes,” he said…. So I walked off…and I got almost by him when he said, “What does it say?” And I said, “What’s that, Mr. President?” He said, “What does it say?” And I said, “Now what does what…?” He said, “I saw you get off and go into the station. I think you probably went in there to see if they had a copy at Newsweek magazine.” And he said, “I think it is possible that you may have it under your jacket there, the way you’re holding your arm.” Well, I said, “Yes, sir.”
So I handed it to him…. And he turned the page and looked at it…[and] he said, “I know every one of these 50 fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.”
Truman put the magazine aside and made no further mention of it. “It just seemed to bounce right off of him,” Clifford remembered.
There were three stops in Indiana, four crossing Illinois, where farmers on tractors waved small flags or held up hand-lettered “Vote for Truman” signs.
“I was with Truman in the central part of the state,” wrote Paul Douglas, Democratic candidate for the Senate. “There was great applause, and there were constant shouts of ‘Give ‘em hell, Harry’…and he was at home with the crowd…he was simple, unaffected, and determined. We were proud of him.”
At Springfield after dark old-time campaign flares burned, the streets were filled with people. No one could come to Springfield without thinking of Abraham Lincoln, Truman said in his speech.
I just wonder tonight, as I have wondered many times in the past, what Lincoln would say if he could see how far the Republican party has departed from the fundamental principles in which he so deeply believed. Lincoln came from the plain people and he always believed in them….
He crossed into Wisconsin and Minnesota. At Duluth, where he rode in an open car with Hubert Humphrey, fully half the population, some sixty thousand people, lined Superior Street for two miles, crowding so close in places that the car brushed their clothes.
At St. Paul, an overflow crowd at Municipal Auditorium whistled, stamped, and shouted as he delivered one of the best fighting speeches of the campaign.
Now, I call on all liberals and progressives to stand up and be counted for democracy in this great battle…. This is one fight you must get in, and get in with every ounce of strength you have. After November 2nd, it will be too late…. The decision is right here and now.
But we are bound to win and we are going to win, because we are right! I am here to tell you that in this fight, the people are with us.
The crowd at St. Paul numbered 21,000—15,000 inside the auditorium, another 6,000 outside. Dewey, in his appearance at St. Paul two days later, drew only 7,000.
Heading east again, Truman said there were going to be “a lot of surprised pollsters,” come November 2.
Some of the Dewey people were beginning to worry. When Dewey asked his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, how he thought Truman was doing, Hagerty said, “I think he’s doing pretty well.” Dewey replied that he thought so, too.
When at Kansas City Dewey met privately with Roy Roberts of the Star, he was told the farmers of the Middle West were defecting from the Republican ticket in droves and that he had better do something about it quickly. Time was now describing Dewey’s crowds as only “mildly curious,” his speeches as “not electrifying.”
“Our man is ‘in,’” reporters were assured by the Dewey staff. “He doesn’t have to win votes, all he has to do is avoid losing them.” Dewey himself told Taft that he had found over the years that when he got into controversies he lost votes—an observation Taft thought disgraceful.
There was much that Dewey could have said in answer to Truman. The “do-nothing” 80th Congress was after all the Congress that had backed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Truman’s assault on the Taft-Hartley Act failed to note that a majority of his own party in the House had voted approval and then to override his veto. The evil influence of Wall Street on the Republican Party, as described by Truman, might have been made to sound a bit hollow, had it been pointed out that such important figures within his own official family as Harriman, Lovett, and Forrestal had all come to Washington from Wall Street. Truman’s dismissal of Henry Wallace had been a fiasco. His handling of the railroad strike might well have been made a major issue. “The only way to handle Truman,” Taft wrote later, “was to hit every time he opened his mouth.” But Taft was a cantankerous man and Dewey was determined to stick to his own strategy.
Meantime, a “slight misadventure” at a town called Beaucoup, in Illinois, had raised a stir. Just as Dewey was about to speak at Beaucoup, his train had suddenly lurched a few feet backward toward the crowd. There were screams, people fell back in panic. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey blurted angrily into the microphone. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise….”
The cold arrogance of the remark did Dewey great damage. The story appeared everywhere, and with it, the observation of the engineer—“the lunatic”—who said, “I think as much of Dewey as I did before and that’s not very much.”
With only two weeks to go, a
new Gallup Poll showed Dewey’s lead cut to six points. In the seclusion of the Governor’s Mansion at Albany, Dewey ordered a showing of all the newsreels of the campaign and what he saw left him greatly disturbed. He was losing ground steadily, he was told. But when his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, put through calls to some ninety Republican committeemen and women around the country, all but one urged him to keep to the present strategy.
Among professional gamblers, the betting odds against Truman on the average were 15 to 1. In some places, they were 30 to 1.
Besides the gamblers’ odds, the opinion polls, the forecasts by columnists, political reporters, political experts, Truman by now had the majority of editorial opinion weighed heavily against him. His frequent claim that 90 percent of the papers opposed his election was a campaign stretch of the truth. It was 65 percent, which in fact meant overwhelming press support for Dewey, and especially since it included virtually all the biggest, most influential papers in the country. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Star, the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal all endorsed Dewey. The Detroit Free Press called Truman intellectually unqualified. The Chicago Tribune, though far from admiring the liberal Republican candidate, simply dismissed Truman as “an incompetent.”
An editorial backing Truman, such as appeared in the Boston Post, under the heading “Captain Courageous,” was a rare exception. Harry S. Truman, said the Boston paper, was
as humbly honest, homespun and doggedly determined to do what is best for America as Abraham Lincoln.
In standing by his party and its inherent principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, he has emulated other great Americans—Jefferson, Jackson, Cleveland, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Alfred E. Smith. Like them, in the words of the old song, he—
Dared to be a Daniel,
Dared to stand alone,
Dared to hold a purpose firm
Dared to make it known.
By that token he should win. America likes a fighter.
More representative were such conclusions as drawn in the Los Angeles Times: “Mr. Truman is the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.”
Even papers that expressed an open fondness for the President as a man chose not to support him. “However much affection we may feel for Mr. Truman and whatever sympathy we may have for him in his struggles with his difficulties,” said a front-page editorial in the Baltimore Sun, “to vote him into the presidency on November 2 would be a tragedy for the country and for the world.”
For Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, George Elsey, for everyone riding the Truman train, the campaign had become an unimaginable ordeal—interminable, exhausting in a way comparable to nothing in their experience.
“If you’re winning, you’d be surprised how you can withstand fatigue,” Clifford would say later. “If you’re losing it becomes oppressive…. They were long, long days. I was young and strong, and in perfect health. From time to time I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.”
The candidate, who bore the main brunt, seemed indefatigable, his outlook entirely positive. Between speeches he could lie down and go immediately to sleep, however pressed others were, however rough the road bed. “Give me 20 minutes,” he would say.
“Strain seemed to make him calmer and more firm,” Jonathan Daniels recalled. At no point in the entire campaign did any of the staff, or the press, or his family ever see Truman show a sign of failing stamina, or failing confidence.
Once during a lull en route to St. Paul after the stop at Duluth, Truman had asked George Elsey to write down the names of the forty-eight states, after which he gave Elsey the number of electoral votes for each and told him how they would go. By his count he would win with 340 electoral votes. Dewey would have 108, Strom Thurmond 42, Henry Wallace none.
“He was not putting on a show for anybody,” Elsey would recall. “Obviously he wasn’t trying to influence or persuade or sell me. This is what the man himself believed.”
“He either honestly believes he will win…or he is putting on the most magnificent and fighting front of optimism that any doubtful candidate ever did,” wrote Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune.
The Truman staff was another matter, Andrews noted. They all appeared “a bit grim.”
The work went on from seven in the morning until past midnight, day after day, until they lost all sense of time, until every day became merged with every other and everything became a blur. Margaret would remember the world beginning to seem like an endless railroad track. She would sit by the window and take idle snapshots of the passing countryside—telephone poles whizzing past, empty plains, country roads that seemed to lead nowhere.
As Ross wrote, the President was driving himself “unmercifully,” and no one on the staff wished to do any less. Ross, “the old philosopher,” suffered from arthritis and heart trouble, yet worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, knowing how much Truman counted on him. “For years afterward,” Clifford said, “I’d sometimes wake up at night in a cold perspiration thinking I was back on that terrible train.”
And day by day, steadily, the crowds grew larger. Clearly, something was happening. The mood of the crowds, their response to Truman was changing. People seemed always to be happier after hearing him speak.
“I remember thinking,” said Clifford, “ ‘Well, I don’t know whether we’re going to make it or not, but, by God, I bet if we had another week we would surely make it.’ There was something rolling…. We could sense it and the newspapermen could sense it.”
Robert C. Albright, the veteran political correspondent for the Washington Post, speculated, “Could we be wrong?”
“We’ve got them on the run and I think we’ll win,” Truman wrote to his sister from the White House on October 20. After a day in Washington, he had flown to Miami, where 200,000 people filled the streets. From Miami he flew north to Raleigh, where there were “people all along the way from the airport which is fifteen miles out of town.”
Things were looking decidedly more hopeful on several fronts. In Berlin, with improved landing facilities and more efficient air-traffic control after months of experience, the airlift was plainly succeeding at last, against all odds and forecasts. At his desk in the Oval Office on Friday, October 22, Truman authorized the dispatch to Berlin of still more of the giant C-54 transports, another twenty-six planes. “The airlift will be continued until the blockade is lifted,” General Clay declared triumphantly in Berlin. Winter supplies for the city were guaranteed.
Back on his train again, Truman was telling a delighted crowd at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that the GOP stood for “Grand Old Platitudes,” and at a thunderous rally at Hunt Armory in Pittsburgh, he declared, “I am an old campaigner, and I enjoy it.”
His opponent, Truman said, acted like a doctor whose magic cure for everything was a soothing syrup called unity. And here were the American people going for the usual once-every-four-years checkup.
“Say you don’t look so good!” Truman said, acting the part of the doctor.
“Well, that seems strange to me too, Doc,” he answered, as the voice of the people. “I never felt stronger, never had more money, and never had a brighter future. What is wrong with me?”
“I never discuss issues with a patient. But what you need is a major operation.”
“Will it be serious, Doc?”
“Not so very serious. It will just mean taking out the complete works and putting in a Republican administration.”
The audience roared with laughter. He had made the cool, letter-perfect Dewey a joke at last.
Chicago went all out. Politicians who had taken part in the great Roosevelt rallies of 1936 and 1940 said they had never seen anything like it. Possibly as many as fifty thousand people marched in the parade from the Blackstone to Chicago Stadium. Another half million lined the route. Marching bands blared, fireworks burst overhead. Yet, oddly, not everyo
ne was cheering. Here and there, remembered Paul Douglas, were people with tears in their eyes. “The newspapers had convinced them that Truman was going to lose, and they believed that the gains they had made under the New Deal were going to be taken away. They seemed to feel something precious was about to be lost, and they wanted to come out and show their sympathy arid support for the doughty little warrior who was doing battle for them against such great odds.” Privately, Douglas felt that he, too, like Truman would go down to defeat in his bid for the Senate.
At the packed stadium, to a crowd of 24,000 Truman delivered his most savage speech of the campaign, a wild attack, uncalled for, in which he said a vote for Dewey was a vote for fascism. The authors of the speech were again David Noyes and Albert Carr, whose main purpose, Noyes later said, was to provoke Dewey into fighting back, a strategy Truman accepted. “An element of desperation comes into a campaign,” Clifford would say in retrospect. “And fatigue leads to it.”
Dewey was properly outraged, so much so he drafted a new speech for his own scheduled appearance at Chicago, but then was persuaded by his advisers to drop it, not to get into a slugging match with Truman. He mustn’t get nasty, mustn’t make mistakes with victory so close. Reportedly, Dewey’s wife said that if she had to stay up all night to see him tear up what he had written, she would do it.
“They have scattered reckless abuse along the entire right of way coast to coast,” Dewey would say only in Chicago, speaking of Democrats in general, “and now, I am sorry to say, reached a new low in mudslinging…. This is the kind of campaign I refuse to wage….”
Truman offered no explanations or apologies. He was on his way east, and the “tide was rolling.” Dewey’s “Victory Special” would follow directly after him a day later.
Truman Page 94