This was the politics of desperation, a sign of how long the odds looked to Truman. To be sure, Presidents seeking reelection had frequently advertised themselves by finding it necessary to ride around dedicating monuments or opening bridges. Such jaunts were considered a legitimate use of taxpayers’ money, justifiable because their purposes were ostensibly nonpartisan. This junket was something else. From the first, Truman served notice that he intended to spend every minute strafing the Republican Congress, and that, as Chairman Carroll Reece of the Republican National Committee observed, made it as “nonpolitical as the Pendergast machine.” Doubtless Reece would have made more of the issue if Truman’s cause hadn’t seemed so hopeless, and if the tour itself, seen from a distance, hadn’t looked like a debacle.
At 11:05 P.M. on June 3, over two weeks before the adjournment of Congress for the conventions, the sixteen-car “Presidential Special” glided out of Washington’s Union Station and headed westward; although Truman usually flew from city to city, people then expected Presidents and presidential candidates to travel by rail. The last car in the caravan was the luxurious, armor-plated “Ferdinand Magellan,” built by the Association of American Railroads for FDR. Walnut-paneled, in continuous radio contact with Washington, its most conspicuous feature was an outsize platform in the rear, protected by a striped canopy and equipped with a public address system. Unlikely as it seemed at the time, that platform was to become the stage for a campaign drama as stirring, in its way, as anything in the history of presidential politics.
Often it seemed likelier to be remembered for its small disasters. Democrats under the impression that he had in fact agreed to draft Eisenhower turned out with homemade signs reading: IKE FOR PRESIDENT! HARRY FOR VP! One state chairman—William Ritchie of Nebraska—tried to board the “Ferdinand Magellan” and was ejected; he angrily told reporters, “I’m convinced that he cannot be elected. He has muffed the ball badly. He seems to prefer his so-called buddies to the persons who have done the work and put up the money for the party.” Elsewhere one of these so-called buddies, a 1918 veteran who had been asked to make speaking arrangements, thought it was to be a reunion of the 35th Division. Others were turned away, with the consequence that the President spoke to fewer than a thousand people in an auditorium with a capacity for ten thousand. Photographers had a marvelous time standing high in the rear and taking shots that showed him addressing acres of empty seats. Literally nobody, the pictures implied, was interested in what the President had to say, though Time commended his “growing entertainment value.”
At least twice he appeared on the train platform in pajamas and a bathrobe. “I understand it was announced that I would speak here,” he told one gaping crowd. “I’m sorry that I had gone to bed, but I thought you would like to see what I look like, even if I didn’t have on any clothes.” In Barstow, California, a girl eyed his blue dressing gown and asked him if he had a cold. He shook his head. She persisted, “You sound like it.” He twinkled and said, “That’s because I ride around in the wind with my mouth open.” It was the truth. In Eugene, Oregon, after his usual introduction of Bess (“my boss”) and Margaret (“who bosses my boss”), he launched into an off-the-cuff discussion of Potsdam and, forgetting that reporters were present, said, “I like old Joe! He’s a decent fellow. But Joe is a prisoner of the Politburo. He can’t do what he wants to.” Back East Mrs. Luce gave him both barrels. She was glad the Democrats had got round to admitting it, she said poisonously: “Good old Joe! Of course they like him. Didn’t they give him all Eastern Europe, Manchuria, the Kuriles, North China, coalitions in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia?”
From Washington, Halleck told reporters that Truman would be remembered as America’s worst President, and Congressman Cliff Clevenger of Ohio said he was a “Missouri jackass.” Then Taft slipped. It was a little thing. Speaking before the Union League Club in Philadelphia, he deplored Truman’s “blackguarding Congress at whistle-stops all over the country.” He had coined a word, and from the Republican viewpoint it was an unfortunate one. Democratic headquarters telegraphed the mayors of all the little towns and cities through which Truman’s train had passed. They were indignant at the slur, and he happily distributed their replies to the press. In Los Angeles, where an enormous throng awaited the President, he grinned and cried, “This is the biggest whistle-stop!”
On June 18 he returned to Washington. He had been away two weeks, had covered 9,504 miles, and had delivered seventy-three speeches in sixteen states. For the most part he had followed Clifford’s suggestion that he be “controversial as hell,” and toward the end he had felt an intangible meshing of the crowd’s mood and his own. After a new Congress was chosen in November, he had said in Illinois, “Maybe we’ll get one that will work in the interests of the people and not the interests of men who have all the money.” A murmur of agreement had risen from the upturned faces. In Bremerton, Washington, the strong voice of a lumberjack had rung out: “Pour it on, Harry!” and he had shot back, “I’m going to—I’m going to!” In Spokane a man said, “What about throwing eggs at Taft?” Truman replied, “I wouldn’t throw fresh eggs at Taft!” “You’ve got the worst Congress you’ve ever had!” he had cried, and, “If you send another Republican Congress to Washington, you’re a bigger bunch of suckers than I think you are!” The crowds had roared approval: “Pour it on!” and “Give ’em hell, Harry!” And he had flung back savagely, “That’s what I’m doing! That’s what I’m doing!”
Taft was right, of course. It was demeaning, it was in ghastly taste, its precedents had ugly implications for future campaigns, and it was unfair to Republicans like Vandenberg, without whom there would be no Truman Doctrine in the Balkans, no Marshall Plan, no Berlin airlift. But as the spectacle of one man fighting against all odds it was stirring. The White House correspondents thought so. Now and then, they told their wives back in the capital, the President had almost made them forget that he didn’t have a chance.
***
In Philadelphia the city fathers had spent $650,000 sprucing up for the Republican, Democratic, and Progressive conventions, in that order; the “Dixiecrats,” so named by a copyreader on the Charlotte, North Carolina, News, would convene on the hallowed ground of the old Confederacy. An eastern city was preferable because the Atlantic seaboard was the farthest reach of the coaxial cable bringing live transmission; the speakers knew that while Edward R. Murrow and the other famous commentators stubbornly clung to radio, the podium in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall could be seen on some 400,000 little TV screens in the East. In those days that was something.
In 1948 newspapermen paid as much as $12 for a room and bath and muttered about inflation; in 1948 they assumed that a hotel’s menial tasks would all be done cheaply by Negroes. Truman had been trying to do something about the plight of colored people, but the Republican platform committee, after weighing a civil rights plank, discarded it without qualms. The issue hadn’t yet caught the imagination of the intellectual community; they were still half persuaded by the plea for more time in William Faulkner’s 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust. Southern filibusters continued to kill every measure prohibiting poll taxes, and southern blacks, like their fathers before them, lived in terror of the rope; there had been a lynching in 1947, there would be two more in this convention year.
The big names in the Republican party were Thomas E. Dewey, Harold Stassen (“Man the oars and ride the crest,/Harold Stassen, he’s the best”), General Douglas MacArthur, Halleck, Vandenberg, Taft (“To do the job, name our Bob,” and “To steer our craft, let’s have Taft”), Earl Warren, and Joseph W. Martin Jr. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and Richard Nixon were present, but were very small potatoes; McCarthy had been a Stassen delegate in the Wisconsin primary, and Nixon, also for Stassen, was up in the galleries—too insignificant to be seated in the California delegation. Their big issue was there, however. Voters in the Oregon primary had found Stassen’s advocacy of a measure to outlaw Communists absurd, but the co
nvention keynoter was declaring, “We shall ferret out and drive out every Red and pink on Federal payrolls.”
Dewey was the Republican front runner, though he had taken a few nasty falls since announcing his candidacy on January 15—or, rather, telling young Jim Hagerty to make the announcement for him. He was always leaving such vulgar details to other men, explaining that he preferred to concentrate on issues. Actually he spent a lot of time worrying about his appearance. With his toothbrush moustache and his stiff manner, he reminded people of a Keystone cop, or the man on the wedding cake. During the primaries photographers had persuaded him to wear a ten-gallon hat and an Indian headdress which had been worn by Queen Marie of Romania on her visit to the United States in the 1920s. He never forgave himself; in the pictures he looked preposterous. Of his tepid manner, wicked gossips said—unjustly—“You have to know Tom Dewey well to dislike him.”
It was a cruel mischance that had made Stassen Dewey’s principal challenger that spring. Dewey’s height was five feet eight inches, Stassen was six feet three inches, and when they posed together in primary lulls, the effect was that of a man and his son. By convention time Dewey had acquired elevator shoes. Still, the damage was done. It was particularly annoying because Stassen hadn’t been expected to do as well as he had in the primaries. In Wisconsin, it had been thought, MacArthur’s slate would carry all before it. The general’s partisans were well financed, and the state had been flooded with instant biographies: MacArthur: Hero of Destiny, MacArthur: Fighter for Freedom, and MacArthur the Magnificent. On March 29 a New York Times headline guessed, MACARTHUR VICTORY DUE IN WISCONSIN. The next day delegates representing the general won only eight convention votes. Senator McGrath told reporters, “This leads me to the conclusion that to insure the election of the Democratic ticket in November we need only have the commentators united in predicting defeat.” They had chuckled politely; national chairmen have their little jokes.
Despite Dewey’s convention eve come-from-behind triumph in Oregon, he could hardly be called the choice of the party’s rank and file. Gallup now reported that the country’s registered Republicans preferred the Minnesota giant, 37 percent to Dewey’s 24 percent. Figures like that deserved more study than Dewey gave them. The summer before, every other Republican voter had wanted the dapper New Yorker. Such an erosion of strength ought to have alarmed him, especially since the Democrats, under Roosevelt, had become the country’s majority party. After his nomination he should have come on slugging. Instead his acceptance speech lulled the delegates to sleep: “The unity we seek is more than material. It is more than a matter of things and measures. It is most of all spiritual. Our problems are not outside ourselves, our problems are within ourselves.”
After photographers had taken pictures of him and Earl Warren, his vice-presidential candidate, Dewey went home to rest. He would not leave Albany until September 19, six weeks before the election, which, as the New York Times noted, would make his campaign “the shortest undertaken in recent years by the presidential candidate of the major party out of power.” He seemed to regard it almost as a formality. And the rest of the Republican leadership agreed. Several powerful Republicans, knowing that they would be members of the new administration, had traveled home from Philadelphia via Washington, stealing a march on their colleagues by picking up good houses at bargain prices.
***
“The Democrats act as though they have accepted an invitation to a funeral,” the Associated Press observed on July 12, as delegates of the party in power trudged into Convention Hall through the soggy sauna of a Philadelphia heat wave. The bunting, gay three weeks ago, was stained and flyblown. KEEP AMERICA HUMAN WITH TRUMAN, said a high banner. Hardly anyone looked up at it. Truman “Victory Kits” were distributed, each with a notebook, pencil, and whistle—“For the Democratic graveyard,” someone said. On the marquee of the Bellevue-Stratford a huge mechanical donkey flashed electric blue eyes at passersby, but that was just about the extent of the gaiety. Democratic delegates had a grim, hammered look. There were a few feeble signs of animation in rebel delegations which had recovered from the collapse of the Draft Eisenhower movement and were now reaching frantically, groping for any straw before they went down for the third time. Nineteen state chairmen held an election eve caucus. They approached Justice Douglas. He declined and they gave up. Then Truman phoned Douglas and asked him to run for the Vice-Presidency. He said he wouldn’t do that, either. For a while it looked as though the President might have to run alone. At last Alben Barkley, faithful old Alben, said he’d be glad to run the race.
In his humiliation Truman was spared nothing. He knew that a majority of the delegates didn’t want him, that if he freed them now they would give him a standing ovation—and quickly choose someone else. It seemed inevitable that Henry Wallace would poll several million votes—enough, at any rate, to cost him New York. Now the Solid South was about to break up. Young (thirty-seven) Mayor Humphrey of Minneapolis, and Paul Douglas and Adlai Stevenson, the party’s senatorial and gubernatorial candidates in Illinois, were leading the fight for a strong civil rights plank. Truman would have preferred to avoid heroics on this point. But North and South were groping for one another’s throats; the Dixiecrats lost the key roll call 651 1/2 to 582 1/2. “We bid you goodbye!” cried Alabama’s Handy Ellis, leading the way to the door.
It was Wednesday evening, July 14, when the Confederates left. The President almost ran into them when he arrived. His special train had left Union Station just as the evening session had been gaveled to order in Convention Hall. Seated in the “Ferdinand Magellan” between Clark Clifford and Sam Rosenman, Truman read through the notes for the speech. He was under the impression that he would go straight to the podium upon arriving. He didn’t; he couldn’t; the nominating speeches were just getting under way. He would have to wait four hours sweltering offstage. It is somehow appropriate that at that low point—the lowest point in his career—he was led to a small bleak room under the platform with a little balcony overlooking a littered alley. It was near the railroad tracks; he could hear the locomotives thundering by, feel them in the tremors of his straight chair. Talking now with Barkley, now with Homer Cummings, he squinted out at the grime and trash, mopping his forehead, rewriting the outline of his talk, glancing at the outline, brooding alone, and waiting.
At 12:42 A.M. on Thursday the President was finally nominated, 947 1/2 votes to 362 for Georgia’s Richard Russell and half a vote for Paul McNutt, former governor of Indiana. Despite the hour, the weariness, and clinging heat, Cabell Phillips wrote, the demonstration for Truman had “developed a sudden spontaneity; the whoops and rebel yells sounded real; delegates who had listlessly kept their seats while others paraded up and down the aisles picked up their banners and noisemakers and joined the aimless snake dance. Reporters standing on their benches in the press bank looked at one another in disbelief and said, ‘This looks like it is for real.’”
Barkley was nominated by acclamation—underscoring the convention’s failure to thus honor its presidential candidate—and at 1:45 A.M. he and Truman mounted the dais to the strains of “Hail to the Chief.” At any other convention it would have been a sublime moment: the two leaders raising one another’s arms high, the glaring lights, the tempo of the organ, the men standing on the collapsible chairs, and the excited women crying into handkerchiefs. There was all that, to be sure, but there was something else, too—a note of burlesque that seemed in keeping with the rest of it. Chairman Rayburn had just begun his introduction of Barkley when a stout, overdressed woman interrupted him. All evening a floral Liberty Bell had stood by the podium awaiting the emergence of the President. Now she presented it to him, or tried to; there was a sudden swishing under it—she just had time to stammer “doves of peace”—and abruptly flock after flock of white pigeons emerged from beneath the floral display and sailed back and forth and back and forth over the assembled delegates bearing their own tributes. Anyone familiar with pigeons, as the pla
nners of this bit of stage business clearly were not, knew what came next. “Watch your clothes!” farmers in the crowd shouted. It was too late. People had been muttering it all through the long session, and here was the real thing, ruining their shirts and dresses. Luckily for the party’s public image, or portrait, the press in 1948 considered such matters too indelicate for readers of family newspapers. Sam Rayburn saved the moment at the rostrum. He captured a passing bird and hurled it high overhead. The delegates cheered, and to their surprise and pleasure discovered that in that moment of slapstick their tensions had fled. They were relaxing, chuckling as they put away their pocket handkerchiefs and telling one another that whatever Harry had in store for them, it couldn’t be fouler than that.
It was another, greater surprise. After Barkley’s brief remarks, “the weary crowd,” Irwin Ross tells us, “steeled itself for a dose of presidential oratory.” Instead, the President spoke from the outline of his address, jotted down while waiting in the cheerless window over the alley near the coughing locomotives. Using his extemporaneous new style, he delivered a lashing, vibrant, give-’em-hell speech, and in Ross’s words, “his strident, high-pitched tones electrified the audience.” Stabbing the air with quick, awkward gestures, he cried, “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make the Republicans like it—don’t you forget it!” He shouted: “If the voters don’t do their duty by the Democratic party, they are the most ungrateful people in the world!”
He then turned to the Republicans, reviewing the list of programs he had proposed, and the Hill had rejected, for medical care, housing, price controls, aid to education. They had killed such measures, he said—and then, in an unparalleled display of cynicism and hypocrisy, they had approved a presidential platform calling for all of them. Very well. He would test their sincerity.
He delivered his haymaker: “On the twenty-sixth day of July, which out in Missouri we call ‘Turnip Day,’ I am going to call that Congress back in session, and I am going to ask them to pass some of these laws they say they are for in their platform. Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind that Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the Eightieth Congress. They can do this job in fifteen days if they want to do it, and they will still have time to go out and run for office.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 68