This, the New York Times reported, “set the convention on fire.” The weather, the hour, the bitter internal strife and the impending defeat in November were for the moment forgotten. Truman waited till the din abated a bit, and then he drove it all home: “They are going to try to dodge this responsibility,” he called, “but what that ‘worst’ Eightieth Congress does in this special session will be the test of whether they mean what they say!”
They were on their feet, giving him a standing ovation. He was hewing to the plan, keeping himself “controversial as hell,” and the reaction outside Convention Hall confirmed it. Editorial writers were all but speechless; using federal funds for a campaign swing was bad enough, but calling a special congressional session to score partisan points was almost grounds for impeachment. Vandenberg told a reporter, “This sounds like a last hysterical gasp from an expiring administration.” Congressman Hugh D. Scott Jr. of Pennsylvania deplored “the act of a desperate man who is willing to destroy the unity and dignity of his country and his government for partisan advantage after he himself has lost the confidence of the people”; and Walter George of Georgia, in a splendid Catherine wheel of mixed metaphors, cried, “The South is not only over a barrel—it is pilloried! We are in the stocks!”
Yet here and there men gave Truman grudging admiration. “There was no doubt that he had lifted the delegates out of their doldrums,” said Time. “He had roused admiration for his political courage.”
***
July was dominated by the two splinter parties and what everyone was calling “the Turnip session.” Dixiecrat morale was high. The southern strategy was to throw the election into the House of Representatives. They believed they would win as many votes as Truman, and on July 14 they met in Birmingham. In one day they zipped through the entire convention ritual. Their nominees were Strom Thurmond for President and Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi for Vice President. Here and there were omens that Dixie’s thin white line might break. Russell and Harry Byrd of Virginia stayed away from Birmingham, not out of love for equal rights but because they thought their seniority on the Hill might be in jeopardy. Still, the Dixiecrat loss was a blow to the Democrats, particularly to Clifford, whose campaign scenario had assumed the continuing solidarity of the Democratic South.
Ten days later Wallace’s Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) arrived in Philadelphia to form the Progressive Party of America (PPA). On December 29, when their leader had launched the movement by announcing his candidacy, the PCA future had looked very bright. “We have assembled a Gideon’s army,” he had said then. Progressives hadn’t expected to win the Presidency in 1948, but they believed it might be theirs in 1952. The average delegate was about thirty years old, some twenty years younger than those at major party conventions. American campuses were heavily represented—more Ivy than Big Ten—and so were unions whose leaders had moved into deep left field. Boys with crew cuts, then part of the student life-style, wore open-necked sport shirts; girls were in bobby socks and dirndls; Negroes were heavily represented; there were many guitars and much singing of folk songs in the manner of Pete Seeger and vice-presidential candidate Glen Taylor. Everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun. To the casual eye Progressivism appeared to be flourishing.
In reality it was racked by internal strains. Rexford Guy Tugwell was the only New Deal recruit Wallace had managed to enlist, and he was in constant conflict with Lee Pressman, the Communist CIO general counsel who would later be ousted by Walter Reuther. One does not lightly affix Communist labels, particularly to public figures in the first postwar decade, and there was much confusion at the time among voters, who were under the impression that the Progressives were merely providing a liberal alternative to Truman. The confusion was deliberate, fomented by Communist party (CP) members who could hardly believe their luck in capturing a former Vice President of the United States. PCA was the mirror image of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which had been formed in January 1947 to combat it. Three years after the 1948 election Michael Quill, who had broken with the CP, described its role in the Progressive movement to a CIO committee taking testimony about it. Quill was president of the Transport Workers Union and no red-baiter. In the autumn of 1947, he said, when his own sympathies were with the CP, Eugene Dennis, general secretary of the Communist party, told him and other labor leaders that the party hierarchy had “decided to form a third party led by Henry Wallace” and that Wallace “would come out in the next few weeks and announce his candidacy.”
Wallace seems to have embarked on this extraordinary adventure wearing blinders. Late in the campaign, as he later told friends, he realized that he was being used, that nearly everyone around him was an avowed Communist. He must have been among the last to find out. The New Republic had tried to warn him; the Nation tried; so did PM. The New York Post had begged Wallace to join ADA, in vain. His candidacy had been supported by only two newspapers in the country, the Daily Worker and Pennsylvania’s York Gazette and Daily. Reporters invited him to repudiate Red support, as FDR had in the 1930s. He refused.
The consequence was shattering publicity. Despite the vigor and enthusiasm of 3,200 attractive PPA delegates in Philadelphia—more than at either of the major party conventions—Wallace’s Communist aides undid him at every turn. Potentially, his acceptance speech in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park had the makings of one of the most memorable events in American politics. With tickets selling for $2.60 to 65¢—the proletariat in the bleachers—more than thirty thousand wildly cheering admirers attested to his continuing popularity. Given a reasonably fair press, which he might easily have had, he could have won over the Walter Reuthers and Jimmy Roosevelts, who needed very little persuading that July. He had only to disassociate himself from the Lee Pressmans. He declined; he wouldn’t “repudiate any support that comes to me on the basis of interest in peace.” A Time reporter called his attention to the resemblance between the PPA’s platform and the CP’s. “I’d say that they have a good platform,” Wallace said of the Communists. He added gratuitously, “I would say that the Communists are the closest things to the early Christian martyrs.”
With that, the wave of the Wallace movement broke. He would go on to the end doggedly, undeterred by hecklers who could see little resemblance between Communists and early Christian martyrs, his hand out, his brow damp, the familiar Wallace lick of hair in his eye. Invading the South, he was pelted with eggs, tomatoes, and firecrackers in three North Carolina towns. To the press, Truman regretted this “violation of the American concept of fair play.” With that exception, the President ignored the PPA threat, trusting that it would shrink as Wallace’s novelty appeal wore off. It did. With each passing week of the campaign, the Progressive effort lost momentum. Tugwell quietly withdrew his support, the left-leaning United Electrical Workers refused to endorse Wallace, and Progressive congressional candidates withdrew from local races. In the spring political analysts had conceded Wallace 3,500,000 votes at the least, approaching Robert La Follette’s 1924 high of 4,800,000 for a third-party race. Gallup had given him 7 percent of the total vote then. By the third week in October, Gallup’s forecast was down to 4 percent, and on November 2 the actual Wallace turnout would be less than that—1,157,172 votes. Democratic defections to the PPA undoubtedly cost Truman New York, but a careful reading of the returns strongly suggests that for every vote he lost to Wallace elsewhere, he picked up two or three sympathetic votes from the independent center.
Thurmond’s popular vote was to be 1,169,021. His concentration in the old Confederacy did bring him 39 electoral votes (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and one Tennessee elector), but it can be argued that this was worse than nothing. The discovery that the party could win without the Solid South freed Democrats from the need to compromise with it; in attempting to thwart advocates of civil rights for Negroes, Thurmond had hastened their victories.
***
On July 26 Truman appeared before a hostile joint session on
the Hill to present what he called his “shopping list” of needed legislation. During the thirty-minute speech he was interrupted only six times by applause, all of it from Democrats. The Republican members sat on their hands. Dewey, wary as always, refusing to “get in the gutter with Truman,” as he called it, evaded reporters’ questions about the Turnip session. He turned the whole thing over to Herbert Brownell and disappeared into his Albany study. Brownell was uneasy. He suggested to Taft that the party’s congressional leadership might give the green light to a few noncontroversial bills, thereby crippling Truman’s charge that it was obstructive. Why not amend the Displaced Persons Act, eliminating discriminatory clauses against Jews and some Catholics? Everyone agreed that the revision was needed, he argued, and Republican initiative now would cut the big Democratic pluralities in eastern metropolitan areas. Taft shook his head. It was a matter of principle, he said. In calling this session, the President had abused his powers. The shopping list must be ignored. Brownell having failed, Taft’s GOP colleagues on the Hill tried to reason with him. Vandenberg said, “Bob, I think we ought to do something. We ought to do whatever we can to show that we are trying to use the two weeks as best we can. Then we have a better case to take before the public.” According to Hugh Scott, who was there, “Bob Taft would have none of it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re not going to give that fellow anything.’ Anyone familiar with Bob Taft’s method of ending a conversation will know that was the end of it.”
Truman was delighted. In his message he had asked for legislation to control inflation, expand civil rights, increase minimum wages, extend social security coverage, and support housing programs—most of which had been vaguely endorsed in Dewey’s platform. In agreeing to the hazy wording in Philadelphia, the Republican congressional leadership had never dreamed that they would be held accountable for it before the election. Taft’s principle was sound, but there was also something to be said for keeping promises to the public. By sulking, the GOP seemed to be confirming the President’s judgment of it.
On August 12 the White House issued a detailed report contrasting presidential proposals with inactivity on the Hill. At that day’s press conference Truman deplored the “do-nothing” session and its “do-nothing Congress.” Every name he had called it had been justified, he said; it had proved itself to be the “worst” Congress in history.
Before leaving, one Washington correspondent, pursuing a different story, reminded the President that it was nearly two weeks now since a plain, stocky woman in her mid-thirties named Elizabeth Bentley had begun testifying before the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments. Since then she and a House Committee on Un-American Activities witness, Time editor Whittaker Chambers, had charged that a number of government employees had spied for the Soviet Union. The accused included Alger Hiss, William T. Remington, and Lauchlin Currie. Did the President wish to say something about these espionage hearings?
“They are simply a red herring,” Truman snapped. His thoughts still on the Eightieth Congress, he said: “They are using this as a red herring, as an excuse to keep from doing what they ought to do. Yes, you can quote me.”
***
At 3:40 P.M. on Sunday, September 5, the engineer in the cab of the “Truman Special” blew his steam whistle twice and left Union Station in pursuit of six million enfranchised spectators. A Democratic campaign, financed from party coffers, was finally in business. There would be two major transcontinental tours of ten days each, a tour of the northeastern United States, and shorter trips into the states around the District of Columbia. In this first thrust the President would ride 32,000 miles and deliver over 250 speeches, then a record in campaigning. From each rural dawn to the day’s last whistle-stop eighteen hours later, with the wide-eyed citizens of a small town gathered around the back of the “Ferdinand Magellan,” holding torches high to see the scrappy little fellow on the platform, Truman was unfailingly full of fight—and always quotable.
Following the script of June’s dress rehearsal, he was good-humored most of the time, admiring the local band, introducing Bess and Margaret, and ending his informal little talks with a plea to “Go to the polls on the second of November and cast your ballot for the Democratic ticket—and then I can stay in the White House for four more years,” or “Do the right thing that will keep me from suffering a housing shortage on January 20, 1949.” At the end of each stop the engineer would give a warning toot, and the medicine show would be on its way.
In the cities, crowds grew larger: 50,000 in Indianapolis; 50,000 in Denver; 250,000 in Boston; 250,000 in Detroit. “Nobody stomps, shouts, or whistles for Truman,” Richard H. Rovere wrote in the October 9, 1948, New Yorker. “Everybody claps. I should say that the decibel count would be about the same as it would be for a missionary who had just delivered a mildly encouraging report on the inroads being made against heathenism in Northern Rhodesia. This does not necessarily mean that the people who come out to hear him intend to vote against him—though my personal feeling is that most of them intend to do exactly that.”
Much that Truman said was absurd or irresponsible, and some of it mischievous. Harried and forlorn, supported by only 15 percent of the nation’s newspapers, told on every side that he was wasting his time and everyone else’s, he was capable of delivering demagogic lines. “The Republicans,” he said, “have begun to nail the American consumer to the wall with spikes of greed.” He called them “gluttons of privilege,” called Dewey a “fascist” and compared him to Hitler, and to over 80,000 listeners at the National Plowing Contest in Dexter, Iowa, he charged that “This Republican Congress has already stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.”
September became October, the days grew shorter, the nights deepened, cider appeared in the supermarkets, children scooped out pumpkins for jack-o’-lanterns, geese honked on their way southward at the first frost, bobwhites and barn swallows fled after them, squirrels hoarded white oak acorns, and still the Truman train crossed and recrossed the great fields of hayshocks, brown now but in trim straight rows, the locomotive meandering gracefully through the forests where maple tops were turning gold and staghorn sumac scarlet, where the long lonely whistle called those who could hear it to listen to the spry man introduce his wife and daughter, state his case, make his jokes, and then wave his hand and depart.
The low point for that train, according to Clifford, came toward the middle of October. As they paused in a small Midwest town, a member of the staff jumped off and bought the October 11 issue of Newsweek. The big black type read: FIFTY POLITICAL EXPERTS UNANIMOUSLY PREDICT A DEWEY VICTORY. “Unanimously,” someone said hollowly, and there was a long silence. One of them trudged back and showed it to Truman. He blinked, grinned, and said lightly, “Oh, those damned fellows; they’re always wrong anyway. Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.” At that point, Clifford believes, neither Bess nor Margaret believed that the President had a chance. He himself did, however, and afterward he could prove it. On the afternoon of October 13, while riding from Duluth to St. Paul, he wrote out his state-by-state analysis of the coming vote on the back of a mimeographed copy of his Duluth speech and handed it to George Elsey, who sealed it and put it away until the day after the election. It then developed that Truman had predicted 340 electoral votes for himself, 108 for Dewey, 42 for Thurmond, with 37 marked “doubtful.” It wasn’t on the nose, and it omitted four electoral votes, but a great many men whose job was forecasting elections would have given almost anything to have written it.
***
Meanwhile the man who was following Harry around continued his triumphant tour of the nation. Superbly organized, rigorously on schedule, always met by liaison men, with facilities for distributing advance speech texts to the ninety-eight reporters aboard and a high-fidelity public address system which could carry the candidate’s deep baritone tones from the rear platform to the press’s bar car, Thomas E. Dewey’s “Victory Special” provided the very latest thing in media equip
ment, designed to carry, spread, and disseminate whatever he wished to say.
He wished to say nothing. “Governor Dewey,” Leo Egan reported in the New York Times late in September, “is acting like a man who has already been elected and is merely marking time, waiting to take office. In his speeches and in his manner there is an attitude that the election will… confirm a decision already made…. Governor Dewey is deliberately avoiding any sharp controversy with the Democratic incumbent.”
Once in a while, in the Middle West and again in California, the two campaign trains would be only a day or two apart. Truman always noted the fact and reeled off a list of prickly questions for his opponent. Dewey declined the bait. He preferred to dwell upon the “incredible beauty” of the Rocky Mountains, the “soft, rolling, wooded country” through which he had been passing, the “teeming cities” and “fertile plains”—in sum, “the sheer majesty” of the United States.
Truman discussed housing, minimum wages, medical care for the elderly, crops. Dewey took his stand in behalf of water: “By adequate soil conservation,” he said resonantly in Denver, “we can do much to preserve our own future. We must also use the water we have wisely and well. We need the water from our rivers for power as well as agriculture…. The mighty rivers of the west should be developed with a view to the widest possible use for conservation, power, navigation, flood control, reclamation, and irrigation.”
In Des Moines, two days after Truman’s “pitchfork in the back” speech, with the country waiting for the Republican standard-bearer’s reply, Dewey said, “On January 20 we will enter into a new era. We propose to install in Washington an administration which has faith in the American people, a warm understanding of their needs, and the competence to meet them. We will rediscover the essential unity of our people and the spiritual strength that makes our country great. We will begin to move forward again shoulder to shoulder toward an even greater America and a better life for every American, in a nation working effectively for the peace of the world.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 69