So thin was the meat in Dewey’s formal addresses that resourceful newspapermen began looking for some anecdote, some light feature to relieve the gray paragraphs. On October 12, at Beaucoup, Illinois, the train abruptly moved backward, toward the crowd. It halted again after a few feet, and there were no casualties, but the governor was upset and angry. Depending upon which version you heard, he said either, “That’s the first idiot I’ve ever had for an engineer” or “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer. He probably ought to be shot at sunrise but I guess we can let him off because no one was hurt.” Possibly because it was one of the rare times that he had said anything real, the remark was passed on and on until it became an anti-Dewey slogan in union halls and railroad roundhouses all over the country.
Other Republicans were on the warpath. Hugh Scott, now national chairman, had seized upon the Bentley-Chambers testimony, judging it as an issue with too many implications to be dismissed as a “red herring.” Dewey made one tame reference to it and then soared off toward his most elegant generalities: “We have sometimes failed in our faith and often fallen short of it. But in our hearts we believe and know that every man has some of the Divine in him, that every individual is of priceless importance.” To be fair, it must be set down that in the closing weeks of the campaign Dewey began to doubt his strategy. His crowds were dwindling and Truman’s, the newspapers told him, were growing. His strategy board—Brownell, Scott, Elliott Bell and Russell Sprague—had decided to aim the final thrust at the industrial northwest; midwestern farmers were Republican by birth and would take care of themselves. Stung by Truman’s hooks and jabs, he wanted to strike back, and in four communities he let loose. Truman’s message vetoing the Taft-Hartley Law, for example, he said was “the wrongest, most incompetent, most inaccurate document ever put out of the White House in a hundred and sixty years.” The crowds enjoyed it, and so did he, but his advisers were alarmed. Hagerty polled the newsmen and reported that all of them believed a slugfest would be a mistake, that it would be a confession of weakness. To be sure Dewey was getting the best counsel, Brownell set up a series of conference calls around the nation tying the candidate into round robin conversations with ninety of the ninety-six Republican state committeemen and committeewomen. All save one urged the governor to press forward on the high road and let Truman totter down the low road into oblivion. The exception, Harry Darby of Kansas, warned that the farm belt was in a mutinous mood. He was dismissed as a Cassandra, and Dewey resumed his crusade for unity, cleanliness, better water, and faith.
Down to the wire, the Truman train was bombarded with bills from managers of service industries terrified of being left unpaid. But after the disheartening Newsweek issue spirits began to lift a little. In bull sessions late on the train the younger staff members argued back and forth about the President’s chances, though whenever they grew optimistic one of them would remind the others that every poll in the country contradicted them. In the last days Clifford thought there was something in the air, that Truman was picking up strength; when he rose to speak at the traditional Friday night before election rally in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, some of whose backers had been leaders of the “Dump Truman” movement before Philadelphia, the crowd gave him a twelve-minute standing ovation. Clifford reflected that if only the campaign could last two weeks more, they might have a chance.
In Chicago Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas stood side by side in an open car on their way to a Truman rally at the stadium. The silent crowds were four or five deep on the sidewalk. Fifteen years ago these had been the forgotten men and women at the bottom of the economic pyramid, the starving teachers and threadbare workers Insull had betrayed and Roosevelt had saved. Stevenson marveled at the size of the turnout. All Chicago seemed to be there, yet there was almost no cheering, hardly any sound at all. Douglas said, “They’ve come out today to see the death of the dream that they cherish.”
In Baltimore, editor in chief Hamilton Owens of the Sun stopped by a young reporter’s desk. “I’ve finished my editorial congratulating the new President,” he said. “It’s in type and on the stone.” He paused and added with a twinkle, “If Truman won, I’d have to write another one, wouldn’t I?” The little sally delighted him; he strode off chuckling.
***
Subscribers to Life that last weekend in October saw on page 37 of the new issue, dated November 1, a full-page photograph of Governor and Mrs. Dewey over the caption: THE NEXT PRESIDENT TRAVELS BY FERRY BOAT OVER THE BROAD WATERS OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY. Accompanying it was an eight-page windup on the campaign, in which the editors concluded that the U.S. was “about to ditch Truman and take Dewey” for reasons that involved “the brain as well as the emotions.” The cover of Willard Kiplinger’s weekly Changing Times for November 1 carried a 72-point type head announcing disclosures inside on WHAT DEWEY WILL DO. On Sunday, October 31, the New York Times reported the results of a month-long survey during which its sizable national staff had studied voter sentiment in every state. Its conclusion: Dewey would carry 29 states with 345 electoral votes (266 needed to win); Truman 11 states with 105 electoral votes; Thurmond 4 states with 38 electoral votes; in doubt, 43 electoral votes. The survey also found that the Republicans would retain control of both houses of Congress. To make sure it was right, the Times polled the forty-seven shrewdest journalists covering Dewey. In a secret ballot, they unanimously agreed that the governor would win handily.
In an editorial which would appear on November 3, the morning after the election, the Detroit Free Press would call upon Secretary of State Marshall to resign and urge Truman to appoint John Foster Dulles, Dewey’s adviser on foreign affairs, in his place. “That,” its editors argued, “would restore confidence in our foreign policy abroad and at home.” (That same Truman Doctrine was pacifying Greece, the Marshall Plan was in full swing, and the Berlin airlift had entered its fifth month.) “True,” the Free Press conceded, “that is asking a great deal of Mr. Truman. Yet these are times which, with all our unity and patriotism, will ask a great deal more of millions of other Americans.” The editors generously described America’s “lame duck” President as “a game little fellow, who never sought the Presidency and was lost in it, but who went down fighting with all he had.” Free Press readers were assured that Harry Truman would still make a living: “There’s first the prospect of a $25,000 pension as a former President. Then there are all the radio contracts and the magazine articles and books which he can look forward to and which will net him a handsome income—close, they say, to a million. The path for him doesn’t lead from the White House to the poorhouse.”
Not everyone in the fourth estate wrote about the crushed President with such benevolence; one syndicated columnist wondered “how long Dewey is going to let Truman interfere with the running of this country.” Like the Free Press, some writers had to complete their Wednesday columns on Monday for setting on Tuesday, while the voters made their choice. Thus Drew Pearson would astonish his millions of readers the day after the returns had been counted by disclosing, in his opening paragraph, “I surveyed the close-knit group around Tom Dewey, who will take over in the White House 86 days from now.” He then triumphantly named the new President’s entire cabinet. That same Wednesday Joseph and Stewart Alsop revealed that “The first post-election question is how the government can get through the next ten weeks…. Events will not wait patiently until Thomas E. Dewey officially replaces Harry S. Truman. Particularly in the fields of foreign and defense policy, somebody somewhere in Washington must have authority to give answers that will still be valid after January 20.” The Alsops proposed that Dewey’s cabinet nominees for the State and Defense posts immediately move in as “special assistants,” guiding their lame-duck predecessors until Dewey’s inaugural.
How did this happen? How could so many seasoned observers have climbed out so far on so shaky a limb? The answer is that they didn’t think of it as a limb, let alone a shaky one. They had been telling one another th
at Truman’s cause was hopeless for so long, and reading each other’s analyses of why Dewey would easily defeat him, that they believed no other outcome was possible. Truman’s campaign claim that “Everybody’s against me but the people” had this seed of truth: unlike the pundits, he and the voters thought of the election as a contest, not a coronation. To those who had devoted their careers to the study of electoral trends, all the signposts pointed one way. When the party out of power captured control of Congress, as the Democrats had in 1930, it was virtually certain to win the Presidency two years later, as FDR had then. Besides, the Republicans were long overdue. Roosevelt’s four straight victories could be attributed only to his charming personality, the Alsops and Pearsons told one another, and if there was one thing Truman lacked, it was charm. The Republican ticket had the money, the overwhelming support of the press—newspapermen naturally thought that this counted heavily—and, most important of all, the blessing of the public opinion polls.
It was twelve years since the Literary Digest fiasco. In the aftermath of the Democratic landslide of 1936, embittered Republicans had sworn that they would never again trust a straw vote. Afterward, however, they learned that George Gallup and Elmo Roper, then lesser known than the Digest’s pollsters, had spurned its direct mail for statistical samplings, which had forecast a big Roosevelt triumph. Since then these pollsters had been vindicated in every election. Metropolitan newspapers subscribed to their services—the New York Times was thought quaint for spending so much money on its own survey—and any pundit who contradicted them would have been considered a fool. Thus the beginning of the cycle: polls foresaw a Republican sweep, and columnists and editorial writers took it for gospel. It is even possible that men and women who planned to vote Democratic misled the pollsters because they wanted to keep up with the Joneses. Error was feeding upon error, and this chain was strengthened by poll takers who had become smug and, in at least one instance, arrogant.
Elmo Roper was arrogant. In a column dated September 9, nearly eight weeks before the election, he announced that he had surveyed the electorate for the last time. “Thomas E. Dewey,” he wrote, “is almost as good as elected…. That being so, I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend he is witnessing a neck-and-neck race.” Like so many professional election watchers, Roper believed in what some had come to call Farley’s Law. After his sensational prediction in 1936, Farley had said that in his opinion, voters made up their minds during conventions; the campaigns, he implied, were ineffective carnivals. In laying his reputation on the line that first week in September, Roper was using figures gathered by his staff in August. Ironically, he did take another poll in the last week of the election showing a slight shift to Truman; it still gave Dewey a heavy lead, however, so he decided not to hedge his bet.
All three of the national polls—Roper, Gallup, and Crossley—erred in failing to ask interviewees whether they actually intended to vote and in excluding from their samples most voters with grade school educations, who were likely to be Truman partisans. The pollsters’ greatest blunder, however, was their indifference to the last-minute impact of Truman’s great effort. Roper had closed his books before the Truman Special could pull out of Union Station. Crossley’s last report (predicting 49.9 percent for Dewey and 44.8 for Truman, the rest going to Thurmond and Wallace) was a reflection of mixed state samplings taken in mid-August, mid-September, and mid-October. Gallup, the most industrious of the three, should have sensed what was happening in the country. His September 24 report foresaw 46.5 percent of the vote for Dewey to 38 percent for Truman. His last column, appearing in Sunday papers two days before the election, showed Truman gaining sharply—to 44 percent—and the interviews on which it was based had been conducted two weeks earlier. Clifford was right. The national mood was shifting daily, almost hourly.
***
In the memories of Americans now over forty, four events stand apart: Pearl Harbor, the death of Roosevelt, the election of 1948, and the assassination of John Kennedy. A man may have forgotten what happened on his twenty-first birthday, or a woman how she lost her virginity, but each can recall where he was when he heard about these four. They became milestones in the lives of people; even as their parents had said, “We met after the Armistice,” or “We moved just before the Crash,” so the swing generation came to date incidents in their private lives from the moment news reached them of the shots in Dallas, the attack on Hawaii, the stroke in Warm Springs, and the Truman miracle.
Everyone expected an early night. In the ballroom of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, Jim Hagerty told reporters, “We may be out of the trenches by midnight”; Governor Dewey, after voting in an East Fifty-first Street school (“Good luck, Mr. President!” a clerk called from an office window overhead), predicted that Truman’s telegram of concession would arrive while he and Mrs. Dewey were dining at the home of his good friend Roger Straus at 6 East Ninety-third Street. In Washington the Statler Hotel, Republican by tradition as the Mayflower is Democratic, had redecorated its ballroom and set aside a corsage for each Republican lady, to be presented to her as she arrived. The Mayflower, on the other hand, was quiet as a stone. The Democratic National Committee was so sure of defeat that it hadn’t bothered to reserve the hotel’s ballroom. Putting the money aside for ’52, the committeemen retired to their office suite, took the phone off the hook, broke out a couple of bottles of whiskey, and settled in for a wake. None of them had brought a radio; this was one evening when they could do without the news. (In the 1960s or 1970s one of them might have brought a transistor in his pocket, but in 1948 “portable” radios were comparatively heavy and bulky, and had to be plugged into wall outlets.) This was going to be one night when the committeemen would be far behind the swiftly developing political picture. Cabell Phillips of the New York Times was also out of touch. Back in Manhattan after Truman’s campaign, he had boosted his spirits by buying a $47.50 topcoat—a real investment in those days—and a ticket to Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt’s latest play. As the first scattered returns came in from New Hampshire, Phillips entered the theater’s Forty-seventh Street door and sat through two acts, unaware of the greater drama outside.
***
Those early figures from New Hampshire surprised Dewey; though he was leading, his margin was less than in 1944, less than any Republican candidate would expect from so staunch a party stronghold. Hurrying back to his hotel suite, he sat by a radio with his family and a few intimate friends, listening, reading wire service returns as they were brought to him, and jotting figures on a scratch pad.
Out in Missouri, President Truman had eluded the press several hours earlier with the help of Secret Service agents Henry Nicholson and Jim Rowley.1 At 4:30 P.M. they had driven to Excelsior Springs, a resort thirty miles northeast from Independence, and checked into the Elms Hotel. The President took a Turkish bath and retired to his room at 6:30 with a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. He turned on the bedside radio. An announcer reported that he had taken an early lead of a few thousand votes. He went to bed and fell asleep almost instantly.
***
At 7:45 P.M. a Chicago Tribune editor faced an agonizing decision. The paper’s bulldog edition was going to press, to reach the streets in time for the late theater crowd. The editor had to compose a headline. He couldn’t just report that a national election had been held; they knew that; he needed a piece of hard news. Truman was now leading, but those first returns from New England were meaningless unless you knew where they came from. The Republican ticket might sweep Connecticut, for example, but if Hartford reported before the rest of the state, as it usually did, the figures would suggest a Democratic victory. Even the commentator in Connecticut couldn’t tell you where the figures were from. He didn’t know himself. In the race to be first on the air, he read scrawled notes the moment they were handed to him.
So the editor in the Tribune Building had to write his headline before he kn
ew what was happening. He fell back on the one certainty in this election and blocked out the banner head: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.
***
By now the running totals made no sense. Truman had taken an early lead, as expected; Democratic strength lay in the cities, whose returns came in first because so many of them had voting machines and superior communications facilities. Correcting for this bias, Dewey seemed to be taking New York and New Jersey (but only because of a heavy Wallace vote in each). He was winning throughout the industrial East, with the exception of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This reassured him; traditionally it was Democratic ground. Furthermore, Thurmond was depriving Truman of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina. However, the Dewey margins were incredibly thin. Some counties that were GOP bastions were going Republican by a handful of votes. And Truman, outpolling Roosevelt in some places, was holding the popular vote lead in key cities.
The real shocks came from the other side of the Appalachian Range. The Democratic ticket had seized a strong lead in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado, all three Republican fiefs; and as early reports came in from the eleven western states, only Oregon seemed to be going to Dewey.
***
At 10:30 in New York the curtain came down on the Lunts’ second act. Cabell Phillips was thirsty. He had remained seated during the first intermission, but he decided to spend this one in a nearby bar. As he ordered scotch he became aware of a voice coming from the bar’s radio, reciting the names of states, the number of wards and precincts, and a jumble of bewildering figures. Phillips had paid the bartender, and the first swallow of whisky was halfway down his throat when the clear voice of a commentator said, “Truman’s lead now looks almost unassailable. If he can hold his lead in Ohio…”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 70