by Roy Jenkins
He did no journey by aeroplane. The train was quite an elaborate affair of sixteen coaches. Truman travelled in the rear car, which had been specially built for Roosevelt and contained bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, dining-room and sitting-room. Next was a dining car converted into a suite of offices for his staff. Then came a newsroom, then a signal corps car, followed by sleeping and living accommodation for all the assorted personnel, including about sixty journalists and photographers.
After a short Labor Day foray into Michigan the first main trip began on September 18th and ended fifteen days later. He covered eighteen states, out to San Francisco by Chicago, Iowa and the mountain states, down to Los Angeles, through the sunbelt and back by St Louis. He worked himself very hard, starting at 5.45 a.m. on his first full day and making his last appearance at 8.10 p.m. On some days he made as many as sixteen speeches. ‘Truman was at his best,’ Irwin Ross wrote, ‘in his whistle-stop appearances.’ Mr Ross also gives us a succinct account of the shape of his speeches on such occasions:
‘Truman’s impromptu talks held to no set sequence, but they usually contained the same ingredients: a plug for the Democratic candidate for Congress or the Senate, a passing reference to the local college or baseball team (sometimes only the local weather was worthy of note), a brief exposition of some problem of local or national concern (housing, farm price supports, public power) which the Republicans had managed to muck up, and a plea for his audience to register and vote. The final turn in his routine was to introduce his wife and daughter. “And now I would like you to meet Mrs Truman,” he would say, at which point the blue velvet curtain behind him would part and the First Lady would appear to smile at the crowd. “And now my daughter Margaret,” or in southern states “Miss Margaret” … Crowds were large, curious, good-natured, but not especially enthusiastic.’17
Reporters who made the trip found it very difficult to estimate whether Truman was gaining votes. The crowds were certainly friendly, but were they convinced? What did they make of the contrast between the hyperbole of his language in denouncing the Republicans and the flat folksiness of his delivery? Did they find his appeals to them to keep him in the White House so that he might not suffer ‘from a housing shortage on January 20th, 1949’ as embarrassing as did most of the members of his staff? Did they find him lacking in dignity for a president or agreeably close to their interests and style? Would they rather have been listening to one of Dewey’s carefully prepared set-piece orations, dealing in sonorous depth with a single major topic? All of these questions remained unanswered when the train got back to Washington on October 2nd. But one thing was already certain. The election was probably lost, but the campaign was not a flop. Three million people had turned out to see him. They appeared to have enjoyed listening to him. He had enjoyed talking to them. There would be no problem of his maintaining his morale until November 2nd.
Truman next set out on his travels on October 6th. He then did a three-day tour of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and up-state New York. The crowds had become very big, and the President was reported as being in crackling form throughout. The limited importance of either of these considerations is however underlined by the fact that Truman succeeded in losing all four of the ‘Roosevelt’ states covered by this expedition.
On the last day of this trip the news of the aborted ‘Vinson mission’ to Moscow had broken. This was, to say the least, amateurishly handled. At the end of his transcontinental journey Truman was persuaded by two of his speech-writers that it would be good politics, and maybe good diplomacy too, to send the Chief Justice on a special peace mission to Stalin. It was a gesture rather than a negotiation which was planned, for it was never clear what Vinson was intended to say when he got to Moscow, and he had little foreign policy experience and no personal entrée to the Russians. However it could be argued that with tension high over Berlin and all the traditional channels of negotiation clogged, such a public display of America’s desire for a peaceful solution might remove some part of Russian suspicion.
Clearly however it required careful consideration with the Secretary of State. Marshall was in Paris where he had just agreed with the British and French foreign ministers that there was no point in further seeking direct negotiation with the Russians on Berlin, and that the three Western powers should rather jointly submit the issue to the Security Council. Marshall was therefore bound to be against the Vinson proposal. Truman however did not bother to discover this before he had, first, persuaded a reluctant Vinson that it was his duty to perform the mission, and, second, had told Charles Ross to negotiate with the broadcasting networks for a half hour of ‘non-political’ time for the evening of Tuesday, October 5th. Not unnaturally, in the middle of an election, they asked what the presidential speech was to be about. Ross told them ‘in confidence’.
It was only at this stage that Truman telephoned Marshall in Paris. Marshall spoke faithfully. At the end of the conversation Truman went back and told his disconcerted staff that, election or no election, the enterprise was off. This has sometimes been presented as the supreme example of Truman’s attachment to responsibility rather than votes in matters of foreign policy. Certainly it makes an interesting contrast with his dealings with Marshall over the recognition of Israel five months previously. But it could also be presented as an example of his ill-considered rashness when he was operating more or less on his own and before he was brought up against the likely consequences of his actions.
Inevitably, of course, the ‘confidential’ discussions with the broadcasting companies leaked, and Truman came near to getting the worst of both worlds. He had no vote-winning peace mission, but he was portrayed as having sought to play politics with major issues of national security. There was general dismay around him, but he himself treated the matter with some equanimity. He thought that there might be advantages in appearing as a man of peace who had nonetheless subordinated his instincts (and his need for votes) to the imperatives of General Marshall’s orderly foreign policy. This was not a position compatible with high presidential authority, and could not conceivably have been held to be helpful had he been running as an unruffled incumbent. But as he and Dewey had spontaneously reversed roles, leaving the President to be the cheeky challenger, he was possibly right in hoping that the incident had done him little harm. And he was almost certainly right in thinking that Dewey’s principal campaign gaffe, made a week later, was more damaging with the public, because it was much less sympathetic. In rural Illinois, where the Governor of New York was making one of his relatively rare back platform appearances, the train suddenly moved a few feet into the crowd during the speech. Dewey snarled with ill-humour: ‘That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer. He probably ought to be shot.’ The words do not sound too serious, but they were enough to move a lot of public sympathy from the imperious little candidate to the engine driver, and Truman subsequently kept the incident skilfully on the boil.
For the last three weeks of the campaign Truman concentrated on the eastern half of the continent. Some of it proved to be stony ground for him, and the foundations of his success came from the West (beyond the Mississippi Dewey carried only Nebraska and Oregon), but the broad tactic was nonetheless right for it enabled him to make a major impact on two of the three most marginal states which were crucial to victory: Ohio and Illinois. His October 10th to 16th trip was particularly productive. Not only did he cover these two states but also three others—Wisconsin, Minnesota and West Virginia—which he won fairly comfortably. Then he went to Miami for the convention of the American Legion, where he gave a good explanation of his Vinson initiative. Then he had a day in Pennsylvania, which he failed to sway, even though he made one of his most successful anti-Dewey speeches in Pittsburgh.
On Sunday evening, October 24th, he left Washington for what most of those around him still thought was the last time before another president was elected. He went to Chicago (another visit to Illinois), Cleveland (another visit to Ohio), Bost
on (the centre of one of the only two north-eastern states that he carried), New York (a predictable waste of effort in view of the strength there of Dewey and Wallace, but obligatory), and then home to St Louis and Independence. In Harlem, on the Friday before the poll he made his only civil rights speech of the campaign. In Madison Square Garden the previous evening he had made his strongest commitment to Israel and claimed full credit for the United States victory in the race to recognize. Everywhere he continued to berate the Republicans without much respect for restraint or even truth. In Chicago he appeared to compare Dewey to Hitler as a tool of reactionary big business interests. In Boston he boxed the compass and denounced him as being the one the Communists wanted to win. It was however all done with considerable good humour. Even his prepared big city rally speeches were by this stage interlaced with successful passages of mocking raillery.
Truman’s last meeting was in St Louis on the Saturday evening. Then he went to Independence and eschewed campaigning for the last two days. He had travelled 21,928 miles and delivered 275 speeches.18 On the Tuesday he voted in the Independence Memorial Hall, before attending a luncheon for about thirty old friends given by the Mayor at the Rock wood Country Club. He reminisced about Missouri politics in a relaxed and expansive mood. Then he left, unaccompanied by anyone other than three Secret Service agents, and drove secretly to a hotel in Excelsior Springs, a small resort thirty miles north-east of Kansas City. There he had a Turkish bath, a sandwich and a glass of milk and went to bed and to sleep early in the evening.
At midnight he awoke and listened to the radio for a few minutes. He was a little ahead in the popular vote, but was still predicted to lose. At 4.00 a.m. he was awake again, to be greeted by the news that Ohio, Illinois and California had been left holding the balance and that he had already won Illinois. He decided that that was it, had a harder drink than milk, and motored to the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, where his staff were installed and where he arrived in dapper condition at 6.00 a.m. He had to wait another four hours for Dewey’s concession. This was not due to any ill-grace on Dewey’s part (indeed his concessionary press conference was one of the most gracious of his career) but to the fact that he had gone to bed very late, with the issue still unresolved, but with his hopes draining away as fast as his disappointed supporters were leaving the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, and had not awakened until 10.30 a.m.
That evening Truman attended an informal impromptu celebration of 40,000 people in Independence, and on the following day took the train back to Washington. At St Louis, where there was a huge crowd at the station, he held up the famous Wednesday morning edition of the Chicago Tribune, with the headline ‘Dewey defeats Truman’. In Washington there was more than a solitary Dean Acheson to greet him on the railroad platform. ‘Barkley and I must have shaken hands with at least five or six hundred—some of them Johnnie come lately boys,’ he did not fail to note. (He felt the same way about $750,000 in back-dated cheques which Louis Johnson received for campaign funds after the result.) However it was all highly satisfactory after the troughs which Truman had been through, and the crowds which greeted him between Union Station and the White House were immense and enthusiastic. There were only two immediate snags. The first was that Bess Truman had a bad sore throat, and that the President had to be up at 3.00 a.m. administering medicine to her on the night after his return. The second was that the White House was falling down. It was already propped up inside like a mine working, and immediate arrangements had to be made for a move across the street to Blair House, which was expected to be for ten months but in fact extended to forty. First, however, he was able to get away to his beloved submarine base at Key West for two weeks.
How did this spectacular and unexpected victory occur? To take a downbeat aspect first, it was achieved on a very low poll. Only 51% of the electorate voted. That probably favoured the Democratic Party, which was somewhat better organized at local level, although certainly not better funded at national level. On the popular vote Truman was significantly although not magnificently ahead. He had a lead over Dewey of 4½%, which would be equivalent in a British constituency election to a majority of about 2,500. He just failed—by 0.4%—to get over half of the votes cast, but he compensated for this by keeping Dewey to a slightly lower percentage of the total than he had achieved against Roosevelt in 1944. Truman had to contend with Wallace and Thurmond, which Roosevelt never had to do.11 Thurmond polled nearly 1,200,000, just over 2%, and because he was geographically concentrated got nearly 8% of the votes in the Electoral College. Wallace did a shade worse, more or less up to expectations in New York, from which state he got nearly a half of his national total, but was badly down in California, thought to be his other pillar. Geographically unconcentrated, however, he got no votes in the Electoral College.
Even without his 50%, Truman nonetheless gained a higher percentage than any British Prime Minister since the war, over 7 points more than Mrs Thatcher in 1983; 2 points more than Lord Wilson in 1966, half a point more than Lord Attlee in 1945. Nonetheless his result, under the Electoral College system, could have been easily overturned, or at least put into the House of Representatives. It was not dissimilar from the Kennedy result in 1960, although his popular majority was greater. Truman carried Ohio by only 7,000 and California by 17,000. A switch of 12,000 votes in these two states would therefore have left the House to decide. In Illinois the majority was only 33,000. A switch of another 17,000 there would have given Dewey an absolute victory. In a poll of nearly 50 million a well distributed shift of 29,000 votes, just over .05 per cent of the total, could have produced a reversal.
Truman immediately attributed his triumph to union support ‘Labor did it’, he was reported by the New York Times as having said on the morning after. It is certainly true that in spite of the upsets of 1946 the leaders of both the AFL and CIO worked far more committedly in that campaign than they ever had before, and probably carried most of their members with them; only the ever-aberrant John L. Lewis, flanked this time by Alvanley Johnston, were for Dewey. They also provided the necessary money and foci of organization for his campaign. Several of his most successful major rallies were labour-sponsored. Yet, when all that is said, to suggest that a candidate who lost in Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania was carried to victory on the backs of the union leaders is verging on the fanciful. It was much more the farmers who ‘did it’. This was certainly Dewey’s view, and it was substantially borne out by Truman’s remarkable string of successes across the Middle West, the mountain states and the Pacific. For a Missouri Democrat to carry Kansas suggested that something was stirring deep in the farm belt. One cause was a fall in the price of corn from $2.25 a barrel in July 1948 to $1.26 in October. It was not dissimilar to the 1921 decline. Then it bankrupted Truman. In 1948 it was a major factor in keeping him in the White House. It was a triumph of his campaign that this collapse was blamed not on the incumbent president, but on the outgoing Congress and the candidate who was tarred with their brush.
Truman also did well, but by no means sensationally so, amongst blacks. Most did not vote at all, but of those who did twice as many were for Truman as were for Dewey. In the big cities Truman maintained the traditional Democratic majority, but substantially less strongly than had Roosevelt. The best summing up seems to be that he held together, on a declining asset basis, the traditional Roosevelt coalition, sustained it with a special injection of farm votes, and was fortified by an over-confident Dewey campaign which discouraged marginal Republican supporters from voting.
However achieved, it was a famous victory. As Mrs Truman, through her sore throat, told the White House assistant usher on the morning after their return to Washington: ‘It looks like you’re going to have to put up with us for another four years.’19 There was also going to be a great deal with which Truman himself, and vicariously Mrs Truman, would have to put up during that forthcoming four years.
9
THE LIMITATIONS OF VICTORY
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Just as defeat in the mid-term elections of 1946 had liberated Truman in his own mind from the shadow of Roosevelt’s splendiferous personality, so his much more important victory in 1948 gave him a new freedom in the minds of most of his countrymen both from this formidable shadow and from the limitations of his own occasionally jejune impact. He had joined a small company of three presidents who had succeeded through death and subsequently been re-elected in their own right. Theodore Roosevelt was the first predecessor, Calvin Coolidge the second. Truman could no longer be regarded as a president simply of chance and gaffes.
This gave him no immunity from criticism. But no president including Washington and Jefferson has ever approached such immunity. Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, to cite the other two (with Washington and Jefferson) now most commonly regarded as in the first league, were peculiarly far away from it.
Roosevelt, by virtue of the beneficent power of the United States when Hitler menaced the world, approached immunity internationally, but not internally. Lincoln, on the other hand, signally failed to achieve it either abroad or at home. The London Times under one of its most distinguished editors (Delane) accomplished the considerable feat of describing the Gettysburg Address as ‘rendering ludicrous’ what might otherwise have been an impressive ceremony of dedication. Nor, beset by the relentless ambition to replace him of his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, and by his own capacity for selecting incompetent generals, did he stand high internally until victory for the Union was manifestly within his grasp. The American democracy has many qualities, but appreciating great presidents during their terms of office is not amongst them.
It should therefore be no surprise that, while Truman’s election was recognized as remarkable, it gave him no guarantee of four years of unchallenged authority. Even before his inauguration on January 20th, 1949, there had been two precursors of the troubles of the second term. In December 1948, Alger Hiss, a State Department official who as a young man of promise had occupied junior but central posts, had been indicted for perjury in denying that he had passed classified documents to a Communist agent. During the same late autumn it became obvious that the Chiang Kai-Shek régime would be driven out of mainland China. Those who wished to oppose the administration said that this was due to supineness in Washington. Those who wished to support the administration thought it was an inevitable result of the corruption and inefficiency of the Kuomintang. It opened a great foreign policy divide in American politics. Towards Europe there was an adequate community of approach. Towards the Far East there was no such thing. Vandenberg’s health was declining. (He died in April 1951.) The China Lobby was rising. Truman was to have more foreign policy trouble at home during the second term than during the first.