by John Egerton
Strom Thurmond and his Dixiecrat ramblers had much bigger dreams in the South, and to some extent they were realized. Only in Alabama did they shove the President off the ballot, but in Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina they got the States’ Rights Democrats listed under the traditional sign of the Democratic Party, with the Truman-Barkley slate treated as a fringe tandem of interlopers. (It was thus no mere coincidence that those same four states all went to the Dixiecrats.) At the start of the campaign, every Southern senator except Claude Pepper was an ostensible ally of the third-party rebels, all twenty-one of them having gone on record in defense of states’ rights and in unyielding opposition to the Truman civil rights program; every governor except the quicksilvery Jim Folsom was likewise committed—and even he had poked his head in at the Dixiecrat convention.
But getting them to denounce civil rights and proclaim states’ rights was one thing; getting them to leave the comfort and safety of the Democratic Party for a philosophically and geographically confined band of renegades on a suicide mission was something else altogether. Some of the more cynical “friends” of the movement, while applauding Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright, were busy planning their own path to the exits. A few papers in the region supported the Dixiecrats, but many more were critical; even the Montgomery Advertiser could find no groundswell of support for the rebels, and predicted that the ticket would capture no more than sixty electoral votes—not enough to make a difference unless the contest was extremely close.
Doggedly, sometimes wildly, Thurmond pressed on. “I did not risk my life on the beaches of Normandy,” he fulminated from the stump, “to come back to this country and sit idly by while a bunch of black politicians whittle away your heritage and mine.” He and Wright grew ever more shrill and slanderous as the days dwindled down. They warned darkly that the Truman programs were communistic edicts to be enforced by “Gestapo-like agents,” and characterized all of their opponents as totalitarian and subversives. When the end was near, practically all of the Southern politicians except the Mississippi diehards had tiptoed out, quietly covering their tracks as they left.
While he continued to insist that it was not race but states’ rights that got his dander up, Thurmond’s actions frequently proved otherwise. In midsummer he wrote to Governor William H. Hastie of the Virgin Islands, inviting him and his family to pay a visit to South Carolina and “be our guests at the Mansion.” (Hastie, a prominent African-American official in the federal government since the early days of the New Deal, had been appointed to the Virgin Islands post in 1946, and was widely noted in the press as “the first and only Negro governor,” but the news had somehow escaped Thurmond’s notice.) Hastie replied with appreciation and reciprocated, inviting Thurmond and his family to the island territory. Inevitably, the letters got into the papers. “I would not have written him if I knew he was a Negro,” Thurmond huffed tactlessly. “Of course, it would have been ridiculous to invite him.”
President Truman suffered few such lapses. As the weeks slipped by, he seemed to be enjoying himself more and more. He didn’t bang the drum for civil rights—in fact, he seldom brought it up at all, and except for brief stops in Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, he stayed out of the South altogether. Thurmond and Wallace might as well not have existed, as far as Truman was concerned; he never so much as acknowledged their presence in the race. To hear him tell it, it was just him and “the other fellow,” Dewey, whom he never called by name.
Crisscrossing the rest of the country by train, the President whistle-stopped like a man possessed. Some days he made fifteen or twenty speeches, relentlessly attacking “the other fellow” and the “do-nothing Congress” with such give-’em-hell gusto that his large and growing audiences shouted for more, loving nothing so much as an entertaining aggressor—or to hear the truth, as Truman liked to say. Alben Barkley did most of his traveling by airplane—he called it the first “prop-hop” campaign—and his great skill as a storyteller blended smoothly with Truman’s folksy manner. The ticket picked up vocal support from Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Will Alexander, Aubrey Williams, and other New Deal stalwarts—and quiet but solid backing from Walter White of the ostensibly nonpartisan NAACP (providing the last straw of estrangement between him and W. E. B. Du Bois, a Henry Wallace backer).
Still, the Eastern establishment looked condescendingly upon the Democratic heartlanders as a couple of backcountry rubes, and the pollsters and the press said their quest was doomed. Professional gamblers offered odds of 15 and 30 to 1 against them. In Hollywood, Truman got a boost from such stars as Frank Sinatra (another former Southern Conference backer) and Ronald Reagan, but a much larger group of celebrities stood up with the Republicans. Most of the big newspapers in the East and Midwest and West endorsed Dewey. The Washington Post was for Truman, but said in a front-page story on Election Day that Dewey was “a sure winner,” and editorialized that “it would be a miracle” if the President pulled out a victory. In the South, Truman got the nod of leading papers in Louisville, Atlanta, Nashville, Chattanooga, Raleigh, Little Rock, St. Petersburg, Miami, and a few other places, but they weren’t exactly wild about Harry—and many others were downright hostile.
In his own mind and heart, Truman was completely convinced that he would win, or so he led everyone to believe. He stuck to his guns: Attack the Republicans and Congress, ignore the other candidates, campaign close to the people, defend your own liberal record and liberal program, and leave the South to take care of itself (which, incidentally, he believed to the end that it would do in his favor). And, in the firm conviction that the urban black vote in the North would provide the decisive margin in several key states, Truman shrewdly played that trump card late in the game. William Hastie came up from the Virgin Islands to help, putting together a strategy that effectively halted Wallace’s efforts to lure away black votes. John Preston Davis, the veteran founder of the United Negro Congress and formerly an activist in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (for both of which he was accused of being a Communist), was hired by the Democratic National Committee as an assistant director of publicity for the Truman-Barkley campaign, and his work in the Northern cities was especially beneficial. J. Edgar Hoover was prosecuting men with tidier credentials than Davis’s, but the Democrats took a much more pragmatic and unbiased reading of his loyalty, and they didn’t hesitate to recruit him when they needed his help.
Finally, in the last week of the campaign, Truman went to Boston to appeal for the Catholic vote, to Lower Manhattan to seek Jewish and ethnic-American backing, and to Harlem, on the first anniversary of his civil rights committee’s report, telling a throng of 65,000 that he would work for the full realization of equality and justice in America “with every ounce of strength and determination that I have.”
On Election Day—Tuesday, November 2, 1948—the President was at home in Missouri. With his wife and daughter, he went early in the morning to the polling place to cast his vote. Late that afternoon he sneaked out of the house, rode to a little resort town not far from Independence, and checked into the Elms Hotel, where he got a steam bath and a rubdown, had himself a sandwich and a glass of buttermilk, listened to the radio until about nine o’clock, and then turned off the light and went to sleep. He woke up around midnight, just long enough to get a radio update. NBC commentator H. V. Kaltenborn was saying that even though the President was ahead by more than a million votes, he was still “undoubtedly beaten.”
Harry Truman was sleeping peacefully at 4:00 a.m. when one of the Secret Service agents protecting him at the Excelsior Springs, Missouri, hotel came into the room to tell him his lead had climbed to two million. The radio networks were still expecting a late surge of rural votes in the Midwest to pull Dewey to victory, but Truman knew better. “We’ve got ’em beat,” he said, and about an hour later, he was headed for Kansas City.
The outcome was still in doubt for three more hours, but the President kept a remarkably serene
composure. He listened with no show of emotion as the radio reported at eight-thirty that Ohio had slipped into his column by just seven thousand votes—and that appeared to give him enough for a victory in the all-important electoral count. An hour later, California and Illinois also went Democratic, erasing any remaining doubt about the outcome. Forty-five minutes after that, Dewey conceded defeat. The miracle had happened. Just about everybody had been wrong—except Harry Truman.
In the end, he beat Dewey by 24 million to 22 million in popular votes, 303 to 189 in electoral votes, and 28 to 16 in states. Henry Wallace got about 1.1 million popular votes (700,000 of them in New York and California, and only 30,000 in the South) but he carried no states. Strom Thurmond’s total was also about 1.1 million (fewer than 5,000 of them outside the Old Confederacy and Kentucky); he carried Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and his native South Carolina, finishing with 39 electoral votes.
The results were much closer than they seemed. A switch of fewer than fifty thousand votes in Ohio, Illinois, and California could have given Dewey a slim victory in the electoral count; had he won any two of those three, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives for a final decision. (But which House? The old one, with a Republican majority of fifty-eight seats, or the newly elected “Truman coattail” assembly, with its Democratic majority of ninety-two seats? Either way, it would have been a messy can of worms.)
The Senate also turned over, going from a Republican advantage of six seats to a Democratic margin of twelve. Truman got close to seventy percent of the black vote, and in such key non-Southern cities as Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, his winning margin among African-Americans was greater than the total of his plurality statewide. Without those crucial ballots, he could have ended up winning the popular vote but losing the election.
In all the celebrating and second-guessing that went on in the wake of Truman’s stunning upset, the losers quickly faded from public view. On his return to Washington, the President found close to a million people lining the streets to welcome him, foul- and fair-weather friends alike. He was amused by an invitation from the Post to attend a “Crow Banquet,” at which he would be served turkey while all the pollsters and press wore sackcloth and choked down the symbolic bird of humility. Truman replied magnanimously that he wouldn’t enjoy watching such a spectacle—but he would like to see all Americans “get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”
For all his graceful good humor, however, the President did allow himself privately to gloat a bit over his conquest of the Republicans, the liberal Northern Democrats who had deserted him—and most of all, the Dixiecrats. Close analysis of the numbers gave him good reason to be pleased with his showing in the South. When he was nominated, Truman had the public backing of not one single sitting member of the U.S. Senate from the eleven Southern states, and very few Southerners in the House of Representatives; furthermore, no incumbent Southern governor was firmly in his camp at that time. His most vocal support in the region came from the least powerful of its constituent groups—blacks and white liberals. His press endorsements, though numerous, tended to be soft and tentative.
And yet he polled more than 2.5 million votes in ten Southern states, and that was more than all the other candidates combined could count in eleven. Not only did he beat Dewey by two to one in the South, he beat Thurmond by more than that. If you were to credit blacks in the region with 750,000 registered voters, and speculate that eighty percent of them voted, and ninety percent of those voted for Truman—generous estimates all— that would account for nearly twenty percent of the President’s total in the South. But even if you set that number aside and counted just his white votes, he still won easily. The President spotted Strom Thurmond an uncontested 171,000 votes in Alabama and yet routed the South Carolinian in Dixie, white on white, by 2 million votes to 1.1 million. And, if more than the paltry twenty-two percent of adult Southerners had been able to vote, no doubt the President’s margin would have been even greater.
The Dixiecrat leaders had shouted to the white people of the South and the nation that Truman had sold them out, that he was imposing communistic programs of racial amalgamation that would reduce the South to a police state and its white people to a mongrelized breed of second-class citizens. And those same Southern whites, by a margin of almost two to one, rejected Thurmond’s mean-spirited attack and returned their verdict in favor of Harry Truman. Even the Southern black minority, no more than fifteen percent of whom were registered to vote, garnered almost half as many ballots for the President as their white denigrators could amass for Thurmond.
Virtually all of the South’s political leaders—both those who eagerly joined the Dixiecrat movement and those who stayed in the Democratic Party but refused to support the President—were shown by their pronouncements and their actions to be far behind their people rather than in front of them. It was not the multiplicity of Southern common folks who failed; rather it was their leaders, utterly and completely. They were the ones who defied Truman with so much vehemence, and stirred such a spirit of rebellion in the general population, and gave people outside the South evidence to reinforce their uninformed and stereotypical views about Southerners in general.
While most of the attention the South received was focused on the Truman Democrats and the Thurmond Dixiecrats, the election also gave a few old names and new faces a chance to shine on the political stage, and they added further to the tiny wave of Southern progressivism that had surfaced earlier with Ellis Arnall and Jim Folsom.
In Louisiana, Huey Long’s son Russell and his brother Earl were both elected in 1948, Russell to the U.S. Senate and Earl to the governor’s office. Earl Long had been lieutenant governor and acting governor before. When he won the top office in his own right, he was intent on continuing the Long legacy—but in his own zanily original style. He threw an inauguration party in the Louisiana State University football stadium, serving hot dogs and soft drinks and buttermilk to the masses, white and black. “Meet each other,” he instructed the assembled throng. “Shake hands. Exchange ideas. Make up your minds that we are going forward … and work together unselfishly. … I hope to see this state where every man is a king and every lady a queen but no one wearing a crown.” Long wasn’t enamored of the Dixiecrats, and, eccentric though he was, he demonstrated early and often his untraditional approach to Southern politics.
In Texas, Truman’s old friend, former Vice President John Nance Garner, joined with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and incoming Senator Lyndon B. Johnson to lasso the governor, Beauford Jester, and get him out of the Dixiecrat corral. Together they led Texans to give Truman a half-million-vote margin over Dewey, and hold Thurmond to just nine percent of the vote. The aggressively ambitious Johnson, moving up from the House to take Pappy O’Daniel’s seat, had outlasted former Governor Coke Stevenson by just eighty-seven votes in a sensational primary punctuated by a crossfire of charges covering just about every imaginable impropriety. One pivotal box of “late returns” gave Johnson 202 votes—all executed in alphabetical order by the same pen and the same penman. It was Texas politics at its theatrical best. Johnson was a conservative New Deal Democrat but a political animal to the marrow of his bones. When the times changed, he would change with them.
Arkansas elected a new governor in 1948 to replace the conservative Ben Laney, and he was a breath of fresh air. Sid McMath had come out of the war fired with ambition to be a populist reformer. He first joined a slate of ex-GIs in ousting a corrupt political machine that ran the city of Hot Springs. Then, at the age of thirty-six, he was elected to a two-year term as governor. McMath was critical of the Truman civil rights program at first, but he was also hostile to the Dixiecrats. In the years to come he would prove to be one of Truman’s closest allies in the South.
Florida’s new governor, Fuller Warren, was at least as moderate as Millard Caldwell, the man he succeeded (neither was a Dixiecrat), and N
orth Carolina replaced R. Gregg Cherry with W. Kerr Scott, a man of some liberal inclinations. Earle Clements was Kentucky’s most progressive governor in recent memory. In Tennessee, the aging E. H. “Boss” Crump, who supported Thurmond, suffered deeper humiliation when the state’s voters spurned his candidates and chose Gordon Browning for governor and former Congressman Estes Kefauver for the Senate. (Browning edged out a Crump candidate in the primary and breezed to victory in November against his Republican opponent, country music star Roy Acuff.) When Crump branded Kefauver a “Communist sympathizer” and a “pet coon” of the reds, the candidate took to wearing a fur cap “made from a genuine Tennessee coon” on his campaign trips around the state, and the trademark hat boosted him to public attention and to victory.
Not all the winners were moderates or forward-looking reformers. Mississippi voters gave Bilboesque Senator James O. Eastland a resounding vote of confidence; Arkansans did the same for reactionary Senator John L. McClellan, and the voters of Georgia easily reelected mossback Senator Richard Russell.
What’s more, Georgians also gave a clear majority to their governor-in-waiting, Herman Talmadge, for the last two years of the term his late father had won in 1946. “Hummon” bored in so hard on the white supremacy issue that his opponent, incumbent M. E. Thompson, took up the same cry—causing the crafty Talmadge to tag him “M. E. Too.” Even Ralph McGill took a “neutral” stance in the race, much to the consternation of former Governor Ellis Arnall, who was backing Thompson. McGill, sounding downright hopeful, expressed the belief that Talmadge would forestall federal imposition of forced social changes from the top down by initiating voluntary reforms from the bottom up. He did nothing so progressive as that, reverting instead to the racial posture that had always worked for his father. In 1950, with Arnall sitting inexplicably on the sidelines, Talmadge subdued Thompson again in a close race for a full four-year term.