Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul

by A. J. Baime

  12

  “For Better or Worse, the 1948 Fight Has Started”

  ON THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 1948, a few minutes before 10 p.m., Washington’s Union Station swelled with crowds who came to catch a glimpse of President Truman and his entourage. Truman was set for a cross-country trip the old-fashioned way: aboard a sixteen-car train, on the back of which was the Ferdinand Magellan, the 285,000-pound bulletproof luxury railcar that had been built for FDR a few years earlier. The Ferdinand Magellan would be home to the Truman family—Harry, Bess, and Margaret—for the next two weeks.

  Truman was headed off on a speaking tour. The impetus for the trip was a memorandum written by the Democratic National Committee’s publicist Jack Redding some months earlier, which outlined the idea of a national tour that would bring Truman into communities where Americans could experience the magic of the presidency and Truman’s own personal charisma. It would be a trial run for the national campaign, which was set to kick off on Labor Day weekend. “If people see him in person,” Redding’s memo read, “they’ll vote for him. His personality, his smile, his manner of approach, his sincerity all come through perfectly. People will trust him. Trusting him, they’ll vote for him.”

  Soon after this memo was written, Truman received an invitation to deliver a commencement speech at the University of California at Berkeley. Campaign staff jumped on it as the perfect opportunity. The speech would allow the president to label the journey west “nonpolitical,” meaning it could be paid for out of the president’s discretionary travel fund. Truman was such an underdog, the Democratic National Committee was broke. Campaign donors had abandoned him. Why fund a lost cause? There was nothing nonpolitical about the president’s tour, however. “The pretense that this is a ‘non-political trip’ disappeared almost as soon as the wheels of his 16-car special train started turning,” one columnist aboard the train commented.

  A dining car became a bullpen office space for the working staff, while another was transformed into a press car, with rows of desks lining either side and facing out the windows. The Army Signal Corps built a state-of-the-art communications setup aboard another train car, with radio and cryptographic equipment, so the president could be in contact with the White House at all times. At stops, telephone wires could be hooked into the communications room to receive calls, and Truman had his own telephone in the Ferdinand Magellan.

  Teams of reporters boarded the train, carrying suitcases and typewriters and fingering smoldering cigarettes. The Democratic National Committee furnished two cases of liquor for the traveling press corps, to butter them up—one of scotch, one of bourbon. On the first night of the trip, columnist Richard Strout thumped out his lead while sitting in the press car: “Rolling across the United States with the biggest collection of news, radio, and camera­men in history, the Truman special train is a traveling question mark . . . For better or worse, the 1948 fight has started.”

  Truman was experimenting with impromptu speeches, a new strategy he had first tried out two months earlier in a White House talk to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He had delivered “one of those deadly dull speeches” for which he had become known, recalled one person there that night, but after, “he began an entirely different, extemporaneous and off-the-record speech of his own, in his own vocabulary, out of his own humor and his own heart.” David Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, heard the president speak that night. He wrote in his diary, “Why wasn’t that on the record? That is what the whole country should hear.”

  Which is exactly what Truman aimed to do: Let the whole country hear him talk, off the cuff. Extemporaneous speeches were dangerous, however. Any gaffe would hit the newspapers as far off as London and Moscow, and embarrass the president to no end. In fact, that is exactly what the journalists on Truman’s California trip expected would happen. “A large number of reporters went along,” remembered Oscar Chapman, a political adviser and speechwriter on the train. “They were expecting to see a complete flop and they wanted to write about it.”

  Truman would not disappoint them.

  * * *

  On June 5 in Omaha, Truman marched out onto a speaker’s platform at the Ak-Sar-Ben Coliseum, and looked out on a vast sea of empty seats. A scheduling error resulted in a near empty arena. (The error was made by Eddie McKim, one of Truman’s poker buddies, an insurance man who lived in Omaha.) Life magazine published photos of the president speaking at a huge venue with almost no one in attendance. The Chicago Daily Tribune commented that “Truman in Omaha . . . was as flat as a platter of beer.” The event was a debacle. “It was almost a death knell for the campaign,” noted Truman appointments secretary Matthew Connelly, who was traveling with the president.

  Two days later, in Carey, Idaho, Truman dedicated a new airport in honor of a fallen World War II soldier—or so he thought. “I am honored,” he told a sprawling crowd of locals, “to dedicate this airport and present this wreath to the parents of the brave boy who died fighting for his country.” Truman heard a loud gasp. A woman spoke up: “Mr. President, it wasn’t my son, it was my daughter.”

  Truman composed himself, then said, “Well, I am even more honored to dedicate this airport to a young woman who bravely gave her life for our country.”

  It turned out, this young girl was no soldier; she had been joyriding in an airplane with her boyfriend and had crashed into a mountainside. “It wasn’t anything to laugh at,” recalled Truman aide Robert Dennison, who was present. “But it was awfully funny just the same.”

  At one point, Truman endorsed a Republican congressional candidate by mistake. On another occasion, during one of his extemporaneous speeches, he began talking about his meetings with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. “I like old Joe,” Truman said. Remembered Clark Clifford: “The uproar caused by the remark was immediate, sustained, and understandable.” From most Americans’ point of view, Stalin was the major source of global war anxiety. This was a man who, during the 1930s political “purges” in the Soviet Union, had overseen the disappearance and murder of millions of his own countrymen.

  After Truman’s gaffe, Clifford approached the president with the press secretary Charlie Ross. “Mr. President,” Ross said, “we just have to tell you, frankly, that your ‘I like Old Joe’ remark is not going over well. We are going to get hammered for it, we know you understand, and we know you will not want to repeat that phrase.”

  Truman paused reflectively. “Well, I guess I goofed,” he said.

  More trouble awaited in Berkeley. When Truman arrived, he was given a fanfare welcome and a motorcade through crowded city streets. His car was followed by a pair of army Jeeps carrying newsreel cameramen. The University of California president was a die-hard Republican, and when he introduced Truman at the commencement event, he punctuated his address with jokes about the president’s incompetency. “I actually cringed,” recalled speechwriter Charlie Murphy.

  At another stop, Truman gave a speech that was meant for a different town, confusing listeners. “At this point,” remembered speechwriter Murphy, “he decided that his staff work was not what it should be, and he called the staff in to meet with him around the table in the dining room on the train. He called the meeting, I’m sure, for the purpose of dressing the staff down.” But when it came time, the president could see how hard everyone was working, and how exhausted they were. “He couldn’t quite manage to scold us.”

  When the train reached Los Angeles, Truman came face-to-face in a hotel room with James Roosevelt II, the eldest son of FDR, who had been actively campaigning to have General Dwight Eisenhower take Truman’s place on the 1948 Democratic ticket. Eisenhower had recently retired from the army and had taken a position as president of Columbia University in New York; he had declined to run for president of the United States, but politicos like James Roosevelt were still hounding him to save the Democratic Party from Harry Truman.

  Truman poked his finger into Roosevel
t’s chest and said, “If your father knew what you were doing to me, he would turn over in his grave. But get this straight: Whether you like it or not, I’m going to be the next President of the United States. That will be all. Good day.”

  * * *

  All along this two-week, 9,505-mile, seventy-three-speech trip, the pressmen aboard the train took potshots. “Not even the most charitable interpretation could describe the President’s performance at Carey, Idaho, as other than monumental ineptitude,” the Washington Post said of Truman’s airport-dedication error. Columnist Henry McLemore, in the Washington Evening Star: “Governors are running like deer. State chairmen are deserting . . . Many are using starting blocks, so anxious are they to quit what they consider a lost cause.”

  Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Eightieth Congress completed its session and broke for recess after overriding three Truman vetoes in a single week—not one but three humiliations for the president. Among these overrides was a tax cut—the Revenue Act of 1948—a bill Truman had called “the wrong tax cut at the wrong time.” Truman argued that the measure was going to fan the flames of inflation. The Republican-controlled Congress pushed the legislation through, expecting to reap the rewards for cutting taxes come Election Day. Republican senator Eugene Millikin later commented that the tax cut “was deliberately contrived to attract votes.”

  The more astute staffers and reporters aboard Truman’s train noticed that something was happening on this trip, apart from verbal missteps and congressional vetoes. “It wasn’t until Butte, Montana, that he began to hit his stride,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon, who was traveling with the president. Truman began to draw larger crowds, and with his folksy style he connected with his audiences. “Truman began to just talk,” recalled Nixon. “He began to talk, instead of orating. He used his Missouri dialect. He became natural in every way. His talks began to be highly effective and to go over.”

  Charlie Murphy recalled, “A typical reaction that you would hear from among people in the crowd was, ‘Why, he’s a nice man, I like him. He’s not at all like what they say about him in the papers.’ And you would hear this, time after time.”

  As for a campaign strategy, the Truman administration took an unexpected approach. Truman’s speeches took aim at the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress. In one city after another, this would be his beating drum. In Los Angeles, he blasted Congress for “inactivity” and for passage of “a rich man’s tax law.” In Olympia, he told another crowd, “If you want to continue the policies of the 80th Congress, that will be your funeral.” Members of the press on tour with Truman were surprised by the president’s aggression. “He is making his attack much more directly and militantly than had been expected,” wrote columnist Richard Strout from aboard the Truman train. The president’s Congress-bashing began to get under the skin of Republicans back in Washington. At one point Robert Taft made a speech denouncing Truman’s tactics.

  “The President is blackguarding the Congress at every whistle stop in the country,” Taft barked.

  The Democrats saw an opportunity. The national committee sent out a form telegram to mayors and the chambers of commerce of thirty-five cities, to conduct an informal poll: “Please wire the Democratic National Committee whether you agree with Senator Taft’s description of your city as a quote whistle stop unquote.”

  The responses flooded in: Local city leaders—in Los Angeles; Seattle; Idaho Falls; and Laramie, Wyoming; among other places—were indeed offended by Taft’s reference to their towns as whistle-stops, a term denoting places so insignificant, trains stopped at them only when signaled.

  The pique Taft’s comment aroused out west worked to the president’s advantage. Truman would use the term whistle-stop against his opponents for the next five months—right up to Election Day, November 2, 1948—as he campaigned throughout America’s heartland.

  Part III

  The Conventions

  A stranger convention there never was . . . I’ve been seeing them now for close to a half-century but I’ve never seen one quite like this.

  —​Lowell Mellett, political writer, 1948

  13

  “We Have a Dreamboat of a Ticket”

  ON JUNE 20, THOMAS DEWEY left New York by train for Philadelphia en route to the Republican National Convention, where the 1948 nominee would be crowned. In anticipation of a victorious Republican year, the City of Brotherly Love came alive with the GOP’s elite and hangers-on. Dewey, his family, Herbert Brownell, and the rest of the team checked into twenty-­five rooms on the eighth floor of the Bellevue-Stratford, which towered over the corner of South Broad and Walnut Streets downtown. Attendance was expected to be so high, the Republican National Committee had run out of hotel rooms. The committee rented out the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at the University of Pennsylvania to accommodate Republican delegates, charging six dollars per person per night.

  By the time Dewey arrived at campaign headquarters in the Bellevue-­Stratford’s ballroom, the place was lavishly dressed in red, white, and blue bunting and decorated with Republican elephants. The ballroom was jammed shoulder-to-shoulder with Republicans gorging on free liquor. The campaign had ordered fifty thousand I’M ON THE DEWEY TEAM buttons, ten thousand Dewey cigarette holders, five thousand Dewey balloons, one hundred DEWEY IN ’48 sashes, three hundred Dewey neckties, and twenty-­five thousand handheld fans so attendees could keep themselves cool. The president of Life Savers candy had donated five thousand cartons of his product, while Pepsi executives kept the bar stocked with soda. A “Women’s Committee” had done the heavy lifting in presenting the event. “The general idea of the Committee,” noted a Dewey team memorandum, “is to make the Dewey headquarters the place in Philadelphia for visitors, and women particularly.”

  On the eve of the convention, news outlets clashed with conflicting predictions.

  Pollster George Gallup had Dewey in front with 33 percent, with Stassen in second at 26 percent.

  The Chicago Daily Tribune claimed that the contest would be between Taft and Dewey.

  The New York Times reported that Stassen and Taft were joining forces in a “Stop Dewey” blitz.

  Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was seen making the rounds, telling friends he had no interest in the nomination, all the while keeping a copy of an acceptance speech in his pocket, just in case. Speaker of the House Joe Martin of Massachusetts kept a “Martin for President” movement simmering while assuring friends he had no interest. Harold Stassen’s team had set up headquarters in a different ballroom in the same hotel as Dewey’s, the Bellevue-Stratford. Guests sipped on free coffee and sliced chunks off huge wheels of orange cheddar. “Cheese at Stassen’s very good,” commented a New Yorker correspondent.

  Robert Taft’s campaign set up headquarters in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel (a landmark that had gotten some publicity a year earlier for refusing to house the Brooklyn Dodgers, because the team had a rookie black player—Jackie Robinson). Taft showed up wearing a TAFT FOR PRESIDENT campaign button that was from his father’s convention in 1908, the year William Howard Taft was elected. The younger Taft sat on a pink couch while a runt elephant named Little Eva—a Republican mascot—made its way through the crowd wearing a blanket over its back that read WIN WITH TAFT. When Little Eva approached Taft, a newsreel man aimed his camera at the senator. “Shake his trunk,” he said. Taft picked up the elephant’s dripping snout and gave it a shake.

  “Shake it again,” said the cameraman. “It’s your baby.”

  As the front-runner, Dewey drew the biggest crowds. He pumped handshakes and smiled so hard, one present recalled, it looked like his mustache might fall off. Meanwhile the one politician who made the biggest splash in Philadelphia was not even present. “The great silent star of the political melodrama being unfolded here at Convention Hall is not a Republican but a Democrat,” recorded the columnist Gladstone Williams. “He is Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. Mr. Truman is the insp
iration of joy and jubilations of the thousands of Republican delegates.”

  On June 21, at the Philadelphia Convention Center, the first speakers took the stage. As was the tradition at party conventions, early on in the process the following words were spoken into the microphone: “We are assembled in this great city to nominate the next President of the United States.” Congressman Martin of Massachusetts remembered the moment: “What was unique about Philadelphia in 1948 was that everyone from the permanent chairman to the man who fed hay to an elephant [mascot] we had installed in the basement believed this with all his heart when he heard it.”

  The political convention was a century-old institution, but this event was unlike any convention ever held before. In front of the stage, scaffolding had been set up to hold television cameras. The major national radio networks were on hand with their new TV equipment—ABC, NBC, and CBS. Five cameras beamed images of the proceedings into homes all over the East Coast (and only the East Coast, as that was as far as the broadcast could reach). Speakers onstage withered under the heat of 10,000-watt bulbs illuminating their faces for the cameras. It being summer, the hall felt like an oven.

  “In a few minutes I began to wilt and go blind,” recorded the political reporter H. L. Mencken, “so the rest of my observations had to be made from a distance and through a brown beer bottle.” Speaker of the House Joe Martin had a different take: For the first time, “we were conducting our affairs in the living room of the U.S.A.”

  The first night’s proceedings culminated in a fighting speech by Clare Boothe Luce—the playwright and former congresswoman from Connecticut. Harry Truman, she famously observed, was a “gone goose.”