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

by A. J. Baime

  By calling the conservative-leaning Congress back into session and demanding that Congress enact legislation that reflected Dewey’s own platform, Truman could drive a stake right through the Republican Party. If the conservative Eightieth Congress failed to enact Dewey’s liberal legislation, Dewey would be embarrassed by his own party and an identity crisis within the Republican Party would be exposed. If Congress did pass the kinds of legislation the Dewey-Warren plank called for, the president would get the credit for it.

  The idea was brilliant but controversial. Not since 1856 had a president called Congress back into an emergency session from recess during an election year.

  Truman was scheduled to travel to Philadelphia on the convention’s final night, July 14, to accept the nomination. Of the six vice presidents who had ascended to the Oval Office following the death of a president, only two had been renominated by their party to run for another four years—Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt. The day before Truman left for Philadelphia, he arrived at his morning staff meeting full of anger and spewing epithets.

  “He said he had made some outline of what he plans to say [at the convention] and added that he was going up there—to the convention—and if he can keep the swear words out of it, tell them just what he thinks,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers wrote in his diary. Truman broached the idea of calling a special session of Congress. “He said he was going to wind up by calling Congress back for a special session on July 19,” recorded Ayers. “Putting in the swear words he expressed his attitude about calling them back, something like this: ‘Now, you s–– of a b––, come on and do your g–– d––t.’”

  When this staff meeting broke up, Truman told his team to get ready. Recalled Ayers: “As . . . we started to leave, the President commented we were going to have more fun in the next six months than we ever had in our lives.”

  * * *

  Truman and his entourage arrived at Washington’s Union Station at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 14, for the trip to Philadelphia. His wife and daughter had returned to the capital that morning, and they were by his side at the station. TV cameras followed Truman as he boarded the train. He wore a crisp cream-colored linen suit, with a dark tie and pocket square. When the train arrived in Philadelphia, rain was pounding the city.

  A motorcade with police escort delivered Truman to the back door of Philadelphia Convention Hall, so the crowds would not see him. The convention speeches and resolutions were hours behind schedule, and the hall itself had no air-conditioning. The backstage room was so crowded “you couldn’t have gotten a toothpick in that room, it was so jammed with people,” recalled one of Truman’s aides, General Louis H. Renfrow, who was present. Truman headed to a balcony outside where he could breathe. Soon the VP candidate Alben Barkley appeared and the two sat talking about old times under an awning to keep dry. As Barkley later recalled, they talked about “many things: politics, trivia, how to bring up daughters.”

  In the convention hall, alcohol and stifling heat had left the crowd in a daze. An electrical storm outside knocked out a fuse, causing further delay. “It seemed like almost everything was going wrong,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon, who was covering the convention for the United Press.

  The worst was yet to come.

  During the final session of resolutions leading up to Truman’s acceptance speech, protesters took control of the night. The Democrats had adopted a plank heavy on civil rights, supporting the right to equal opportunity in employment, equal treatment of all races in the military, and “security of person” (the lawful right not to be lynched). Southern Democrats were ready to make their protest against Truman’s civil rights policies in front of television cameras. First, a delegate from Georgia named Charles J. Bloch came onstage and demanded to be heard.

  “The south is no longer going to be the whipping boy of the Democratic party,” Bloch yelled with a hoarse southern accent. “And you know that without the south you cannot elect a President of the United States.” He called for the nomination of a new candidate to represent the Democratic Party, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, adding, “You shall not crucify the south on the cross of civil rights.”

  A crowd of southern leaders paraded in front of the microphone. One yelled: “Mississippi has gone home!” Another voice, delegate Byrd Sims of Florida, came through: “He can’t win. We must have new leadership.” Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina stepped onto the stage. “Our fight is the fight of every American who does not want to be subjected to federal police control!” he yelled. Parts of the crowd booed Thurmond, who responded, “It’s medicine you don’t want to hear.”

  A large group of delegates from Mississippi and Alabama gathered in the aisle and walked out, waving Confederate flags on their way. The convention band started up with an impromptu version of “Dixie.” Truman supporters blocked the aisles, forcing the southern protesters to push their way through. Grown men in suits were now jostling and shoving as if the arena floor was a school yard. The scene was descending into chaos. One reporter cataloged the moment: “A live donkey was led in and seemed properly astounded at the goings on. An Indian in full dress did a war dance in front of the speaker’s rostrum . . . Firecrackers crackled, cowbells were banged, and over and over, and faster and faster, the band played ‘Dixie.’”

  The Washington Post’s Marquis Childs put the moment in perspective: “We may well be watching . . . the liquidation of one of the major parties.”

  Onstage, a convention organizer pounded a gavel before the microphone, attempting to regain control. By the time Governor Phil Donnelly of Missouri took the stage to introduce Truman, it was nearly 2 a.m.

  * * *

  The president marched up to the speaker’s podium like a fighter entering a ring. The crowds stood for him and he smiled, picking up a glass of water off the podium and taking a sip. Behind him, Alben Barkley stood clapping his hands, his face grimly focused on the president. A brass band belted out an intro, and Truman said, “Thank you, thank you very much,” just loud enough to be heard over the trombones.

  He did not look like a president with a 36 percent approval rating. He looked like a man who knew in his heart he was going to win. But scanning the crowd, he saw a picture of defeat. “The delegates that evening were a tired, dispirited, soggy mass of beaten humanity,” recalled David C. Bell, a Truman special assistant who was there that night. Truman’s wife and daughter were in the crowd, on their feet but not clapping their hands. A scaffolding stood in front of the stage holding the TV cameras, but it was so late that the TV broadcasters had called it a night. Only the nationwide radio hookup was working. Truman struggled for a moment to adjust the phalanx of microphones in front of him. Then he began, his voice full of Missouri flavor.

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the honor which you’ve just conferred upon me,” he said. “I shall continue to try to deserve it.” He paused for applause. “I accept the nomination.” (More applause.) “And I want to thank this convention for its unanimous nomination of my good friend and colleague, Senator Barkley of Kentucky. He’s a great man and a great public servant.”

  For months, rage had boiled in the president’s gut. Now, all that anger came out as if a floodgate had opened. With a single sentence, Truman transformed the night.

  “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!”

  The crowd came alive instantly.

  “We will do that because they are wrong and we are right,” Truman said, “and I’m going to prove it to you in just a few minutes!”

  In his memoirs, Truman recalled speaking this line. “I meant just that, and I said it as if I meant it. There could be no mistake. I intended to win.”

  Truman unleashed his fighting speech. He had tried to get the Eightieth Congress on board to enact his policies addressing high prices and the housing crisis, he said, but Congress had failed to pass these laws, and the Amer
ican people were suffering. He denounced the Republican-controlled legislature as the “worst Congress in history.” He called on farmers to vote for Democrats. Farmers—who traditionally voted Republican—had never been as well off as they were in 1948, following sixteen years of Democratic leadership, Truman said.

  “Never in the world were the farmers of any republic or any kingdom or any country as prosperous as they are in the United States,” he said. “And if they don’t do their duty by the Democratic Party they are the most ungrateful people in the world!”

  He called on the nation’s workers, who were also seeing wages higher than they’d ever been before. “And I’ll say to labor just what I said to the farmers. They are the most ungrateful people in the world if they pass the Democratic Party by this year!”

  The crowds were on their feet. Tired eyes widened. “It was one of the most electrifying things that I had ever been present at,” recalled Truman adviser Max Lowenthal. “He just had them on the ropes.” Recalled Truman’s Missouri friend Tom Evans: “I never in all my life got such a tremendous buildup in such a short time.”

  Truman took on the Southern Democrats who had just bolted the party in protest of his civil rights support.

  “Everybody knows that I recommended to the Congress the civil rights program,” Truman railed. “I did that because I believed it to be my duty under the Constitution. Some of the members of my own party disagree with me violently on this matter. But they stand up and do it openly! People can tell where they stand. But the Republicans all professed to be for these measures [as clearly stated in their platform]. But Congress failed to act.”

  Truman’s speech reached its climax. “My duty as president requires that I use every means within my power to get the laws that people need on matters of such importance and urgency. I am therefore calling this Congress back into session on the 26th of July!”

  The roar of approval was so loud it was a full thirty seconds before Truman could get another word in. “On the 26th day in July, which out in Missouri we call Turnip Day, I’m going to call that Congress back and I’m gonna ask ’em to pass laws halting rising prices, and to meet the housing crisis, which they say they are for in their platform. At the same time I shall ask them to act upon other vitally needed measures such as aid to education, which they say they are for. A national health program. Civil rights legislation, which they say they are for. And an increase in minimum wage—which I doubt very much they are for . . .”

  Truman ended with a plea. “Now my friends, with the help of God and the wholehearted push which you can put behind this campaign, we can save this country from a continuation of the 80th Congress, and from misrule from now on. I must have your help. You must get in and push, and win this election.”

  The clamor was deafening. “Everybody jumped up. It was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen,” remembered Frank Kelly, a journalist who was soon to join the Truman campaign staff. “Everybody was like zombies and all of a sudden they were alive. They were yelling. Truman amazed us all that night.”

  The convention’s national committeewoman from Pennsylvania, Emma Guffey Miller, seized the moment. Convention workers helped her wheel onto the stage a five-foot replica of the Liberty Bell made out of eight thousand flowers, donated by the Allied Florists union of Greater Philadelphia. The floral Liberty Bell was a surprise to all. At Ms. Miller’s signal, men with broomsticks started poking inside the bell, and from within it, forty-eight pigeons—one for every state—flew frantically into the hall.

  Panicked pigeons swirled around the stage. Some flew toward the ceiling, where the metal blades of four thirty-six-inch fans whirled at high speed. Former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was on the stage, swatting at birds flapping desperately around his bald head. The national radio audience heard him yelling, “Get those goddamned pigeons out of here.”

  “I remember vividly all over the nationwide radio . . . you could hear the Speaker say, ‘Shoo, shoo, shoo,’” recalled Neale Roach, the convention’s director. Roach managed to flip the switch to the metal fans near the ceiling, turning them off. “All I could visualize was a bunch of blood and feathers being sprayed all over everybody.”

  By the time Truman’s train was headed back to Washington, one of the most memorable national conventions of all time was over, and the empty hall in Philadelphia was littered with programs, newspaper balls, and a few feathers. As the train clattered over the tracks, news of Truman’s “Turnip Day” emergency congressional session spread nationwide. Republican Speaker of the House Joe Martin would remember being woken up at three o’clock that morning, at his sister’s house in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. His sister had picked up a ringing phone to find a reporter in Philadelphia yelling at her, wanting to talk to Speaker Martin.

  “What do you want him for at this hour?” she inquired.

  The reporter said, “Haven’t you heard about the President?”

  * * *

  “Arrived in Washington at the White House at 5:30 a.m., my usual getting up time,” Truman wrote in his diary the morning after the convention. By nine fifteen, he was in his upstairs study, surrounded by those familiar groaning White House walls. His door creaked open and the White House head butler Alonzo Fields peered in. Fields was surprised to see the president awake.

  “Good morning, Fields,” Truman said.

  “Good morning, Mr. President. We did not hear from you and I was nosing around to see if you were up.”

  “Yes,” Truman said. His wife and daughter were still asleep. “You send me a tray up here when it is ready.”

  “Sir,” said Fields, “you had a rough night.”

  “Yes, I did,” said Truman. “But, Fields, I am going to win this thing if there is a God in heaven.”

  “Yes sir,” said Fields. “With God’s help, you will win.”

  15

  “What Is at Stake Here Is the Very Survival of Western Civilization”

  AT 11:30 A.M. ON JULY 15—just six hours after Truman’s return to the White House from Philadelphia—Secretary of Defense Forrestal and Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall arrived at the Oval Office for a scheduled appointment with the president. Forrestal had requested the meeting to discuss the bomb. It was time to address the vexing questions surrounding history’s most dangerous invention.

  “The president was chipper and in very good form,” Forrestal wrote in his diary, “and obviously pleased with the results of his speech at the Convention last night.”

  All over the country, Americans were reading in their newspapers about the most bizarre political convention that anyone could recall. Truman was not angry at the southern revolt, he told the secretary of defense: “I would have done the same thing myself if I were in their place and came from their states.”

  Forrestal brought with him a nervous energy that tended to put people on edge. He had a flattened nose, having taken a punch to the face as a young boxer in the military. He had earned a fortune on Wall Street before taking a job as undersecretary of the Navy under FDR in 1940, and although he did not need to work, he threw himself into his job so completely, he had become incapable of relaxing. On this morning, in discussing the bomb, he raised what he called the “serious question as to the wisdom of relying upon an agency other than the user of such a weapon, to assure the integrity and usability of such a weapon.” In other words, he was asking the president to hand custody of the bomb over to the Defense Department.

  Truman did not like what he was hearing. No one but the nation’s chief executive should be able to make the decision to use an atomic weapon, he argued. He did not want, in his words, “to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one.”

  More than any other American, Truman understood the power of an atomic weapon—politically, psychologically, and practically. At one point in 1948, he told the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, “I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It
is a terrible thing to order the use of something that”—he paused, bowing his head—“that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”

  The United States had roughly fifty atomic bombs stockpiled. As of 1948, the Soviets had none. During the three Operation Sandstone nuclear tests in the Pacific that year, military scientists had designed a long-range detection system that could—if it worked—tip off US officials to an atomic-bomb detonation in other parts of the world, so the United States could monitor Soviet activities in this regard. If the Kremlin tested a bomb, Truman would know about it, and quickly. According to the latest estimates from the CIA—in a memo to the president dated July 6, 1948, two weeks before Truman’s nomination in Philadelphia—“it is estimated that the earliest date by which it is remotely possible that the USSR may have completed its first atomic bomb is mid-1950, but the most probable date is believed to be mid-1953.”*

  For Truman, the whole discussion with regard to atomic bombs and how to stockpile them and when one might be used was a stiff reminder that he was going to have to conduct his election campaign under excruciating pressure. The tension from within Washington was growing. The threat to national security due to instability outside US borders was too. Violence was rampant in Palestine. The Israelis were clamoring for a $100 million loan from the United States, and for the US government to lift an embargo on the shipment of arms to the Middle East. Communism was spreading deep into the Far East. According to a US intelligence report from that month, “The position of the present [US-allied] National Government [in China] is so precarious that its fall may occur at any time.”