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

by A. J. Baime

  Powerful people came to Hiss’s defense. “Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie, Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgivable,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column. “Anyone knowing either Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who . . . I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it.”

  Two days after Chambers’s testimony, the committee opened another hearing, and Alger Hiss appeared—tall, thin, and well-dressed. Hiss had contacted the committee, asking to testify to clear his name. In a voice so confident that, to some present, it came across as too confident, Hiss told the crowded committee room, “I am here at my own request to deny unqualifiedly various statements about me which were made before this committee by one Whittaker Chambers the day before yesterday.”

  Hiss lowered his voice dramatically. “I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party,” he said, and went on to refute everything Chambers had said about him, denying ever having laid eyes on his accuser.

  One of these two men was lying, under oath. The ensuing drama became a national obsession.

  * * *

  At ten thirty on the morning that Hiss testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a White House usher opened the door to the Oval Office, and the Washington press corps pushed in. It was a Thursday, and the president had a particularly busy schedule—meetings with the secretary of state, the secretary of the Treasury, the attorney general, the director of the budget, and a dinner to discuss the upcoming election with officials from the Democratic National Committee.

  Truman opened his weekly press conference by calling out the Eightieth Congress for failing to pass legislation he had proposed to curb inflation, which was becoming a hot campaign issue. (“High prices are not taking time off for the election,” Truman had said.) The administration had come up with a plan that included wage and price controls and rationing, but Republicans had rejected it.

  “There is still time for the Congress to fulfill its responsibilities to the American people,” Truman said. “Our people will not be satisfied with the feeble compromises that apparently are being concocted.”

  When Truman opened the floor, reporters asked predictable questions about his upcoming campaign. One then asked, “Mr. President, do you think that the Capitol Hill spy scare is a ‘red herring’ to divert public attention from inflation?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Truman, “and I will read you another statement on that, since you brought it up.” He picked a piece of paper up off his desk and spoke about the HUAC hearings, ending with the following: “The public hearings now under way are serving no useful purpose. On the contrary, they are doing irreparable harm to certain people, seriously impairing the morale of Federal employees, and undermining public confidence in the Government.” He ad-libbed this last sentence: “And they are simply a ‘red herring’ to keep from doing what they [Congress] ought to do.”

  A reporter asked, “Don’t you think the American public is entitled to this information?”

  “What information?”

  “That has been brought out in these investigations?”

  “What useful purpose is it serving . . . ? They haven’t revealed anything that everybody hasn’t known all along, or hasn’t been presented to the grand jury [a reference to the grand jury charging twelve members of the Communist Party USA with conspiracy to overthrow the government]. That is where it has to be taken, in the first place, if you are going to do anything about it. They are slandering a lot of people that don’t deserve it.”

  “Mr. President,” said one reporter, “could we use a part of the quote there, that last: they are simply a ‘red herring,’ etc.?”

  “Using this as a ‘red herring’ to keep from doing what they ought to do,” Truman said again, for emphasis.

  It was a clever pun, but a politically dangerous one. The term red herring meant something that is misleading or distracting. “The President simply had acknowledged that this was a red herring,” remembered the reporter Robert Nixon, who was in the room. “The meaning of the phrase ‘red herring’ was even ignored. It was made to appear that the President, in effect, was acknowledging that there was communism in Government and that some of the people in his administration and in the previous Roosevelt administration were traitors who had sold out their country to the Russian Government.”

  The next day, the words red herring made headlines on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. GOP leaders used the story to berate the president. His “red herring” comment was “treasonable in spirit,” said Congressman Kingsland Macy of New York. The columnist H. L. Mencken described Truman’s “red herring” comment as “puerile whim-wham,” and called on the House Un-American Activities Committee to “keep on until Truman is booted out of the White House.” Dewey’s campaign manager Herbert Brownell declared himself “shocked” by Truman’s attitude, which was “seeming to cover up” the activities of Communists in government.

  Republican senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan went even further. Ferguson pointed to Executive Order 9835, issued by the Truman administration in March 1947, which subjected federal employees to FBI oversight (the so-called loyalty board). Ferguson demanded that the administration start handing over the FBI files of government employees to congressional investigators. Ferguson’s demand backed the president into a corner. If Truman handed over the files, he would be (to his mind) violating the privacy rights of American citizens whom he believed to be innocent. If he did not, he would open himself up to attacks by Republicans that he was weak on Communism, perhaps even participating in a cover-up of Communist infiltration in American government.

  Truman flatly refused to turn over the FBI files of any federal employee, and Ferguson responded by demanding an impeachment inquiry. “The trend of presidential arrogance is becoming intolerable,” Senator Ferguson said in a speech on the floor of the Senate, accusing Truman of abusing “executive immunity.” The impeachment process went nowhere, but the headlines hurt Truman and inflamed the anger of conservative voters.

  Meanwhile, the Alger Hiss investigation continued. In a private session, Chambers revealed to HUAC members detailed information about Hiss and his wife, supporting his claim that he knew Hiss personally. When Congressman Nixon asked Chambers if he would take a lie-detector test, Chambers said yes.

  “You have that much confidence?” Nixon asked the witness.

  “I am telling the truth,” Chambers answered.

  For many Americans at the time, the handsome, buttoned-up Hiss was more believable than the rumpled Chambers. For decades to come, the Hiss case would remain controversial. It would take years before the government revealed through declassified documents that it had decrypted many Soviet cables from the 1940s—and for most who have studied the matter, those cables and other supporting documents settle the matter: Hiss was lying; Chambers was telling the truth. Congressman Richard Nixon, in 1948, apparently had a winning hand to play.

  * * *

  What did it mean to be a Communist in the first place? In the summer of 1948, that depended on whom you asked. Yet the idea that the enemy could be “walking among us”—the person standing next to you online at the pharmacy, or the neighbor who kept to himself—caused the seed of fear to blossom. “Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of fear,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. For Americans, fear of Communism began to coalesce into panic. The Alger Hiss matter rooted this controversy deep in the collective American psychology.

  In 1948 the National Security Council aimed to answer the question—what is Communism?—in a top secret memorandum called “Communism Is the Greatest Internal Security Threat at This Time.” (This document was dated August 6, the day after Alger Hiss first testified before Congress.) “In different ages there have been different threats to the internal security of the United States,” it read. “In this present
age the threat is communism.” Citing the Communist Party USA’s sixty-eight thousand enrolled members, the document warned of a future in which the United States itself would cease to exist, leaving instead a “stateless, classless, Godless” society in which “there is no God, no soul, no immortality.”

  The Hiss case was a political hornet’s nest for both Truman and Dewey. “If there turned out to be substance to Chambers’s charges [regarding Alger Hiss],” recalled Richard Nixon, “Truman would be terribly embarrassed, and ordinarily this possibility alone might have spurred Republicans on in an election year. But special factors in the Hiss case favored a cautious approach [among Republicans].”

  One of Dewey’s closest advisers was John Foster Dulles, the world-renowned lawyer and diplomat who was widely believed to be Dewey’s choice for secretary of state in the next administration. Dulles was a friend of Hiss’s and had recommended Hiss for his current job as president of the Carnegie Foundation. And so the Hiss controversy had the power to stain Dewey’s campaign as well as Truman’s.

  On August 11 Congressman Richard Nixon took a train to New York to visit the Dewey headquarters at the Roosevelt Hotel. Present was John Foster Dulles. Nixon had brought with him transcripts of hearings and private testimony in which Chambers revealed details about Hiss. Dulles read through the transcripts and began to pace in his office. He looked up at Nixon and said, “There’s no question about it. It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.”

  The investigation had to continue. Where it would lead, none could say.

  As the American press kept the story front and center, paranoia surrounding a Communist conspiracy grew. Americans were pressed to ask themselves: Which candidate in 1948 would more effectively expose Communists at home? Which would fight hardest to rid the nation of what appeared to be a sinister enemy? Candidates would now have to prove themselves on the issue. “Red Activity Looms Big in Campaign,” the Chicago Daily Tribune declared in a front-page story. The Red Scare had begun.

  Alger Hiss was not the only figure to pay a high price as a subject of the HUAC hearings. The proceedings brought renewed scrutiny to the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace.

  Whittaker Chambers had publicly outted as members of an underground Communist ring John Abt and Lee Pressman—two of the most influential members of Wallace’s Progressive Party. Photographs of Abt and Pressman appeared in newspapers nationwide. On August 19, 1948, the committee ordered the two men to testify the next day. When it was Abt’s turn to speak, Congressman Nixon leaned over to a colleague and said, “Watch your step with this one. He’s a smart cookie.”

  “It was clear that these were not regular, garden variety hearings,” Abt later recalled. “Implicit was a threat of great danger. We had engaged in no illegal activity. But we were radicals.”

  Asked continuously to admit he was a Communist, Abt refused, pleading the Fifth Amendment so as not to incriminate himself. Lee Pressman did the same, and after the proceedings were over, he issued a statement, calling the hearing “a shameful circus,” and the committee’s leader, J. Parnell Thomas, “a Republican exhibitionist.” He accused Thomas of “stale and lurid mouthings” that intended to steer attention away from the 1948 election’s more important issues. Rather than comment on whether he was or was not a Communist, Pressman chose to catalog the Progressive Party platform: “civil rights, inflation, housing, justice for the heroic state of Israel, and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.”

  Following Abt’s and Pressman’s testimony members of the press once again attacked Henry Wallace. A Georgia judge named Lee B. Wyatt told one reporter, “If I had my way about Wallace, I would say ‘get the hell out and go back to Russia.’ It makes my blood boil to hear Wallace and his Progressive Party presidential running mate say that we are provoking a war with Russia.”

  Nine days after Abt and Pressman pleaded the Fifth, Wallace headed south to begin a six-state campaign swing. He was going deep into Strom Thurmond territory. Wallace knew before he arrived that the potential for embarrassment and even violence was high. He had no support among whites from the South. Wallace’s support of “Negroes” and civil rights, his highly publicized Communist connections, his call to appease the Soviets during this new Cold War—all of this made him a public enemy in the eyes of whites in the region who—though Democrats—were as conservative or more so than many Republicans.

  As his campaign manager Beanie Baldwin later said, “I don’t think any person in American political life ever demonstrated the sheer personal courage that Wallace did in that trip through the south.”

  * * *

  Wallace arrived in Virginia on August 29, 1948. Before leaving, he made a statement that he would not speak to any crowd that segregated blacks from whites. He would not sleep in any building that segregated blacks from whites. He was traveling with a mixed-race campaign staff, and when he learned that certain hotels had canceled his reservations because they did not serve black Americans, he was not surprised. “This meant I had to stay in Negro homes everywhere I went,” he recalled, “which was really slapping the southern tradition.”

  On his first day, Wallace addressed roughly a thousand people at a theater in a black neighborhood in Suffolk, Virginia. “We must learn from Jesus and Jefferson,” he said. “The military strategies of history can give no answer to the problems of the atomic age.” He proposed a billion-dollar-a-year federal subsidy for southern industry and agriculture. The Marshall Plan money pouring out of the United States to war-torn nations abroad could be better spent at home, he said, in towns like Suffolk. When Wallace left the hall, a dozen young white men heckled him.

  “Hey, Joe Stalin is looking for you.”

  “Why don’t you go to South Carolina?”

  When Wallace reached Durham, North Carolina, protesters carried signs outside a state Progressive Party convention where he was scheduled to speak.

  SEND WALLACE BACK TO RUSSIA, read one.

  WALLACE—THE HITLER OF TODAY, read another.

  “They continually shouted, ‘Go back to Russia, you nigger lover,’” Wallace later recalled.

  Inside the hall, Progressive Party supporters—black and white—intermingled. As Wallace made his way to the podium, escorted by an armed guard, a melee broke out outside and a Wallace supporter was repeatedly stabbed. The wounded man lay bleeding on the stairs leading to the hall while police tried to establish control. One officer fired a warning shot into the air to try to calm the tumult. As the stabbing victim was pulled from the ground and rushed to the hospital (he survived), inside the hall, Wallace gave his address, proposing a Marshall Plan that would send federal dollars not to Europe, but to the southern states. Boos and catcalls repeatedly interrupted him, causing the candidate to plead with his audience: “Please sit down! Please sit down!”

  After the event, the members of the Wallace campaign team were unnerved. Beanie Baldwin asked Wallace, “Do you think we ought to go through with this?”

  “Yes,” Wallace answered, “we’ll go through.”

  The next night, in Burlington, North Carolina, raw eggs, tomatoes, and an ice-cream cone rained down on Wallace’s car as he arrived at a speaking event. An angry crowd of several hundred whites refused to let him enter the hall where members of Gideon’s Army had gathered to hear him speak. He stood outside his car next to a police officer for fifteen minutes, incredulously staring out over a raucous assembly of hecklers.

  “I would like to see some indication that I am in the United States!” he shouted. But the protest against him continued.

  When Wallace did take the stage, boos greeted him, and another egg hit him. He tried to compose himself, beginning his speech with eggshell stuck in his hair and yolk running down his white shirt. When the candidate finished his speech and headed back to his car, a police guard followed closely, with one officer drawing his gun. Wallace headed for Mecklenburg, North Carolina, where a similar scene awaited. More eggs. More tomatoes. More signs: SELL YOUR JUNK
IN MOSCOW, HENRY.

  Wallace spoke at the courthouse in Mecklenburg because no hall or theater would rent the Progressive Party space. “I believe there are people in Mecklenburg County who still believe in human rights,” he shouted over taunts.

  In Dallas, Wallace was awoken after midnight by a Western Union messenger bearing a telegram that read, “Get out of town!” At another event, the window of a car containing two Wallace staffers—one white, one black—was smashed.

  The national reaction to Wallace’s trip South was a mix of outrage and apathy. By one reporter’s account, the Wallace campaign had been targeted by twenty-seven eggs, thirty-seven tomatoes, six peaches, two lemons, an orange, and one ice-cream cone. But it had also shed light on a dark American truth. Wallace’s chief treasurer, a Georgia-raised black man named Clark Foreman, who had once witnessed the lynching of a black man when he was in college, years earlier, called Wallace’s southern odyssey “the greatest blow against slavery since the emancipation proclamation.”

  “As the direct result of Henry Wallace’s trip through the South,” wrote one journalist in the New York Star, “millions of Americans who were not aware of the meaning of discrimination in the South have suddenly been jolted. Segregation is no work of fiction, but a brutal fact. The conflict between American democracy and segregation hit home to millions.”

  Years later, looking back on this trip, Wallace would describe his encounter with “human hate in the raw.” He had never experienced anything of the kind before, he said, and could not imagine doing so again.

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