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

by A. J. Baime

  “There Is Great Danger Ahead”

  THE EXECUTIVE MANSION WAS PHYSICALLY crumbling. “The White House Architect and Engineer have moved me into the . . . Lincoln Room—for safety—imagine that!” Truman wrote in his diary on August 3. He wrote his sister on the tenth of that month, “Margaret’s sitting room floor broke in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling. They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the red parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath.”

  The problem was kept a highly guarded secret. “Can you imagine what the press would have done with this story?” the president’s daughter later wrote. “The whole mess would have been blamed on Harry Truman. The White House would have become a metaphor for his collapsing administration.”

  As engineers and architects hammered on walls and peeled back ceilings to reveal the building’s old bones, staffers and the Democratic National Committee were working overtime piecing together an itinerary for Truman’s campaign appearances. He was going to travel aboard the Ferdinand Magellan train car, as he had done in his “nonpolitical” trip two months earlier in June, crisscrossing the nation. He aimed to give more speeches and make more campaign appearances than any presidential candidate in history.

  The tour would kick off Labor Day weekend in Detroit. To rest up beforehand, and to escape the structural problems of his current home, the president went on vacation. On August 20 Truman left the White House for a cruise aboard the presidential yacht—the USS Williamsburg. With a crew of advisers, poker buddies, a Secret Service detail of a half-dozen agents, and the White House physician, Dr. Wallace Graham, accompanying him, the Williamsburg left Pier 1 at the Navy base in Washington under the command of Captain Donald J. MacDonald.

  For the next nine days Truman lounged on the ship’s deck, paced its length in his bathing suit, and worked in his cabin as the party cruised Chesapeake Bay. At night, the group watched movies—Key Largo starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and The Emperor Waltz with Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine. Truman loved boats. He could relax and be Harry instead of Mr. President. “In the intimacy of the ship,” remembered George Elsey, “his language was unguarded.” That said, Truman was so respectful of women, he never told what Elsey called “dirty stories.” “He would laugh if others told them, but his repertoire was confined to political anecdotes, scatological only if they involved a politician.”

  It was a brief respite from a troubled world. In Palestine, the Arab-Israeli War had reached a temporary truce under the watchful eye of a United Nations mediator, Folke Bernadotte of Sweden. There was almost no hope that the truce would last. Jews in America were thrilled with the surprising strength of the fledgling Israeli army. At the same time, the State Department was alarmed. In the process of claiming territory, the Israelis had pushed some three hundred thousand Palestinians out of their homes and were refusing to allow them to return, creating a humanitarian crisis. “The situation is becoming daily more critical as cold weather sets in,” a State Department official informed Truman.

  In Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, was locked in direct negotiations with Joseph Stalin and his number two, the impossibly irascible Vyacheslav Molotov, over the standoff in Berlin. The talks were proving fruitless and the airlift in Berlin continued. American and British planes were landing three thousand tons of supplies in the western sector of Berlin each day.

  On August 20, US officials in Berlin announced that the Soviets had raided the American sector of the city and had kidnapped seven German policemen at gunpoint. Three had apparently escaped but four were still missing and were feared dead. The next day, another report came out of Berlin that the Soviets had once again raided the US sector and had beaten and stabbed German police officers.

  Days later, the Communist party in power in the Soviet sector of Berlin stormed city hall, demanding a liquidation of the Berlin city council. That night thirty thousand Berliners in the western sectors gathered in the hot night to protest. The city’s elected mayor, Professor Ernst Reuter—whose administration the Soviets refused to recognize—demanded justice.

  “We have said ‘no’ and we shall say ‘no’ again until liberty and democracy have been regained for Berlin,” he announced. “We Berliners have said no to communism and we will fight it with all our might as long as there is a breath in us . . . The struggle for Berlin is a struggle for the freedom of the world.”

  In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal felt the pressure from across the ocean. They were attempting to clarify guidelines for the use of the atomic bomb. They created one document for “immediate use,” while another was to take precedence “in the event of war.” Forrestal’s continued effort to have custody of the atomic stockpile placed in the military’s hands was getting nowhere with Truman. No matter how much work the Defense Department put into creating guidelines for the bomb, any decision to use it remained with the president.

  Back in the White House at the end of August, Truman prepared to begin his campaign trip while the Democratic National Committee made a frantic push to raise money. They needed $10,000 for Truman’s nationwide Labor Day radio broadcast from Detroit, $10,000 for Truman-Barkley campaign posters, $17,000 for two Barkley broadcasts, etc.

  Truman packed his bags for what would turn out to be one of the most unusual trips any president had ever made. Around this time, he received a visit from an old friend, Leslie Biffle, the secretary of the Senate. Biffle was from a small town in Arkansas. For a summer vacation, he had traveled undercover as a chicken farmer, driving through farming towns in the Midwest to gauge the grassroots sentiments of America, regarding the upcoming election. He told Truman that his impressions of voters defied everything he was reading about in the newspapers. Truman, Biffle said, could win.

  “Do you think so?” Truman asked. “Do you really think so?”

  * * *

  Just after lunch on September 5, 1948, Truman and his daughter, Margaret, climbed aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, the rear car on a seventeen-car train parked at Union Station. Truman sported a gray fedora atop a blue suit, while Margaret wore a blue silk dress, a cocoa-brown hat, and a thick layer of red lipstick. At 2:30 p.m., with a jarring lurch, the train’s steel wheels began to turn. Bess was on vacation visiting family in Denver. She would join the campaign soon. This would be the Truman family home for the foreseeable future—an adventure covering nearly thirty-five thousand miles.

  The latest numbers by pollster Elmo Roper made Dewey’s lead seem insurmountable. Roper had the GOP candidate running 46.3 percent to Truman’s 31.5 percent, with Wallace at just 3 percent and “other candidates” at 2.4 percent. “I’d be much better off personally if we lose the election,” Truman wrote his sister just before taking off, “but I fear that the country would go to hell and I have to try to prevent that.” The reporters aboard had given the train carrying the president a nickname: the Truman Special.

  The Ferdinand Magellan was the only train car ever built especially for presidential travel. Entering through the Magellan’s front door (which had a vault-like lock on it for privacy), the first thing one saw was a galley and pantry where cooks worked, followed by servants’ quarters, then an oak-paneled dining space that featured a table covered in a white tablecloth and eight chairs upholstered with thin gold-and-green stripes. In the back of the train car, on one side, a lounge offered a row of comfortable chairs, behind which were two windows—three-inch-thick bulletproof glass. Atop those windows was the round presidential seal. Also mounted on a wall in this lounge was a speedometer, so the president could see how fast the train was moving.

  A back door opened onto an outdoor speaker’s platform at the rear of the train. When the train pulled into a “whistle-stop,” staffers would set up a microphone with three loudspeakers, while Secret Service agents installed a rope to keep crowds at a safe distance from the president and his family.

&n
bsp; Directly adjacent to the lounge were four staterooms marked A, B, C, and D. The two middle rooms made up the presidential suite, one for Harry and one for Bess. They were joined by a shared bath and shower room. Each stateroom had a bed, a dresser, and a telephone that could be hooked up when the train pulled into a station. The car was cooled using a blower system and some three tons of ice that needed to be continuously replaced.

  In the dining and bar car, crowds lined up for a sendoff highball. Political reporters rubbed elbows with photographers and newsreel camera crews, Truman staff, Secret Service agents, Army Signal Corps engineers working in the communications room, and teams of railroad workers.

  Another train traveled a few miles ahead of the Truman Special for safety reasons, as did an advance man, White House staffer Oscar Chapman, whose job it was to drum up interest in every town at which the president stopped, so that when Truman got onto the Ferdinand Magellan’s back platform to speak, everything was in order and crowds would be on hand, lured by a well-oiled advertising campaign coordinated and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and local Democratic organizations.

  Campaign staffers had worked out what they’d hoped would be a smooth-running assembly line of facts, figures, and ideas for the president. Truman had Clark Clifford on board to handle the big speeches. “I lived in a little tiny stateroom where I slept and ate and wrote,” Clifford remembered. “My big task in the campaign was to do the writing for the President.” Clifford’s assistant George Elsey would handle the shorter whistle-stop addresses. Truman would give these talks impromptu, using note cards full of relevant facts supplied by Elsey and his team. Elsey remembered, “I was armed with briefcases filled with notes and outlines for the first few days with the promise that the daily pouch flown from Washington to wherever we might be would have more from Batt”—Bill Batt at the secret research unit in Washington.

  Truman staffer Charlie Murphy would write rough drafts of bigger speeches from his office in the White House, to send to Clifford for rewrites. “I worked at it night and day, every day,” recalled Murphy of the campaign. “The pattern that evolved was that we would send a draft of a speech from here [the White House] at night, it would be flown by courier plane that would land wherever that train was before day in the morning.” The speech would make its way into the hands of Clifford, who would work on it personally with Truman.

  Everyone on board and at the White House—apart from Truman—believed that his chances at victory were near null. The only shot he had was to put on a campaign so surprising, it would take the nation by storm. “He was on his own five-yard line,” Clifford recalled, “there were only three minutes left, and the only thing that could win the game for him was a touchdown. Now, why would he just go ahead and run plays through the line? He had to try any sort of innovative, surprising, startling kind of tactic that might work because he had everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

  * * *

  On the first night aboard the Truman Special en route to Detroit, Truman had his whole staff to dinner. At a quarter after eight the next morning, the train pulled into Grand Rapids, where the president was set to give his first whistle-stop speech. Truman stepped out onto the Magellan’s back platform. He would remember the sight for the rest of his life.

  It was pouring. Grand Rapids was a Republican stronghold. Still, some twenty-five thousand people were huddled under umbrellas and out in the elements. Rows of state police officers stood drenched in their uniforms. These were the first words in Truman’s first official campaign-tour speech of 1948: “My, what a wonderful crowd at 8:15 in the morning,” he said into his microphone. “It is a great day for me. It is a great day for you. I am just starting on a campaign tour that is going to be a record for the President of the United States.”

  What the people of Grand Rapids saw was not the man they thought they would. This was no stiff oratory, no FDR-like prose. There was nothing formal about it.

  “The record proves conclusively that the Republican Party is controlled by special privilege; and that the Democratic Party is responsive to the needs of the people,” Truman said. “Now the necessity that faces us is one of voting on November 2d. You must register, you must vote, if you expect to get a square deal in this great Nation. Doesn’t do any good to talk about voting, if you are not on the books. Doesn’t do any good to talk about voting, if you sit around on election day, too lazy to turn out. The interests of this great Nation are such that every man and woman of voting age in this country ought to turn out and vote on November 2d.”

  After his talk, Truman was ushered into a special train car designed for guests. Nearly four dozen local officials were there expecting a handshake—the heads of over a dozen auto union divisions, of the carpenters union, the plasterers union, the sheet-metal workers union, the financial secretaries typographical union. There was the head of the Democratic County Club, the former mayor of Lansing, the head of the Eleanor Roosevelt League, plus candidates for county clerk, state senator, and the US Congress. Labor Day Queen Miss Elayne Balance was on hand to present a bouquet to the First Daughter.

  The train was on a strict schedule. All of this—the extemporaneous speech, the meet-and-greet—had to occur in fifteen minutes. Somehow, Truman managed to shake all the hands and the train moved on.

  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the president, the campaign had reached what Margaret Truman called “the first major crisis.” The advance man, Chapman, was in Detroit, where Truman was scheduled to make his first major speech downtown in Cadillac Square that afternoon. The speech was set to go live nationwide on radio, but radio executives told Chapman they would need the $25,000 fee for the broadcast up front, or they would be forced to cancel. Chapman frantically contacted union leaders, but no one had that kind of cash on hand. A Truman aide happened to run into the wealthy Democratic governor of Oklahoma, Roy J. Turner, at a cocktail party at the Statler Hotel in Washington that day, and pleaded with Turner for help.

  “Well, that broadcast is going to be made,” Turner said. He got out his checkbook and wrote a check. “That broadcast goes on,” he said.

  When the train reached Detroit at 1:40 p.m., Truman and his entourage funneled into a row of limousines and rode downtown for the day’s main event. Thousands lined the roads along the route. In Cadillac Square, 125,000 people stood awaiting the president. A nationwide radio audience listened in. Detroit was the spiritual home of the American labor union—not just ground zero for the votes of working Americans but also for the union leaders themselves, who had the power and funds to organize voter-registration drives and door-to-door canvassing. Big urban areas typically formed Democratic Party strongholds, but Detroit in particular—these were Truman people. And with this crowd, Truman had an ace up his sleeve: the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the federal law that had restricted the power and activities of labor unions, which Truman had vetoed and the Eightieth Congress had passed, over his protest. Taft-Hartley had proven the most controversial labor law in years, one that workers believed tipped the scales in favor of big business and Wall Street, over the rights of the common workingman and -woman.

  “As you know,” Truman said from the speaker’s platform, “I speak plainly sometimes. In fact, I speak bluntly sometimes. I am going to speak plainly and bluntly today.” The crowd roared. “These are critical times for labor and for all who work,” Truman said. “There is great danger ahead.” Citing Taft-Hartley he warned voters of “the boom and bust” that lay ahead if Thomas Dewey was elected president. “The ‘boom’ is on for them, and the ‘bust’ has begun for you.” He warned of the predatory businessman with “a calculating machine where his heart ought to be . . . Labor has always had to fight for its gains. Now you are fighting for the whole future of the labor movement . . . I know that we are going to win this crusade for the right!”

  After the Detroit speech, Truman sat with Margaret and motored in the back of a limo north out of the city, followed by cars holding camera crews from all three t
elevision networks. Along the trip, police estimated, a half million people stood on the sides of the roads.

  The president’s appointments secretary Matthew Connelly recalled the ride: “Along the highway from Detroit to Pontiac I’d see people alongside the highway. This was not organized and there were a lot of them out there . . . This tells me what I want to know.” Others saw the turnout through a lens of colder logic. “A President can always bring people out,” recalled Jack Bell, the top political reporter for the Associated Press, who was traveling with the Truman campaign. “Even if they are not going to vote for him, even if they hate him, people want to see the President in person you know . . . Most of them never saw a President.”

  In Pontiac, fifteen thousand people heard Truman speak. In Flint—“Vehicle City,” where General Motors, the largest corporation on earth, was originally founded—an audience of thirty-five thousand turned out. Then it was back to the train to head south to Toledo, Ohio, where eighty-six local officials—from the city mayor to union representatives to journalists from the local newspapers and radio stations—were waiting to shake Truman’s hand. By the end of the first night of campaigning, the train was full of weary people who wished they could take showers.

  Truman was sixty-four years old, vigorous and in good health. Still, the staff questioned whether any man his age—healthy or not—could continue at this pace up until November 2.

  21

  “The All-Time Georgia Champion of ‘White Supremacy’”

  ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 7, the day after Truman’s Detroit speech, Thomas Dewey gathered several of his advisers in the governor’s mansion in Albany and switched on the radio. Five hundred miles due west, at the Masonic Temple on Temple Avenue in Detroit that night, the former governor of Minnesota and current president of the University of Pennsylvania—Harold Stassen—officially kicked off the GOP campaign with a blistering rebuttal to Truman.