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

by A. J. Baime

  “Yesterday in Detroit,” Stassen began, “the American people were given an additional reason why there should be a change in the White House and Governor Thomas E. Dewey should be elected in November as the next President of our country.” Truman’s speech in Detroit, Stassen told a packed house, was “an extreme demagogic appeal to set class against class.”

  Stassen blamed Truman for the nation’s high prices, for setting off “the inflationary spiral from which this country is still suffering.” He blamed Truman for the housing crisis, which was acute in Detroit, where the poorest neighborhoods were among the most overcrowded in the country. He blamed Truman for “an all-time high record of strikes and work stoppages” that caused workers to lose over a billion dollars in wages. He told his audience that the surprisingly big crowds that had turned out to see Harry Truman only did so because union bosses had threatened people with a “$3 fine for nonattendance.”

  “With a record of little judgment and less faith,” said Stassen, “he [Truman] once again sets himself up as a prophet and attempts to arouse in America an unreasoning, nameless fear of future depression, unemployment and chaos if he is not retained in office.” Truman, said Stassen, was “a colossal failure.”

  When Stassen walked off the stage, he took a phone call from Dewey. “He said he listened to the speech, liked it, and thanked me for it,” Stassen recorded. This was no surprise; Dewey had read and approved every word of it ahead of time.

  * * *

  The day after Stassen’s rebuttal speech, the nation’s political spotlight shifted to an unlikely place—Georgia, where the Democratic primary race for the state’s governorship was heating up. Traditionally, Republicans had no shot at winning a big election in Georgia, and the Democratic primary would in fact choose the next governor. This year the party faced a crisis, and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats were a looming threat.

  The state’s political crisis had begun in 1946. The governor-elect that year, Eugene Talmadge, died before he could take office. The state constitution had no apparatus to name a successor, and three men laid claim to the position. Since none of them could point to any precedent or law that would make such a claim stand, Georgia’s secretary of state, Benjamin Fortson, paralyzed from the waist down, hid the governor’s office state seal under his wheelchair cushion until the controversy could be cleared up, which took two years. The September 8 Democratic primary would decide the matter, which had by this time gained national attention.

  Two candidates were now in the running. There was Herman Talmadge, son of the late governor-elect Eugene Talmadge, a legend in Georgia politics who had served three terms as governor and was a pillar in the region’s white supremacist political structure. The New York Times once called him “the all-time Georgia champion of ‘white supremacy.’”

  “Wise Negroes,” Talmadge had said before the 1946 midterm elections, “will stay away from white folks’ ballot boxes.”

  Herman Talmadge was hoping to walk in his father’s footsteps into the Atlanta governor’s mansion, and to continue pressing for the segregationist laws he had known all his life. At a rally in Fort Valley, Georgia, in August 1948, Talmadge had told a crowd, “We’re going to have white supremacy in Georgia, by peaceful means if possible, by force if necessary.”

  His opponent was Melvin E. Thompson, who had come up as an educator and had served in a previous governor’s administration. Thompson publicly supported Truman’s civil rights campaign and the Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright ruling.

  Leading up to the primary, racial angst spread through the state. Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan chapters pledged support for Talmadge. The KKK’s local grand dragon, Samuel Green, publicly announced he would turn out a hundred thousand Klan votes for Talmadge, who was polling a three-to-one advantage in the race. On the night before the primary, just after Melvin Thompson gave his final campaign address, thirty robed and hooded Klansmen gathered in the black section of the town of Valdosta and burned a cross in front of a group of a hundred blacks and a phalanx of police officers. Two other cross burnings, clear threats to African Americans who aimed to cast a ballot in the election, were reported that night.

  The following morning, September 8, Georgians nervously went to the polls. A black man named Isaiah Nixon, who lived on a farm in Alston, Georgia, went to his local polling station to cast his ballot. Like many other black men in Georgia, he had registered to vote with the help of the local chapter of the NAACP. Nixon was strongly advised by election officials not to vote, but he cast his ballot anyway.

  Later that day, Nixon was at home on his farm with his family. His wife was on bed rest, as she had recently given birth. A car pulled up and out stepped two white men whom Nixon knew: two brothers named Johnson. One was carrying a shotgun, the other a pistol. They yelled for Nixon to come outside, and both Nixon and his wife emerged from their home. When the Johnson brothers asked Nixon whom he had voted for, Nixon reportedly said, “I guess I voted for Mr. Thompson.”

  According to subsequent investigations, the Johnson brothers demanded that Nixon get in their car, and he refused. According to the defense lawyer who later represented the Johnson brothers, Nixon charged at them with a knife, though this version of the story was disputed. One Johnson brother fired a shot into Nixon’s abdomen. When Nixon remained standing, his wife screamed, “Fall, Isaiah, fall!”

  Herman Talmadge won the governor’s race by a huge margin. Georgia’s most widely read newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, noted: “Herman Talmadge’s victory in the gubernatorial Democratic primary . . . today may give the States’ Rights Democrats a boost in their presidential campaign.” Talmadge went on to become a popular governor, and then to serve twenty-four years as US senator. Two days after Talmadge’s primary win, Isaiah Nixon died in a local all-black hospital. The Johnson brothers were charged with murder, but would ultimately be found not guilty by an all-white jury, on the grounds of self-defense.

  Days after the Georgia gubernatorial primary, in a black school not far from the Georgia State Capitol, a teacher asked her third-grade students whether their parents were going to vote in the upcoming presidential election in November. A male student responded, “My mama ain’t going nowhere and get shot voting.”

  * * *

  On September 10, two days after the Georgia primary, Henry Wallace surged again to the top of the political news cycle. Following his trip through the Deep South, Wallace made a triumphant return to his strongest base, in the city of New York. Some forty-eight thousand people moved through turnstiles at Yankee Stadium, illuminating the striking cultural and political divide between the new conservatism building in the American South and the new liberal movement in New York, as personified by Gideon’s Army. Promoters of this rally were claiming it was the largest political rally for which admission was charged in the history of the United States, and the largest political rally ever held in New York City.

  The scene was, in the words of one man present, “a weird combination of the old-fashioned open-air church revival meeting, of chanting and song-fest and evangelical fervor in mass.” Banners hung from around the stage, reading SAFEGUARD FREEDOM, KEEP AMERICA FREE, FIGHT JIM CROW, and NO ISRAEL EMBARGO—the latter banner a protest against the weapons embargo that was keeping the Truman administration from sending arms to the Israelis. The speaker’s platform was set up over the baseball field’s second base. The black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson sang “Let My People Go” and “Old Man River.” Folk singer Pete Seeger shouted into the microphone a description of his experience touring the South with Henry Wallace the previous week.

  “I can tell you a lot of things the newspapers didn’t tell you,” Seeger said of Wallace’s trip through Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. “They were wonderful things. In Memphis, in Birmingham, in Durham, where white men and Negroes had never sat side by side before, they sat together and they sang and cheered Wallace—but the newspapers didn’t tell you that.”

  More warm-up spe
akers took the stage. There was Wallace campaign officer Lee Pressman, who just weeks earlier had been accused of being a Communist conspirator by Whittaker Chambers during the Alger Hiss hearings, and Vito Marcantonio, US congressman representing the east side of Harlem, widely known for his support of Communist causes.

  “They can call us Reds and call us pinks,” Marcantonio announced. “But we never double-crossed anybody and nobody can call us yellow.”

  Wallace took the stage at 11:30 p.m. to thunderous applause. “This is a great American meeting,” he said. “It is a meeting in the best American tradition—a meeting of men and women of all races, of all creeds.” Wallace told his fans of the ugliness he had seen in the South, how the eggs and tomatoes had rained on him, how the faces of white Americans were “contorted with hate.” But the trip exemplified “our American rights to freely assemble and freely speak,” he said. “Fear is a product of inactivity and the greatest remedy for fear is to stand up and fight for your rights.”

  “We must work,” he said in conclusion. “We will work so that on November 2, Americans can clearly choose.”

  22

  “We’re Going to Give ’Em Hell”

  AFTER HIS DETROIT SPEECH ON Labor Day weekend, Truman returned to Washington on September 13, before his campaign train headed west for California and all stops in between.

  At 1 p.m., Truman welcomed Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and Secretary of the Army General Kenneth Royall to the Oval Office to discuss Berlin and the bomb. Forrestal bluntly asked Truman if he was prepared to push the proverbial button, in the event of war. According to Forrestal, Truman answered “that he prayed that he would never have to make such a decision, but that if it became necessary, no one need have a misgiving but what he would do so . . .”

  “The situation in Berlin is bad,” the Atomic Energy Commission chief David Lilienthal wrote in his diary on this same day. “The Russians seem prepared to kick us in the teeth on every issue. Their planes are in the air corridor today, and anything could happen . . . The President is being pushed hard by Forrestal to decide that atomic bombs will be used . . . The President has always been optimistic about peace. But he is blue now, mighty blue. It is very hard on him, coming right now particularly.”

  Later that night of September 13, Truman’s campaign-finance chief Louis Johnson held a fund-raising event at the White House. Johnson arranged to have some thirty wealthy potential donors gather for a tea in the Red Room. After the staff served drinks on silver trays, Truman stood up on a chair and asked for the group’s attention. He said his campaign was so desperate for money that, if donors did not come through with $25,000, the Truman Special, which was about to embark on a cross-country campaign trip, would not get beyond Pittsburgh.

  “I am appealing to you for help,” he said, “help to carry my message to the American people. We just haven’t got the money to buy radio time. In Detroit on Labor Day we had to cut one of the most important parts of my speech because we didn’t have the money to stay on air.”

  “Mr. Truman looked pathetic and alone,” Drew Pearson wrote of this moment, in the Washington Post. (Pearson was presumably in the room.) “Some of the [Democratic National] committee’s operations have been so amateurish they are unbelievable.”

  Still, two men wrote checks for $10,000 apiece.

  At the end of this hectic day, Truman wrote in his diary: “I have a terrible feeling . . . that we are very close to war. I hope not . . . My staff is in a turmoil. Clifford has gone prima donna on me. So has Howard McGrath. It’s hell but a part of the game. Have had to force McGrath to behave and Clifford too . . . I get a headache over it. But a good night’s sleep will cure it.”

  Four days later, Truman left the White House again with Margaret. Bess was still in Denver visiting family. On track 16 at Union Station, the Truman Special was ready for departure. Vice presidential candidate Alben Barkley arrived at the track siding to see Truman off.

  “I think I am going to mow ’em down,” Truman said.

  “Are you going to carry the fight to them, Mr. President?”

  Truman smiled. “We’re going to give ’em hell.”

  The president’s twenty-four-year-old daughter leaned in and said, “Daddy, you shouldn’t say ‘hell.’”

  Truman and Barkley grasped each other’s hands, and then the president climbed into the Ferdinand Magellan. He was suffering a cold, which would serve to compound the discomfort of rail travel. That afternoon, he spoke in Pittsburgh, then in Crestline, Ohio. The train rolled into the small farming community of Rock Island, Illinois, at sunrise the next morning. Truman stepped out onto the Ferdinand Magellan’s back platform at 5:45 a.m. To his surprise, there were four thousand people waiting to hear him.

  “I don’t think I have ever seen so many farmers in town in all my life,” he told the crowd. “I had no idea that there would be anybody else in a town the size of Rock Island at this time of day.”

  After his talk, he stood staring out at the scene with a staffer named William Bray, who remarked that this was a good beginning to this next leg of the trip. Truman asked why.

  “Well, those people had to get up maybe at 4:30 in the morning to be here and if such a crowd is willing to come out to hear you it looks like a good omen,” Bray said. “Maybe in spite of the polls, there are a lot of people who have not made up their minds and are willing to listen. And,” Bray concluded, “that’s all we can hope for.”

  * * *

  On the morning of September 17, the Truman Special crossed into enemy territory. Like most heavily agricultural states, Iowa was firmly Republican. The state had gone to the GOP in all but three presidential elections dating back to 1856, and had landed squarely in Thomas Dewey’s column over FDR four years earlier. Iowa had a Republican governor, and all eight congressmen and both senators were Republicans. Still, in each town where Truman stopped, he found a crowd awaiting him to hear his “rip-snorting” impromptu speeches.

  The president waved peeled ears of golden corn at farmers. Local marching bands honked out crowd favorites. Swarms of motorcycle police sporting American flags revved their engines. So soon after the war, patriotism was palpable at these rallies, and the hours moved by in a montage of red, white, and blue. “It is fascinating,” Margaret wrote in her diary on this day. “We made about six stops altogether, and we eat in between.” At the station in Des Moines, the Truman Special picked up the First Lady. Porters helped Mrs. Truman get her luggage aboard; Bess settled in for what would be her first and only national presidential campaign tour.

  By the end of the first week, the reality of life aboard a traveling train began to set in. “Going across the country, I imagine we were the laughing stock of the nation,” recalled one Democratic Party official, John P. McEnery. “It was like a traveling circus,” according to columnist Richard Strout, who was aboard. “Nothing in the world is remotely like the atmosphere on one of these transcontinental campaign caravans,” the columnist Marquis Childs wrote of the Truman Special. “It is a perpetual public affairs forum, a gossipy smalltown sewing circle, a traveling rodeo, the mixture being unique and completely and unmistakably American.”

  The Union Pacific railroad kitchen offered surprisingly tasty fare. The menu included an à la carte breakfast: bacon and eggs ($1.25), griddle cakes with syrup ($0.50), fillet of salt mackerel, club style ($1.85). At lunch and dinner, martini and Manhattan cocktails ($0.60) and beer ($0.40) accompanied chicken à la King ($2.05) or pan-fried fillet of fish with tartar sauce ($1.80), while the gem on the dessert menu was ice cream with caramel sauce ($0.30).

  The Truman family and the president’s aides fell into a routine—as much as was possible, given that the schedule called for numerous whistle-stops at different times each day, from sunrise to well into the night. “The most important function was to take part in the daily policy meetings that took place to set the policy in the campaign,” recorded Clifford. “We met every day around the dining room table on his car so
metimes at breakfast, sometimes at lunch, and sometimes off and on during the day.”

  The advance team led by Oscar Chapman would be out in front of Truman’s train by a day or two, and this team would funnel back information via telephone or messenger. “As an advance man,” noted Chapman, “you first try to find out from your friends or whomever you’ve got the closest contacts with, the leaders from a different state or community, just what the situation is, what’s the President’s standing around there, what they feel about him, and what are the issues which they disagree with him on . . . Within a short time, you’ve pretty much got them catalogued into two or three groups of their likes or dislikes and their reasons.”

  Data was constantly flying in from Bill Batt’s research division, working day and night in the Dupont Circle office in Washington. “They worked like dogs and they ground out an incredible amount of material,” recalled presidential aide George Elsey, whose job it was to organize this material for Truman. “All kinds of historical, literary, political, economic data flowed from them, and the news clippings, photostats of useful documents, anything that would give a spark and vitality and originality and vigor to President Truman’s campaign effort.”

  “When [Truman] would come into Chicken Bristle, Iowa, or some such place like that . . . ,” noted Clark Clifford, “he would congratulate the town on their having a new sausage factory. That would be based on material that had just come in a few days earlier from the advance team.” While Truman would have notes to help him aim his talk at the specifics of his location, he had to wing these speeches. “He didn’t have time between stops to sit and think about what he would say at the next stop, because between stops, he had to do other things,” recalled speechwriter Charlie Murphy. “So in this sense, I suppose he did more in writing his own whistle stop speeches than anyone else.”