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

by A. J. Baime

  After a week of traveling, “we developed a pattern for the typical stop,” recorded Clifford. “The President would emerge at the back of his car, make a few nice remarks about the town he was in, and then launch into an attack on the ‘do nothing’ Eightieth Congress. He would ask the crowd, ‘How would you like to meet my family?’ and wait with his head cocked for the response. Then he would introduce Bess Truman, always referring to her as ‘the Boss.’ After that he would present his daughter Margaret . . . ‘who bosses the boss.’ Then, as the train started to pull away, Margaret would toss a red rose to someone in the crowd.”

  Standing inside the train just behind a curtain, a few feet behind the president’s back, an aide named Jack Romagna would be taking down in shorthand what Truman was saying during his impromptu speeches, so there would be a record of each whistle-stop talk.* At the same time, armed Secret Service agents would ensure the president’s security. “We’d bring the rope up and let these people come right up to the back of the train, maybe 15, 20 feet away from the train,” recalled Floyd Boring, Truman’s driver and bodyguard on the Truman Special. “We’d have control that way.” Floyd Boring later took part in a gunfight during an assassination attempt on Truman in 1950 in Washington, which left one shooter and a Secret Service man dead.

  When the opportunity presented itself, Truman would be up before sunrise to take a “constitutional” walk, 120 steps per minute. A farcical retinue of Secret Service agents and members of the press would hustle after him. At one point, on his way back to the train after one such walk, Truman shook his fist at a group of photographers.

  “You guys let me down,” he said.

  The photographers expressed their confusion at the president’s remark. “Come on, boys,” Truman said, “you have photographed me in every possible situation. I stopped back there at that gas station to use the men’s room, and there wasn’t one photographer to take my picture in that place.” Roars of laughter followed.

  The Truman family was a curiosity for Americans. They were so different from previous First Families—the aristocratic Roosevelts, the wealthy Hoovers. Mrs. Truman stood five foot four, with gray hair cropped short. She appeared well-tailored and matronly in conservative midwestern style, in a new wardrobe she had purchased at the dress shop Agasta Gowns on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. The staff kept a respectable distance, but liked her. Photographers knew to keep their camera lenses pointed elsewhere, and news scribes understood that whatever she said was off the rec­ord. “Despite Mrs. Truman’s reserve in public,” recalled George Elsey, “she was warmly human to those she knew.”

  Harry’s favorite time of day was his bourbon cocktail with Bess. Privately, they talked through the issues the president faced, the speeches he was going to make, the policy decisions. But in public, Bess Truman formed her persona as the antithesis of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had used the position of First Lady to create her own political influence. Once, two years earlier, Bess was asked, “If it had been left to your choice, would you have gone into the White House in the first place?” She answered, “Most definitely would not have.” Would she want Margaret to become a First Lady? “No.” Did she think there would ever be a female president? “No.” Had living in the White House changed her view of politics and people? “No comment.”

  The First Lady “wasn’t trying to run the world,” remembered Truman speechwriter Oscar Chapman. On the train in 1948, “she was just trying to help Harry. And I’m telling you, that went through that crowd [on the train], and you’ll never understand the feeling that a man has when you catch that so clearly, that this whole group was, ‘We’re going to help this man . . . because she’s out here trying to help him, and we’re going to help him too.’ You’d be amazed at the sincerity and the depth with which that particular group [Truman’s staff] felt towards Mrs. Truman.”

  * * *

  The Trumans’ only child, Margaret, had her own unique iconography. Society columnists were riveted by her. She had been twenty-one years old at the time her father became president. Now twenty-four, she was set on blazing a nontraditional path. A profile of her in the New York Times in 1946, “Margaret Truman, Career Girl,” summed up her story:

  “The interest the public takes in Margaret Truman, as a young unmarried White House daughter, is wholly in the American tradition. In one notable respect, however, Miss Truman herself is not at all in the tradition of Presidential daughters of debutante age . . . [She is] earnestly working toward a career that no other Presidential daughter seems even to have thought of. The career would be in opera, as a coloratura soprano.”

  Margaret had grown up listening to her father playing the piano, and would often sing while he played. Voice lessons led to her first professional appearance, on March 9, 1947, on a live broadcast of ABC’s Sunday Evening Hour. “Now don’t get scared,” her father wrote her before that night. “You can do it! And if anyone says you can’t, I’ll bust him in the snoot.”

  Two days before Christmas in 1947, Margaret sang on a professional stage in front of a crowd that included the president of the United States, for the first time, at Constitution Hall in Washington. Some critics hailed her skill and courage; others thought her ability to lure crowds stemmed solely from her role as First Daughter. The Washington Post’s music critic Paul Hume said she needed to find a new instructor. Nevertheless, by 1948, “Margie,” as her father called her (with a hard g), was getting offers to appear onstage at Carnegie Hall, as a guest on the TV show Pepsodent Hour with Bob Hope, and from Cecil B. DeMille Productions in Hollywood.

  Aboard the Truman Special, Margaret was, in her father’s words, “my greatest asset,” and the pride the president took in his daughter was a genuine, humanizing force. On the Ferdinand Magellan’s back platform at whistle-stops, crowds would yell for her.

  “Where is Margaret?”

  “How about a song?”

  Still, there was no question of who was commanding this steel-wheeled adventure. It was, in the words of Truman’s first press secretary, Jonathan Daniels, “the Odyssey of the ‘everyday’ American through our times. Truman was that ‘everyday man’; he remains his greatest symbol.”

  Never had there been a president who looked and talked so much like the average voter. Truman had lived most of his life in obscurity—as a farmer, a soldier, a failed businessman, before destiny had intervened and placed him at the helm of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. “Hardly any other President has so personally shared all the vicissitudes of all the people,” according to Daniels. Truman walked among them, as one of them. He was fallible, he was blunt, and he exemplified humility. “Judging by his appearance,” recalled the reporter Robert Donovan, “he might have been an insurance salesman paying a call, or the family physician. As he drew nearer, the image changed from bland to crisp. The man who was nondescript from afar exuded a glow of vitality at closer range. The backs of his hands were covered with fine dark hairs, and when he shook hands his grip was strong.”

  “He had a tremendous veneration and respect for the institution of the Presidency,” recalled George Elsey. “He didn’t demand any respect at all for Harry S. Truman; he demanded respect for the President of the United States . . . He was without any guile or any pretense. He was a politician. He was proud of his being a politician. He thought it was an honorable word.”

  As the train chugged west, the president’s campaign strategy began to emerge. “You know the issues in this campaign are not hard to define,” he told an audience in Rock Island, Illinois. “The issue is the people against the special interests, and if you need any proof of that, all you need to do is to review the record of this Republican 80th Congress.”

  In Truman’s speeches, Thomas Dewey was never mentioned. Truman aimed to run not against the Republican candidate, but against the Republican Congress, the Congress elected two years earlier, led by conservatives Robert Taft of Ohio, Joe Martin of Massachusetts, and Charles Halleck of Indiana. The line between
the policies of Truman and the policies of the more liberal Republicans Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren was a gray one; in many ways—Palestine, civil rights, an increase in Social Security benefits—the two platforms resembled each other. The line between Truman and the Eightieth Congress, however, was stark and clear.

  “While I knew that the southern dissenters [from the Democratic Party] and the Wallace-ites would cost some Democratic votes, my opponent was the Republican Party,” Truman later wrote in his memoirs. “The campaign was built on one issue—the interests of the people, as represented by the Democrats, against the special interests, as represented by the Republicans and the record of the Eightieth Congress. I staked the race for the presidency on that one issue.”

  * * *

  When the Truman Special pulled into Dexter, Iowa, at 11:15 a.m., on September 18, Truman and his entourage filed into cars while maintenance men with the Pennsylvania Railroad climbed aboard to service the train. “This was another blistering hot day,” recalled one journalist present. The sun beat down on the president, who had already made six whistle-stop speeches that day. Truman was scheduled to speak to farmers at the National Plowing Contest, held at the private farm of Mrs. T. R. Agg, the widow of the dean of Iowa State College. When the president arrived, he was stunned to see that ninety thousand people were on hand, and if tradition were to hold up, a vast majority of these farming people were going to vote Republican.

  In one field, rows of glistening luxury cars were parked, many sparkling new Cadillacs among them. In another field, a surprising number of private airplanes formed their own rows; event organizers were wandering around complaining that all these private aircraft had been parked in the wrong place. A correspondent from London’s BBC, Leonard Miall, saw these airplanes and drew a conclusion. “You know farmers tend to vote their pocketbooks,” he recalled. “The moment that I saw the number of private aircraft illegally parked in the wrong parking place for the plowing match I began to wonder whether the farmer’s vote was going to be so solidly Republican in the ’48 election as it was expected to be.”

  When Truman climbed up onto the speaker’s platform, he stood under a huge sign reading WELCOME TO IOWA and looked out at a vast audience. He knew that he was addressing some very wealthy Americans. The Depression had ravaged this part of the nation, but farming communities like these had bounced back. Since 1940, the purchasing power of farmers had risen 70 percent, compared with 50 percent for the rest of the country. Bank deposits and currency among farmers had quadrupled during that time. Farmers in 1948 were enjoying a prosperity they had never known. One Iowa farmer told a reporter on this day, “I have my own airplane; my son has his own airplane. We both own Cadillacs . . . The depression hit the farmer first and hit him hard . . . [But] today, I have more money than I know what to do with or even count myself.”

  Toward the end of his speech, Truman raised the issue of the Commodity Credit Corporation. He knew that this crowd would catch on fast to the importance of the CCC, but he did not know that he was about to hit on a point that would have a major impact on the outcome of the election. The CCC was a government-controlled bank of sorts that stabilized farm income and farm commodity prices. In June the Eightieth Congress had passed a law that rewrote the charter. An obscure provision did away with storage bins that the government had previously used to help farmers with especially large harvests. Without these bins, farmers would have no way to store their grains if the harvest turned out to be surprisingly good; they would have to sell them all at once, and prices would thus drop precipitously. Truman noted:

  Now the farmers need such bins again. But when the Republican Congress rewrote the charter of the Commodity Credit Corporation this year, there were certain lobbyists in Washington representing the speculative grain trade . . . These big-business lobbyists and speculators persuaded the Congress not to provide the storage bins for the farmers. They tied the hands of the administration. They are preventing us from setting up storage bins that you will need . . . When the farmers have to sell their wheat below the support price, because they have no place to store it, they can thank this same Republican 80th Congress that gave the speculative grain trade a rake-off at your expense.

  The crowds showed Truman little enthusiasm—a smattering of applause and that was it. The significance of his remarks was not yet apparent. Within weeks, however, during the harvest, the prescience of Truman’s speech would become brutally obvious to farming communities across the country.

  When he was done, he stepped into the crowd to perform a publicity stunt. Using mules and a plow, he demonstrated his farming prowess gained from years on his own farm as a young man in Missouri, by plowing a perfectly straight line. Then it was back to the train. Two Secret Service agents—James J. Rowley and Henry J. Nicholson—were on the train, gauging the dim response to the president’s Dexter speech when Truman boarded.

  Nicholson said, “There was not much of a demonstration there, Mr. President.”

  “Nick, don’t worry about that,” Truman said, as the Secret Service man later recalled. “I know these people. The fact is that they were there; I have no worry at all.”

  23

  “The Presidency of the United States Is Not for Sale!”

  THE DAY AFTER TRUMAN’S SPEECH in Dexter, Iowa, on the other side of the country, Thomas Dewey and his wife, Frances, boarded the “Dewey Victory Special” at Albany’s Union Station and departed westward on a misty afternoon, on a trip Tom Dewey believed would end in the White House in January. Herbert Brownell gave a statement to the press saying Dewey’s campaign would be “the most intensive in the modern history of the Republican party.”

  The train left track 8 at 4:15 p.m. Dewey had no Secret Service contingent, as he was not an elected federal official, but six New York State police officers aboard comprised his security detail. If elected, he would rank with Ulysses S. Grant as the second-youngest man ever to become an American president, at forty-six. (Theodore Roosevelt moved into the White House at forty-two.) Not including Dewey’s speechwriters and top advisers, the staff comprised six research experts, two research secretaries, two press secretaries, a newsreel assistant, a radio assistant, a stenographer, a mimeograph operator, and two physicians. Dewey also had some help from an unlikely source.

  “The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman, though there wasn’t much,” an assistant to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover later told Truman biographer David McCullough. Hoover had designs on the attorney general job, in a new Republican administration.

  Also on board the seventeen-car Dewey campaign train were eighty-one pressmen and -women—the A-team of the journalism world—who had elected to travel with the Republican nominee. The Alsop brothers, Robert Albright of the Washington Post, Jack Bell of the Associated Press, Leo Egan of the New York Times, and Richard Rovere of The New Yorker were among them. There were radio commentators aboard, picture artists, photographers, and enough photography equipment to start a Hollywood studio. Dewey was set to become “the most news-covered, radio-covered, still- and motion-picture covered Republican presidential candidate in political history,” wrote Roscoe Drummond from aboard the Dewey train.

  At 12:10 p.m. the next day, the train pulled into Rock Island, Illinois, where the candidate made his first appearance. Ten thousand people turned out to see him. That night, Dewey gave his first major speech, at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Sheets of rain had swamped the football stadium in the afternoon, and the night’s event was moved to the university’s field house. Dewey spoke soberly of the problems the next administration would inevitably face, obstacles “as momentous as any which have ever confronted this nation,” and he warned foreign nations expecting to capitalize on America’s difficulties that no such benefits would be forthcoming.

  He “spoke with special seriousness and special effect,” recalled one attendee. “The glitter of success, the air of super-efficiency which marked his whole app
earance here, may have been a little putting off. But this defect of too much perfection was compensated for by the impression that Dewey undeniably gave, of sensing the magnitude, the complexity, the difficulty of the task that is ahead of him.” Commented another in the crowd that night: “Caravans from out in the state were organized to swell the audience. All that could be done by bunting, noise-makers, good radio and loudspeaker arrangements, careful seating and good crowd management was done with efficiency. The result was a meeting with such a strong smell of success about it that the observer was inclined to propose calling off the whole campaign as an unnecessary expense.”

  Like Truman, Dewey’s itinerary had him making back-platform speeches at train stations in small towns, with big rallies scheduled along the way. Over the next days, the main thrust of his strategy came into focus for the American public. He was going to ignore the right wing of his party, and he was going to speak in poetic platitudes rather than make concrete commitments to any future policy. Thus, he believed, he would have a free hand to do what he wanted when he moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Dewey campaign could be summed up in a single word: unity.

  In Des Moines, Dewey told a sprawling audience: “Tonight we enter upon a campaign to unite America,” adding later, “we will rediscover the essential unity of our people.” The next night in Denver, he spoke of “the unity that binds us together,” and how “this strength and unity can be increased in the years ahead.” The next night in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he stumped for a renewed “unity among our people.” (There in Albuquerque, Dewey also made a rare campaign policy commitment that was in opposition to Truman’s platform: more tax cuts for the American people.)