by A. J. Baime
With five weeks to Election Day, Truman was making no progress, if the newspapers were to be believed, and his increasingly populist tone left the pontificators surprised—even angry. “It is difficult to see how you could put a campaign on a lower plane,” the columnist Frank R. Kent declared in the Los Angeles Times the day after Truman’s Denver speech. “The most blatant demagoguery . . . in politics has piled higher than ever before.”
One of the nation’s two most respected pollsters, Elmo Roper, wrote in his newspaper column that he was finished with polling for the rest of the campaigns; there was no longer any point, because “Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected to the Presidency of the United States.” The Atlanta Constitution stated on its editorial page: “Nowhere is there any enthusiasm for Harry S. Truman. Even those who support him do so largely because they have less enthusiasm for Tom Dewey.”
The only real base Truman seemed to have in his corner was made up of labor unions. James A. Hagerty declared on the front page of the New York Times in early October, “President Harry S. Truman will get a larger share of votes of organized labor than any other Presidential candidate, but this will not be sufficient to enable him to carry any of the more populous industrial states with large numbers of electoral votes.”
With the presidential election all but decided, according to overwhelming public opinion, attention turned to the heated battle to capture control of the Eighty-First Congress. The Republicans held a 245 to 185 lead in the House, and a 51 to 45 lead in the Senate. “One can reasonably deduce that the makeup of the House should not be altered greatly by Dewey’s election, although here and there seats will change hands,” concluded the Alsop brothers in their syndicated column in mid-September. As far as most could see, however, the battle for the Senate was on. Democrats were campaigning hard to capture Senate seats in Illinois, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Minnesota, hoping to narrowly regain control.
The Truman Special rolled on, through the Colorado Rockies and into Utah, where the president spoke to a crowd of twelve thousand people at the Mormon Tabernacle. Then it was on to Reno, Nevada, the “famous divorce city,” as Margaret wrote in her diary. That night, the train crossed the border into California and the pine and juniper forests of the Sierra Nevada, into the high-elevation town of Truckee. Truman was scheduled to travel the entire length of California in a desperate fight for the state’s twenty-five electoral votes. The polls showed him far behind Dewey in California, but gaining.
* * *
By the time Truman arrived on the West Coast, fatigue had begun to chip away at the staff’s morale. Clark Clifford had broken out in a severe skin rash. “I was besieged by an attack of boils,” he recalled. “It was a nightmare. For years afterwards I’d sometimes wake up at night in a cold perspiration thinking I was back on that terrible train. It was a real ordeal. I don’t know quite how I got through it except I was young at the time and strong and vigorous.”
Any time the train stopped for more than a few minutes, Truman campaigners and reporters would dash for laundromats in hopes of washing the stale odor out of their clothes, and to find some soap and a shower. The only shower on the train was in the president’s suite in the Ferdinand Magellan. Deodorant was a rare find in stores (a new “stick form” version called Bar-It had just come to market that summer, for a dollar, plus tax). “What weeks of travel can do to your looks!” Margaret recalled. “I had a strong inclination to burn all my clothes.” “When to get our laundry done became something of an obsession,” recalled Clifford.
In the swaying Ferdinand Magellan, the First Lady and the First Daughter had fallen into the habit of incessant bickering. “My mother and I love to argue,” Margaret later wrote of life aboard the Truman Special, “and one of the great frustrations of our life as a family has been my father’s constant refusal to join us in our favorite sport.” Meanwhile the men played cards. “The thing I remember most clearly,” noted Jack Bell of the Associated Press, “was that there was a poker game going at the end of the press car twenty-four hours a day, with a two dollar limit game, seven card hi-lo stud, low hole card wild.”
Newsmen could hear Truman’s speeches from inside the press room on the train, so they grew lazy and stopped going outside to do any reporting. The most exercise their legs would get was during trips to the bathroom and bar car. The press corps believed they were covering a loser, and it showed. “Many of the reporters who traveled on our train had been condescending,” remembered Margaret. “Contempt was lying around in hunks. But the people came to listen. What they heard came straight from my father’s heart.”
Around the time Truman entered California, something began to happen on the campaign trail, although the reporters traveling with the president failed to notice. In town after town, the whistle-stop speeches continued to draw surprising turnouts, and Truman’s speeches were connecting more and more with audiences, who saw him as a fearless underdog fighting for survival on the biggest public stage on earth. The crowds began to feel his energy, and to pull for him, as if they wanted him to succeed. People would yell, “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” And he would shout back, “I’m just telling the truth about them [the Republicans] and they think it’s Hell!”
“We had tremendous crowds everywhere,” Truman wrote his sister from aboard the train. “From 6:30 a.m. in the morning until midnight the turnout was phenomenal. The news jerks didn’t know what to make of it—so they just lied about it!”
“I never saw anything in my life like the enthusiasm with which the President was greeted at some of these what we called ‘whistle stops,’” recalled aide Robert Dennison. “There were more people there than the population of the whole damn county. They came for miles, sometimes at the most ungodly hours, 5:30 a.m., 6 a.m. . . . And you could tell that they loved the President and loved his family.” “Even after twenty-five years,” recalled reporter Robert Nixon, “I can still see in my mind actual scenes of what happened. I can see the President . . . standing on the rear platform at his whistle stop speeches and the crowds at certain little towns and hamlets. I can remember the words he spoke and the things he did.”
To his staffers, and to his family, Truman was unwavering in his confidence. “He fought, and fought, and fought,” recalled Clifford. “He worked like a dog. He worked sixteen hours a day, day after day, week after week, and month after month. And at no times during the whole campaign did I ever hear him utter a word which indicated that he had the slightest doubt that he was going to win.”
It was common knowledge aboard the train that not even the president’s wife believed he could achieve his goal. One day, Truman was having breakfast with Bess and the executive director of the women’s division of the Democratic National Committee, India Edwards, on the Ferdinand Magellan. Bess and India had known each other for years and were stark opposites in style and persona, which made moments like this ever so slightly awkward.
“You know, sometimes India,” Truman said to Edwards as Bess looked on, “I think there are only two people in the United States who really think I’m going to be elected President . . . They’re both sitting at this table and one of them is not my wife.”
* * *
The battle for the Golden State was critical; only three states held more than California’s twenty-five electoral college votes (New York, forty-seven; Pennsylvania, thirty-five; Illinois, twenty-eight). This fight would climax with a group of successive rallies in the nation’s fifth-largest city—Los Angeles, with its growing movie industry. Truman was scheduled to host his biggest rally yet at Gilmore Stadium—which until recently had been the home of the Los Angeles Bulldogs, the city’s professional football team—on September 23. Dewey was set to appear the following night, at the Hollywood Bowl.
All forecasts had Dewey and Warren carrying California, but by less than was expected. Earl Warren posed a peculiar problem for Truman. The Republican VP candidate from San Francisco had won the California governorship in 1942, and when he c
ampaigned for reelection in 1946, he won both the Democratic and Republican primaries. California was split between a liberal majority along the coast and a more conservative populace in the farm belt that ran through the entire interior. Both embraced Warren, and his record showed that he and Truman agreed on most major issues.
“It will be extremely difficult to attack Mr. Warren on his record or generally on his stand on issues of the day,” according to a Truman campaign memo, “since in the majority of the instances he is in accord with the Democratic program.”
A bigger problem for Truman was that his campaign had once again run out of money. When the Truman Special hit San Francisco on September 22, there was no hall for the president to use for his first major West Coast speech, because so much of the budget had been reserved for his appearance in Los Angeles, the following day. The Democratic National Committee had arranged for Truman to speak for free on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. The head of California’s central party committee, Howard I. McGrath (no relation to J. Howard McGrath), had to pony up $400 of his own money so that lighting equipment could be rented to allow television cameras to broadcast Truman’s speech, which was set for 8 p.m. West Coast time.
“We were startled when the crowd assembled at the City Hall,” recalled McGrath. “With absolute conservative estimates, we had over 35,000 people standing in the dark in the air in the park in front of the City Hall.” Then it was off over the Bay Bridge to Oakland, where Truman ripped into the Republican Congress, blaming it for high prices, the housing shortage, and poor education in schools.
“The most significant thing about the failures of this Republican Congress is that they show so clearly the attitude of the special interests who dominate the national Republican Party. Their actions set a definite, clear pattern. And that means a lot to your future,” Truman told twenty-two thousand audience members in Oakland. “Big business interests in the East . . . control the Republican party.”
Truman was opening himself up to criticism that he was trying to create class conflict to benefit his campaign. The argument was hard to refute, but still, the president seemed to wholly believe everything he was saying.
Thanks to campaign-finance man Louis Johnson, money trickled in, enabling the train to roll on. The day after Truman’s Bay Area appearances, he headed south through the farm belt, turning up the heat on the GOP. In Fresno, he personally attacked the district’s Republican congressman Bertrand W. Gearhart: “You have got a terrible congressman here in this district. He is one of the worst . . . He has done everything he possibly could to cut the throats of the farmer and the laboring man. If you send him back, that will be your fault if you get your own throat cut.” In Bakersfield, Truman railed the Republican Congress for sabotaging the Democrats’ farm program.
In Los Angeles, after nightfall, he was late for his speech due to street traffic. Some one hundred thousand people lined the streets to see his car roll by. Billboards trumping the Dewey-Warren ticket were everywhere. As the motorcade pulled toward the stadium’s north gate, Truman could see the beams of forty searchlights in the night sky, reminding him that he was in the transplanted capital of the global movie business (New York City had been its home until recently). The stadium was filled to capacity; “you couldn’t put any more in with a shoehorn,” recalled California state senator Judge Oliver J. Carter. On a stage festooned with American flags, the master of ceremonies, actor George Jessel, stood at the microphone making idle remarks to kill time, while sitting in chairs onstage were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, whose hit movie Key Largo was playing in theaters. The crowd grew restless, and audience members started yelling out: “We want Bogey!” “Let Margaret sing!” “You tell ’em, Harry!”
Finally, Truman arrived, and the crowd came alive. “This is a championship fight,” Truman said, and the crowd responded as if it actually was.
In the hardest-hitting speech on Communism of his entire campaign, Truman launched a seething attack on Henry Wallace. Here in Los Angeles, the Red Scare was a major story. Less than a year earlier, ten Hollywood screenwriters had been charged by the US Justice Department with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in 1948 the “Hollywood Ten” were imprisoned. Truman’s speech was careful not to fan those particular flames. He focused instead on Wallace. Along with New York, California was a state where Wallace could steal enough votes from Truman to make a difference in the outcome. Truman went for the jugular.
“The fact that the Communists are guiding and using the third party shows that this party does not represent American ideas,” he told the assembled crowd at Gilmore Stadium. “The simple fact is that the third party cannot achieve peace because it is powerless. It cannot achieve better conditions here at home because it is powerless.”
Once again, Truman found his audience enthusiastic and receptive. Afterward, his motorcade headed for San Diego, where the president packed another stadium. “I just have never seen anything like it,” recalled state senator Carter. “I don’t think it will ever be repeated.”
“It was at that point,” recalled Howard I. McGrath, “when people decided that maybe this man did have a chance to carry California.”
* * *
The Dewey Victory Special rolled into Los Angeles at 3:50 p.m. the next day. The goal was to outdo the Democrats in the power of the candidate’s message, in crowd numbers, in Hollywood star power—in everything. For the second day in a row, Californians lined sidewalks to get a glimpse of a presidential candidate. Confetti strewn along the route made it look like snow was falling on the palm trees.
The Dewey campaign’s efforts to recruit figures from the silver screen had paid off. Making appearances at the rally that night were Jeanette MacDonald, star of that summer’s hit movie Three Daring Daughters; she would lead the crowd in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Walt Disney was on hand, along with Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Lionel Barrymore, Barbara Stanwyck, and John Wayne, whose Howard Hawks–directed western Red River was currently playing in theaters. The rally was carefully choreographed by Warner Brothers director and dance choreographer LeRoy Prinz.
Onstage, Dewey came through in a perfectly measured cadence, his delivery as precise as a ticking clock. Like Truman, he chose Los Angeles to deliver his big anti-Communism speech.
“A grim, new struggle is on in the world,” Dewey said. “It is a struggle between two exactly opposite ways of life for the mind and soul—the very future of mankind.” Without mentioning Truman’s name, Dewey called out the administration for having “bungled and quarreled . . . telling the world that ours is a blundering, bungling system.” He skewered the president for his “red herring” comment; Truman was “shutting his eyes to the rampant evil” of Communism, while “Communists and fellow travelers have risen to positions of trust in our government.” The Republican candidate continued:
I propose that, next January 20 [Inauguration Day], we start a mighty world-wide counteroffensive, a counteroffensive not of aggressive acts but of truth, a counteroffensive of hope. I propose that we begin to tell our story—the American story—so well, so truthfully and with such meaning that the world will never again be in any doubt as to the choice between our way of life and theirs.
Dewey finished with a pledge to bring “a new unity for all America.” For the audience, the speech was expeditious, poetic, climactic, and focused.
When it was all over, the street cleaners had their work cut out for them. “It would be foolish to make flat predictions about California at this stage,” wrote the columnist Roscoe Drummond. “But the consensus still is widely on the Dewey-Warren side.”
25
“The Democratic Party Was Down to Its Last Cent”
THE DAY AFTER HIS LOS ANGELES rally, Truman held whistle-stops in Yuma, Arizona, then Lordsburg and Deming, New Mexico, places where, historically, residents might have had more luck seeing a UFO than an American president. When the tr
ain crossed the Texas border, Truman entered Dixiecrat territory for the first time. While Strom Thurmond was not polling well in Texas, pockets of the state adamantly opposed federal civil rights laws, and Harry Truman.
Over a dozen whistle-stops were scheduled in the state, in tiny towns like Sierra Blanca and Valentine. Three major addresses were also planned. By this time, the speechwriters in charge of crafting the formal addresses were desperately far behind. Three days before the train crossed the Texas border, White House staffer Albert Carr wrote Matthew Connelly, the president’s appointments secretary, “It is surprising to me that these speeches were not conceived, drafted and polished weeks ago, so that they did not have to be whipped into shape on the midnight before mailing.”
The first major stop was El Paso. “The railroad station was at the end of a long street that had another street coming in at an angle,” recalled White House staffer Donald Dawson, who had just recently joined the campaign train. “The President spoke from the back platform of the train. When he arrived, both of those streets were filled with crowds backed up for two city blocks trying to see the President and wanting to hear him speak. From that point on, it was a succession of personal triumphs.”
The campaign had gathered more political muscle for the Texas trip. Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, who was running for a Senate seat, came aboard looking disheveled and bewildered; Texans had just voted in the primary and Johnson did not know yet how the tally had come out. “He hadn’t had any sleep or time to shave for three days,” remembered Truman’s first press secretary, Jonathan Daniels, who also boarded the train in Texas. The former Speaker of the House and current Texas congressman Sam Rayburn got on board, as did Truman’s attorney general, Tom Clark.