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

by A. J. Baime

  “Mr. President,” Vinson finally said, “as Chief Justice I must decline to undertake this mission to Moscow. But if you make it as a presidential request, I shall have a clear duty to comply.”

  “I am sorry, Fred, to do this to you,” Truman came back. “But in the interest of the country and the peace of the world I am compelled to request you to go.”

  Vinson answered, “I’ll be ready in a few days.”

  “I intend to discuss the purpose of this mission and mean to have the full agreement of our allies before you leave for Moscow,” Truman told Vinson. “I will also tell our own people. But first, everyone who is concerned will be duly informed before any public announcement is made. We must be careful in all respects, or this could misfire and be misunderstood.”

  That afternoon, Truman met with his press secretary Charlie Ross and ordered him to notify the radio networks that the president would need a half hour for what he called “a public statement of major importance”—not campaign-oriented, and thus free of charge. Two days later, at 8 p.m., he had two senators—Democrat Tom Connally of Texas and Republican Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan—up to his second-floor study in the White House for an informal meeting. Connally and Vandenberg were the two most influential members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Much to Truman’s surprise, both senators opposed the Vinson mission. Truman wondered aloud if he should go to Moscow himself and meet with Stalin privately.

  “You don’t know any Russian and he doesn’t know any English,” said Connally. “Besides there’s the question of authenticity. After you finish talking, what will you have? No witnesses or documents. And there’s no possible way of telling about commitments agreed upon or promises made regarding the future.”

  After the meeting, Vandenberg told Connally privately, “He must be feeling desperate about the campaign.”

  When Truman called Secretary of State George Marshall to brief him on the upcoming Vinson mission, Marshall was alarmed. He was in Paris for United Nations negotiations with the Soviets and others. Marshall told Truman he felt the proposed Vinson mission was a mistake; it would make the Paris negotiations more difficult, and it might be construed as undermining the United Nations. After the call, Truman met in the Cabinet Room with advisers and the debate about the Vinson mission continued. Some were in favor; others not.

  “I have heard enough,” Truman said. “We won’t do it.”

  Jonathan Daniels, who was in the room, recalled, “[Truman] got up and went out of the glass-paned door to the terrace by the rose garden and walked alone—very much alone that day—back [from the West Wing] toward the White House itself . . . The next time we saw him he was laughing with the reporters, the politicians and the police as he got back on that long train which everyone seemed so sure was taking him nowhere.”

  The story of the Vinson mission was far from over.

  * * *

  On October 8 Truman was in Schenectady, in upstate New York, when he got ahold of the morning papers. The news was bad. The story of the proposed Vinson mission had leaked and the reaction was furious. The press attacked Truman for using foreign policy as a campaign tool, even though Truman had called off the mission before it had gone anywhere.

  The Hartford Courant: “The capital was alive with reports . . . that President Truman has been planning a sensational move in American relations with Russia which he originally intended to announce to the nation and the world in a radio broadcast last Tuesday night.” The Los Angeles Times: “It is dangerous to the peace of the world to have a bumbler like Harry S. Truman handling any part of any international negotiations.” The Wall Street Journal called the Vinson mission “a resounding blunder in Mr. Truman’s conduct of foreign affairs. It is not his first mistake of this kind; but in view of the approach of November 2, it may well be his last.”

  Even Strom Thurmond had choice words on the proposed Vinson mission, calling it “further confirmation of the incompetency of Truman.”

  “This was the worst mistake of the Truman campaign,” Clark Clifford recalled.

  Aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, the president sat with press secretary Charlie Ross, trying to figure out how to mitigate the damage. Ultimately the administration put out a long statement on the doomed Vinson mission. “But the damage was done,” Truman noted.

  The day after the news broke, Truman awoke early as usual as the campaign train steamed through Ohio. In Akron, one hundred thousand people lined the streets to see the president cruise by in a motorcade to the Akron Armory. Akron was the unofficial rubber capital of the country, and on hand were well-dressed executives from Firestone, General Tire, B. F. Goodrich, and Goodyear.

  “The Republicans have the propaganda and the money,” Truman told this crowd. “But we have the people, and the people have the votes.”

  While in Akron, Clark Clifford slipped off the train and headed for a newsstand. A widely anticipated survey had been printed in the latest issue of Newsweek magazine, and it was expected to land on newsstands that day; campaigners aboard the Truman train had been talking about it for some time. Fifty political experts had been polled on the election outcome. When Clifford saw the story’s headline, it hit him like a kick in the gut: “Election Forecast: 50 Political Experts Predict a GOP Sweep.” “That Dewey would be favored hardly surprised me,” Clifford recalled, “but the shocker was the vote: fifty to nothing.”

  Clifford passed through the Ferdinand Magellan shortly after. Truman was sitting on a couch next to Margaret, reading a newspaper. Clifford tucked the magazine into his jacket.

  “What have you got under your coat, Clark?” Truman asked.

  “Nothing, Mr. President.”

  “Clark. I saw you get off the train just now and I think that you went in there to see if they had a newsstand with a copy of Newsweek. And I think maybe you have it under your coat.”

  Clifford reached into his jacket and handed over the issue. Margaret watched her father: “Dad stared at the magazine for a moment and then grinned.”

  “Don’t worry about that poll, Clark,” he said. “I know every one of those fifty fellows, and not one of them has enough sense to pound sand into a rat hole.”

  * * *

  When Dewey arrived back in Albany for a short break before his final campaign swing, he found his mailbox filled with letters from angry voters. Truman’s populism was getting to these Republicans. Why wasn’t Dewey fighting back? How could he let Truman say all those things about the Republican Party? This was not the Thomas Dewey many voters expected. This was not the fearless and irascible Dewey of 1944, the attack dog whom FDR had labeled “a son of a bitch.”

  “The greatest danger that could exist would be for too many people to feel that we have a ‘push-over,’” wrote J. E. Broyhill of the Broyhill furniture factories in Lenoir, North Carolina.

  “If you don’t open up on the one hundred and one iniquities of the Truman administration, the New Deal termites will win by default!” wrote one Earle S. Clayton of Greenfield, Ohio. “Strike while the iron is HOT!”

  The Vinson-mission fiasco offered a golden opportunity for Dewey to go on the attack. He debated the matter with advisers in person and by phone. “No, I won’t do it,” the candidate reportedly said. “I’d rather lose the election than add to the damage this country has already suffered from this unhappy incident.”

  Dewey had a different plan. The perception was that Truman had somehow changed his thinking on US foreign policy, and so Dewey aimed to reassure the world that the United States had not changed course, that UN negotiations in Paris would continue, and that soon enough there would be a more steady hand on the wheel. Dewey was going to make a statement as if he was already the president, in an attempt to heal the wound that Truman’s bungling error had created. On October 10, two days after the Vinson mission leaked to the newspapers, Dewey invited fifty reporters to the Executive Chamber in Albany, where he read aloud a short statement. Britain, France, and other nations west of the Iron Cu
rtain—“our friends of the free world,” Dewey said—should be reassured that Americans “are in fact united in their foreign policy.”

  “The people of America wholeheartedly and vigorously support the labors of our bipartisan delegation at Paris and specifically its insistence on a prompt lifting of the blockade of Berlin,” he said.

  In the crowd in Dewey’s office that day was the Washington Post’s political reporter Edward T. Folliard, who called Dewey’s move “perhaps without precedent in American history.” A presidential candidate was attempting to counteract the damage done by the acting president, in terms of the nation’s foreign relations, in the middle of a presidential campaign.

  One reporter asked Dewey if he was going to keep his foreign affairs adviser John Foster Dulles at the UN meetings in Paris, or whether he would call Dulles back to the United States. Implicit in the question was that Dewey would soon be the one to be shaping foreign policy, after he was elected, and that Dulles was about to become Dewey’s secretary of state. Dewey answered, “Certainly.” He would keep Dulles in Paris when he took command in Washington.

  Six hours later, the governor and his wife were back aboard the Dewey Victory Special, blasting out of Albany for points west on a nine-state campaign swing, which would end with a climactic pre-election weekend extravaganza in New York City. Dewey was headed for the Midwest, where he would find friendly crowds. Gallup’s latest numbers, released three days before the Republican candidate left Albany, had him ahead in Illinois (49 to 40 percent over Truman), in Michigan (52 to 41 percent), Indiana (52 to 40 percent), and Ohio (51 to 42 percent).

  Still, at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in Washington, GOP officials had noticed some unnerving trends. They were hearing the same stories as everyone else, about the size of the crowds that the president was drawing. They also noticed that the Republicans’ bank account was starting to run low. While Dewey’s campaign had a list of donors that included some of the oldest moneyed families in the country—Mellon, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller—plus industrialists Alfred Sloan (chairman of the world’s largest corporation, General Motors) and Walter Chrysler, the donations were not coming in from farmers and from other places where the Republicans had expected. Complacency and overconfidence had caused donors to keep their checkbooks in their pockets. Why donate to a campaign that has effectively already won?

  For the first time, GOP officials started to believe that this election might be closer than anyone thought—maybe not in the electoral college, where they felt entirely confident, but in the Senate and in the presidential popular vote. In mid-October, the head of the Republican National Committee, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, attended a meeting of the United Republican Finance Committee of Greater New York at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan, to make a plea.

  “We need the money and we need it early,” he asserted. “I have been all around the country, have traveled 22,000 miles and have been in 32 states,” he said. “The polls indicate a heavy electoral vote for Dewey and Warren, but that the popular vote is going to be rather close. Of course,” he added, smiling, “we expect that President Truman is going to continue to help us all he can.”

  27

  “Could We Be Wrong?”

  ON OCTOBER 10, THE SAME day Dewey made his statement regarding the Vinson mission, Strom Thurmond sent the president of the United States a telegram. “Again renew my challenge to debate you face to face on the same platform, on your ‘so-called civil rights program,’” Thurmond’s telegram read. “Suggest we debate it in Virginia, Texas, or Missouri . . . You name the time and place.”

  The telegram was ignored.

  Thurmond’s Dixiecrat ticket, like the Progressive campaign, had long since begun to deflate, especially outside Thurmond’s base in the Southeast. Not only was there little new material to keep reporters’ typewriters crackling, polls showed Thurmond’s numbers at just 2 percent nationally, behind even Henry Wallace, who was polling 4 percent. The only major financial support the States’ Rights Democratic Party was getting came from the oil industry. Under the Truman administration, the federal government and private oil concerns were in a feud over who owned the rights to tidelands off the US coast, where inestimable amounts of oil lay pocketed under a shallow sea. Oil drillers in the Gulf states—such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—wanted the rights to drill, and wealthy oil executives saw in the States’ Rights movement an opportunity to leverage power over the tidelands away from the federal government and back into the hands of local lawmakers and business organizations. But even this source of support was drying up.

  “The oil men’s generous enthusiasm for the Dixiecrats is now said to be waning,” noted the Alsop brothers in their syndicated column on October 20.

  Thurmond’s campaign was further injured by an unfortunate incident. As a publicity stunt, his staff mailed out letters to all the governors across the country, inviting them to visit South Carolina and stay in the governor’s mansion in Columbia. One of those letters went to William Hastie, the governor of the US Virgin Islands. Hastie had been appointed by Harry Truman as the first African American governor in the United States. Thurmond had no idea that Hastie was African American, and when Hastie politely declined the invitation, in mid-October, Thurmond’s letter was leaked to the press. Only then did Thurmond learn of Hastie’s race.

  Humiliated, Thurmond issued a statement to the press claiming that the letter to Hastie was an “understandable mistake,” the result of a clerical error. Thurmond’s statement attacked “pro-Truman” newspaper columnists for publishing it. Then he blamed the incident on Harry Truman. Thurmond said he “did not know that Harry Truman, in his all-out bid for Negro votes, had gone so far as to take the unprecedented action of appointing a Negro governor of the Virgin Islands . . .

  “I would not have written him if I knew he was a Negro,” Thurmond went on. “Of course, it would have been ridiculous to invite him . . . Gov. Hastie knows that neither he nor any other Negro will ever be a guest at the Governor’s house in Columbia as long as I am Governor or as long as the Democratic Party of South Carolina continues to elect Governors of my State.”

  Thurmond continued to tour through Kentucky and Tennessee. At a Memphis rally, he called Truman “an inefficient and confused little man,” and Dewey “a pennyweight glamor boy.” His barbs got rises out of his crowds but were unlikely to have any effect on his election prospects.

  One American who was closely following Thurmond’s campaign was Governor Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter, Essie Mae. She celebrated her twenty-third birthday on October 12, 1948. She had recently married Julius Williams, a black man who had served in the US military in World War II. One night they were watching the news on television in a hotel in North Carolina, where they had gotten jobs, and she saw her father on the TV. “His endless attacks on President Truman had made him so popular below the Mason-Dixon line,” she later recalled.

  Essie Mae’s identity was so secret, not even her husband knew that she was Strom Thurmond’s daughter, and as they watched Thurmond speak, she felt consumed by despair. She remembered hearing him say these words: “On the question of social intermingling of our races, our people draw the line. All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro race into our theaters, our swimming pools, our schools, our churches, our homes.”

  “I don’t like that man,” Essie Mae’s husband said as they watched Thurmond talking on the screen. “I fought Hitler to end up with that? What’s the difference?”

  Essie Mae’s father had always been kind and gentle with her, but now, he had been “brainwashed,” she recorded, “if not by the Ku Klux Klan, then by the ghost of Pitchfork Ben Tillman.”

  “If the South had been stabbed in the back by Harry Truman,” she wrote in her memoirs many years later, “my mother and I, and the blacks of South Carolina, had been stabbed in the back by Strom Thurmond.”

  * * *

  “We went through Illinois a
nd Indiana,” the reporter Robert Nixon recalled of riding aboard the Truman Special in early October. “Indiana was normally a Republican state, but in towns where you knew the population was 20,000, in several instances, there would be a hundred thousand to see Truman. They would be jammed in for blocks around where loud speakers would have been set up. They had come from towns in the whole surrounding countryside, maybe as far away as a hundred miles . . . You didn’t have to be very smart to say, ‘Look here, something is going on.’”

  Assistant press secretary Eben Ayers took a break from the White House to ride the Truman campaign train through the Midwest in early October. He returned to Washington and told his wife, “There is something happening. I think something’s going to happen.” Remembered Richard Strout, one of the most widely read political writers: “The Truman crowds had just changed in that last three weeks. They had changed enormously.”

  All the data still pointed to a Dewey landslide. Pundits had predicted that the Republicans would easily maintain a House majority but that the Senate was too close to call. Now even the Senate appeared to be leaning back toward the GOP. Columnist Joseph Alsop, on October 15: “This correspondent’s inquiries have led to the view that the Republicans will not lose the Senate after all.” Drew Pearson in the Washington Post claimed on October 14 that “about 75 percent of the newspapers have announced for Dewey . . . Dewey is certain to win, and it’s only natural to want to be on the side of the winner.”

  Truman saw the numbers differently. The day before Pearson made this claim, he sat with his aide George Elsey, on the way from Duluth, Minnesota, toward the Twin Cities. Elsey was focused on facts and figures to prepare Truman for the upcoming whistle-stops, but Truman interrupted him and told him to start writing down some notes.