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

by A. J. Baime

  The advance man Oscar Chapman noticed too. Arriving a day or two ahead of time in the towns Truman was set to speak in, Chapman could sense the shift in the attitude of the people. “The month of October absolutely confirmed my conviction that he was going to be elected,” he recalled.

  Now late in the game, a surprising list of Truman supporters had come to the candidate’s aid. Eleanor Roosevelt finally went public urging voters to choose Truman, in a radio address (DNC officials had scrambled to raise the $25,721 fee to ABC for the radio time, delivering it in cash in a brown paper bag). Twenty-seven leading writers endorsed Truman, including Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Conrad Aiken and Archibald MacLeish. Truman Capote and Carson McCullers endorsed Truman. Thirty-six FDR associates came out in support of the president, including Harold Ickes, who had been Truman’s most outspoken critic a year earlier. The new president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, came out for Truman, saying he was “more than a little impatient with those promises the Republicans made before they got control of congress a couple of years ago.”

  Press reports told an entirely different story from the one the Truman campaigners were seeing. The day before Truman reached Massachusetts, the Boston Daily Globe printed a front-page story that Dewey “has a safe lead over President Harry S. Truman in Massachusetts,” and that the state would tip to the GOP for the first time in twenty-four years. That same day, the New York Times published a front-page story that read: “Thomas E. Dewey and Earl Warren, Republican nominees for President and Vice President, respectively, appear certain to defeat President Harry S. Truman and Senator Alben W. Barkley, their Democratic opponents, by a large plurality in the Electoral College.”

  Robert Nixon of the White House press corps remembered filing a pre-election story with the New York office of the United Press Service at the end of October. “The tenor of this story,” he recalled, “was that there was a snowballing tide of public opinion for Truman that indicated very strongly that he would be the winner in a great political upset. My New York office was part of the Hearst organization, which blatantly opposed any and all Democrats. They had hated Roosevelt with a passion, and they despised Truman because they considered him a very inept man.” The upshot: “They never used my story. They never put it on the wire. They thought I was crazy.”

  In Boston, the Truman party checked into the Statler Hotel. The reception was near pandemonium. “I’ve never seen such a mob in a lobby,” recalled campaign staffer and speechwriter Frank Kelly. “They had to fight to get him [Truman] through, and people were just cheering madly.” Kelly looked over at an anxious police officer.

  “How does this crowd compare with what Roosevelt drew when he came through Boston?” Kelly asked.

  “Roosevelt never drew a crowd half as big as this in Boston,” the officer replied. “We like Harry better up here.”

  Truman and his family were escorted via a private elevator to his thirteenth-floor quarters in the Statler. Then it was off to Mechanics Hall, where he delivered his Boston speech—a scathing attack on his “red herring” critics, and a shot across the bow of Communists who, Truman said, were trying to influence the outcome of the election.

  “Get this straight now,” the president barked. “I hate Communism. I have fought it at home. I have fought it abroad. I shall continue to fight it with all my strength. I shall never surrender. The fact is, the Communists are doing all they can to defeat me and help my Republican opponent,” he said. “I’ll tell you why. The Communists don’t want me to be President because this country, under a Democratic administration, has rallied the forces of all the democracies of the world to safeguard freedom and to save free people everywhere from Communist slavery.”

  Truman finished with a plea: “We are engaged in a great crusade . . . This is Roosevelt’s fight. And now it is my fight. More than that, it is your fight. We are going to win.”

  The applause lasted for several minutes. The evening was notable for another reason: “Biggest applause of the evening outside of that given the Truman family was for Congressman John F. Kennedy [serving his first term],” noted the Boston Daily Globe writer Elizabeth Watts, “who had a whole cheering section among the pretty young girls who served as ushers.”

  On this same night of October 27, The Truman Story debuted in movie theaters across the country and was an instant hit. Jack Redding, the Democratic National Committee’s publicist, would remember sitting with Tom Meade, who had supervised the making of the Universal Newsreel film, as they watched the completed version. Redding would remember Meade laughing “as I’ve seldom seen anyone laugh,” in response to what both perceived as the brilliance of the film, which had been cobbled together using existing newsreel footage. They had shot not a single frame. The film played to Truman’s authenticity; nothing about it was staged.

  “It’s fantastic,” a delighted Meade observed. “I was told that this film would be a flop because there’d be no time to do any shooting. But this thing is the best I’ve ever seen.” Remembered Redding: “Thus, during the last six days of the campaign no one could go to the movies anywhere in the United States without seeing the story of the President. It was probably the most important and most successful publicity break in the entire campaign.”

  The following morning, Truman was back on the train, making way for the finale in New York City. “We worked all through the campaign on New York,” remembered Clark Clifford. “We knew that it was critical. We knew at the time that that was Wallace’s major bastion of support . . . The whole Democratic organization was set to work.”

  * * *

  Boston gave Dewey the biggest crowd he had seen yet. Still, it did not measure up to the one Truman had drawn the night before; an estimated fifty thousand fewer people came out to see the Dewey motorcade.

  Here in New England, Dewey was polling far ahead, however. Gallup had him running 52 percent to Truman’s 45 percent in Massachusetts. Dewey was determined to snag the state’s sixteen electoral votes. Onstage, he was joined by Speaker of the House Joseph Martin—a favorite Massachusetts son. Martin sat in a chair onstage and, ignored by Dewey, listened to a speech that shocked him.

  In Boston, Dewey went all out for Social Security and a higher minimum wage, ideas that were not very different from the proposals Truman had made. Martin was among those anti-Truman conservatives in Congress who refused to pass the Social Security legislation that Truman—and now Dewey himself—had called for.

  Dewey said, “A social security program that leaves so many people out in the cold is not good enough for America.” The “pittance” the federal government paid to the average retired worker or his widow “is not security enough,” the governor continued. “We must take action to bring about an increase of these benefits to our older people and their dependents.” One reporter called the speech “a GOP ‘New Deal’ in social security.”

  Sitting on the stage, Martin remained silent. At one point he glanced at a group of friends in the audience and smiled with embarrassment. In Boston, the GOP’s identity crisis was on full display.

  * * *

  Truman’s reception in New York “surpassed anything in our history,” the national committee’s J. Howard McGrath recorded. From the moment the president stepped out of his train in Grand Central Station, police had their hands full keeping the crowds behind ropes. A motorcade of open cars cruised down Forty-Second Street as ticker tape poured from open windows in steady streams. The police escort—101 motorcycles—was the largest the city had ever deployed.

  Meanwhile, many floors up above Grand Central at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel, campaigners were dialing through lists of phone numbers, in a frantic effort to urge voters to make it to the polls. A day earlier, McGrath had sent out a telegram to the state chairmen of the Democratic Party in all forty-eight states. “Suggest you contact wives of all Democratic officials and committees asking them to spend as much of the day as possible te
lephoning friends and neighbors to get out and vote. This can be built up in an endless chain fashion.”

  The president made stops at an Amalgamated Clothing Workers rally in Union Square at 4:45 p.m. (“We’re going to lick ’em, just as sure as you stand there!”), then at City Hall at 5:20 p.m. (“90 percent of the press is against us; 90 percent of the radio commentators are against us; and the only way you can find out the truth is for me to come out and tell you what the truth is”).

  By the time Truman reached the Biltmore Hotel at 6 p.m. to ready himself for the night’s rally at Madison Square Garden, a police-estimated 1.4 million New Yorkers had seen him, over a nine-mile tour through the city. The moment Truman reached the Biltmore, however, he faced yet another crisis.

  Oscar Ewing and Clark Clifford had been waiting for the president at the hotel, and they were obviously concerned. Ewing produced a cable he had received from a Zionist journalist named Lillie Shultz, who worked for the liberal magazine The Nation. Ms. Shultz claimed to have information regarding the UN negotiations in Paris. She said that Secretary of State Marshall was about to publicly announce to the United Nations his approval of the Bernadotte Plan. This was the peace proposal that would recognize statehood of both Arabs and Israelis in Palestine. The Israeli government had rejected this proposal, because it offered the new nation a smaller territory than it was fighting to obtain. Marshall, Ms. Shultz now claimed, was about to endorse the plan before the UN, without Truman’s approval.

  The humiliation for the president would be extreme, and it would surely cost him the Jewish vote on November 2.

  Truman was set to give his biggest speech yet on the subject of Israel, in roughly two hours, at Madison Square Garden. The speech was going to go live over nationwide radio. His speechwriters had been up all night fine-tuning it, to make it align with the most up-to-date information regarding the UN negotiations in Paris. Truman had to stop Marshall from making any statement on Israel, if such a statement was in fact pending.

  “What on earth can we do to prevent this?” Truman asked his aides.

  Ewing suggested sending Marshall a cable straightaway, with a suggestion of a statement that Marshall should make, instead of Marshall making any statement of his own.

  “That’s a good idea,” Truman answered. “Do you and Clark mind missing the speech at Madison Square Garden tonight and use the time to draft a statement for General Marshall to make?”

  “Of course,” came the answer. “We’d be glad to.”

  Sending cables to the secretary of state in Paris was no easy task, however. Clifford and Elsey drafted two cables, then Clifford called the undersecretary of state, Bob Lovett, in Washington and dictated the two cables over the phone. Lovett then had to go to the State Department coding office to encrypt the cables. The messages would then go over the wire to Marshall. “There was six hours difference in time between Washington and Paris,” recalled Ewing, “so it would be nip and tuck as to whether the President’s message would reach General Marshall before he had delivered his statement to the [UN] conference.” The first cable read:

  From: The President (in New York)

  To: The Secretary of State (in Paris)

  I am deeply concerned over reports here of action taken in [UN] Security Council on Palestine question. I hope that before this nation takes any position or any statement is made by our Delegation that I be advised of such contemplated action and the implications thereof.

  The second cable contained a statement that Marshall should use, if he was going to make any statement on Palestine. Lovett sent it along with his own memo to Marshall, stating, “President again directs every effort be made to avoid taking position on Palestine prior to Wednesday [November 3, the day after the election]. If by any chance it appears certain vote [on the Palestine matter] would have to be taken on Monday or Tuesday he directs US Delegation to abstain.”

  That night, Truman ate a quick dinner at the Biltmore. Joining him was his adviser Donald Dawson, who got a phone call from an official at Madison Square Garden. Truman was hoping for a moment of rest before his MSG rally. But not tonight. The pressure was relentless. Dawson learned that the arena’s seats were nearly empty, and the president was expected to arrive soon. Dawson jumped from the table and rushed down to the Garden, which was about a dozen blocks away. He recalled, “The place was half empty . . . The lights were blazing down from the highest balcony. I walked up there, ran and saw—there were no people at all . . . I saw few spectators but several photographers.”

  Dawson figured out the problem. The Democratic National Committee had run out of money and so a fringe group called the Liberal Party had paid for the hall that night. The Liberal Party was so small that it could not possibly fill the Garden’s thousands of seats, and party officials had reserved all the tickets for party members, a relatively small number. If Truman gave one of his most important speeches to an empty hall at the climax of the campaign, the results would be disastrous. It would confirm what all the reporters and pollsters had been saying: Truman was a lost cause.

  There were thousands and thousands of people outside Madison Square Garden, and Dawson arranged for the doors to be opened to the public. Soon crowds of people were filing through turnstiles and filling the seats. By the time Truman arrived, the venue was full. “We had a big motorcade and marching parade coming over from the Biltmore Hotel to the Garden with the President,” Dawson recorded. “I marched the parade into Madison Square Garden, and closed the gates so they couldn’t go out.”

  By the time Truman stepped onto the stage at the Garden, he had already given fourteen speeches on this one day, no two exactly alike. The first had been a whistle-stop at 7:30 a.m. in Quincy, Massachusetts. Now it was just after 10:30 p.m. Onstage with the president was Herbert Lehman, the former Democratic governor of New York, labor leader David Dubinsky, and Bess and Margaret, clutching bouquets of flowers. A band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  Truman approached the podium amid tremendous applause. Innumerable drafts of his speech had been written, but Truman now made a bold decision to go off script. He had a surprise for everyone.

  * * *

  “There is a special reason why I am glad to be here tonight,” Truman said onstage at Madison Square Garden. “We have come here tonight with one mind and one purpose. We have come to pledge once more our faith in liberal government, and to place in firm control of our national affairs those who believe with all their hearts in the principles of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

  Truman then began to taunt Thomas Dewey. The GOP candidate had spoken in Los Angeles, right after Truman. Dewey had spoken in Cleveland, right after Truman. He had spoken in Boston, right after Truman. Now Dewey would be coming to New York, the night after the president’s speech. “Now,” Truman said, “I have a confession to make to you here tonight”:

  For the last two or three weeks I’ve had a queer feeling that I’m being followed, that someone is following me. I felt it so strongly that I went into consultation with the White House physician. And I told him that I kept having this feeling, that everywhere I go there’s somebody following behind me. The White House physician told me not to worry. He said: “You keep right on your way. There is one place where that fellow is not going to follow you—and that’s in the White House.”

  The crowd exploded with laughter and approval. “This brought down the house,” remembered journalist Robert Nixon, in the Garden that night. “The crowd just roared and stomped and cheered.”

  Truman went on: “He can follow me to Cleveland . . . [Applause!] He can follow me to Chicago . . . [Applause!] He can follow me to Boston . . . [More!] He can follow me to Pittsfield and Providence . . .”

  The Republican candidate can follow me all the way from Los Angeles to Madison Square Garden, but the Republican record makes it certain that he will still be trailing along behind when the votes are counted. He is doing all he can to make you forget that record. He doesn
’t dare talk about it. I have never in my life been in a campaign where the opposition refused absolutely to discuss the issues of the campaign. I can’t understand that sort of an approach . . .

  Truman was more than halfway through his speech before he brought up the main subject of the night: Israel. Here in New York—where there were probably more Jews than there were in the Holy Land—he reiterated his support for the Democratic platform. Without committing to de jure recognition of the new Israeli government, Truman pledged his support for the success of this new nation.

  “That is our objective,” he said. “We shall work toward it, but we will not work toward it in a partisan and political way. I am confident that that objective will be reached.”

  Nearing his finish, Truman said, “I have only one request to make of you: vote on election day. Vote for yourselves. You don’t have to vote for me. Vote in your own interests.”

  The applause resonated throughout the building, and even after Truman left the stage, it kept on coming.

  Truman delivered nearly eighteen thousand words of campaign speeches on this single day, many of them off the cuff. He had one more day to make his case to New Yorkers before heading home. For over a year he had been the catalyst for a new civil rights movement, one he hoped would recast the nation’s racial and political landscape forever. He was scheduled to speak on October 29 in a place no presidential candidate had ever gone: Harlem, the spiritual home of black America.

  30

  “I Stand by My Prediction. Dewey Is In.”

  FOR MONTHS, THE Republican National Committee had been holding regular meetings, meticulously planning every detail of Dewey’s triumphant return to New York City. When the governor arrived at Grand Central Station, all that work paid off. There were brass bands and color guards, a torchlight parade, and even an airplane that spelled Dewey’s name in the sky with its exhaust.