by A. J. Baime
“We have come to the end of a campaign which will decide the course of our country in the four fateful years ahead,” Dewey said. “The speeches have been made. The debate is ended. Tomorrow we will go to the polls.”
Any number of publications and pundits offered final predictions, and while they varied in detail, they were unanimous in terms of the outcome. Radio broadcaster Walter Winchell gave the election to Dewey, with 15 to 1 odds. One St. Louis bookie gave Dewey 8 to 1 odds. One in Chicago offered 3 to 1. The final polls: Crossley had it 49.9 percent for Dewey and 44.8 for Truman, with the remainder for Wallace and Thurmond. Gallup gave 46 percent to Dewey and 40 percent to Truman. The third big pollster, Elmo Roper, gave the election to the GOP with a statement: “I stand by my prediction. Dewey is in.”
The New York Times predicted a Dewey landslide of 345 electoral votes. Newsweek forecast an even bigger landslide, with 366 electoral votes. Life magazine had already published a photo of Dewey in a boat with the caption, “The next President travels by ferryboat over the broad waters of San Francisco Bay.” Columnist Ralph McGill wrote in the Atlanta Constitution: “I have already made up my mind that Gov. Dewey is to be the next President of the United States. It is no new decision. It became obvious some months ago.” The nation’s most popular political columnist, Drew Pearson: “I would say that Governor Dewey had conducted one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent years . . . Undoubtedly, you’ll have teamwork in the White House under Dewey.” The Wall Street Journal: “Government will remain big, active and expensive under President Thomas E. Dewey.” Kiplinger magazine: “What will Dewey do?”
“You’ve got to live with him for four years, possibly eight,” Kiplinger stated. “He will influence your life, your thinking, your work, your business.”
Even in Britain, pundits were digging Harry Truman’s political grave, using boldface headlines as the shovel. The Manchester Guardian: “Harry S. Truman: A Study of a Failure.” The London Daily Mail: “Dewey Gets the Votes: Truman—Admiration.” The United Kingdom’s most widely circulated daily paper, the Daily Express: “What kind of President will Tom Dewey make?”
“Most of the articles [in Britain] read like obituaries of President Truman’s Administration,” commented New York Times political writer Clifton Daniel from the paper’s London office. (This story would prove especially ironic, as Daniel would later become Margaret Truman’s husband and Harry Truman’s son-in-law.)
In the nation’s capital, the switchboards at hotels were reportedly ringing off the hook as Republicans were booking rooms for the inauguration. It was also reported that Republican families were renting homes in Washington and enrolling their kids in schools for the spring 1949 semester.
At home in Independence, the Trumans went to bed late on November 1, after the president’s radio broadcast. The next day, some fifty million Americans headed to the polls.
31
“Tens of Thousands, and Hundreds of Thousands! How Can He Lose?”
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
—Abraham Lincoln
AT 10 A.M. ON ELECTION DAY 1948, the door to the Truman home at 219 North Delaware Street in Independence, Missouri, opened and Harry, Bess, and Margaret emerged. North Delaware was normally a quiet street but neighbors had gotten used to crowds gathering outside the Truman home. On this day, there was a mob scene out front. The Trumans descended to the cement sidewalk, and the Secret Service escorted them along the five-minute walk to Memorial Hall.
The brick neo-Georgian building was a special place for the Truman family; as a young local politician, Truman himself had led the charge to build Memorial Hall* in honor of World War I soldiers who had lost their lives. When the building first opened, back in 1926, Truman was an obscure county judge. Now, twenty-two years later, he walked through these doors again, to cast his vote for himself for president.
Inside the polling station, an election judge named Emma Flowers called out the name of “Harry S. Truman, 219 North Delaware.” Truman stepped forward and checked his registration card. The clerks handed him ballot #101, Bess #102, and Margaret #103. It was Margaret’s first time voting in a presidential election. The Trumans filled out their ballots in booths, and after the president dropped his into the ballot box, someone in the crowd asked him, “How do you think it will go, Mr. President?”
“Why, it can’t be anything but victory,” Truman said.
Another voice called out, “Are you going to sit up for the returns, Mr. President?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “I think I’ll go to bed. You don’t know anything till tomorrow. I expect to be at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City at 10 o’clock tomorrow—if everything holds together.”
* * *
Dewey and his wife slept late in their suite on the fifteenth floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, rising at 9:30 a.m. At noon, the candidate and his wife walked out of an elevator surrounded by a phalanx of police officers, who parted crowds to allow the Deweys to make it to their “NY #1” black limo out front. They motored to their polling place at the School of Industrial Art at 121 East Fifty-First Street with a police escort.
In the basement of the school, Thomas and Frances Dewey cast their votes, then stood smiling in front of the ballot box for photo and newsreel cameras.
“Well,” Dewey said, “that’s two votes we got anyhow.”
* * *
Henry Wallace awoke early on Election Day at his farm in rural South Salem, New York. He drove his wife and a press secretary to the nearby public library in the village of Lewisboro, a 148-year-old white colonial building where there was already a small crowd lined up to vote. This district was almost entirely Republican, and at 8:05 a.m., Wallace and his wife cast two of the very few votes that would go to the Progressive Party at this polling station. Camera flashbulbs popped in their faces when they exited the polling booth.
When asked if he would estimate the total votes he thought he would earn nationwide, Wallace declined to answer, saying he would get “more votes than the pollsters say.”
The Wallaces climbed back into their car and returned to the farm, where they spent the day tending to their floral gardens and their chickens. In the afternoon, they headed for the Progressive Party’s headquarters in New York City, where they would await word of Wallace’s fate.
* * *
Strom Thurmond traveled from Columbia, South Carolina, to the town where he grew up and where the Thurmond name had been known for generations—Edgefield—to cast his vote. With his wife and his mother, he made his way through Edgefield’s familiar county courthouse and up the stairs to the second floor, shaking hands with hometown friends along the way.
His wife—who at twenty-two was voting for the first time—cast her ballot first, followed by Thurmond’s mother and finally Thurmond himself. Before leaving the courthouse, the governor gave a final statement: “They said back at Philadelphia [at the Democratic National Convention in July] that southern leaders had no place to go. Well, we’ve gone back to the people themselves, and today they’re going to let us know what they think about the matter.”
* * *
All over the country, long lines formed at polling stations. In Alabama, election officials had managed to keep Truman’s name off the ballot, so anyone who wanted to vote for the president had to write his name in. Thus Dewey was the only candidate on the ballot in every state. Other presidential candidates included the white nationalist Gerald L. K. Smith of the Christian Nationalist Party, John Maxwell of the Vegetarian Party, Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party, and Claude A. Watson of the Prohibition Party.
Clouds blanketed much of the country and rain was anticipated in the evening along the Eastern Seaboard. In the town where Tom Dewey was raised, and where his mother still lived—Owosso, Michigan—local businesses and small-town political leaders had a big celebration planned, for this was to be the most exciting day in the town’s history. In Truman’s hometown of Independence, no ce
lebration was planned.
All over the South, voters headed for the polls hoping there would be no violence. Separate polling stations were set up for black Americans, who lined up to cast their votes while nervously watching over their shoulders. The murder of Isaiah Nixon—the twenty-eight-year-old black man killed in southern Georgia because he voted in a primary election—was fresh in their minds.
Local populations had their eyes on key special-issue referendums. In Kansas, where sales of liquor had been outlawed for sixty-eight years, voters would decide if the state would become “wet” once again (it would). In South Carolina, voters would decide if the state would remain the only one of the forty-eight that outlawed divorce (voters would decide to legalize divorce in the state).
In Independence, after the Trumans voted, Harry went to lunch at the Rockwood Country Club, where he was the guest of honor among a few dozen friends. The lunch was hosted by Truman’s old friend, the mayor of Independence and a local grocer named Roger Sermon. Outside, reporters paced and littered the sidewalk with cigarette butts, unaware that they were about to fall victim to a clever ruse.
Truman excused himself from the lunch table to go to the bathroom. Three Secret Service men escorted him out the back door to a car, and together they motored out of town. The only other person along was Truman’s personal doctor, Wallace Graham. Truman had informed almost no one as to where he was going. One of the people he told was his old friend Tom L. Evans, a local radio station and drugstore chain owner. Evans had helped raise money for Truman’s campaign, and now on Election Day, the stress had caused him to suffer from severe abdominal pain. “Boy,” he recalled, “those ulcers of mine and that day in ’48 were turning over and upside down and everything.” Evans would be one of the very few who would be permitted to call Truman at the place he was going—a secret hideaway.
The president’s car motored over a bridge past the Missouri River and up to the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, about twenty-five miles from Independence. For sixty years people had come from all around to the Elms to soothe health problems in the hotel’s pools of warm natural spring water. The sprawling hotel was nearly vacant on this Tuesday night. The president checked into a room on the third floor picked out for him by the Secret Service. He had himself a Turkish bath, then ate a ham sandwich with a glass of milk in his room while he listened to the radio. He had left Independence without any baggage, so he was wearing a bathrobe and slippers borrowed from the hotel. While there is no mention of any whiskey in any surviving record, it is hard to imagine that Truman did not have a thimble of his favorite drink—bourbon and branch water.
“We didn’t talk any about the election [that night],” remembered Dr. Graham. “He wasn’t concerned one iota, not a bit. We talked fairly late that evening and went to bed and that’s all there was to it.”
* * *
In the afternoon of November 2, Dewey’s black limousine cut through traffic headed north to the Ninety-Third Street apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Straus. The Deweys had an election-night tradition—a lavish meal with their friends, the Strauses, and perhaps a round of cards with the radio on. Mrs. Straus served a feast: consommé, roast duck, cauliflower, peas, fried apples, and blueberry pie. Then the Deweys motored back to the Roosevelt to listen to the returns on radio and watch the first-ever election-night television broadcast.
The hallways of the Roosevelt were crawling with police officers. On the mezzanine floor, GOP campaigners busied themselves setting up for the victory party in a huge ballroom. Dewey was expected to appear at 9 p.m. in the ballroom, but for now he remained on a couch in his suite, his mother sitting on his left and his wife across from him. ABC was featuring pollster George Gallup and popular news personalities Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson on both its radio and television broadcasts. On NBC TV, pundits could be seen talking into cameras between puffs of tobacco smoke, pausing occasionally to thoughtfully toss their cigarette ashes onto the floor.
A long night awaited. The Deweys settled in—excited, expectant, and terribly nervous—not because of the outcome but because of the awesome responsibilities they believed would soon weigh on their shoulders. Sitting on a chair in the Deweys’ suite, a cop was focused on a crossword puzzle. Dewey’s mother, Annie Thomas Dewey, asked him, “How do you think it’s going to go? What do you think his chances are?”
The cop looked up and said, “It’s a hundred to one, Mrs. Dewey. He can’t lose.”
* * *
The first election return of November 2, 1948, came from the tiny hamlet of Hart’s Location in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where voters leaned conservative. A small group gathered at 7 a.m. in the dining room of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Burke. Voters were handed ballots and told to fill them out on whatever surface they could find. The voting took six minutes. When it was done, the tally was announced.
Far off in Kentucky, a student named Donald P. Miller would recall sitting in a lounge at Centre College with a political science professor, hearing that New Hampshire tally over the radio: “Five votes for Dewey, two for Truman.” The professor stood up and said, “That’s it. Truman will win. If he can get two out of seven votes in that little town in New Hampshire, he will win the election.”
* * *
Truman campaigners set up shop in the presidential suite on the eleventh floor of the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City. This suite with its many rooms had already seen its share of historic events. Four years earlier, Truman had played songs on the piano for crowds of drunken campaigners the night FDR won the 1944 election, the night Truman became vice president–elect. He had signed the Truman Doctrine into law in this hotel suite. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Truman himself had used this suite as a Kansas City office space.
Downstairs in the Muehlebach’s smoky lobby, exhausted Truman campaigners were loafing in chairs and on couches, catching some rest for the long night ahead. Hotel staff in white gloves and pressed uniforms darted about the place like minnows, emptying ashtrays and moving luggage. A special private elevator led up to the hotel’s presidential suite, and in front of that elevator, the presidential seal had already been placed on a stand, anticipating Truman’s arrival, whenever that would be.
One Truman campaigner was asked, “What do you think of the President’s chances?”
“One to two weeks more and he’d be a cinch,” came the answer.
Said another Truman campaigner: “I’m nearly dead, and if he doesn’t win I’ll want to die.”
“Crowds, crowds, crowds,” said another. “Tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands! How can he lose?”
Upstairs in the presidential suite, White House press secretary Charlie Ross milled about nervously, talking to reporters who were coming in and out. Ross’s deep, smokestack voice could be heard over the ringing telephones, which were being managed by White House secretaries Roberta Barrows, Grace Earle, and Louise Hachmeister. In a corner, four teletype machines had been set up next to a desk covered in typewriters.
In the early afternoon, the teletype machines began to churn and hum, pumping out paper—returns coming in from the first voting precincts on the East Coast. “It was a rather sober bunch of us that put up in the Muehlebach Hotel,” recalled Chicago Times reporter Carleton Kent. “I think it’s fair to say that those of us of the press corps who were in Kansas City were there to see the roof fall in on Mr. Truman.”
Outside the hotel on West Twelfth Street, in the afternoon hours, crowds began to steadily grow.
* * *
At Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel, chairman J. Howard McGrath sat at a huge conference table that had about thirty empty seats. In front of him were three telephones, which he would be manning through the night. The hallways and offices were full not of people but of gloom. The place was virtually empty. Outside McGrath’s office was a large room with teletype machines and tables with rows of sile
nt typewriters. When a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune stopped by, he found the publicist Jack Redding alone.
“Nobody here,” said the reporter, who looked embarrassed. It was clear he had been sent to write a story about the losing side. Redding would remember him as a “third string” journo.
“Not yet,” Redding said.
“Do you think this is the way it’ll be?”
“No. It won’t be this way. It’s early yet. The polls are still open here in the East. Everyone’s still working.”
“Then you think you have a chance?”
“Look, friend.” Redding was irritated. “You’re here to cover what your boss thinks is a losing cause. If he’s right you’ll get your story as it develops. And that story will be much better than any you can get from me. If your boss is wrong, and I think he is, you’ve got the top assignment of the day. What more can you ask? Now let me be.”
* * *
In the White House, the offices were nearly empty. Truman’s special aide for minority issues, Philleo Nash, and assistant press secretary Eben Ayers were alone and had the run of the place. “We had the President’s office with a TV, and the press office with a teletype, and a White House car, and the White House staff to bring us sandwiches and coffee, so we had a pretty good time,” Nash recalled. Ayers wrote in his diary that morning, “Were it not for all these predictions and the unanimity of the pollsters and experts, I would say the President has an excellent chance.” Ayers seized on one important factor: the economy, “the general prosperity of the country.”