by Michael Liss
Our Government is made up of the people. You are the Government. I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants. I can’t order you around, or send you to labor camps, or have your heads cut off if you don’t agree with me politically. We don’t believe in that. —Harry S. Truman, “Whistle-Stop” speech, San Antonio, Texas, September 28, 1948
He was going to lose and lose big. “Dewey Defeats Truman” seemed more a certainty than what later became a meme. Trailing badly in political polls, dismissed by savvy media figures, beset by multiple crises, both foreign and domestic, he was written off by elected officials even in his own party, who feared he would take down the entire ticket. Perhaps the only person who, in the summer of 1948, actually believed Harry Truman could win in November was Harry Truman.
Why he believed this is hard to say, but why his doubters doubted makes perfect sense: Truman was widely seen as a mediocrity, a product of a corrupt local political machine, undereducated (the first President since McKinley not to have a college degree), a former haberdasher, and even a bankrupt. Perhaps above all, Truman was a commoner, and commoners did not become Presidents, at least not in the 20th Century.
It was an accident that Truman was in this situation. He was FDR’s third Vice President in four terms. Roosevelt’s first, John Nance Gardner, served two terms before the two men had a falling out. Gardner’s replacement, Henry Wallace, was brilliant, accomplished, eloquent, and ultimately what can only be described as a flake. Roosevelt, showing that ice-in-the-veins quality of which he was capable, had others deliver the message to Wallace that he wanted a change. FDR had a favorite choice as well: James Byrnes, whom he had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1941, then convinced to return to the Executive Branch to help with the war effort. But Byrnes had some liabilities—he was perceived as anti-labor, and, while Senator, had helped spearhead Southern opposition to a federal anti-lynching law. For these reasons, FDR considered but ultimately rejected Speaker Sam Rayburn (Texas), and finally turned to Truman. Truman seemed safe, if not particularly distinguished. He had performed well on an important Senate committee looking at the budget (it came to be known as the Truman Committee). He was also liked, a hard worker, a person to be trusted, a loyal Party man, and, well, if not quite Presidential timber, it wasn’t going to be a long-term and possibly even a consequential choice. Truman it would be, if he could get the nomination.
In those days, the Conventions and not primaries would decide the nominees (at least for non-incumbents), and the Conventions were the place where men of immense local power heavily influenced the selection of the nominees. Wallace had loyalists, and Wallace had a devoted following that approached cult status. The 1944 Convention first rhapsodically greeted FDR’s bid for a fourth term, and then got down to grappling with the choice of Veep. The trick at a Convention was to keep the frontrunner from amassing enough votes to win in the first round. If you could manage that, you could convince uncommitted/favorite son/powerbroker-controlled delegations to flip afterwards. How you did that—through strategic use of the Convention’s Chair’s gavel, who got tickets, whom the Chair would recognize, when adjournments could be taken, and sheer influence peddling was not for the faint of heart. Wallace might have had enthusiasm, but the Truman forces had the Chair (Sam Rayburn) and many more strings to pull. On the second ballot, after a dizzying number of yanks, Truman got the nod.
The strategy behind this was both clear and deeply puzzling. The public did not know of Roosevelt’s health problems, but certainly the insiders did. They had to be aware that whoever became Vice-President had very good chance of “inheriting” the Presidency. If Wallace was too wild for many (and he was, being way out there on issues like relations with Russia and domestic policy, including Civil Rights), Truman was untested and lackluster.
Consciously or not, FDR’s approach to Truman reflected that evaluation. We all know that FDR kept the development of the Atomic bomb away from Truman before his death. More generally, though, he kept Truman at arm’s length, even where he might have been useful, such as acting as liaison to Congress. It’s difficult to be certain why he did that—it may have been his sense of Truman’s skills and limitations, perhaps mixed with a confidence (or at least a hope) that he, FDR, could physically soldier on long enough to make the issue moot. It’s an interesting, if abstract question: Did FDR run for a fourth term because he thought he would survive it or was he already counting on the war’s end and thought he needed to be there to make the crucial decisions, regardless of whether he would last the full four years? To place this in time, it was two years into the Manhattan Project, and the Convention itself occurred the month after D-Day.
April 12, 1945, less than three months into that fourth term, FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Truman became the nation’s 33rd President. All Presidents step into the shoes (and messes) of their predecessors. Truman’s happened to be an extraordinarily complex one. Truman got a honeymoon period (and earned it). V-E and V-J Day passed; the boys were finally coming home; families were being reunited. His approval rating from Gallup was at 75% in late November 1945, still quite strong, but the signs of deterioration were already apparent. Truman had invited FDR’s Cabinet to stay on, but many of the prominent New Dealers, the talented and energetic idea men, drifted away, some quietly, some angrily. To the extent they were in official positions and had to be replaced, some of Truman’s choices were a tad parochial. The media noticed and began to push the trope of a small-town politician in a job too big for small-town politicians.
On top of these “political’ issues, plenty of real-world ones challenged Truman. At home, America had sacrificed: 16 million had served in the armed forces, industry had converted to a wartime economy, and there were shortages of just about everything, including necessities like food and housing. Europe was in rubble. The Russians had ideas about dominating Eastern Europe and Joe Stalin was not a man who fainted at the idea of conflict. Labor Unions became more aggressive in seeking raises, industry pushed back, and strikes (or threats of strikes) affecting major sectors of the economy became common. Truman was pro-labor, but not pro-strike. On November 21, 1945, the UAW went out on a 113-day strike—over 300,000 men left the factories and got on the picket lines. Other unions threatened similar actions. By summer of 1946, five million people, many in essential industries, had gone on strike for higher pay and better working conditions. Most crucially, the Railroad Workers struck in May of 1946, stranding people and products, including perishables, just where they were. Negotiations became acrimonious, and Truman went to Congress to ask for the authority to order the Army to draft striking workers—surely an unconstitutional assertion of power.
Labor reeled and seethed. Truman’s popularity dropped to 63% by February 1946, by April he was down to 50%, and the downward trendline continued through the spring and summer.
November 5, 1946, the Midterm Elections. Truman’s approval was in the thirties, and Democrats got hammered. Republicans picked up 12 Senate seats and 55 House seats, flipping both chambers. In fact, the damage was greater than that, because the “Solid South” was still solidly Democratic, but deeply conservative. With a few significant exceptions (notably its approval of the Marshall Plan and backing of the Berlin Airlift), 1947’s 80th Congress would be overwhelmingly hostile to most of Truman’s policies, particularly his New-Deal-like domestic policies.
Let’s fast-forward to spring 1948, with the country careening among crises, and, both unfairly and quite appropriately, pointing fingers at Truman. Truman wanted to run again. Many in his party disagreed. Privately, he was advised not to run. Not so privately, even those who recognized that much of the chaos that surrounded the country was not of his making and not totally within his control, wanted him gone. The Democrats were being pulled in three directions at the same time. Southern Democrats were aggressively resisting the Party’s (and Truman’s) move on Civil Rights. They threatened to bolt—and, if they did, up to 102 Electoral Votes could go out the door, sending the election to the House and making a Democratic victory in 1948 impossible without massive concessions that would alienate Blacks and other Civil Rights supporters. From the Left, former Veep Henry Wallace was leading the Progressives, and, for them, Truman was an unworthy heir to FDR, not truly committed to New Deal policies and unwilling to take the next steps that Wallace was openly articulating. If the Progressives were even modestly successful, they could do as much or even more damage than the Dixiecrats, by pulling away enough votes in winnable swing states to hand them over to Dewey.
Even beyond the Dixiecrats and Progressives, Truman had a third threat that could have ended his candidacy before it began. A special kind of opposition was coming from within. In early July 1948, 19 Democratic party movers and shakers, led by James Roosevelt (FDR’s oldest son and head of the California Delegation) and including then-Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey, sent telegrams to 1592 Delegates asking them to nominate the person they thought would make the strongest candidate—Dwight D. Eisenhower.
This would have been an enormous challenge to Truman, but for one thing—Ike wasn’t a Democrat. He also, at least publicly, was not a Republican, and, despite enormous pressure to accept, he firmly closed it off. Still, the intra-Party opposition to Truman didn’t cease—some of the same men tried to convince Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to run, but he, too, firmly turned them down.
So, it was to be Truman? Still, resistance, and some party insiders and Democratic thought leaders tried to appeal to his sense of duty…he must refuse the nomination for the good of the Party and the country.
They underestimated Truman, as Dewey and his team did, as almost every member of what we would now call the chattering class did, and even as many of those closest to him did. What the small-town politician lacked in polish he more than made up in sheer determination. First, he brought divided, exhausted Democrats to their feet with a 2:00 a.m. barnburner of an acceptance speech. Then he called Congress into special session beginning July 26th to consider legislation he said was essential and that the “Do-nothing” 80th had refused to consider. Finally, he simply decided to close his ears to the naysayers, the “experts” who told him he wasn’t worthy of the job and had absolutely no chance of beating Tom Dewey.
Harry was taking his show on the road. He got on a mighty train, the custom-made, heavily armored Presidential car, the “Ferdinand Magellan,” and accompanied by staff and roughly 50 members of the press, headed out to meet the voters. If Harry Truman was going to go down, it wasn’t going to be through lack of effort. “I want to see the people,” he had said. He meant it literally. Truman wanted them to know that he was thinking about them, that he shared their values, that he understood the challenges they faced. He and his team plotted three big runs—a cross-country one that took him to California, a move back to the Midwest for six days, and finally a ten-day trip to the major industrial centers of the Northeast. Then, back to Washington before a trip home to Missouri to vote and watch the returns.
Truman wanted more than the set-piece speeches in arenas in large population centers. And he wanted more stops as well. He realized something that both the Dewey brain trust and the media hadn’t grasped. People like to see and they also like to be seen. That meant stopping in small towns and rural railroad junctions. You could see Truman in big places like Cincinnati and St. Paul, and little ones like Fostoria, OH and Tolano, IL. Each place they stopped, Truman would get out on the rear platform of his car and speak, no matter how big the crowd. Go to the National Railroad Hall of Fame’s website and you can see the extraordinary number of places, literally in the hundreds, some just depots or crossings with fewer than a thousand residents. Stops brought words from Truman, sometimes a stump speech, sometimes one of a more personal nature, and almost always culminating with a glimpse of his wife Bess and daughter Margaret. The crowds loved it. Truman dressed in suits and ties, but his manner was local. He could talk about plowing because he grew up on a farm. He could talk about the stress of operating a small business because he’d done that himself—and failed. It wasn’t all spontaneous: he had a team of researchers who identified local issues for him, but it was often extemporaneous. There was another aspect to this type of campaigning, and perhaps to Truman’s regular-man style. Reports of hecklers are almost non-existent. His listeners understood the difference between political rhetoric and person-to-person communication. A man comes to your house, nonjudgmental as to whether you are rich or poor, meek or powerful; you feel his respect, and you give respect back. Dewey just couldn’t manage it, and neither could the majority of the press following both men. The amazing thing about Truman’s crowds is that they were so large they couldn’t possibly consist of only his supporters. Some of this was curiosity for sure—in a time before widespread television ownership (just one percent of households had a television), if you wanted to see the man in the flesh rather than a grainy newspaper photo, you had to go in person. But more of it was genuine interest and a desire to participate. You didn’t have to shout “Give’em hell, Harry” to be there. You could be an adult and judge for yourself whether you wanted to give Truman your vote. His promise to you was simple—he respected you enough to ask for it, and, if you gave it, he would never take it for granted.
What about Dewey? He was certain of victory—after all, he was so much the better man. He didn’t start campaigning until September 19—in hindsight, an astonishing lapse, but one that went almost unnoticed at the time. The game was essentially over. The press, the pundits, the professionals all called it for Dewey, and why not? Elmo Roper, the distinguished pollster, wrote on September 9th that Dewey held a 44.2% to 31.4% lead, and “Thomas E. Dewey is as almost good as elected.”
Dewey’s team meticulously planned his strategy—speeches that sounded high-minded, given in places and before audiences that would appreciate the honor he was bestowing upon them. He had his own train, the “Dewey Victory Special,” and it was a lot classier a ride for the press. Dewey’s train had a sound system so reporters could hear his speeches without needing to leave the car. On Truman’s ride, if you wanted to listen, you hustled to the back of the train, like his audiences did. Truman’s retinue washed their own clothes and carried their own bags. Dewey’s had things taken care of for them. The only car on the Ferdinand Magellan that had air conditioning was Truman’s. On the Dewey Victory Special, the reporters sat in cool comfort, with plenty of booze on hand to ease any boredom.
What’s fascinating about the whole tour is that the magician didn’t hide his tricks. His rival and his critics saw what he was doing, but wrote it off as corny, and just not convincing. Even the reporters who traveled with both men, who could see the difference in crowd size and crowd reaction, found it easy to explain it away.
Explanations or not, something was happening. Truman kept at it, over more than 30,000 railroad miles and more than 350 stops and speeches (as compared to Dewey’s 40). At one point, Truman and a few members of his team jumped off the train for a 140-mile road trip through parts of rural Kentucky that hadn’t voted Democratic in recent memory. He spent four days in Texas, 24 stops, 25 speeches, knowing that Texas was a state he could not afford to lose. At some point between Texas and Oklahoma, the campaign ran out of money and had to do an impromptu fundraiser on the spot, or the train could not continue.
Ohio might have been a great bellwether as to what was going on. Dewey had actually defeated FDR there in 1944, albeit by a narrow margin, helped by the farm vote. The Dewey camp barely paid it attention in 1948, thinking little of Truman. But Truman was convinced he could win it, so on just one swing, he made 11 stops, going deeply into rural areas. Ohio’s farmers sized up the little man who could make a horse-driven plow cut a straight furrow and thought he was the real deal.
None of this seemed to make a dent in the ongoing narrative of Dewey’s inevitability. On October 12th, Newsweek published a poll of 50 pundits, columnists and political reporters, including some who had ridden the rails with Truman and seen his crowds, and had also been with Dewey and seen his smaller and less enthusiastic ones. Not one of the 50 picked Truman to win.
Truman kept going, relentlessly. He seemed inexhaustible—his staff couldn’t keep up with him. Stop after stop, speech after speech, Truman rode on, and the doubters kept saying no. What he understood was something they seemed to have forgotten—that the farm couple, the taxi driver, the factory worker, got just as many votes as the Harvard-educated banker did. Over and over the reporters watched the enthusiasm, and over and over they discarded it as a mirage.
Something clearly was happening, if there were eyes to see. Dewey was privately advised that the farm vote might be moving in Truman’s direction, but either ignored the information or failed to act on it. His campaign chief, Herbert Brownell, checked with roughly 20 local campaign heads and found that all but one advised staying the course. Through late October, the Truman momentum continued to build. Crowds were immense and shouted themselves hoarse. Two final polls, from Gallup and Crossley showed the Dewey margin down to five, but five was still enough for a decisive victory.
October 29, Truman arrived in New York City, landing in a lap of love. Literally millions came out to see him—at a ticker tape parade, at small open-air speeches in places like Union Square and big ones like Madison Square Garden, and in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. New York was Dewey’s home state and considered a certainty, but Truman was going to fight him for every vote.
Election Day, November 2, 1948. Truman and Bess voted, and then Truman did something quite extraordinary. With a couple of Secret Service men, he snuck out of the family home and went to a resort, the Excelsior Springs, for a Turkish Bath and some rest. The hordes, including reporters, surrounding his house, didn’t know he’d left.
Turnout was big, and, by 4:30 p.m., Brownell was declaring victory. Six Secret Service men arrived at Dewey’s suite at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan to tend to the new President. The networks expected to call it by 9 p.m., but held back in caution as Truman was holding on in much of the South and performing more strongly in the Midwest than expected. Truman, by the way, was sleeping.
Midnight, Missouri time, and Truman woke up, turned on the radio, and heard from pundit H.V. Kaltenborn that, while Truman was then winning the popular vote by 1.2 million, he could not possibly win the election once the rural vote was counted. By 4 a.m., Kaltenborn announced that the lead had grown to 2 million, but Truman really had no hope.
10:30 a.m. on November 3rd, and Dewey awoke to the unreality of hearing that Truman had won California, Illinois…and Ohio. It was over. Truman had pulled it off, a rabbit out of one of those hats in which he was constantly photographed. Dewey conceded by telegram at 11:14.
In the end, Truman won 304 Electoral votes, from 28 states; Dewey 189 Electoral votes, from 16 states; the Dixiecrats just 39 Electoral votes, from four states; and Henry Wallace’s Progressives no Electoral Votes, and less than 2.5% of the popular vote. The race was actually excruciatingly close—and particularly in California, Illinois and Ohio, where Truman got his margin of victory.
The following day, Truman returned to Washington, greeted by crowds estimated at 750,000.
As his car passed the Washington Post building, he noticed a huge sign hung from the windows:
“MR. PRESIDENT, WE ARE READY TO EAT CROW WHENEVER YOU ARE READY TO SERVE IT.”