Brief Summary of the 1948 Campaign

Truman sprang out of his car with his characteristic jauntiness, but at least one member of his entourage was reluctant to join him. Ed Flynn, "boss" of the Bronx and former Democratic national chairman, remained in his car seat. Donald S. Dawson, one of the President's aides, had to lock arms with Flynn and literally pull bim out of the car and up onto the platform. "I thought it was important for Flynn to be seen on the platform with the President," Dawson has recalled.1 Truman clearly needed all the local support he could get. But Flynn, a man who played politics to win, had an equally understandable desire not to be seen with a sure loser.

A few days earlier, in Chicago, Paul Douglas was riding in a car with Adlal Stevenson, on their way out to the stadium where Truman was to speak. Douglas was then a professor at the University of Chicago, making his first campaign for the Senate; Stevenson was the Democratic candidate for governor. Their car passed through the west side of town some time before Truman's motorcade was due; the streets were already packed four and five deep with silent spectators. The crowds were later to cheer enthusiastically when Truman appeared, but Douglas only witnessed the solemn, almost funereal hush-so different from the noisy mobs which had awaited Roosevelt in 1940. Moved by the contrast, Douglas remarked to Stevenson, "They have come out today to see the death of a dream that they cherish."

The dream, of course was that of Roosevelt's New Deal, soon to be effaced by a bland new era in American politics that would bear the name of Thomas E. Dewey.

Long before the campaign began, the certainty of Dewey's victory was almost universally accepted. On the eve of the Republican convention in June, the New York Times' James A. Hagerty, dean of American political writers, reported "the general conviction that the nominee of the convention will become the next President of the U.S." Prior to the Democratic convention in July, Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote that "if Truman is nominated, he will be forced to wage the loneliest campaign in recent history."

After the convention opened, Walter Lippmann commented that "Mr. Truman S insistence that he be nominated, though he has been repudiated by the active elements of his party . . . is remarkable as showing how the pomp and power of the Presidency can turn humility into stubborn pride."

After the campaign opened in September, many correspondents noted the warmth and friendliness of the crowds which Truman attracted, but saw no reason to revise their view that he was engaged in a hopeless and quixotic effort. In one of the memorable lines of 1948, Richard H. Rovere wrote in The New Yorker that the American people seemed willing to give Truman "just about anything he wants except the Presidency."

Governor Dewey shared the same judgment. He went about the country confidently delivering a serial paean to "unity" and carefully avoiding any mention of his opponent's name. "The governor of New York," Sidney Shallett aptly observed in the Saturday Evening Post, "talks not like a man who wants to be President, but like a man who already is President in everything but name, and who merely is awaiting the inaugural date before taking over."

For months, the three national polling organizations Gallup, Roper, Crossley periodicaliy reported that Dewey was leading Truman by a wide margin. As early as September 9, Elmo Roper announced that he was no longer going to publish a poll on the Presidential race. "Thomas E. Dewey," he declared, "is almost as good as elected . . . That being so, I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend he is witnessing a neck and neck race.

" Roper's judgment impressed the experts because of his own past performance: in 1936-the year scientific polling started in Presidential campaigns-his estimate of Roosevelt's popular vote was off by only 1.1 percent; by 1944, Roper's margin of error had been reduced to .3 percent.

The evidence of the polls seemed to be confirmed by an analysis of what had happened to the old Democratic coalition. Franklin D. Roosevelt's long tenancy in the White House had been basically grounded on the traditional Democratic control of the Solid South, plus a firm hold on the urban voters in the North who generally swung the electoral vote in the most populous states. Truman, by contrast, was harassed by both a right-wing revolt in the South and a left-wing revolt in the North and West. With the States' Rights party in the field, the Solid South had cracked beyond chance of immediate repair; Truman was clearly going to lose the electoral votes of at least four southern states-and perhaps more. In the North, he faced a similar breakaway from the newly created Progressive party of Henry Wallace, whose appeal was to the militantly liberal urban voters who had always favored F.D.R. No one gave Wallace a chance of winning the electoral vote of a single state; on the other hand, he was likely to attract enough votes from Truman in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and California to allow Dewey to take some or all of those states on a minority poll. In addition, Dewey was the favorite to win the traditionally Republican farm belt of the Midwest, where he had done well agalnst Roosevelt in 1944. It thus seemed impossible for Truman to put together a winning combination of electoral votes.

The psychological atmosphere of the campaign was also demoralizing to Democratic partisans. The Republicans were clearly on an upward spiral, having won control of the House and Senate in 1946. Such a midterm victory by the opposition party had traditionally foreshadowed a Presidential triumph at the next election. The Republicans were well financed, blessed with overwhelming press support, and stimulated by the certainty of a victory long overdue. The Democrats suffered from a malaise that could be traced back to that bleak day in April 1945 when F.D.R. had died. Truman's problem as a candidate, quite apart from the odds against him, was that he inspired disparagement even on the part of citizens who planned to vote for him out of party loyalty, fear of the Republicans, or a simple sense of faute de mieux. Measured against the towering memories of F.D.R., he had always been a puny figure. There was no commanding presence about him and when he read a speech, in his flat, staccato manner, the only emotion he seemed sure to arouse was ennui. The common tag of derision applied to Truman was "ex-haberdasher," as if there was something disreputable as well as ridiculous in having once sold gents' furnishings.

As Truman's campaign progressed, periodic expressions of confidence did come, to be sure, from Senator J. Howard McGrath, the Democratic national chairman, but such statements were part of the ritual expected of a national chairman. The President never wavered in his public display of confidence; his bravado won him a measure of admiration, as well as a good deal of ridicule, but it persuaded no one. His staff notably failed to share his confidencea fact not lost on the reporters traveling on the Truman campaign train.

The outcome seemed so certain that many journals printed Truman political obituary even before the votes were cast. On the eve of the election, Life declared that "the U.S. was about to ditch Truman and take Dewey for reasons that involved the brain as well as the emotions." Life wound up its eight-page story on the campaign with a handsome full-page picture of Governor and Mrs. Dewey, captioned, "The next President travels by ferry boat over the broad waters of San Francisco Bay."

Scoring what it no doubt regarded as a coup, the Kiplinger Magazine put its November issue to press with a bold-face cover entitled "What DEWEY will do-32-page feature complete in this issue." On election night, November 2, long before all the votes were counted, the Chicago Tribune published an early edition with the banner headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Eagerness to beat the competition also led to a number of morning-after appraisals penned too rashly the night before. Thus, Drew Pearson's widely syndicated column startled his readers, on November 3, with its opening assertion: "I surveyed the close-knit group around Tom Dewey, who will take over the White House 86 days from now." The piece went on to discuss Dewey's cabinet choices.

That same morning, the Alsop brothers published a sober essay which began, "The first post-election question is how the government can get through the next ten weeks. . . . Events will not wait patiently until Thomas E. Dewey officially replaces Harry S. Truman. Particularly in the fields of foreign and defense policy, somebody somewhere in Washington must have authority to give answers that will still be valid after Jan. 20." The Alsop brothers' solution was to have Dewey's State and Defense Department appointees immediately go on the government payroll as "special assistants" in order to work out a smooth transition of power.

Also troubled by the problem of the interregnum, the Detroit Free Press presented a bolder solution: Secretary of State George C. Marshall should resign and Truman should appoint John Foster Dulles, Dewey's candidate for the job, as his successor. "That would restore confidence in our foreign policy abroad and at home," the Free Press asserted. "True, that is asking a good deal of Mr. Truman. Yet these are times which, with all our unity and patriotism, will ask a great deal more of millions of other Americans." The Free Press also bestowed a few pleasantries on our "lame duck" President-"a game little fellow, who never sought the Presidency and was lost in it, but who went down fighting with all he had. . . ." The Free Press reassured its readers that Mr. Truman faced no dismal future: "There's first, the prospect of a $25,000 pension as a former President. Then there are all the radio contracts and the magazine articles and books which he can look forward to and which will net him a handsome incomeclose, they say, to a million. The path for him doesn't lead from the White House to the poor house."

It merely led right back to the White House. Although the outcome was not certain until the morning after the election, Truman's victory was overwhelming. He carried 28 states with 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 16 states with 189 electoral votes. Truman's popular vote was even more impressive-a margin of more than 2 million over Dewey, despite the fact that both the Progressive and States Rights' candidates each polled over 1.1 million votes, which would normally have gone to the Democratic candidate. As expected, Truman lost four states in the formerly Solid South. What was remarkable, however, was that he managed to win without the large blocks of electoral votes of such normally Democratic states as New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

It was the most astonishing political upset in modern times. How it occurred, how Truman managed to win out over the defeatism in his own party and the exuberant confidence of his adversaries, how he confounded the experts, embarrassed the pollsters, and at one stroke transformed the political atmosphere will all be examined in considerable detail in the pages that follow.

On the morrow of the election, the dramatic quality of Truman's victory was endlessly celebrated. The drama has hardly lessened, but with the passage of time the historic significance of 1948 emerges more clearly. To start with, the election proved that the Democratic party had become the nation's majority party. It became apparent that Democratic victories in the four preceding Presidential elections were not merely the result of adventitious circumstances, such as the impact of the great depression and the magnetic personality of Roosevelt. Instead, there had been a profound alteration in the political loyalties of the great mass of Americans, a shift of allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party. Truman's decisive victory in the popular vote, despite the many disadvantages he labored under, confirmed the fact that the nation's center of political gravity had shifted several degrees to the left.

Growing awareness that the Democratic party had become the majority party led to unexpected consequences for the Republicans. The first consequence was the emergence of the movement to nominate Eisenhower in 1952; there is a logical line of progression between the Truman upset and Eisenhower's successive victories in 1952 and 1956, as we shall have occasion to demonstrate. A similar connection exists between the events of 1948 and the Goldwater boom which began in 1961, reached fruition with his nomination in July 1964, and ended four months later in disaster. The Goldwater adventure was perhaps the most paradoxical consequence of 1948.

The 1948 election was of historic significance in a variety of other ways. It was the first time the Democrats won the Presidency despite the crackup of the Solid South; Kennedy in 1960 and Johnson in 1964 were later to repeat the feat. The southern defection occurred, of course, because in 1948 the issue of civil rights for the first time figured prominently in a Presidential election. It was Roosevelt who had broken the traditional Republican hold on the Negro vote, but his appeal had more to do with economic issues and his general aura of human brotherhood than with concrete legislative proposals to eliminate racial discrimination. Truman, with his civil rights program, introduced a new issue into Presidential politics whose potency was proven by an outpouring of Negro support which was of considerable importance in a number of states where the popular vote was close.

In 1948, as well, the labor movement became a more significant factor than it had ever been before in a Presidential election. It is true that in 1944, when the CIO's Political Action Committee was organized, the Republicans blew up a huge propaganda storm over labor's role. While the labor effort was helpful in 1944, it was of much greater importance in 1948, when Democratic party organization was weak and defeatist; in many parts of the country the only strong local organization was provided by the labor unions. Labor, of course, had no greater faith in Truman's chances of election than did the party leadership, but it was eager to elect liberal Democrats to the Senate and House of Representatives; its strenuous effort on the part of local candidates inevitably helped the national ticket.

And, finally, 1948 was the year when a whole new generation of political leaders first achieved national prominence. Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr., of Minnesota, after leading the dramatic civil rights fight at the Democratic convention, went on to win his first term as U.S. senator. In Illinois, Adlai Stevenson was elected governor and Paul Douglas U.S. senator; they had both been underdog candidates and they both achieved overwhelming victories.

In Michigan, G. Mennen Williams, a young man whose trademark was a green bow tie, was elected governor on the Democratic ticket; he was to serve in that office until 1961, longer than any other man in Michigan's history. In Connecticut, Democrat Chester Bowles was unexpectedly elected governor. Tennessee sent Estes Kefauver to the Senate, after a hard-fought campaign against the candidate of "Boss" Ed Crump of Memphis. And, although their victories hardly achieved any national celebrity at the time, the Senate class of 1948 also included three other newcomers, each notable in his own way-Louisiana's young Russell Long, the son of Huey; Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma; and Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, who won the Democratic primary by 87 votes, thereby becoming known as "Landslide Lyndon."

All in all, 1948 was quite a year.