5

Against All Odds

Harry Truman complained constantly about the burdens of the presidency. “Liars and demagogues,” in his words, abused him and he had little means to make them “behave.” He told his sister in November 1947 that “all the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”¹

He also repeatedly stated his readiness, indeed eagerness, to retire after his term was up. But the truth was that he loved political combat and relished beating opponents who had repeatedly underestimated him. He also believed—as did everyone who has ever run for the office—that he could serve the national well-being better than any of his competitors. And so he resolved to run to become president in his own name in 1948.

“The job agreed with him,” says David McCullough, and Truman’s close associates “were certain he would never willingly abandon it.” As had been the case earlier in his political career, he loved proving that he was up “to tasks seemingly too large for him … . He liked being in charge. It showed in his face and in the way he carried himself.”²

As 1948 began, the challenge was to find a winning political strategy. Whereas 1946 had been a difficult year, Truman’s fortunes had improved in 1947. His appointment of George Marshall as secretary of state and his announced plans to combat Communist threats by aiding Greece and Turkey and reconstructing Europe through the Marshall Plan—combined with the stumbles of the Republican-controlled Congress—boosted his standing with the public. Opinion polls showed majority support for his foreign policies and little regard for the legislative branch. By March 1947, 60 percent of those responding to a Gallup poll endorsed the way the president was doing his job, and the number hovered there for the rest of the year.³

In designing a political strategy for the coming election, Truman relied on a November 1947 memorandum by Clark Clifford, his White House counsel, and James Rowe, a former White House aide to Roosevelt, which concluded that only a strong appeal to the New Deal base seemed likely to carry Truman to victory in 1948. Because the South had so consistently voted for Democratic presidential candidates since Reconstruction and because the South was so warmly supportive of the president’s strong anti-Soviet actions, Clifford and Rowe believed that Truman could take the region for granted. “As always, the South can be considered safely Democratic,” they wrote. “And in formulating national policy, it can be safely ignored.”⁴

Instead, Clifford and Rowe focused on the threat to Truman from the left or liberals, who were, at best, lukewarm toward the president. The Left considered Truman unlikely to expand upon the New Deal reforms and were troubled by Henry Wallace’s firing and by Truman’s failure to sustain Roosevelt’s friendly wartime relations with the Soviet Union. It was increasingly likely that the liberals would look for an alternative Democratic candidate for the presidency. And if this failed, a reduced liberal turnout at the polls could jeopardize Truman’s chances in November. While liberals were not great in numbers, Clifford and Rowe asserted, they were the most articulate members of society and carried influence with millions of Americans.

The Clifford-Rowe memo also emphasized the importance of reaching out to middle-class Americans by reining in inflation and easing a housing shortage, as well as to farmers, who would shape the outcome in the West, and African Americans in northern and midwestern cities, where they could make the difference in crucial states such as New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan.

The memo accurately predicted that Wallace’s “Messianic belief” that “he is the indispensable man” would draw him into a thirdparty candidacy.⁵ On December 29, 1947, Wallace announced his decision to run. The date, which was unusually early for a presidential declaration, and Wallace’s lack of any party structure for a coming campaign bore out the description of him as an impractical idealist on an evangelical mission. He described his followers as a “Gideon’s Army, small in number, powerful in conviction, ready for action,” and predicted that “by God’s grace, the people’s peace will usher in the century of the common man.”⁶

Although Clifford and Rowe considered Wallace something of a crackpot, they feared that he could appeal to “gullible idealists.” More specifically, Truman’s challenge was to blunt Wallace’s attraction to liberals by using the “bully pulpit” of the White House to announce reform initiatives that would firmly identify the president as battling the conservative Republican Congress.

The vehicle for launching the president’s campaign was his State of the Union address on January 7. The president struck all the right notes with liberals and the broad middle classes: a “poor man’s” tax cut; a 35-cent increase in the minimum wage (to 75 cents); federal appropriations to help expand affordable housing; increased price supports for farmers; greater spending on public education; a national health insurance program; and new conservation and public power initiatives.⁷

Truman had no illusions that the Republicans would give him any of what he asked, except for generous funding of the Marshall Plan. Nevertheless, he shared Clifford’s view that his message was less a substantive design for an expanded New Deal than a call to arms in the coming election fight.

However attractive liberals might find Truman’s rekindled passion for building on Roosevelt’s legacy, it was not enough to persuade them that the president was recommitted to their cause. And they too saw little likelihood that any of his proposals would be enacted.

A promise at the end of Truman’s speech that he would send Congress a special message about civil rights was another matter. No issue opened a greater divide between liberals and southern Democrats than federal action on behalf of equal protection under the law for African Americans. Lynchings, denial of the ballot box, and use of state and local police authority across the South to enforce institutional racism offended most Americans. But it especially outraged liberals, who saw it as a fundamental blight on traditional American commitments to the rule of law and equality of opportunity, not to mention the embarrassment in the emerging contest with the Soviet Union for hearts and minds among peoples of color all over the world.

On February 2, Truman fulfilled his promise by asking Congress to enact comprehensive civil rights legislation. It was an unprecedented presidential request. He urged an antilynching law; expanded protection for the right to vote and elimination in particular of poll taxes that denied blacks access to the polls in seven southern states; a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission; and an end to racial discrimination on interstate transportation facilities. He also promised to issue executive orders ending segregation in the federal government and in the armed services.

The military was a particularly glaring example of national indifference to equal opportunity and rights for African Americans. Although nearly 11 percent of enlisted men in the army were black, there was only one black colonel, who was the highest-ranking member of his race in the army. The same was true of the air force and the navy, where black officers were notable for their absence. Clark Clifford said the navy “resembled a southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.”⁸

Truman understood that his message would receive a negative and even angry reception across the South. But he was shaken by the vehemence of the response. Southern politicians led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina told the press that the Democrats could no longer take his region for granted. In one of the more memorable printable attacks, the Mississippi House Speaker called Truman’s message “damnable, communistic, unconstitutional, anti-American, anti-Southern legislation.”⁹ Inflammatory rhetoric filled the air waves across the South and letters poured into the White House full of invective toward the president and anyone associated with his proposals.

Truman meant what he said when he pressed the case for equality under the law. Even though he was a man with southern roots, whose ancestors had served the Confederate cause and who hailed from a part of Missouri that reflected southern mores on matters of race, he was nonetheless offended by the abuse suffered by blacks in the South. It particularly outraged him that the local authorities turned a blind eye to mob violence, including lynchings and maiming of black veterans. When a Missouri friend urged him to be cautious about provoking southern whites, Truman replied: “When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [surrounding] country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.”

Yet the hostile southern response to his proposals weighed on him, and he held off sending Congress a comprehensive civil rights bill incorporating his various recommendations. Since the combination of influential southern Democrats and conservative Republicans ensured that Congress wouldn’t act on the president’s requests anyway, he could rationalize not sending up a bill. But his failure to take executive action during the winter and spring on desegregating the armed forces renewed liberal doubts about his commitment to their agenda.¹⁰

In the first six months of 1948, however, Truman had much more to think about than domestic tensions and his reelection. Communist challenges in Europe and Asia threatened America’s allies and raised the specter of a possible war with the Soviet Union.

After Truman had announced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the Soviets saw the United States as launching an aggressive campaign to challenge their influence in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. In response, Stalin tightened Soviet control over Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria by purging non-Communists from their respective governments and forcing some of them to flee their countries, if they were lucky enough to escape execution or imprisonment.

Czechoslovakia and Germany were Moscow’s greatest concerns. In February and March, in Prague, where there was a representative elected government, the Soviets forced non-Communist ministers from office; the pro-Western president Edvard BeneD, who was in poor health, resigned; and Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister, another friend of the West and democracy, was alleged to have committed suicide by leaping from his high-rise office. But the truth was that Soviet agents murdered him.

Moscow was especially agitated by a meeting in London from February 23 to March 6 between U.S. and Western European officials about establishing a West German state in the American, British, and French occupation zones. Nothing terrified Soviet leaders more than a revived Germany with the potential once more to become an economic and military power in Central Europe. Equally worrisome, from Moscow’s perspective, was the announcement on March 17 of a fifty-year mutual defense agreement among Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Moscow saw this agreement, known as the Brussels Pact, not as a defensive pact but as an offensive alliance aimed against the Communist countries in the East.¹¹

On March 17, as news of the Brussels Pact spread, the president went before a joint session of Congress to denounce the Communist destruction of Czech democracy and to emphasize America’s determination to meet the Soviet challenge. He asked Congress to fully fund the Marshall Plan, enact a Universal Military Training law, and reinstate the draft. Although politics was certainly not the principal motive for the speech, his rhetoric was also calculated to raise his standing with potential voters.

It was clear to Truman and his campaign advisers that a tough anti-Communist line would be a considerable asset in the upcoming election fight. He reverted to the language of the Truman Doctrine, in which he described a struggle between worldwide communism and democracy that only a committed America could help likeminded peoples win. His evangelism was even more evident in a speech he gave that night in New York, where he reiterated his requests to Congress, depicted the United States as engaged in a battle between a godless East and a devout West—a contest between tyranny and freedom—and added a denunciation of “Henry Wallace and his Communists” for whom there was no place in the Democratic Party.

The president’s speeches deepened East-West tensions, signaling the end of any hope that the two sides would trust each other—if any such possibility had ever realistically existed.¹² What each side saw as defensive actions to prevent its adversary from gaining an advantage, the other side considered acts of aggression. Such distrust is a formula for long-term conflict. And by 1948, U.S.-Soviet tensions were in full bloom.

On March 20, when the Allied Control Council for Germany met in Berlin, the meeting degenerated into an acrimonious debate over Germany’s future. The Soviet military representative denounced the United States, Britain, and France for moving toward West German autonomy without regard for Moscow’s interests. In response, the Soviets declared their intention to abandon council discussions as useless in sustaining East-West agreements on the German occupation. On April 1, the Soviets notified the U.S. military authority that they would subject all Americans—military and civilian—to identity checks as they moved through the 110-mile corridor (within the Soviet occupation zone) that connected Berlin to the Western occupation zones. When the United States resisted the Soviet demands as a violation of its occupation rights and replaced road travel by a limited airlift of supplies into Berlin, the crisis quickly passed. But General Lucius Clay, the U.S. commander in Berlin, predicted that this was a foretaste of what the Allies could expect if they took steps to create a separate West German state.¹³

Tensions with the Soviet Union were not limited to Germany. In response to intelligence predicting that Moscow would pressure Norway to sign a mutual assistance agreement, which Oslo feared as a step toward being forced into the Soviet orbit, the Truman administration asked Congress to support a resolution approving U.S. participation in a regional military alliance for the North Atlantic that would become an expanded version of the Brussels Pact. With almost no debate, the Senate approved the proposal.

In June, after the Western powers issued a new single currency for the occupation zones in western Germany and then Berlin to rein in inflation, the Soviets, who saw this as a decisive step toward the creation of a West German state, announced a blockade of the Allied sectors of Berlin. All motor, rail, and river traffic from the West was barred, and electricity and food supplies from the East were also shut off to West Berlin.

The president faced a choice between ceding control of all of Berlin to Communist control, threatening military action to preserve Allied rights in the western sector of the city, or expanding the earlier airlift and relying on diplomacy to ultimately resolve the problem. Despite pressure from General Clay to act more aggressively, Truman chose to establish a daily airlift of some twenty-five hundred tons to maintain the two million residents of West Berlin for the indefinite future. Although it would take almost a year before the Soviets agreed to a resolution of the dispute, Truman was able not only to maintain the airlift but also to derive significant political and diplomatic benefits from the crisis. His resolve in the face of the Soviet threat boosted his public standing in the United States and encouraged European allies to believe that Washington would not abandon them to Moscow’s bullying.¹⁴

The tensions with Moscow ran concurrently with difficult decisions on how to manage the crisis over Palestine. National interests, domestic politics, and moral imperatives each played a part. As the issue of a permanent partition into a Jewish and Arab state came to a head in the first months of 1948, the State Department opposed U.S. recognition of the Jewish state, emphasizing the importance of maintaining Middle East oil supplies for America’s European allies. Secretary of State Marshall and his subordinates also warned that offering such recognition would permanently oblige the United States to defend the Jewish state and antagonize millions of Arabs, who might then turn to the Soviet Union for support.

Clark Clifford urged the president not to recoil from a commitment that could have serious domestic repercussions. He predicted that the Arab countries, which were so dependent on oil revenues, could not afford to shut down supplies to the West and would find little appeal in aligning themselves with the Communist superpower, which suppressed the religious practices of its own Muslim populations.

In March, as an intermediate response to these crosscurrents in the United States and the continuing violence in Palestine, Marshall, who believed he had the president’s approval, directed the State Department to propose UN truce arrangements and a trusteeship that would forestall any partition. The proposals had no appeal to the contesting forces in Palestine and angered American Jews, who saw the administration as retreating from its promised support of a Jewish state and predicted Truman’s defeat in the November election. The president disingenuously denied having authorized the action.

A battle now erupted at the White House between Clifford and Marshall over recognizing the nascent Jewish state, which fighting in Palestine demonstrated would now come into existence upon the British withdrawal on May 15, regardless of what the United States did.

The president sided with Clifford and decided on prompt recognition. He did not see how the United States could prevent partition, and it seemed only sensible to benefit politically from a reality it could not alter. Moreover, a Gallup poll showed 65 percent of Americans in favor of Palestine partition with only 10 percent opposed. As the historian Melvyn Leffler asserts, “U.S. officials could not dictate developments in the region. Jewish leaders would not accept trusteeship. Arab governments would not accept a truce if it envisioned Israeli independence. Why not, then, profit politically and recognize Israel? Why not, then, fulfill one’s humanitarian instincts to assist the survivors of Hitler’s camps?”¹⁵ It would also prevent Moscow, which was allowing the Czechs to supply arms to the Jews in Palestine, from gaining influence in the new Jewish state without necessarily ensuring that U.S. recognition would expand Soviet influence among the Arabs.

While the establishment of Israel in May, which Truman promptly recognized, settled immediate questions about how to proceed, it left new issues unresolved: what support should Washington provide to Israel in a war for its survival with Arab neighbors and what should the United States accept as the boundaries of the new state? Inevitably, these became involved in the presidential campaign.

Beginning in the spring of 1948, everything Truman did had consequences for the election. Despite his outspoken responses to domestic and foreign problems, his public standing gave little hope that he could win in November. His appeal for civil rights reforms, the most visible of his domestic actions, had fallen flat, and had made him especially unpopular in the South. Nor did his response to the various foreign policy problems help his national standing. Polls showed him losing to three likely Republican challengers, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. Only the conservative senator Robert Taft of Ohio seemed unlikely to beat him.¹⁶ When the Republican convention met in June in Philadelphia, Clare Boothe Luce, the prominent congresswoman and wife of Henry Luce, the conservative publisher of Time magazine, addressed the delegates. She confidently described Truman’s “situation as hopeless. Frankly, he is a gone goose.”¹⁷ For the first time in sixteen years, the Republicans believed that they would restore their party’s control over the White House.

Truman badly needed something to kick-start his campaign. An invitation to speak at the University of California at Berkeley became an opportunity for a cross-country precampaign tour. The idea was to travel slowly across the United States by train, which would make frequent stops and give the president an opportunity to speak to local crowds drawn by the chance to see and hear the president in person.

Truman lived, worked, and spoke from the last car of the train, which his aides dubbed the Ferdinand Magellan, suggesting an exploratory adventure. The car included a rear platform with a lectern and loudspeakers and room for a handful of dignitaries to stand beside him, which made the president seem less like a remote Washington figure than an associate of each town’s local officials.

The distinguishing feature of the two-week trip was thus not the six formal addresses Truman gave along the way at venues in big cities, but the informal, seemingly extemporaneous talks at the stations or “whistle stops,” which was code for insignificant communities, as Senator Taft derisively called them, that struck resonant chords with thousands of people.

As Truman’s biographer Alonzo Hamby described the typical scene:

The president began a talk by alluding to some bit of local history … . He always introduced Bess (the “Boss”) and Margaret (the “Boss’s Boss”), giving the crowd a look at the womenfolk and a sense of his model middle-class family. He always displayed his customary smile and increasingly seemed to take a genuine delight in his fleeting contacts with the average Americans who came down to the station; many of them, in turn, saw someone who might be running a local bank or small business: decent, respected, well traveled, but not much different from themselves.¹⁸

Observers noted how effective these informal (once, at a latenight stop in California, he appeared in bathrobe and pajamas) offthe-cuff talks were and how much people in the crowd warmed to him. “Pour it on,” someone shouted at a stop in the Northwest, where the president lambasted the “worst,” “do-nothing,” “good-fornothing” Republican Congress. “I’m going to—I’m going to,” he shouted back.

It was estimated that three million people saw him on his two-week trip through eighteen states. When he got off the train at Union Station in Washington on June 18, Time described him as “full of bounce.”¹⁹

He needed all the self-confidence he could muster. After the Republicans nominated Dewey at their convention and bolstered the ticket by making the popular California governor Earl Warren his running mate, a poll showed the president at a continuing elevenpoint disadvantage in a contest with Dewey.²⁰ Worse, the Democrats headed into their July convention as a fragmented party. Southern stalwarts wanted no part of Truman, and liberals, who had not already bolted to back Henry Wallace, openly advocated drafting General Dwight Eisenhower as the party’s nominee.²¹ Harold Ickes privately urged Truman to drop out of the running. “You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity,” he told the president, “or being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry.”²²

Yet Truman remained confident that he would get the nomination and win the election. Few agreed with him. The Democratic delegates who came to Philadelphia, McCullough notes, “looked … like nothing so much as mourners at a funeral.” Catching the mood of the visiting Democrats, a cabdriver declared, “We got the wrong rigs for this convention. They shoulda given us hearses.” A keynote speech by the seventy-one-year-old senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky gave a spark of life to the gathering with a barn-burner address that recalled Franklin Roosevelt’s twelve years of New Deal gains as a contrast with past and current Republican failings. The speech did more than ignite some enthusiasm among delegates; it won Barkley the vice presidential nomination. Truman’s first choice had been the liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, but Douglas preferred to stay on the Court.

For all the intraparty doubts about Truman’s candidacy, he was nominated on the first ballot, with only token opposition from southern delegates supporting Senator Richard Russell of Georgia.

The convention’s most dramatic moments came with a fight over the party’s platform on civil rights. Hubert Humphrey, the young and voluble mayor of Minneapolis, led an impassioned revolt against what he and his fellow liberals considered an ambiguous, restrained statement on the subject that was designed more to appease southerners than to right a historic wrong. In a floor fight demanding fullthroated backing for the president’s package of civil rights reforms, Humphrey and the liberals won majority support for the party, in his words, “to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

When Truman came before the exhausted delegates to accept the nomination at two in the morning on July 15, neither the late hour nor the drama of Humphrey’s civil rights coup dampened his determination to turn the moment into a demonstration of his conviction that he could lead his party to victory in November. Having seen how effective his informal remarks on his recent train trip had been, he adopted the same style in a speech that lambasted the Republicans for offering empty promises and surprised the delegates and the media by announcing that he would call a special congressional session on July 26. He declared his intention to challenge the Republicans to fulfill Dewey’s promises to halt inflation, ease the housing shortage, aid education, and enact civil rights reforms. It was a brilliant maneuver that threw his opponents on the defensive and gave everyone the feeling that Harry Truman had emerged as a true leader ready for a hard fight that he expected to win.

Yet Truman’s fight had just begun. Two days after the Democrats ended their convention, the southerners formally bolted the party. Announcing the formation of a new political party, which became known as the “Dixiecrats,” the southern Democrats nominated Strom Thurmond for president and pledged to preserve segregation. The southerners’ goal was to win enough electoral votes to force the election into the House of Representatives. At the same time, Henry Wallace presided over the Progressive Party convention, which formally nominated him for president and attacked Truman’s foreign policy as a prescription for another war. Despite the obvious political liability, Wallace refused to reject the support of the Communist Party of America, which, he said, shared his views on world peace.²³

Truman’s attention, however, was on the special session of Congress. The president appeared before the House of Representatives on July 26 to repeat his request for the reforms he had demanded in his convention speech. Over the next two weeks, the Congress, in defiance of the president, accomplished almost nothing, which gave Truman exactly what he wanted—a demonstration that the Republicans were unwilling or incapable of dealing with major domestic problems. In part to underscore his differences with the “do-nothing” Republicans, the president issued executive orders that fulfilled his promises to integrate the armed forces and end segregation in the federal civil service.²⁴

As Truman looked forward to the fall campaign beginning in September, he found good news and bad news. The good news was that a solid majority of voters saw the Republican Congress as doing only a fair or poor job, and a slim majority believed the Democrats could do a better job of handling the nation’s most important problems. The public also largely supported the president’s civil rights initiatives, favoring federal jurisdiction to deal with lynching crimes and the abolition of poll taxes that impeded black voting.²⁵

The bad news was that Dewey led consistently in most of the polls. Pre-September polls showed Dewey with a ten- to twelvepoint advantage. Even in New York, which all observers agreed was essential for a Truman victory, the electorate favored their native son by 42 percent to 32 percent, with 14 percent backing Wallace.²⁶

In October, the polls, the newspapers, the political pundits, and leaders in both parties gave Truman little chance of winning. But Truman was undeterred. He consistently hammered on the “do-nothing” Congress and the Republicans as the party of Herbert Hoover, a party that had failed to overcome the Depression and refused to accommodate itself to Roosevelt’s New Deal gains that had served so many millions of current voters. And of no small consequence, Truman came across to most Americans as a man who didn’t need to be president to feel good about himself. He was like most of them—plainspoken, hardworking, flawed, decent, and honest. It was a rare combination in politics, one that Dewey could not match.

Dewey was a stiff-backed character whose mustache, homburg hats, well-groomed looks, and uninspiring speaking style left people cold. The political commentator Richard Rovere described Dewey as someone who came onstage “like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind.” People made fun of him as the groom on the wedding cake or the only man who could strut sitting down. By contrast, Truman impressed one columnist as someone with “an agreeable warm heartedness and simplicity” that was “genuine.”

More than personality made the difference, however. Believing he was well ahead and assured of a victory, Dewey saw little point in mounting an aggressive campaign against an opponent who was beaten anyway. Instead of launching a sustained attack against what many viewed as America’s setbacks in the burgeoning cold war or blaming inflation and housing shortages on Truman’s policies, Dewey spoke passively about the administration’s shortcomings, fearful that beating up on someone who was so much of an underdog might do him more harm than good.

To almost everyone’s amazement on Election Day, Truman defeated Dewey by more than two million popular votes, winning twenty-eight states to Dewey’s sixteen and Thurmond’s four, decisively beating Dewey in the Electoral College by a 303 to 189 margin. The Democrats also regained control of both houses of Congress.

Embarrassed pollsters explained their miscalculation by saying that they stopped polling too soon or failed to track shifts in voter sentiment in the last days of the campaign, when a seismic shift had occurred. But the American people, and not the pollsters, had spoken, and they rewarded Harry Truman with a four-year term not as Franklin Roosevelt’s successor but as the man who deserved to be president in his own right.²⁷