In the summer of 1944, Missouri senator Harry S. Truman was nominated by the Democratic Party for the vice presidency, joining the ticket that sought to reelect for a fourth term the incumbent president Franklin Roosevelt. At the nominating convention held in Chicago that summer, Senator Truman issued a brief statement accepting the nomination. Well over a month later, Truman gave a second, longer acceptance speech at an event in his birthplace of Lamar, Missouri, in which, while stressing the need to reelect FDR owing to the president’s experience, leadership, and intimate knowledge of the war, he observed, “The end of hostilities may come suddenly. Decisions that will determine our future for years, and even generations to come, will have to be made quickly. If they are made quickly and wisely by those who have had years of experience and the fullest opportunities to become well informed with respect to our national and international problems, we can have confidence that the next generation will not have to spill its blood to rectify our mistakes and failures.”
In sharing these thoughts, Truman was emphasizing the need for experience in the Oval Office, the experience that was guaranteed in the reelection of the incumbent president, the implication being that his opposition, Republican candidate Thomas Dewey, could not bring that same guarantee to the presidency, given the nature of the times and what was at stake. Truman further remarked, “It takes time for anyone to familiarize himself with a new job. This is particularly true of the presidency of the United States, the most difficult and complex job in the world. . . . There will be no time to learn, and mistakes once made cannot be unmade.”
Truman’s observations were widely shared. Even though some were uncomfortable with the prospect of a four-term president, and others were concerned over the health of a visibly aging, physically weakened Roosevelt, the argument that the president’s unmatched experience was vital, given the dangers of the times and the demands of the war, was a persuasive one. One could not fight Hitler and the Japanese Empire, or meet with Churchill and Stalin, without the confidence, probity, and fortitude that come from the experience of having braved terrible ordeals and the maturity that follows the necessities of hard decision. Questions of health and ideological differences could not outweigh that one fact. Few people seriously believed that Dewey could bring to the war what Roosevelt had and still could. Within eight months, Harry Truman, elected as the thirty-fourth vice president of the United States, came into intimate knowledge of the meaning behind the rhetoric; just eighty-two days after his inauguration as the vice president, President Roosevelt passed away, and Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States.
The war, while drawing to a close in Europe, was still raging in the Pacific, and while the military might of the United States had nearly destroyed the Japanese Imperial Navy, Japanese forces bravely fought with a resolution and ferocity that indicated they were far from defeat. Thus into the fray, the newly inaugurated President Truman, a capable senator and skilled politician, came to his responsibilities every bit as inexperienced as the Republican challenger of whom he spoke in that acceptance speech at Lamar. He was now faced with continuing the leadership of the American forces as they concluded the most destructive war in history, and the responsibility of diplomatically dealing with the strong leadership of the United States’ allies, and in particular Josef Stalin. As the fighting in the Pacific seemed to intensify even as the Nazis fell in Europe, Truman found himself facing one of the more momentous decisions that had ever been expected of any world leader, let alone an American president. The decision, the use of newly invented atomic weapons against the Japanese homeland, finally ended the horrors of World War II, ushering in the “atomic age,” and within just four months of his inauguration, thrusting upon President Truman the kind of responsibility that no man, regardless of experience, temperament, and character, should have to bear. But bear it Truman did; the plain-spoken, unassuming son of Missouri farmers, former army captain (having served with distinction during World War I), former businessman and product of Missouri’s Pendergast political machine, became the first (and, it can only be hoped, the only) world leader ever to order the deployment of nuclear weapons, a dread decision that was spared his beloved predecessor. With the war over, President Truman now turned to managing a new peace won through an unimaginable sacrifice drawn from the peoples of many nations, confronting a resurgent Republican Party, and absorbing the petty discontents that were brewing throughout the political landscape.
With the war won and the Great Depression over, the Republicans finally recaptured a majority in Congress for the first time since 1930. The GOP had been making gradual gains over the past few election cycles, and it finally broke the Democratic majority during the 1946 midterms. While the Democrats still held the White House, Congressional Republicans outnumbered the Democrats 246 to 188 in the House of Representatives, and 51 to 45 in the Senate. The transition from wartime to a peacetime economy created a multitude of problems for the young Truman administration. With the end to wartime wage and price controls, inflation soared as the demand of American consumers, tired of wartime rationing and frugality, drove increased prices for scarce consumer goods. Seeking to protect wages, labor unions called a record number of strikes. In response to labor unrest, a Republican-led Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which prohibited labor unions from making campaign contributions to candidates for federal office and authorized states to pass right-to-work laws. With the labor unions agitated, disunity was now more evident within the Democratic Party; the liberal wing was displeased with Truman over his antagonistic stance toward labor, an important bloc within the Roosevelt Coalition. Liberals feared that as former Roosevelt appointees within the executive branch were replaced by more moderate and conservative Truman appointees, the New Deal was being abandoned by the new administration.
Equally important, by the beginning of the 1948 campaign, the euphoria associated with the end of World War II and the establishment of the United Nations gave way to a cold war between the United States and its former ally, the Soviet Union. Concern increased over the activities of communist subversives inside the United States. While the Republican Party for the most part strongly supported new domestic security measures, liberal Democrats expressed reservations about the potential impact of such measures on the civil liberties of American citizens. Additionally, Southern Democrats were aggravated by Truman’s open sympathies with the African American community and his support of recommendations offered by his Committee on Civil Rights, which conservative Democrats perceived as too radical and a sign of ingratitude, given their support of Truman for the vice presidency over then-incumbent Henry Wallace at the convention of 1944. Southern conservatives interpreted Truman’s actions as a cynical attempt to curry the African American vote in the North, and for the first time since the end of Reconstruction, it appeared that the southern bloc, the Democratic Party’s most reliable reservoir of electoral power, might now be in play, jeopardizing the party’s plans to retain the White House.
Worst of all, Truman’s popularity had greatly suffered. In April 1948, during the early weeks of the campaign season, polls indicated that the president’s approval rating had dipped to just 36 percent, nineteen percentage points below more favorable numbers that he had enjoyed as recently as the previous October. In another poll asking respondents to indicate who they thought would serve as the most effective president, only 11 percent selected Truman, with 24 percent naming General Dwight D. Eisenhower, even though he was openly disinterested. Since the conclusion of the war, Eisenhower had been courted by both parties, and many in the Democratic Party saw in the general a stronger, more capable leader than the president. Eisenhower, who kept his party affinities to himself, eventually announced that he was a Republican, but in late 1947–early 1948, an effort to dump Truman for Eisenhower was set in motion, and even after Eisenhower refused to accept any nomination from either party, some still worked for that result well into spring.
Thus Truman was vulnerable on many fronts; nonetheless, when the Democratic convention opened in Philadelphia, he was the clear candidate to bear the Democratic standard. This was to a considerable extent the result of efforts by energetic and intelligent supporters on Truman’s behalf, led by prominent members of the president’s inner circle of advisers such as Clark Clifford and Charles S. Murphy, supportive members of Congress such as Rhode Island senator J. Howard McGrath (who also served as both the party’s national chairman and the president’s campaign manager), and key individuals in the party leadership such as the former party chair Robert Hannegan. With Eisenhower no longer an option, the only challenger to Truman was conservative senator Richard Russell of Georgia, but as events unfolded at the convention, Russell’s challenge was quickly blunted. Truman won the nomination on the first ballot, with Kentucky senator and veteran New Dealer Alben W. Barkley selected as the vice presidential nominee.
But Russell was the least of Truman’s worries. Even though Truman easily won the nomination on the first ballot, a remarkable recovery from the feeble approval ratings exhibited by the polls leading up to the convention, a battle ensued over the platform that caused a full breach within the party. Now that the war was over, liberal Democrats (particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest) intensified their focus on the issue of civil rights, particularly for African Americans; and at the convention, the liberal wing of the party proposed and succeeded in securing the adoption of a progressive civil rights plank that exceeded the plank added in 1944:
The Democratic Party is responsible for the great civil rights gains made in recent years in eliminating unfair and illegal discrimination based on race, creed or color. The Democratic Party commits itself to continuing its efforts to eradicate all racial, religious and economic discrimination. We again state our belief that racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws, on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution. We highly commend President Harry S. Truman for his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights. We call upon the Congress to support our President in guaranteeing these basic and fundamental American Principles: (1) the right of full and equal political participation; (2) the right to equal opportunity of employment; (3) the right of security of person; (4) and the right of equal treatment in the service and defense of our nation. (American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara)
The latter clause referring to military service was a direct endorsement of President Truman’s Executive Order 9981, which had formerly desegregated the U.S. military, although the process of desegregation had already incrementally begun during World War II under the leadership of both the late President Roosevelt (counseled by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt) and General Eisenhower. Truman, who was satisfied with the party’s 1944 platform on issues of this nature, was regarded by most within the party as a moderate on civil rights, but his decision to officially desegregate the entire military is regarded by many historians as the first of many significant postwar steps in the civil rights movement. Southern conservatives were frustrated with Truman, causing them to turn to leaders such as Senator Russell, who unabashedly sought to preserve racial segregation. Thus a simmering discontent between the liberal wing and the conservative, Southern wing percolated into the national convention, intensified by the proposed civil rights plank, and brought to a boil by the eloquence of the progressive mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey, an ebullient rising star within the party. Humphrey’s stirring speech galvanized pro-civil rights delegates, and that, in prompting the passage of their plank, also prompted a number of Southern conservatives to walk out of the convention, leaving those who remained steeled in their opposition against both the platform and the president. Led by South Carolina’s Governor J. Strom Thurmond, these bolting Southern conservative Democrats, known as “Dixiecrats” (or formally, the States’ Rights Democratic Party), would convene their own convention in Birmingham and nominate Thurmond as their candidate for president, tapping Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi as his running mate. Strongly defending the practice of segregation, the Dixiecrat platform warned that increased federal power put the nation on course toward a totalitarian police state. Not mincing words, the Dixiecrats averred, “We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.” With the defection of the Dixiecrats, an important affiliate of the Roosevelt Coalition had now become alienated, and the Democrats’ traditional and virtually unbreakable hold on the South (which reached back to the end of Reconstruction) was slipping away.
To make matters even worse for the president and the Democratic Party in general, a movement to revive the Progressive Party (which had not run a presidential candidate since Senator La Follette’s campaign in 1924) drew more votes away from the liberal side of the Democratic Party, nominating former vice president Henry Wallace to carry its standard in the general election. Thus elements of both the left and right wings of the party were shaved off, leaving a divided and weakened party to confront the more unified Republican challenge, which, given the evidence of the polls, promised to come in full strength.
There was less drama at the Republican convention held in Philadelphia, the first national convention to be broadcast over television, but it was not without its own divisions. New York governor Thomas R. Dewey, the GOP’s nominee against President Roosevelt in 1944, came into the convention riding a wave of momentum that was the result of his winning an important radio debate against his competitors during the Oregon primary. But a number of influential party leaders—among them Harold Stassen, the former governor of Minnesota; “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio; and Michigan’s venerated senator Arthur Vandenberg—were still able to attract attention and together worked to block a Dewey movement. During the primaries, Dewey’s support was tepid, showing a distant fourth, winning only 11.5 percent among those voting in the candidate preference polls, just ahead of entrepreneur and prizefighter Riley Bender of Illinois, who polled 11.3 percent, and well behind the leader, Governor Earl Warren of California (27%), who was followed by Stassen (22%) and Taft (16%). But the Oregon campaign and radio debate boosted Dewey back into the spotlight, and when the convention was gaveled to order, he was perceived as holding the best position.
The Stassen-Taft-Vandenberg alliance against Dewey failed to produce an alternative candidate, causing each of them to guardedly retain his delegates and independently engage against Dewey’s rising tide. (Vandenberg managed less than 1% of the preference vote in the primaries but was nonetheless an esteemed figure and was thus able to pull some influence on the convention floor.) Dewey, a veteran of two campaigns for the GOP nomination, winning in 1944, had the better campaign organization and was well prepared to counter the alliance against him. On the first ballot, Dewey won 434 votes to Taft’s 224, Stassen’s 157, and Vandenberg’s 62. Warren, who showed strongest in the primaries, came in fifth with 59. The remainder of the field consisted of seven candidates, none of them winning more than 56 votes. On the second ballot, Dewey gained strength, winning 515 delegates, at which point Senator Taft withdrew, thereby guaranteeing Dewey’s nomination, which was unanimously affirmed on the third ballot. Governor Warren, the leader in the primaries whose growing popularity had drawn attention from party leaders, was then selected to join Dewey as his running mate. With no one bolting from the GOP convention, and the party in the end exhibiting a unity that the Democrats clearly seemed to have lost, the Republicans were optimistic as they moved into the general election, a confidence that was verified in the media, where Dewey’s impending victory seemed no less than a fait accompli.
From the close of the conventions to the eve of Election Day, all the indicators predicted a Dewey landslide. Truman responded by campaigning tirelessly, engaging in a whistle-stop campaign that has become legendary in the annals of American politics. Beginning in September and covering more than 30,000 miles by rail, making as many as eight speeches a day at a total of 201 stops as he moved from town to town, Truman’s cross-country tour effectively brought the message and, more importantly, the fighting character of the undaunted president to the people. Senator Barkley also stumped aggressively; as the president took to the rails, Barkley took to the air, becoming one of the earliest candidates to make frequent use of air travel during a presidential campaign. As he journeyed throughout the lower forty-eight, Truman’s plain-speaking, hard-hitting, candid, and occasionally colorful delivery worked well in his favor, and his attacks on the “do-nothing Republican Congress” made for good press. The president did not hesitate to target his opponent, ridiculing Dewey’s campaign for its failure to deliver nothing more than “soothing syrup” to the voters. Much in the style of William Jennings Bryan, Truman positioned himself as the friend of working men and women. At every stop, Truman supporters would yell, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” To counter Dewey’s financial advantage, the Truman campaign depended upon organized labor to get out the Democratic vote. Overcoming past resentment, Truman managed to finally win over labor, calling for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act that had been passed over his veto the previous year. Throughout the campaign, Truman returned to his roots as the true heir to President Roosevelt, arguing that a Republican victory would threaten the very survival of the important New Deal programs that had been established by Democrats and since accepted by moderate and liberal Republicans. He pledged to continue the New Deal system of farm price supports and, steeled against the Dixiecrat bolters, urged the passage of new civil rights laws.
With a large war chest, the Dewey campaign had almost unlimited funds to convey its message to the voters. As in the past, however, Dewey proved to be his own worst enemy. To many voters, Dewey still came across as cold and calculating. At each campaign stop, Dewey repeated the same rote stump speech with little emotion. He frequently repeated bland lines such as “Your future lies ahead of you” (as if one’s future could possibly be behind one), and he claimed that when he got to Washington, he “would do the greatest pruning and weeding operation in American history” by cutting the size of government. To his credit, he stumped hard and earnestly; but as he had in 1944, Dewey annoyed his audiences by ending sentences with the word “period,” and he continued to come off as priggish and self-important. “The only man who could strut sitting down,” one wag cracked; “A man you had to really get to know to dislike,” commented another. Equally important, Dewey made a series of campaign gaffes that permitted Truman to punctuate the image of Dewey as unapproachable and uncaring. The most famous of the Dewey gaffes took place in early October 1948, when Dewey was speaking from the back of his own campaign train. The train suddenly lurched backward toward the crowd. Surprised, Dewey responded by telling the crowd, “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer. He probably ought to be shot at sunrise but I guess we can let him off because no one was hurt.” Meant to be a joke, the awkward comment was widely reported, and Truman and his supporters gleefully used the incident to portray Dewey as no friend of the working man. Responding to Dewey’s comment, Truman wryly observed that his rival “objects to having engineers back up. He doesn’t mention that under that great engineer, Hoover, we backed up into the worst depression in history.”
Dewey, wanting to remain above the fray in the model of his former rival, the incomparable President Roosevelt, made every effort to ignore Truman’s jibes. But eventually he lost his forbearance and was goaded to react, accusing the president of slinging mud and resorting to allegations of communists and fellow travelers in the Truman administration. Even so, on the eve of the election, the polls continued to forecast a Dewey victory and the press spoke quite confidently of a “Dewey Presidency.” Pundits and analysts wrote columns speculating on the configuration of Dewey’s cabinet, and journalists were already referring to Dewey as “our next president.” Even Truman himself was braced for defeat, quietly slipping away to his hometown of Independence, Missouri, to await the election returns, while Dewey camped out in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, primed to celebrate his impending victory. But that victory never came; “President-Elect Dewey” did not materialize.
As the first returns came in just after the polls closed, President Truman surprisingly showed a slight lead. Nonetheless, pollsters and journalists were so persuaded that Dewey’s election was inevitable that these early indicators were universally dismissed. Newspapers casually went to press declaring that Dewey had been elected as the next president. But as the following day dawned and all the returns were in, the final count in both the popular vote and the Electoral College revealed the contrary—President Truman had been, against all prior signs and indicators, convincingly elected to another term. In a famous photograph snapped the day after the election, a grinning and triumphant President Truman held up the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune, its headline boldly declaring, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” But to the embarrassment of the Tribune’s editors, such was not the case: Truman won just over 24,180,000 popular votes (49.5%) to Dewey’s total of slightly under 22,000,000 (45%), which in comparison to his 1944 campaign against FDR was actually a slight reduction. Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat ticket managed just under 1,200,000 votes, while Wallace’s Progressive ticket took approximately 160,000 votes, and the Socialist Party’s eternal candidate Norman Thomas won around 140,000 votes.
The Dixiecrat effort had hurt the Democrats, as Dixiecrats took away four traditionally Democratic states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Thurmond’s home state of South Carolina. After Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose campaign (which won six states in 1912), it was to that date the second-best showing in the Electoral College enjoyed by any third party (not counting the four-way elections of 1828 and 1860). The final Electoral College tally was 303 for Truman, 189 for Dewey, and 39 for Thurmond. Dewey did take Pennsylvania and his home state of New York, winning also all of New England except Massachusetts (which had, since its support of Al Smith in 1928, converted from a Republican bastion to a Democratic one, which it remains to this day), and swapping Ohio (won in 1944, lost in 1948) for Michigan (lost in 1944, won in 1948). Republicans gained Oregon but lost to the Democrats Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Intermountain states of Colorado and Wyoming.
As one pundit remarked, Dewey, who by all signs should have defeated the incumbent, “extracted defeat from the jaws of victory.” Truman became the first candidate since Woodrow Wilson to be elected president without a popular majority but rather with a popular plurality, mustering 49.5 percent of the electorate (Wilson’s plurality was slightly below 42% in the multiparty race of 1912). And with Truman, the Democratic Party returned to the pattern of winning the White House without gaining a simple majority (i.e., at least 50.1%), a trend going back to 1852 that Franklin Roosevelt had broken (four times) but that now seemed to have resurfaced. In any event, instead of finding himself moving toward retirement as he had anticipated, the president now prepared for a second term, one in which he would build on Roosevelt’s New Deal with his own “Fair Deal,” and one in which he would, like Roosevelt, face the hard challenges of open war.
The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
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Truman Presidential Museum and Library. “Project Whistlestop.” http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop.