It will be the greatest campaign any President ever made.
Win, lose, or draw people will know where I stand….
—Truman to his sister, autumn 1948
I
The Ferdinand Magellan was the only private railroad car ever fitted out for the exclusive use of the President of the United States. Eighty-three feet in length and painted the standard dark green of the Pullman Company, it had been built originally in 1928 as one of several luxury cars named for famous explorers—Marco Polo, David Livingstone, Robert Peary—then taken over by the government for Franklin Roosevelt’s use during wartime, in 1942, when it was completely overhauled to become a rolling fortress.
The windows were three-inch, bulletproof glass, the entire car sheathed in armor plate—sides, top, bottom, ends, and doors—with the result that it weighed a colossal 142½ tons, or as much as a locomotive, Special trucks and wheels had to be built to carry the weight.
For security reasons during the war, only the word “Pullman” appeared on the outside, and still, in 1948, the only distinguishing exterior features were the presidential seal fixed to the rear platform and three loudspeakers mounted on top of the platform roof.
Inside everything was designed for comfort. At the forward end were galley, pantry, servants’ quarters, and an oak-paneled dining room, which doubled as a conference room for the President, this furnished with china cabinets, a mahogany dining table, and six matching chairs upholstered p in gold-and-green striped damask. Beyond, down a side aisle, were four staterooms, marked A, B, C, and D, the two middle rooms, B and C, forming the Presidential Suite with joining bath and shower. Stateroom B, for the First Lady, was a pale peach color. Stateroom C, the President’s room, had blue-green walls and carpet and satin chrome fixtures.
Past the staterooms, at the rear, was the observation lounge with blue and brown chairs and a blue sofa, walls covered with an attractive light brown tufted material resembling leather, blue velvet curtains at the windows and at the door opening onto the rear platform. The carpeting was dark green.
The whole car was air-conditioned—to its immense weight under way were added some 6,000 pounds of ice for the cooling system—and each room had a telephone that could be hooked up to a trackside outlet whenever the train was standing at a station.
To Truman, who loved trains and loved seeing the country, it was the perfect way to travel, and one he had enjoyed frequently since becoming President. There had been the memorable night of poker with Churchill on the way to Missouri for the “iron curtain” speech, the long “nonpolitical” swing west in June. More recently, he had made a quick one-day tour of Michigan for a Labor Day speech at Detroit’s Cadillac Square, to open his campaign for reelection. Yet for all the miles covered, the days and nights spent on board the Magellan, these prior expeditions had been only prologue to the odyssey that began the morning of Friday, September 17, 1948, when the Magellan, at the end of a seventeen-car special train, stood waiting on Track 15 beneath the cavernous shed of Washington’s Union Station. In June, he had gone 9,000 miles. Now, on what was to become famous as the Whistle-stop Campaign, he would travel all told 21,928 miles, as far nearly as around the world—as far nearly as the voyage of Magellan.
The idea was his own. “I want to see the people,” he had said. There would be three major tours: first cross-country to California again, for fifteen days; then a six-day tour of the Middle West; followed by a final, hard-hitting ten days in the big population centers of the Northeast and a return trip home to Missouri.
“There were no deep-hid schemes, no devious plans,” remembered Charlie Ross, “nothing that could be called, in the language of political analysts, ‘high strategy.’ ” The President would simply take his case to the country in a grueling, no-quarter contest. Mileage meant crowds.
According to Ross, it had been Truman’s original intention to go into all forty-eight states, including those of the Deep South. “He rather relished the prospect effacing up to the Dixiecrats on their homegrounds.” (How did he expect to be received in the South, Truman was asked. “Why with courtesy, of course,” he replied.)
The idea of a Southern trip held appeal [wrote Ross], because it would show that the Boss had courage, but the plan was ultimately ruled out on the ground that every ounce of energy should be used in places where material political gain might be expected. The political courage of the President had already been amply demonstrated.
So for a total of thirty-three days, more than a month, the Magellan was to be center stage for a fast-rolling political roadshow, which, as was said, had but one act and that one act built around just one performer. “We play more towns than the World of Mirth or Brunk’s Comedians…and we work longer hours,” an accompanying reporter would write. For Truman, away from the White House, the big private car would be home, office, presidential command center, campaign headquarters, and the place where, day after day, he would somehow, bravely, almost inconceivably keep hope alive.
No President in history had ever gone so far in quest of support from the people, or with less cause for the effort, to judge by informed opinion. Nor would any presidential candidate ever again attempt such a campaign by railroad.
As a test of his skills and judgment as a professional politician, not to say his stamina and disposition at age sixty-four, it would be like no other experience in his long, often difficult career, as he himself understood perfectly. More than any other event in his public life, or in his presidency thus far, it would reveal the kind of man he was.
“It’s going to be tough on everybody,” he told the staff. “But that’s the way it’s got to be. I know I can take it. I’m only afraid that I’ll kill some of my staff—and I like you all very much and I don’t want to do that.”
The rest of the train was made up of diners, lounges, sleepers, a press car, a dynamo car for power, and a communications car (a converted baggage car operated by the Signal Corps), where radio teletype would provide continuous contact with Washington and thus the rest of the world, a point of critical importance to Truman, who had become more and more uneasy over the situation in Berlin. “I have a terrible feeling…that we are very close to war,” he had written privately the night of September 13.
Security would be a major undertaking. Every grade crossing would have to be checked in advance by the Secret Service. A pilot train—a single locomotive and one car—would run five miles ahead of the President’s train to “absorb” any possible trouble. The railroad official in charge, who had been handling presidential trips since the time of Warren G. Harding, admitted he was a nervous wreck. “Every grade crossing has to be manned when the train passes and I just can’t tell you how many switches have to be spiked until we’ve moved on,” he told a reporter. Once rolling the train would travel under the code name “POTUS,” for “President of the United States,” which gave it the right of way everywhere in the country.
Truman liked to move fast. Roosevelt, because of his infirmities, had preferred a smooth, easy pace of no more than 35 miles an hour when traveling in the Magellan. Truman liked to go about 80.
A cheer went up from the moderate-sized crowd gathered at the Union Station platform, the sound echoing under the vaulted roof as his limousine, easing through a break in the crowd, pulled right to the gate. Truman stepped out looking “positively buoyant,” Margaret close behind. Marshall and Barkley had come to see him off. The First Lady would catch up with the caravan at Des Moines.
Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, Matt Connelly, George Elsey, Charlie Murphy, White House physician Wallace Graham, and Rose Conway, the President’s secretary, were all present and waiting to go on board, in addition to several White House stenographers, Jonathan Daniels, who would help with speeches, and three new speechwriters, David M. Noyes, Albert Z. Carr, and John Franklin Carter. Bill Boyle of Kansas City, an old Truman friend and aid who had served on the Truman Committee, would, like Matt Connelly, be handling political chores.
Counting the whole staff, the Secret Service detail, forty-four reporters and five photographers, the complete entourage numbered some seventy people. The one notable, absentee was Harry Vaughan, who would remain out of sight—and out of contact with the press—for the duration of the campaign, at Truman’s request.
With everything ready, Truman and Barkley posed together on the rear platform for a few last pictures.
“Mow ‘em down, Harry,” Barkley exhorted.
“I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to give ‘em hell,” said Truman, setting the theme at the start.
The odds against him looked insurmountable. The handicaps of the Truman campaign, wrote columnist Marquis Childs, one of the writers on board, “loomed large as the Rocky Mountains.” Henry Wallace and the Dixiecrats had split the Democratic Party three ways. Conceivably, New York and the South were already lost to Truman. The victory of the Republicans in the elections of 1946 had been resounding, and ever since the Civil War, the party winning the off-year election had always gone on to win the presidency in the next election. At Washington dinner parties, as Bess Truman had heard, the talk was of who would be in the Dewey Cabinet. Some prominent Democrats in Washington were already offering their homes for sale. Even the President’s mother-in-law thought Dewey would win.
In the West, where Truman had made an all-out effort in June, predictions were that at best he might win 19 of the 71 electoral votes at stake. Only Arizona, with 4 votes, looked safe for Truman. And the West was essential.
A Gallup Poll of farm voters gave Dewey 48 percent, Truman 38. And the farm vote, too, was essential.
On September 9, a full week before Truman’s train departed Washington, Elmo Roper, a widely respected sampler of public opinion, had announced his organization would discontinue polling since the outcome was already so obvious. “My whole inclination,” Roper said, “is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and efforts to other things.” The latest Roper Poll showed Dewey leading by an “unbeatable” 44 to 31 percent. More important, said Roper, such elections were decided early.
Political campaigns are largely ritualistic…. All the evidence we have accumulated since 1936 tends to indicate that the man in the lead at the beginning of the campaign is the man who is the winner at the end of it…. The winner, it appears, clinches his victory early in the race and before he has uttered a word of campaign oratory.
The idea that the campaign was “largely ritualistic,” a formality only, became commonplace. Life, in its latest issue, carried a picture of Governor Dewey and his staff under the headline: “Albany Provides Preview of Dewey Administration.”
Yet, inexplicably, Truman had drawn tremendous crowds in Michigan on Labor Day. A hundred thousand people had filled Cadillac Square. By train and motorcade he rolled through Grand Rapids, Lansing, Hamtramck, Pontiac, and Flint, where to Truman and his staff the crowds were even more impressive. “Cadillac Square…that was organized,” remembered Matt Connelly. “But we rode from there up to Pontiac…[and] from Detroit to Pontiac I’d see people along the highway. This was not organized and there were a lot of them out there!” According to police estimates the turnout at Truman’s six stops in Michigan totaled more than half a million people.
Often, in later years, the big Truman crowds would be remembered as a phenomenon of the final weeks of the campaign. But this was a misconception. They were there from the start, in Michigan and in traditionally Republican Iowa—in Davenport, Iowa City, Grinnell, Des Moines—beginning September 18, his first full day heading west.
“Newsmen were nonplused,” reported Time. “All across Republican Iowa large crowds turned out…a good deal of the cheering was enthusiastic.”
The main event of the day was the National Plowing Contest at Dexter, forty miles west of Des Moines, where Truman spoke at noon, in blazing sunshine, standing front and center on a high, broad platform, a sea of faces before him, a giant plowing scoreboard behind. The crowd numbered ninety thousand.
The long horizons were rimmed with ripening corn. The atmosphere was of a vast county fair in good times, with throngs of healthy, well-fed, sun-baked and obviously prospering people enjoying the day, as dust swirled in a steady wind and more families arrived in new trucks and automobiles. Lined up in an adjoining field, their bright colors gleaming in the sun, were perhaps fifty private airplanes.
It was a Republican crowd. Iowa had a Republican governor. All eight Iowa representatives in Congress, and both senators, were Republicans. In the last presidential election Iowa’s ten electoral votes had gone to Dewey. But more important to Truman, nearly all his audience were farmers and in the Depression, he knew, Iowa farmers had voted for Roosevelt.
Years before, in 1934, when he had been running for the Senate the first time, a St. Louis reporter had written, “In a fight this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire.” Now at Dexter he ripped into the Republican “gluttons of privilege…cold men…cunning men,” in a way no one had heard a presidential candidate speak since the days of William Jennings Bryan. The difference between Republicans and Democrats was a difference in “attitude”:
You remember the big boom and the great crash of 1929. You remember that in 1932 the position of the farmer had become so desperate that there was actual violence in many farming communities. You remember that insurance companies and banks took over much of the land of small independent farmers—223,000 farmers lost their farms….
I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you?…
The Democratic Party represents the people. It is pledged to work for agriculture…. The Democratic Party puts human rights and human welfare first…. These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men.
They are cunning men…. They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship….
It was language that, to many, seemed oddly archaic and out of place in the midst of such obvious prosperity. The Des Moines Register would point to the “incongruity of being a prophet of doom to an audience in time of harvest of bumper crops.” Truman, it was said, was sadly miscast as the new Bryan, his speech “harsh and demagogic.” But he was leading to something quite specific.
In June, when rewriting the charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC)—the agency for federal farm loans—Congress had included an obscure provision prohibiting the CCC from acquiring additional grain-storage bins. It was meant as an economy measure. But since farmers were required to use storage facilities approved or maintained by the CCC in order to qualify for price supports, they stood to lose heavily in the event of wheat and corn crops too large for the existing facilities to handle. If there were no approved bins to store the surplus of a bumper yield, then for the farmers a bumper yield could mean not prosperity but heavy losses.
The bill had gone through unopposed by the Democrats and Truman had signed it. But that was in June when no one was paying it much attention. Now the prospect of a bumper year was no longer hypothetical. The corn harvest would not begin until October, but all that day crossing Iowa, since early morning, those on board the train had seen little else but corn in abundance. The talk in Iowa was of yields of 135 bushels to the acre.
It was the Republican Congress that rewrote the charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation, Truman now charged at Dexter. The Republican Congress, said Truman, had “stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.” Nor would the Republicans stop with limits on grain storage. The “whole structure of price supports” was in jeopardy.
“I’m not asking you to vote for me. Vote for yourselves,” he said, a theme he would strike over and over. To reporters covering the event, the huge crowd seemed friendly yet unmoved. But then who was to say.
Afterward, in a tent behind the platform, a perspiring President in his shirtsleeves pulled up a wooden folding chair to a long table with a red-check cloth and ate country fried chicken and prize-winning cake and pie with thirty farmers and their wives. Asked if he would please speak again, only on a more personal level this time, Truman agreed and returned to the platform.
Was it true he had once been able to plow the straightest furrows in his part of Missouri, he was asked. Yes, said Truman, but only according to an exceedingly partial witness, his mother. But he did have a reputation, he said, for never leaving a “skip place” when he sowed wheat. “My father always used to raise so much fuss about a skip place.”
He talked of the 12-inch, horse-drawn gang plow he rode at Grandview and how it had taken him sometimes four days to plow a field. He didn’t want to go back to those days. “I don’t want to turn back the clock. I don’t want to go back to the horse and buggy age, although some of our Republican friends do,” he said, and this brought a warm cheer.
“He was delightful and the people were delighted,” wrote Richard Rovere of The New Yorker, who had thought the earlier speech “deplorable.”
Truman had begun the day at 5:45. There had been six stops and six speeches before Dexter. After Dexter, he spoke at Des Moines, Melcher, and Chariton, Iowa. “At each stop,” reported the Des Moines Register, “the listeners massed for his rear platform talk were larger than the town’s population.”
“You stayed at home in 1946 and you got the 80th Congress, and you got just exactly what you deserved,” he said at Chariton. “You didn’t exercise your God-given right to control this country. Now you’re going to have another chance.”
He was on a crusade for the welfare of the everyday man, he said next, across the state line, at Trenton, Missouri. At Polo, Missouri, just after 8:00 P.M., he told the delighted crowd he had not been sure whether he would be able to stop there, but that the railroad had finally consented. It was his thirteenth speech of the day and he was sounding a little hoarse.
After a brief visit home Independence the next day, Sunday, September 19, he was on his way again. Crossing Kansas that night, the engineer had the train up to 105 miles per hour, which Truman, from his chair in the lounge, decided was too fast, considering the weight of the Magellanand what might happen to the forward cars should the engineer suddenly have to stop. Calmly, quietly, he asked Charlie Ross to send word to the engineer that there was no great hurry. Eighty miles an hour would do.
“Understand me, when I speak of what the Republicans have been doing. I’m not talking about the average Republican voter,” Truman told the twenty-five thousand people spread across the lawn of the State Capitol at Denver.
Nobody knows better than I that man for man, individually, most Republicans are fine people. But there’s a big distinction between the individual Republican voter and the policies of the Republican Party.
Something happens to Republican leaders when they get control of the Government…
Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests.
He had just one strategy—attack, attack, attack, carry the fight to the enemy’s camp. He hammered the Republicans relentlessly, in speeches at Grand Junction, Colorado, Helper, Springville, and Provo, Utah. “Selfish men have always tried to skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed. And…[their] instrument in this effort has always been the Republican Party,” he charged at Salt Lake City, to a standing-room-only crowd in the cavernous Mormon Tabernacle. At Ogden, he warned of “bloodsuckers who have offices in Wall Street.” The 80th Congress, he said at Reno, Nevada, was run by a “bunch of old mossbacks still living back in 1890.”
The country must not go backward, he would keep saying over and over, because he felt with all his heart that Americans were a forward-looking people and that his own program, as he had told Clark Clifford earlier, was a forward-looking program. If the old guard Republicans were to get control under a Republican administration, they would dismantle the progress made by the New Deal and in foreign affairs, retreat back into isolationism, which would be disastrous for the country and the world. He was certain of this and determined to keep it from happening.
To the crowd beside the Southern Pacific tracks at Roseville, California, he declared the Republican “do-nothing Congress tried to choke you to death in this valley,” by cutting off appropriations for publicly owned electric power lines. “You have got a terrible Congressman here in this district. He is one of the worst,” he told the citizens of Fresno, referring to Republican Bertrand W. Gearhart, who had once denounced George Marshall on the floor of the House.
One correspondent, Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, would later characterize the Truman campaign as “sharp speeches fairly criticizing Republican policy and defending New Deal liberalism mixed with sophistry, bunkum piled higher than haystacks, and demagoguery tooting merrily down the track.”
Truman was at his best speaking to small crowds and without notes and, often, when the subject was himself, his family, his own pioneer background and outlook on life. He was described by some of the eastern reporters as a “feed mill type of talker” and “excellent indeed” with a small-town crowd. These “little speeches,” thought Charlie Ross, were more important than the major addresses. “They got him close to the people.”
At both Grand Junction, Colorado, and the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he reminisced about Grandfather Solomon Young and his journeys over the plains, his friendship with Brigham Young. “Oh, I wish my grandfather could see me now,” he said spontaneously at Salt Lake, and the audience first laughed, then broke into prolonged applause. “Those pioneers had faith and they had energy,” he said, seeming himself to embody an excess of both qualities.
Though he refused to put on Indian war bonnets or to kiss babies, he was thankful always for the gifts ceremoniously presented at stop after stop—hats, spurs, baskets of fruit (“I’ll be eating peaches from now until I get to Washington”). And nearly always he had something to say about the local scenery, local history, local achievements and interests.
They tell me [he said at Mojave] that in 1883—that was the year before I was born—that a gentleman by the name of Webb built ten grand, big wagons here in this town, bought himself a hundred head of mules, and began to haul borax out of the Mojave Desert—and that was the origin of Twenty-Mule Team Borax which we always kept in the house when I was a kid. I never thought I would be here as President at the place where it originated and talking to you people about your interests in the welfare of the country.
He expressed love of home, love of the land, the virtues and old verities of small-town America, his America. “Naturally, if we don’t think our hometown is the greatest in the world, we are not very loyal citizens. We all should feel that way,” he told the loyal citizens of American Fork, Utah.
“You don’t get any double talk from me,” he declared from a brightly decorated bandstand first thing in the morning sunshine at Sparks, Nevada. “I’m either for something or against it, and you know it. You know what I stand for.” What he stood for, he said again and again, was a government of and for the people, not the “special interests.”
He was friendly, cheerful. And full of fight.
“You are the government,” he said time after time. “Practical politics is government. Government starts from the grass roots.” “I think the government belongs to you and me as private citizens.” “I’m calling this trip a crusade. It’s a crusade of the people against the special interests, and if you back me up we’re going to win….”
“The basic issue of this campaign is as simple as can be: it’s the special interests against the people.” “I’m here on a serious mission, and because it is so serious, I propose to speak to you as plainly as I can.” “In 1946, you know, two-thirds of you stayed home and didn’t vote. You wanted a change. Well, you got it. You got the change. You got just exactly what you deserved.” “Now use your judgment. Keep the people in control of the government….” “I not only want you to vote for me but I want you to vote for yourselves, and if you vote for yourselves, you’ll vote for the Democratic ticket….”
The crowds would be gathered at station stops often from early morning, waiting for him to arrive. Men and boys perched on rooftops and nearby signal towers for a better view. There would be a high school band standing by, ready to play the national anthem or “Hail to the Chief,” or to struggle through the Missouri Waltz, a song Truman particularly disliked but that it was his fate to hear repeated hundreds of times over. His train would ease into the station as the band blared, the crowd cheered. Then, accompanied by three or four local politicians—usually a candidate for Congress or state party chairman who had boarded the train at a prior stop—Truman would step from behind the blue velvet curtain onto the platform, and the crowd, large or small, would cheer even more. One of the local politicians would then introduce the President of the United States and the crowd would cheer again.
At the ten-minute stops, he would speak for five minutes, beginning with praise for the local candidate for Congress or some issue of local interest, then moving quickly from the general to the particular. He would lambaste the Republican Congress for the high cost of living or failing to vote the grain-storage bins, for the Taft-Hartley Act or the “rich man’s tax bill,” for slashing federal support for irrigation and hydroelectric power projects in the West. It was the Republicans in Congress who were holding back progress in the Central Valley of California. Republicans at heart had no real interest in the West—not in water, not in public power. The Republicans who controlled the Appropriations Committees in the House and Senate, those upon whom the future of federal projects in the Central Valley depended were not Californians, they were not westerners: “They are Eastern Republicans.”
“Give ‘em hell, Harry!” someone would shout from the crowd—news accounts of his promise to Barkley to “give ‘em hell” having swept the country by now. The cry went up at one stop after another, often more than once—“Give ‘em hell, Harry!”—which always brought more whoops, laughter, and yells of approval, but especially when he tore into the 80th Congress.
(“I never gave anybody hell,” he would later say. “I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”)
At the close, he would ask if they would like to meet his family and the crowd never failed in its response. The routine became standard. He would first introduce Bess—“Miz Truman”—who would step out from behind the blue curtain, looking pleased and motherly. He would take her hand and she would stand at his right, saying nothing. If the crowd was small and especially friendly, he would refer to her as “the Boss.” Then, proudly, he would present “Miss Margaret,” whose appearance nearly always brought the biggest cheer of all, and to the obvious delight of her father. She would be carrying an armful of roses, a few of which she would throw to the crowd. Truman would lean over the brass rail to grasp one or two outstretched hands. Someone would signal the local band to start playing again, and with warning toots of the whistle, with reporters scrambling to get back on board, the crowd cheering and the three Trumans waving, the train would pull slowly out of the station.
No matter what the outcome of the campaign, wrote Richard Rovere, millions of Americans would remember for the rest of their lives this final tableau of the “Three Traveling Trumans.”
It will be a picture to cherish and it will stand Harry Truman in good stead for the rest of his life. Travelling with him you get the feeling that the American people who have seen him and heard him at his best would be willing to give him just about anything he wants except the Presidency.
It could be said also they had seen and heard for themselves a President who was friendly and undisguised, loyal to his party, fond of his family, a man who cared about the country and about them, who believed the business of government was their business, and who didn’t whine when he was in trouble, but kept bravely, doggedly plugging away, doing his best, his duty as he saw it, and who was glad to be among them. He wasn’t a hero, or an original thinker. His beliefs were their beliefs, their way of talking was his way of talking. He was on their side. He was one of them. If he stumbled over a phrase or a name, he would grin and try again, and they would smile with him.
“There is an agreeable warmheartedness and simplicity about Truman that is genuine,” wrote Richard Strout for his column in The New Republic. A presidential train was probably the worst of all places to gauge public opinion, he added. “Nevertheless, reporters keep pinching themselves at the size of the crowds and their cordial response.”
At Los Angeles, at Gilmore Stadium, with screen stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan—all ardent liberal Democrats—seated prominently on stage beside him, Truman hit hard at Henry Wallace, warning liberal Democrats to “think again” if they thought a vote for the third party was a vote for peace. With Communists “guiding and using” it, the third party did not represent American ideals. A vote for Wallace only played into the hands of the Republican “forces of reaction.” Now was the hour for the liberal forces of America to unite. “Think again. Don’t waste your vote.
At San Diego, ten thousand turned out, despite threatening skies and the early hour of 9:00 A.M., and gave him the most enthusiastic welcome thus far. After the stop at Oceanside, California, where the train pulled within sight of the rolling surf of the Pacific, the route was east again.
By then, Friday, September 24, he had been on the road a week, and while some on board had already begun to show signs of strain, Truman, who bore much the heaviest burden, remained steady as a rock. Nor had he left the duties and concerns of the Oval Office. A White House pouch arrived daily—papers requiring his signature, letters to be signed, letters to be read, reports from department heads, reports to Congress, sealed manila envelopes marked “Confidential,” as well as copies of the Kansas City Star and the Independence Examiner. A memorandum from Head Usher Howell Crim reported on the quantity of plaster descending in the East Room.
The Berlin crisis and the risks involved in the airlift weighed heavily on Truman. Though the quantity of supplies being flown into the city had increased since August, the disturbing truth was that the airlift was supplying less than half of what Berlin needed. “We are not quite holding our own,” General Clay had cabled. In another few days, in Dallas, at Truman’s request, General Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to Moscow, would come quietly aboard the train to give his assessment to Truman of Stalin’s mood and the chances of war.
Staff work on board had acquired a pattern of a kind, though little about it was systematic or efficient or ever very formal. Of the major speeches only the one at Dexter, Iowa, had been prepared well in advance. The rest—for Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles—were produced under way, with the combined efforts of Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Murphy, and the new writers Noyes, Carr, and Carter. No speech was ever the work of one writer, and no speech failed to go through several drafts. Truman himself went over every line, worked “painstakingly” on every draft, and was the first to approve suggested deletions. “That’s good,” he would say. “Never use two words when one will do best.” Convoluted structure and highblown or evasive phrases greatly annoyed him. “That’s not the way I would say it,” he would remark as the group sat around the mahogany table in the dining room of the Magellan, working late into the night. “Let’s just say what we mean.”
“Nobody had any special pride of authorship, but we did get into heated arguments now and then,” wrote Ross. “The President would grin and say, ‘All right, you fellows fight it out and I’ll decide.’ ” Ross wanted Truman to ease up on the abusive language and state his case in more dignified fashion. But Truman was determined to keep the heat on. He had also introduced a new line about the housing shortage that made the others wince. If they went to the polls and did their duty on November 2, Truman would tell the crowd with a smile, then he wouldn’t have to go “hunting around in this housing shortage.” He could stay right in the White House. It was a line he liked and that he was sure the people liked. So he kept it.
Background material, particularly material useful for the rear platform appearances, was provided by a “Research Division” of the Democratic National Committee—three or four “bright young men” who had been holed up in a small office off DuPont Circle in Washington and who, according to George Elsey, “worked like dogs and ground out an incredible amount of material. All kinds of historical, literary, political and economic data flowed through them, and news clippings, photostats of useful documents, anything that would give spark and vitality and originality and vigor to President Truman’s campaign effort.”
Elsey’s task was to sort and edit it all, then keep the President supplied with pertinent items to choose from, and in proper order as they sped along. “I was the ‘whistlestopper’ on the job doing the outlines, getting the stuff together, and feeding these back to him,” he remembered. “I felt I got twenty-five years exercise walking from my car to his car in the weeks of the campaign.”
Bill Boyle would be credited with “planning every inch” of Truman’s itinerary. Constantly in touch with state party leaders, he advised Truman on which towns mattered, and why.
Traveling ahead of the train, as “advance men,” were Oscar Chapman, the Under Secretary of Interior, and Donald Dawson, of the White House staff. They were responsible for all the details of local ceremonies, to make sure the local politicians knew where and when to come on board Truman’s train, and that no such fiasco as the empty hall at Omaha in June ever happened again.
Between stops, in the comparative quiet and privacy of the Magellan, the candidate himself remained even-tempered and steadfastly confident. The strain on him was unrelenting. Yet he showed no signs of wear-and-tear or faltering expectations. He knew he was behind and in private said so. But he was also sure he would catch up and move ahead by November, when it would count—a view shared by almost no one else on board, though few, other than the press, ever talked about it.
Once, late in an especially long day, a noticeably weary First Lady asked Clark Clifford if he thought the President really believed he could win and Clifford said yes. “He gives every appearance under every condition,” Clifford answered.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know where it comes from.”
Though several of his staff were gravely concerned about the split in the Democratic ranks—the campaigns under way by the Progressives and the Dixiecrats—Truman seems never to have taken the candidacies of Wallace and Thurmond as serious threats.
Henry Wallace was running hard. In August he had bravely campaigned through the South, decrying segregation and refusing to stay in hotels that enforced discrimination. In North Carolina angry crowds pelted him with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Traveling the rest of the country mainly by plane, he would eventually roll up more mileage even than Truman, his main theme remaining constant throughout: the Progressive Party was “the peace party” that could end the Cold War through direct negotiations with the Soviet Union. At Los Angeles, speaking at the same stadium where Truman had, Wallace drew a larger crowd than Truman had, and it was a paying crowd. But attendance overall at Wallace rallies and speeches was falling off, the excitement of his Progressive “crusade” plainly in decline, as he was perceived—and portrayed more and more in the press—as “playing Moscow’s game.” Of the Republicans and Democrats, he said they were “equally sinister” in their policies, both being in the grip of Wall Street and the Pentagon.
Strom Thurmond kept harping on states’ rights and demanding that the “evil forces” in control of the Democratic Party be “cast out.” He called Truman’s Fair Employment Practices Committee “communistic.” Racial integration of the armed services was “un-American.” The South must hold the line. “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” He and the Dixiecrats would win 140 electoral votes in the South, Thurmond said, more than sufficient to force the election into the House. But almost no one took the claim seriously, and Truman least of all.
In his speeches, Truman never mentioned Wallace or Thurmond by name. But then never in the major addresses or in any of his largely extemporaneous remarks to small crowds in out-of-the-way places did he speak of Dewey by name. Dewey was always “my Republican opponent,” or “the other fellow.”
He never criticized or ridiculed Dewey in a personal way. Interestingly, Dewey was never even a subject of discussion on board the Ferdinand Magellan. There was no talk of Dewey’s personality or failings, no gossiping about him, or ever any consideration of attacking him on personal grounds. It would not be recalled that the President ever even mentioned Dewey.