II
Governor Thomas E. Dewey had gone aboard his own campaign train at Albany on Sunday, September 19, two days after Truman left Washington, and Dewey, too, delivered his first major speech in Iowa, at Des Moines on Monday the 20th, two days after Truman spoke at the Dexter plowing contest. Starting later than Truman, Dewey would travel nowhere near so far, and at a much more leisurely pace. And he would deliver far fewer speeches—all this, like everything about the Dewey campaign, having been carefully thought out in advance. As the candidate and his advisers proudly informed the press, nothing was to be left to chance.
Press coverage of Dewey’s advance across the country was also to be far greater than that Truman received. There were ninety-two reporters riding the “Dewey Victory Special”—ninety-eight by the time the train reached California—roughly twice the number traveling with the President, and they were catered to, their everyday needs handled with a skill and efficiency unknown on the Truman train. Copies of the candidate’s speeches were nearly always available twenty-four hours in advance, as they seldom ever were on the Truman train. An internal public address system fed Dewey’s remarks directly to the press car and dining cars, so reporters need not bother leaving their air-conditioned comforts. Coffee and sandwiches were provided to reporters at odd hours, their laundry attended to, their luggage moved from train to hotel for overnight stops. To those who had traveled with both candidates, the Truman operation, by comparison, was forty years behind the times.
“If you wanted anything laundered [on the Truman train], you did it yourself, in a Pullman basin,” Richard Rovere informed his readers in The New Yorker.
When you detrained anywhere for an overnight stay, it was every man for himself. You carried your duffel and scrambled for your food. If a man was such a slave to duty that he felt obliged to hear what the President said in his back-platform addresses, he had to climb down off the train; run to the rear end, mingle with the crowd, and listen. Often this was a hazardous undertaking, for the President was given to speaking late at night to crowds precariously assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew the contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment.
A condescending tone entered into a lot of what was written about Truman and his efforts. His whole campaign, as Jonathan Daniels said, was given a “sort of rube reputation” by the largely eastern press traveling with him. The Dewey campaign, by contrast, was described as “slick,” “tidy as a pin,” everything handled with “junior-executive briskness.” The favored drink on board the “Dewey Victory Special” was the martini, not bourbon as on the Truman train. The favorite game was bridge, not poker. Dewey himself was cool, careful, “supremely self-confident,” and from the start elevated in tone.
“Tonight we enter upon a campaign to unite America,” he told the crowd at Des Moines, where, reportedly, he was leading Truman by a resounding 51 to 37 percent.
“We propose to install in Washington,” Dewey said, “an administration which has faith in the American people, a warm understanding of their needs and the competence to meet them. We will rediscover the essential unity of our people and the spiritual strength which makes our country great. We will begin to move forward again shoulder to shoulder….”
There were no harsh or divisive accusations, no pitting of farmers against Wall Street, no pitchforks in the back or angry, staccato assaults on any segment of government or society.
A Republican congressman from Minnesota, August H. Andresen, had written to warn Dewey of discontent among farmers, saying, “We cannot win without the farm vote.” But Dewey refrained also from any mention of farm problems.
His voice was deep and resonant, as flowing as the smoothest radio preacher—everything Truman’s voice was not. Dewey was dignified. He spoke ill of no one, offended no one. He had no surprises, he took no risks. And the pattern prevailed, his text seldom more rousing than a civics primer. “Government must help industry and industry must cooperate with government,” he would say with a grand preacherlike sweep of the right arm.
“America’s future is still ahead of us,” he also said.
They were not speeches of the kind he had given in 1944, when he had hit hard and often, charging Franklin Roosevelt with failure to end the Depression, failure to build American defenses before Pearl Harbor. At one point, he had called Roosevelt truly “the indispensable” man—“indispensable to the ill-assorted, power-hungry conglomeration of city bosses, Communists, and career bureaucrats which now compose the New Deal.” But there would be no such harangue this time, because this time Dewey was not the challenger. This time he had the election sewed up.
It was an odd reversal of roles, with the incumbent President running as the challenger and his opponent performing as though he were already elected and the campaign a mere formality. Dewey had only to mark time, be careful, make no mistakes, say or do nothing silly or improper, and the presidency was his.
So the speeches were kept unceasingly positive. He was for unity, for peace, for “constructive change.” He was not running against the New Deal. He was not even running against Harry Truman, whom he never mentioned, any more than Truman spoke of him, which was another odd turn. “Governor Dewey is deliberately avoiding any sharp controversy with the Democratic incumbent,” reported The New York Times as the “Victory Special” rolled through California, passing, at one point, within only a few miles of the Truman train.
In some ways the two candidates were much alike. Both were efficient with their time, alert, and energetic. They always looked spanking clean and pressed. Both were men of medium stature, though Truman, the one so often referred to disparagingly as “the little man,” was an inch taller than Dewey, who was 5 feet 8 inches. And unlike Truman, Dewey was extremely sensitive about his height.
They were each diligent, career public servants who genuinely believed that good government was possible and the best politics. They both loved music. Truman had dreamed of being a concert pianist, Dewey of being a concert singer and still loved to sing (especially “Oklahoma” in the bathtub). Each was devoted to his family. Dewey’s wife, Frances, a particularly photogenic woman with a somewhat shy but winsome manner, was generally seen as an asset to his political career; and they had two teenage sons, Tom, Jr., and John.
Like Truman, Dewey was a product of small-town middle America. He had grown up in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, the editor of the local newspaper, was vitally interested in politics, just as John Truman had been.
Beyond there, however, the similarities ended. Where Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man—raised, educated, formed in thought and outlook in the era before World War I—Dewey was of a different generation. Dewey had never lived with the burden of farm debt; he had never been to war, he had never been bankrupt. Born in 1902, eighteen years after Truman, he was the first candidate for President born in the twentieth century. His middle American origins, moreover, were hardly apparent any longer. Educated at the University of Michigan and the Columbia Law School in New York, he had made his entire career in the East, and with his homburg hats and cultivated voice, he had left Owosso far behind.
Where Truman had been, as Nellie Noland said, “a late bloomer all along,” attaining prominence only past the age of fifty, Dewey had soared almost from the start, achieving national fame as the crusading district attorney of New York while still in his thirties. He was “the Gangbuster,” a national hero. In 1938, at age thirty-six, he had made his first run for governor of New York. Trying again in 1942, he became New York’s first Republican governor in twenty years. Running for a second term in 1946, he rolled up the biggest victory in the state’s history, winning by nearly 700,000 votes.
As governor he cut taxes, doubled state aid to education, raised salaries for state employees, reduced the state’s overall indebtedness by over $100 million, and put through the first state law in the country prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. If elected now, he would be, at forty-six, the youngest President since Theodore Roosevelt. Given his youth, ambition, his proven ability, it was not inconceivable that Thomas E. Dewey could serve as long as, or longer than Franklin Roosevelt. If he were to have four full terms, he would be in the White House until 1965, and even then would still be younger than was Truman in 1948.
But, as often noted, Dewey was also extremely cautious and cold in manner, at least in public, which for a politician was what mattered. On the campaign trail, he seemed not to care for the gifts he was offered or to mix with the crowd. He was incapable of unbending. Where Truman, at the end of a platform talk, would ask, “Would you like to meet my family?” Dewey would say stiffly, “I’m pleased to present Mrs. Dewey.”
“Smile, governor,” a photographer had called at a campaign stop in 1944. “I thought I was,” said Dewey. A remark attributed to the wife of a New York Republican politician would be widely repeated. “You have to know Mr. Dewey well,” she said, “in order to dislike him.”
He was so self-controlled as to seem mechanical—Dewey came on stage, wrote Richard Rovere, “like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind”—and there was a hard look in the dark eyes, a look that had served him well as a prosecutor. “Those eyes tell you this guy doesn’t crap around,” a staff man once said.
It was Dewey’s small, dark “bottle-brush” mustache that the public knew him best for and that many people disliked, or wished he would get rid of, mustaches having been long out of fashion among public men. He had grown it on a bicycle tour of France years earlier and kept it because his wife approved. To the actress Ethel Barrymore, the mustache and Dewey’s diminutive size made him look “like the bridegroom on the wedding cake,” a remark greatly amplified by the acerbic, much-quoted daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and that may have done Dewey real harm in the campaign.
To the reporters on board his train, he seemed aloof, even haughty. They were kept at a distance, and though they were certain he would win—and most believed he would make an efficient chief executive—almost none of them liked him, which was quite the reverse of how they felt about Truman. Dewey’s “mechanical smile…and his bland refusal to deal with issues, have got under everybody’s skin,” wrote Richard Strout of the mood in the press car. Dewey, it was cracked, was the only man who could strut sitting down.
In sharp contrast to Truman, who had never wanted to be President, Dewey had started running for the job as early as 1939, in advance of the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie. Dewey believed it was his destiny to be President. “It is written in the stars,” he said privately.
That it was written in the polls as well also carried enormous weight with him, for, unlike Truman, Dewey took such samplings with utmost seriousness. He was the first presidential candidate to have his own polling unit.
On several major issues Dewey, as a liberal Republican, held the same or very similar views as Truman. Dewey backed aid to Greece. He supported the Marshall Plan. He believed in a strong military defense, including Universal Military Training. He was for recognition of Israel. He supported the Berlin Airlift and wanted further progress made in civil rights. As he and his advisers saw things, the real struggle waited beyond November, not with the Democrats in Congress, but with Taft, whom Dewey intensely disliked. (On more than one occasion Dewey had been heard to say that the Ohio senator should have carnal relations with himself.)
The dominating strategy of the Dewey campaign, to say as little as possible, was Dewey’s own—“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” he would tell the Republican politicians who came aboard his train. The “Dewey high command,” however, had more influence than did the people around Truman. They included campaign manager Herbert Brownell, Jr., whose headquarters were in Washington, but who talked to Dewey every night by phone; Paul Lockwood, Dewey’s veteran executive assistant; and Elliott Bell, an old friend who wrote speeches and served as unofficial chief of staff on the train. These were able, experienced men. Brownell had been Dewey’s campaign manager the last time, as well as chairman of the Republican Party. Lockwood had been with Dewey since his days as district attorney. Elliott Bell, a former financial writer for The New York Times, had managed Dewey’s two triumphant campaigns for governor.
And they all agreed: the campaign was going fine. Nor had other Republican politicians objected thus far. “We always asked them what our strategy should be,” remembered Bell, “and they all said that as matters stood Dewey was in and the thing to do was not stir up too much controversy and run the risk of losing votes.” The consensus was that Dewey would have done better in 1944 had he not gone on the attack as he did. So why repeat the mistake?
“The tone of his campaign was set,” wrote Time approvingly—Time, like its sister publication Life, having concluded that Dewey was as good as elected. The real concern among the Dewey staff, reported Time, was over what Truman might do between now and January to upset things, and particularly in the field of foreign policy. “The responsibilities of power already weighed on them so heavily that a newsman inquired blandly: ‘How long is Dewey going to tolerate Truman’s interference in the government?”
Dewey, said Life, would keep his composure “no matter how much his rival taunted, teased and dared him to come out in the alley and scrap.” Dewey himself remarked that he would never “get down in the gutter” with Truman. He would have preferred a more worthy opponent. In the seclusion of his private car, Dewey wondered aloud, “Isn’t it harder in politics to defeat a fool, say, than an abler man?”
To help guarantee a Dewey victory, J. Edgar Hoover was secretly supplying him with all the information the FBI could provide. Dewey and Hoover were old friends and got along well. Hoover had put the resources of the bureau at Dewey’s disposal months before, in the expectation that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General. “The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman, though there wasn’t much,” remembered an assistant to Hoover, William C. Sullivan, who was one of those assigned to cull the files.
We resurrected the president’s former association with Jim Pendergast…and tried to create the impression that Truman was too ignorant to deal with the emerging Communist threat. We even prepared studies for Dewey which were released under his name, as if he and his staff had done the work…. No one in the bureau gave Truman any chance of winning.
Only on the issue of Communists in government was Dewey willing to taunt Truman. “I suggest you elect an administration that simply won’t appoint them in the first place,” Dewey said at one stop after another, the line always drawing applause.
In Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, flanked on stage by Republican movie stars—Gary Cooper, Jeanette MacDonald, and Ginger Rogers, who came from Independence, Missouri—Dewey described communism on the march. “The tragic fact is that too often our own government…seems so far to have lost faith in our system of free opportunity as to encourage this Communist advance, not hinder it…. Communists and fellow travelers [have] risen to positions of trust in our government…[and yet] the head of our own government called the exposure of Communists in our government ‘a red herring.’ ”
Dewey did not try to inflame crowd passions. He opposed outlawing Communists. “We’ll have no thought police,” he said. Still the charge that the government was “coddling” Communists, a charge that had been injected into the campaign by the House Un-American Activities Committee, would be made again and again at nearly every stop.
Joseph Alsop described the typical Dewey speech as “over-rehearsed” and “a trifle chilling.” Marquis Childs warned in his column that in the “very expertness” of his campaign, Dewey might be “laying up future trouble for himself.” Privately among the Dewey people there was an increasing uneasiness over the size of the crowds, which, as Time conceded, were “good—but no more than good.” At Salt Lake City, Dewey, like Truman, filled the Mormon Tabernacle to overflowing, but the turnout along the streets had been nothing like that for Truman. “We hit Salt Lake City about five P.M.,” Elliott Bell would recall. “I was struck by the fact that there were very few people on the sidewalks—and a good many people walking hardly bothered to look at the motorcade.”
“Then we went into Texas and everybody said Texas was going to be cold to the President,” Truman would later tell a crowd in Neosho, Missouri, recounting his latest adventures.
And the first city we stopped in was El Paso, and everybody in El Paso was down at the station. The Chief of Police said he estimated the crowd at 25,000. Then we went over and had breakfast with John Garner, former Vice President, a good friend of mine, and he gave me a breakfast to write home about. We had chicken and white-wing dove, and we had ham and bacon and scrambled eggs and hot biscuits and I don’t know what all. And the governor of Texas met me there as did Sam Rayburn, and we went across Texas, and I must have seen a million people in Texas.
Pounding his way across Texas, Truman had seemed to gather strength by the hour and give more of himself to the campaign with every stop. He was fighting for his political life and having a grand time at it.
“He is good on the back of a train because he is one of the folks,” said Sam Rayburn. “He smiles with them and not at them, laughs with them and not at them.”
With the rest of the Old South in revolt over his stand on civil rights, Truman had to hold on to Texas and its twenty-three electoral votes. Yet racial bias ran strong in Texas—segregation, poll taxes, outright race hatred. In Texas he was in Dixiecrat territory for the first time, which was why a “cold” reception had been assumed. There had even been rumors of threats on his life, of Dixiecrats claiming “they’d shoot Truman, that no-good son-of-a-bitch and his civil rights.” It was the first time a Democratic nominee for the presidency had ever found it necessary to court Texas, and banking on friendships with such longstanding, powerful Democrats as Rayburn and Garner, Truman had decided to make it the most strenuous campaign ever waged there by a non-Texan.
A high point was the breakfast put on by “Cactus Jack” Garner at Uvalde, which, reporters discovered to their surprise, was a tree-shaded town with neat green lawns and no sign of anything remotely like cactus. Served on the glass-enclosed porch of Garner’s big, buff-colored brick house, the breakfast was the best he had had in forty years, Truman later told the delighted crowd outside. Ten thousand people and a high school band had been at the Uvalde station to greet him at 6:50 that morning. Now several thousand cheered as he stood on the front porch with Garner, Rayburn, and Governor Beauford Jester, none of whom was known for his devotion to civil rights. (Jester, not long before, had called Truman’s civil rights program a “stab in the back.”)
John Garner and he had been friends “a long, long time,” and they were going to be friends as long as they lived, Truman said. “I’m coming back for another visit sometime. I fished around for another invitation and got it.”
Old friendships, old loyalties would hold, in other words, not only now for the sake of politics, but later, too, whatever changes were in the wind. The crowd understood what he meant and the crowd applauded.
So pleased was Bess Truman by the warmth of the reception that she broke precedent and stepped forward to the microphone to say thank you, proving thereby “beyond all doubt,” reported Robert Donovan in the New York Herald-Tribune, “what an extraordinary occasion it was.”
At San Antonio later the same day, Sunday, September 26, an estimated 200,000 people filled the streets, and at a dinner that night at the Gunter Hotel, speaking spontaneously and simply of his feeling for people and his wish for peace, Truman achieved what Jonathan Daniels called “an eloquence close to presidential poetry.”
Our government is made up of the people. You are the government, I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants. I can’t order you around, or send you to labor camps or have your heads cut off if you don’t agree with me politically. We don’t believe in that….
I believe that if we ourselves try to live as we should, and if we continue to work for peace in this world, and as the old Puritan said, “Keep your bullets bright and your powder dry,” eventually we will get peace in this world, because that is the only way we can survive with the modern inventions under which we live.
We have got to harness these inventions for the welfare of man, instead of his destruction.
That is what I am interested in. That is what I am working for.
That is much more important than whether I am President of the United States.
“Truman Gains Texas Votes by ‘Human Touch’ Method,” read the headline in the San Antonio Express. When a reporter for the Express polled the correspondents on board the train, he found nearly all now thought Truman had at least “a fighting chance.”
In not quite four days in Texas, he made twenty-four stops, spoke twenty-five times. He had perfect weather and enthusiastic crowds the whole way. Monday, September 27, the biggest day, began with a rear platform talk at San Marcos at 6:40 in the morning. As the day wore on he spoke at Austin, Georgetown, Temple, Waco, Hillsboro, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Dallas, Greenville, and the little rail stop of Bells, where he told the crowd, “I am going over to Bonham…and make the speech…. It’s only 12 miles—why don’t you just get in the car and come on over to Bonham, and I will give the Republicans the gun over there. I think you will like it!” The Bonham speech, last of the day, was carried by radio nationwide.
On board with him through the day were Rayburn, Governor Jester, and Congressman Lyndon Johnson, candidate for the Senate, who had just been certified by the Democratic State Convention as having defeated his rival in the primary, former Governor Coke Stevenson, by a total of 87 votes out of roughly 1 million cast.
At Waco a boy waved a Confederate flag and there were scattered boos from the crowd when Truman shook hands with a black woman. Otherwise, all was harmonious. But then neither did he mention civil rights.
At Rebel Stadium in Dallas, where authorities quietly did away with segregation for the day and blacks and whites were mingled in the cheering crowd as never before, Truman, for the first time, hit hard at the Republicans for the hypocrisy of their “high-level” campaign—the Dewey speeches:
So in making their speeches they put them on a very high level, so high they are above discussing the specific and serious problems which confront the people…. Republican candidates are apparently trying to sing the American voters to sleep with a lullaby about unity…. They want the kind of unity that benefits the National Association of Manufacturers…the real estate trusts…[the] selfish interests…. They don’t want unity. They want surrender. And I am here to tell you people that I will not surrender….
Bonham, in the fertile Blackland Prairie, was Sam Rayburn’s hometown, and at Bonham Truman went after Dewey again, saying Republican unity meant unity of the Tafts and the Martins of Congress—“unity in giving tax relief to the rich…unity in letting prices go sky high…unity in whittling away all the benefits of the New Deal.” Was that really what they wanted, he asked the crowd.
Some things are worth fighting for…. We must fight isolationists and reactionaries, the profiteers and the privileged class…. Our primary concern is for the little fellow. We think the big boys have always done very well, taking care of themselves…. It is the business of government to see that the little fellow gets a square deal…. Ask Sam Rayburn how many of the big money boys helped when he was sweating blood to get electricity for farmers and the people in small towns….
It was all language his audiences understood. He was truly, as Rayburn said, “one of the folks” and they let him know how much they approved.
At a reception later, at Rayburn’s white frame house west of town, hundreds of people waited in a long line across the front lawn. “They came in droves and kept coming,” remembered Margaret. When Truman’s Secret Service detail, worried for his safety, refused to let him stand in the receiving line unless the names of all the guests were provided Rayburn exploded, “I know every man, woman, and child here.” They were all his friends, every one, Rayburn said; he would vouch for them personally.
So while Truman stood at the door shaking hands, and sipping now and then on a surreptitious bourbon-and-water, Rayburn called out each name. But then Rayburn exclaimed to the governor, “Shut the door, Beauford, they’re comin’by twice.”
For the Republicans money was never a problem. Talk of the big money behind Dewey was another sign supposedly of just how far out in front Dewey was, how certain his victory—on the theory that big money never followed a loser. But to find backing for Truman was nearly impossible. At small White House receptions for Democrats that spring and summer, Truman himself had had to ask for financial help, something he detested, just to get his campaign under way. At one such gathering in the Red Room in early September he had stood on a chair to say, in effect, that while he knew most people thought he was going to lose, he thought the President of the United States should have sufficient funds to take his case to the people, but that as things were he could not do that. There was no money to buy radio time. One of the most important parts of his speech in Detroit on Labor Day had to be cut, he said, because of insufficient funds to stay on the air. Now there was not money enough to get the train out of Union Station. His plea, reportedly, produced over $100,000.
When Truman asked Bernard Baruch to serve on the finance committee, Baruch refused, saying it was not his policy to play so partisan a role—an answer that infuriated Truman, who in sharp reply wrote, “A great many honors have passed your way…and it seems when the going is rough it is a one-way street.” Baruch, his pride hurt, spoke of the President as “a rude, ignorant, uncouth man.”
Others, too, turned him down, until finally he named for financial chairman Louis A. Johnson of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a former commander of the American Legion and Assistant Secretary of War who had headed the finance committee of the Democratic Party from 1936 to 1940. Johnson was a looming, bald-headed, headstrong corporation lawyer and millionaire who stood over six feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. A subject of controversy in the past, he would be again in time to come, to Truman’s regret. But he took the job now when nobody else would, and he achieved amazing results, given the fact that no one other than Truman thought the ticket had the slightest chance.
Averell Harriman and Will Clayton were among the larger contributors. Harriman gave $5,000; Clayton, $9,000. Others included Stuart Symington; David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers; Milton S. Kronheim, Sr., who controlled the wholesale liquor business in Washington; Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee; William Helis, a Louisiana oil man known as “the Golden Greek,” who had been Governor Earl Long’s biggest money backer; Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney; and Pearl Mesta, the Washington hostess who came on board the Truman train at Gainesville, Texas, for the ride across Oklahoma, where her first husband had made a fortune in oil.
Floyd B. Odlum, the head of Atlas Corporation, a Wall Street investment company, put in $3,000, then rounded up another $20,000 from his associates. But the largest contribution seems to have come from Truman’s old Kansas City friend Tom Evans, the drugstore king, who, after giving $3,000 himself, raised some $100,000 more in the Middle West.
As the train headed across Oklahoma, the weather remained ideal. Truman in “fine fettle,” spent much of the time out on the back platform waving at people as he sped along. If he was worried about campaign funds or anything else, no one would have known it. During a stop at Ardmore, having expressed his admiration for the Palamino horse of a cowboy who met the train, Truman examined the animal’s mouth and declared it was six years old. “Correct!” exclaimed the delighted cowboy and the story appeared across the country: “Truman Gets Right Dope from Horse’s Mouth.”
The crowd at Ardmore was somewhere near forty thousand, more even, it was said, than for Gene Autry. At remote stations where no stops were scheduled people waited just to see the train go through. At Paul’s Valley, Truman asked if it was true they grew taller corn than in Iowa and five thousand people happily roared yes. “Hello Harry,” came shouts from the throng at Norman.
At Oklahoma City 100,000 turned out; 20,000 were at the State Fair Grounds for his speech. He had chosen Oklahoma as the time and place to answer Republican charges of communism in government and he was “strictly on the offensive.” Such Republican tactics were only a “smoke sreen” to hide their failure to deal with housing, price controls, education—real problems. His own Loyalty Program, he claimed, had proven the loyalty of 99.7 percent of all federal workers. It was not Republican talk that checked the Communist tide, but programs like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and that was “a plain and unanswerable fact.” The government was not endangered by Communist infiltration. Publicity-seeking, electioneering Republicans with their irresponsible charges were doing more to damage national security than to strengthen it.
The speech was considered so important that for the first time the Democratic National Committee had dipped into its slim resources to pay for nationwide radio time.
But by then the money had run out. There was not enough even to move the train out of the station.
The crisis was resolved when Governor Roy J. Turner of Oklahoma, and a businessman from Shawnee, W. Elmer Harber, organized an emergency collection party on board the Ferdinand Magellan and raised enough contributions—“a substantial sum”—to keep the train rolling for another several weeks. But even so, remembered Charlie Ross, the campaign was never more than “one jump ahead of the sheriff.”
The day following, Wednesday, September 29, was one of the biggest of the campaign. At Eufaula, Oklahoma, Truman gave his one hundredth speech. Before the day ended, he spoke sixteen times. There were crowds at Shawnee, Seminole, Wewoka, Muskogee, “tremendous” crowds at Tulsa. Crossing into Missouri, Truman told the throng at Neosho that he had already talked to 500,000 people that day—an understandable overstatement, given all he had seen. And so it went the rest of the journey through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. At Mount Vernon, Illinois, leaving his train to travel by motorcade, he stumped the down-state mining country for 140 miles, through five counties that had not gone Democratic in fifty years. “Mr. Truman [reported The New York Times] was the first Chief Executive to campaign in southern Illinois and the people turned out by the thousands, breaking through police lines, swarming around and through the procession of cars and yelling a noisy greeting.”
With his headlong lambasting of Wall Street and “the special interests,” the constant harkening to grim memories of the Depression, he sounded often as if he were running against Herbert Hoover. But at Carbondale, the sixth of nine stops in southern Illinois, he talked as he had not until now of the postwar era, of the “history” he himself felt responsible for and proud of, knowing how many in his audience remembered how differently things had gone after the first war.
A Democratic administration working with a Democratic Congress had seen to a swift reconversion in 1945, not only avoiding a postwar recession but achieving
a peak of more jobs, a higher civilization, and better standards of living than ever before.
There is nothing like that in the history of the world after a great war. Bear that in mind…. Not very much has been said about that, but we had no riots and no bloodshed. We didn’t have people crying for jobs. We didn’t have farmers marching on Washington. We didn’t have returning soldiers marching on Washington, because we took care of them in educational institutions and absorbing them back into the economy of the country without a debacle.
We enacted the Employment Act of 1946, pledging all our resources and efforts to the maintenance of prosperity.
We brought the United States to a position of unquestioned leadership in world affairs. Don’t let anybody tell you anything different.
A warm reception in Kentucky had been anticipated, if for no other reason than Alben Barkley’s presence on the ticket. But the crowds there surpassed all predictions. Truman was “never more human,” reported the Louisville Courier-Journal. “He got down to earth and talked the language of the people….” At Shelbyville, where a banner stretched ln front of a wood-frame depot said: “Welcome Home President Truman and Family, Grandchildren of Shelby County,” he talked of his grandfather, who had been married there. At Lexington, heart of the Bluegrass horse country, he reminded everyone that it didn’t matter which horse was ahead or behind at any given moment in the race—it If was the horse ahead at the finish that counted. To the several thousand gathered on the tracks at Morehead, Kentucky, pressing as close as possible to the rear platform of his car, he left no doubt what he expected of them:
Now, whatever you do, go to the polls early on election day, and don’t waste any time. Just take that ticket and vote the Democratic ticket straight down the line, and you will be helping your country, and helping yourselves. You will not only be voting for me…but you will be voting for yourselves and your best interests. And I believe that is exactly what you are going to do.
At Montgomery, West Virginia, the final stop at 10:45 that night, Truman was so stunned by the size of the turnout at such an hour that before beginning his remarks he asked the photographers to turn their cameras around and take a picture of the people. That was the real news to show he country, he said.
But what to make of the phenomenon of the Truman crowds?
Most correspondents attributed it to ordinary curiosity. Truman had made his campaign a vaudeville act, said Time, so naturally people would come out to see the show. The American people had a high regard for the office of President and so naturally wanted to see the man who occupied it, wrote Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, who had been on the train from the beginning. Fletcher Knebel of the Cowles papers would remember in particular the stop at Shelbyville:
The early morning haze was still hanging over the hills, and the sun wasn’t up. But gathered around the railroad tracks, as far as you could see in any direction, was this incredible crowd of people—men holding kids up on their shoulders so they could see, little boys climbing trees and roofs, old grandpappies and men in overalls. Of course, we experts in the press car talked about the crowd, and we finally decided it didn’t mean a damned thing. “Anybody will come out to see a man who is President of the United States, just to say they’ve seen one in the flesh. But that doesn’t mean they’d vote for Harry Truman.” He was going to lose. We believed it, because we wrote it every day.
Some correspondents, Jonathan Daniels noted, had convinced themselves that Truman’s crowds were not Truman followers at all, but people wishing to see a very nice man on his way to oblivion.
To Walter Lippmann, who, as usual, was observing the world from his ivy-covered home in Washington, all such speculation was immaterial. Lippmann deplored the whole spectacle of a President chasing about the country devoting himself to parades and hand shaking, trying to “talk his way to victory.” To Lippmann, who was secretly offering Dewey advice on foreign policy and who shared Dewey’s contempt for Harry Truman, this was no time for a President to be away from his duties, and this President had been gone sixteen days. Unwittingly, wrote Lippmann, Truman had proven how little he mattered.
He had only begun to fight, Truman told the crowd waiting to welcome him at Union Station in Washington, Sunday morning, October 2. He would be heading off again in another few days. Others—his wife, daughter, his press secretary—looked exhausted, but not the President.
To his sister he wrote, “We made about a hundred and forty stops and I spoke 147 times, shook hands with at least 30,000 [people] and am in good condition to start out again….” It would be the greatest campaign any President had ever made, he promised. “Win, lose, or draw people will know where I stand….”
So much would be written and said about the Truman campaign of 1948, about the scrappy “Give-’em-hell-Harry” style that evolved, the headlong vigor and determination of the folksy, doomed candidate, that other factors bearing on the outcome were often overlooked. Truman was and remained his own show. Nor had any President ever worked harder at running for reelection. But other efforts behind the scenes were of considerable importance. Like all campaigns, his was a combination of many elements besides the candidate himself. Jack Redding, publicity director for the Democratic National Committee, would later write of the “classic unities of politics,” saying they were as vital to a campaign as were the unities of time, place, and action to a successful drama. “When the unities fuse, the results achieved are far in excess of the sum of the parts.” That Redding, Howard McGrath, and others worked as hard and effectively as they did was all the more remarkable given that they, too, knew perfectly what the odds were against them.
It was Redding, for example, who enlisted the services of the manager of a Polish-language newspaper in New York, Michel Cieplinski, who saw that all Truman press releases were translated into various foreign languages before being sent to foreign-language papers and radio stations around the country. Later, this would seem an obvious idea, but no one else had done it until then, and as Redding recalled, acceptance of the material was immediate. Truman stories were carried substantially as written—in Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Swedish—and with 35 million people of foreign birth in America, or roughly 25 percent of the population, of whom 11 million were eligible to vote, this was no small break.
McGrath appreciated particularly the political importance of foreign-born Americans—it was with their support that he had been elected governor three times in Rhode Island—and he understood how greatly the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as Truman’s policy on immigration, mattered to such groups, that for no other reason than his stand on foreign policy, Truman had an excellent chance of winning their support.
It was arranged for the President to have his portrait painted by a beloved Polish artist, Tadé Styka, who, though an avowed Republican, became an immediate convert after hearing Truman speak to a group of Polish editors about the problems of the world as they affected Poland. (“Another hell of a day. I’m sitting for an old Polish painter, and I don’t like to pose—but it’s also part of the trial of being President,” Truman had written in his diary on September 14. “He’s painted a nice stuffed-shirt picture.”) In October, after Styka presented the portrait at a formal ceremony at the White House, all seventy-two Polish papers in the country ran a picture of the painting, as well as Styka’s personal praise for the President. To publicist Redding, it was a “political triumph.”
Meantime, for the amusement of the press, a selection of the platitudes and banalities of the Dewey speeches was prepared and distributed:
“Our streams abound with fish.”
“The miners in our country are vital to our welfare.”
“Everybody that rides in a car or bus uses gasoline and oil.”
“Ours is a magnificent land. Every part of it.”
A sixteen-page, four-color comic-book biography was produced, The Story of Harry Truman, which, panel-by-panel, portrayed the Independence boyhood, the courtship of Bess Wallace, Truman’s time on the farm, and how the neighbors judged him (“By crackies, in spite of Harry Truman’s newfangled ideas about farmin’, he’s a durned good ‘un!”). His part in the war took up two and a half pages, followed by his business failure (“You’d think the Republican Administration would do something to help small businessmen”), and the high points of his public service, including the presidency. To many the comic-book format seemed highly unfitting for a President. Several at the White House complained that it should never have been permitted without Truman’s knowledge. But he had known and approved, and the book was a success. Three million copies quickly disappeared. In some places schools permitted distribution among students, who took the books home. Time, in a special feature, hailed it as “something new in ‘campaign literature’,” while regretting that it made no mention of “the late, great-bellied” Tom Pendergast.
Even more important and effective was a ten-minute Truman film, a “short” to be shown in movie theaters. (With approximately 20,000 theaters in the country, the weekly movie audience in 1948 was about 65 million.) Hearing that a Dewey film was being produced and paid for by the Republicans, Jack Redding, with no money available for films, threatened to have theaters picketed as unfair unless a “balancing” Truman story were made available. In response, the movie industry decided to produce a Truman film for nothing—Universal Newsreels lost the flip of a coin and did the work. With so little time left, and to keep costs to a minimum, The Truman Story was put together almost entirely from available newsreel footage, with the result that the finished production had a feeling of authenticity missing in the Dewey film, most of which had been staged. The candidate was seen as “neighbor Truman,” shaking hands with people on the streets of Independence (including a black man in bib overalls). He was shown visiting Eddie Jacobson in his store, at Grandview with his mother, but above all as the President, signing the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, addressing Congress, reviewing troops, conferring with Secretary Marshall beside the large globe in the Oval Office.
The two-reel film that had cost the Truman campaign nothing and was considered much more effective than its counterpart on Dewey would, in the final week before the election, play in theaters in every part of the country. “Thus, during the last six days of the campaign no one could go to the movies anywhere in the United States without seeing the story of the President,” boasted Redding, who considered it the most important publicity break of the campaign.
Seventy-one-year-old Alben Barkley, meantime, was crisscrossing the country in a chartered DC-3 called The Bluegrass. In contrast to his much younger Republican counterpart and rival, Earl Warren, who was touring by train, Barkley had initiated what he called history’s first “prop-stop” campaign. He flew 150,000 miles and delivered 250 speeches, mostly in small cities, farm towns, coal and railroad towns, labor halls, and small hotel dining rooms, his audiences sometimes numbering only in the hundreds. The press called him “the poor man’s candidate,” and Barkley enjoyed himself hugely, telling stories, speaking extemporaneously at almost any length, and giving no sign of wanting anything for himself, only to help the President and any number of local Democratic candidates. His own best help, he liked to say, came from the Republicans. Dewey’s speeches reminded him, Barkley said, of an old Tennessee politician known as “Fiddlin’ Bob” Taylor, who, in the era of the free silver issue, ran for governor by playing a violin and using his magnificent speaking voice to say as little as possible about anything specific, until finally he was pressed to state where he stood on the money question. “He paused dramatically,” Barkley would say, savoring the story, “and he said, ‘Here is where I stand. I am for a little more gold, a little more silver, a little more greenback—and a sprinkling of counterfeit.’ ”
When a reporter in New Haven, Connecticut, asked Barkley if he honestly thought the Democrats had a chance, Barkley replied, “Certainly. What do you think I’m running around for?”
One idea hatched behind the scenes by two of the new speechwriters proved a major embarrassment. David Noyes and Albert Carr, who were partial to the dramatic phrase or gesture—it was they who contributed the “pitchfork-in-the-back” line at Dexter—had concluded that the President needed to announce a bold move to dramatize his desire for world peace, and soon.
They proposed he send the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, on a special mission to Moscow to see Stalin. That Vinson, as a member of the Supreme Court, had no connection with the diplomatic role of the executive branch, that Vinson knew nothing of the crisis in Berlin beyond what was in the papers, or had any experience in Soviet affairs, or in dealing with Stalin, were apparently not considered serious drawbacks.
Truman agreed to the scheme—a decision that suggested as nothing else would that for all his show of confidence he knew perfectly how desperate his situation was and was therefore willing to try almost anything. Undoubtedly, too, he hoped that so daring and unorthodox an approach might just give Stalin the chance to “open up,” as he later wrote. He still thought Stalin could be reached, reasoned with, man-to-man. “If we could only get Stalin to unburden himself to someone on our side he felt he could trust fully, I thought perhaps we could get somewhere.”
On his second day back at the White House, Sunday, October 3, without notifying George Marshall, who was at a United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris trying to deal with the Berlin crisis, Truman called the Chief Justice to his office and asked him to make the trip.
Vinson was astonished. Members of the Court, he said, should confine themselves to their Court duties, and especially in an election year. But then, dutifully, Vinson consented to go.
The plan was for Truman to announce the mission on a special radio broadcast to the nation. Charlie Ross was instructed to arrange with the networks for a free, nonpolitical half-hour, for a statement of “major importance.” The State Department was alerted, to make the necessary clearances with Stalin. Truman would remember requesting also that “every possible precaution” be taken against premature leaks.
The atmosphere at the White House was extremely uneasy. Nerves were on edge. Those of the staff who had been traveling with the President were still exhausted, while a number of those who had remained behind felt overworked and unappreciated. “There is much confusion and taut nerves [recorded the faithful diarist Eben Ayers], due to…the belief that the President is going to be defeated. There are a few optimists in the place. There are jealousies and undercurrents all through the staff.”
The proposed “Vinson Mission” made tensions still worse. Clifford and Elsey argued vehemently against it, “almost violently,” Elsey remembered.
But when Truman met with his advisers in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday, October 5, the majority view was that only a dramatic, “even desperate” measure could save the campaign.
Excusing himself from the meeting, Truman went to the Map Room to inform Marshall by teletype. But Marshall, appalled by the very idea of the Vinson scheme, vehemently objected, with the result that Truman immediately called the whole thing off.
When he returned to the Cabinet Room to report his decision, several at the table, including Jonathan Daniels, addressed him in no uncertain terms, arguing that the mission was his last, best chance. But Truman cut them off. “We won’t do it,” he said.
To Daniels, it was one of the most vivid moments of all he had witnessed in the White House. If ever there was a point when Truman seemed at his best, when he was more than large enough for the job, Daniels later wrote, it was then, and
at a time when, by all reports, he seemed smaller than ever.
He got up and went out of the glass-paned door to the terrace by the rose garden and walked alone—very much alone that day—back toward the White House itself. He was wrong, I thought, but he was strong, I knew. There were no dramatics about it. He never said he would rather be right than President. The next time I saw him he was laughing with the reporters, the politicians and the police as he got back on that long train which everyone seemed too sure was taking him nowhere.
He was gone just three days this time. A quick swing through eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upstate New York had been decided on, as an extra effort. The “Vinson Mission,” presumably, was dead and buried, and no one the wiser. But there had been a leak. The radio networks, understandably, had insisted on knowing the nature of the “nonpolitical” announcement before relinquishing a free half hour in the middle of a presidential campaign. So Ross had told them “in confidence.”
The story of the aborted peace mission broke wide open. Editorials accused Truman of attempted appeasement, of playing politics with foreign policy. “His attempted action was shocking because it showed that he had no conception whatever of the difference between the President of the United States and a U.S. politician,” wrote Time. The campaign that had never had a chance was said to have been dealt a fatal blow. Dewey, publicly, decided to let the President’s action speak for itself. Off the record, he told reporters huffily, “If Harry Truman would just keep his hands off things for another few weeks! Particularly, if he will keep his hands off foreign policy, about which he knows considerably less than nothing.”
When Marshall flew in from Paris on Saturday, October 9, and stepped from his plane looking “ashen-faced,” it was said he had come home to resign. In fact, though Marshall was in poor health, his relations with Truman were excellent. Indeed, Marshall assumed part of the blame for what had happened, apologizing to Truman for not having kept him better informed on the progress of negotiations in Paris.
Truman was not worried about the fuss in the papers. He found it hard to believe that the American people would fault a President too harshly for wanting to achieve peace in the world. He had been encouraged also by his three-day swing. At Albany, Dewey’s own capital, ten thousand people had come down to the station in an early morning downpour to cheer and shout, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!”
On Sunday, October 10, he was back on board the train, still behind in the polls, still exuding confidence, and with just three weeks to go.