III

Were one to pick a single representative day of all the many days in Harry Truman’s drive for the presidency in 1948, a day that in spirit and content could serve as a classic passage in his whistle-stop odyssey, probably it would be Monday, October 11, when he barnstormed through central Ohio at the start of what was to prove a crucial swing into the Middle West.

Like the larger campaign; the day began in an atmosphere of gloom.

When Truman arrived in Cincinnati at 7:00 A.M., it was cold and raining. The streets from the railroad station to the Netherland Plaza Hotel, where he was to speak, were deserted. A reporter for the Des Moines Register, who had been traveling on board the Truman train for weeks, described him as looking that morning “like a man who had received bad news but felt the show must go on.”

The morning was bleak and the whole plan for the day seemed pointless. At stake were Ohio’s twenty-six electoral votes, but Ohio, the Buckeye State, was as formidable a Republican stronghold as any of the forty-eight states, with a Republican governor, nineteen Republican congressmen (as opposed to four Democrats), and two famous Republican senators, Taft and John Bricker, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944. Moreover, Truman had decided to spend much of the day in rural Ohio, in places where, in 1944, the vote had run as much as 70 percent for Dewey.

It had been Bill Boyle who had urged Truman to campaign in Ohio and whose political sagacity Truman had decided to bank on. Boyle, who was still in charge of Truman’s itinerary, was directing things now from an office at Democratic headquarters in Washington.

From Cincinnati, home of the Tafts, in the southwest corner of the state, Truman would head north on the B&O Railroad to Hamilton and Dayton, then on to a string of little towns, Sidney, Lima, Ottawa, and Deshler, where the train would turn east on the main line of the B&O, to stop at Fostoria, Willard, Rittman, and finally, that night, at industrial Akron, in the northeast corner. It was a trip of 350 miles. That Truman would even bother with towns like Ottawa or Willard struck many as a waste of time. But then to many observers the whole campaign was a waste of time. Dewey, who had carried Ohio against Roosevelt in 1944, was so sure of carrying it again, he would not actively campaign there. At one point while stopped in Ohio, Dewey did not trouble himself even to step out onto the rear platform, but sat in his compartment with the blind drawn. Told there was a crowd outside hoping to catch a glimpse of him, Dewey did not bother to raise the blind.

In eleven speeches at eleven stops, in the span of a fifteen-hour day, Truman hammered away steadily and happily at his same favorite themes—the high cost of living, the need for adequate housing, the intransigence and shortsightedness of the 80th Congress, the evils of the Taft-Hartley Act, and his desire for peace. He sang the praises of Franklin Roosevelt, and in the speech at Akron, the major speech of the day, he embraced as he never quite had in so many words the “entire philosophy” of the New Deal as his own, vowing “to build upon it an always better way of life.”

There were no startling claims or announcements. He just kept pressing the attack, mindful always of where he was and to whom he was speaking. He praised the people of Hamilton for their wartime production record, a subject he knew about, he said, from his years on the Truman Committee. “I grew up on a farm and I always like to see good farming country,” he said at rural Ottawa, then spent ten minutes describing the gains and prosperity achieved by farmers in the “Democratic years” since 1932.

At Lima, home of a locomotive factory, he shouted, “I’ve worn out three locomotives and we’ll use three more before we get through, so that will make it good for business here….”

“Well, I say thank God for the whistle-stops of our country. They are the backbone of the nation,” he told the citizenry of little Fostoria.

Bess and Margaret appeared on cue from behind the blue curtain and always to the delight of the crowd. “Would you like to meet the Boss?” Truman asked at Lima, adding that most married men had bosses at home. “He’s the President,” wrote the editor of the Lima News, and yet, “he’s just an ordinary family man, proud of his wife and daughter. He has something in common with many who heard him.”

(It was shortly after this that Bess told the candidate that if he called her “the Boss” one more time, she would get off the train.)

After the dreary start at Cincinnati the skies had literally cleared. The rain ended, the sun broke through. A crisp autumn wind was blowing, and with the maples beginning to turn gold and red, Ohio was a calendar picture for October in small-town, rural America.

From Hamilton on, the whole way, the crowds were big and responsive and Truman’s vitality returned, as if he had been given a powerful injection. The sight of ten thousand people spilling out in all directions at Hamilton produced what the Des Moines reporter called “the most striking change in the Democratic candidate’s demeanor I have witnessed in all our trips.” Everyone was surprised by the size and mood of the crowds. Ohio’s youthful, handsome former governor, Frank Lausche, who was running a “lone wolf campaign for another try at the governorship, had come aboard at Cincinnati, not at all sure that being seen with Harry Truman was the best thing for his fortunes. But as he told Truman in dismay, he had never seen such throngs. At Dayton, where he and Truman rode in a motorcade, there were fifty thousand lining the route. Lausche, who had planned to get off the train at Dayton, decided he would stay on board.

No two of Truman’s speeches were the same. Nearly all of what he said was spontaneous, his energy and enjoyment appearing to compound as the day went on, the more miles he covered, the more he talked of “the common people,” “the American people,” or “you good people of Deshler,” or Dayton or Fostorfa or Willard. As before, he played on fear of hard times, the memory of lean years, knowing from experience what so many who turned out to see him had been through, knowing, for example, how, among farmers, recollection of the 1920s in no way resembled the cliché, good-time picture of the Jazz Age. “If you don’t want to go backward,” he said at Ottawa, “if you don’t want to slide downhill to bankruptcy and poverty the way you did in the Republican 12 years of rule back there in the 20’s, you better get out early on election day and look after your own interests.” He knew, he had been through it.

Take stock of your prosperity now, he was saying. Remember, it wasn’t the Republicans who pulled the country back on its feet.

His opponent, he said, talked all the time of unity, because he didn’t dare do anything else. “He’s afraid that if he says anything, he will give the whole show away.” Meantime, the real leaders of the Republican Party in the “do-nothing” 80th Congress had been “sent off into the bushes to hide until the campaign is over.”

The people had a right to know where the candidates stood. That was why he had come to their town. They were entitled to know what the issues were, entitled to take a look at their President and hear what he had to say and decide for themselves. That was the idea of democracy: the people decide.

“They tell me that Seneca County is a Republican county,” he said at Fostoria. “Well, that’s all right with me. I want the Republicans of Seneca County to know what I think…”

His best trackside talk of the day was at Willard, in Huron County, Ohio, at 4:55 in the afternoon. It was a perfect example of Truman the barnstormer at top form.

A railroad town of plain, square frame houses and a population of four thousand, Willard had been called Chicago Junction until 1917, when it was renamed for Daniel Willard, president of the B&O Railroad. There was a surgical gloves factory in town, a Rotary Club, a good high school football team, and a World War II honor roll at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Pearl Street listing 876 names. Will Rogers was known to have had lunch once in the restaurant in the red-brick, Italianate railroad station.

Truman’s train stopped just east of the station, and Truman, looking west from the rear platform, the late afternoon sun full in his face, appeared still fresh and clean in a dark blue double-breasted suit and dark blue tie. Flags snapped in the wind. A crowd of several thousand pressed closer, cheering, waving to him, calling, “Hi, Harry!” As in so many other places, people who had brought small children held them on their shoulders, so they could say one day they had seen the President.

The excitement in Willard had begun building long before the train appeared down the tracks. When Franklin Roosevelt’s train stopped at Willard during the campaign of 1944, and thousands of people had gathered, Roosevelt never appeared. They saw only his dog Fala.

Truman was introduced by Harlow A. Stapf, the proprietor of a popular bar and grill in Willard and president of Huron County’s Young Democratic Club, who, to Truman’s delight, was wearing a campaign necktie with Truman’s portrait on it.

Truman began with a few customary words of appreciation for the warm welcome, which he followed with a note of local history, in this instance, Daniel Willard, who, as Truman said, was still fondly remembered for his generosity to suffering families of the town during the Depression. Several key themes were then sounded—housing, inflation, the 80th Congress—and Truman did a little advance drumbeating for the main speech to come, at Akron, which was to be carried by radio.

A personal observation on the value of opinion polls was also added at Willard, for the first time. The complete talk, all spontaneous, lasted twelve minutes. Characteristically, it was without flourishes. There were no quotations for effect, no big words. He used no jargon, no stock jokes, nothing cute. But the intent of his thought was always clear. He spoke in good, solid, complete sentences—as indeed he did the whole way along, through the entire campaign. From what he said, his audience never had any trouble knowing what he meant.

I have had a most wonderful reception in Ohio today. It has been just like this all across the State of Ohio. We started in Cincinnati and came up the western border of the State, and now we are headed for Akron, and it seems as if everybody in the neighborhood and in every city has turned out, because they are interested in what is taking place in the country today and in the world.

It is good to be here in Willard this afternoon, even for a short stop. You people here in Willard have a great tradition, a tradition set by Dan Willard many years ago when he was President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. I think it is significant that the name of Dan Willard is loved and respected all over the country, because he was the man who believed in the common people of the nation. He liked and respected the people who worked for him, and he recognized their right to join a union and bargain collectively.

Now, Dan Willard did not sneer at the “whistle-stops” of our country. He trusted people, and people trusted him. I think that is a good principle. It is a good way to run a railroad, and it is a good way to run a country. That is the way I have tried to run the country, but the Republican Congress would not cooperate, this 80th Congress.

Now, that is the way, with your help, we are going to run the country for the next 4 years.

The Republican candidate and the Republican Congress do not trust the people. They just work along at their old problem of trying to fool the people into voting for the interests of the few. They try to do it without telling you what they think. I have been out among the people now for nearly a month. I believe you have got a right to know what I think, and I have been telling you what I think.

Tonight, in Akron, I am going to talk over the radio about the Republican Taft-Hartley law. I am really going to tear the mask off the Republican Congress and the Republican candidate.

In Cincinnati this morning, at a splendid meeting, I talked about housing. I told the people there how your President had tried for 3 years to get a decent housing bill passed. At other places we stopped at in Ohio, I talked about prices. I told the people how your President had twice called Congress into special session in an effort to get something done about inflation that is picking your pockets.

Since I have been in the White House, there has not been a moment of doubt about where I stood on issues which are of concern to the people of America today. I have always spoken out and I have taken a stand on every issue as it has come up. I don’t wait for any polls to tell me what to think. That is a statement some of the Republican candidates cannot make.

You know, since I started this campaign, I have talked to over 3 million people in various communities. They have come down to the train, just as you did this afternoon, because they were interested in this election. They know that the peace of the Nation and the peace of the world depend, to a large extent, on this election. They know that the continued prosperity of our Nation depends upon this election, and they want to know where the candidates stand on the issues. And that is what I have been telling you as simply and as plainly as I know how.

There is not a single, solitary man or woman in the United States today who can’t find out in two minutes where I stand on the important matters like foreign policy, labor, agriculture, social security, housing, high prices, and all the other problems we as a nation have to face.

But there is not a single, solitary man or woman in the United States who has been able, within the last 2 months, to find out where the Republican candidate stands on these issues.

I think he is going to get a shock on the second of November. He is going to get the results of one big poll that counts—that is the voice of the American people speaking at the ballot box.

And he is going to find out that the people have had enough of such fellows as the one from this district who has been helping the 80th Congress to turn the clock back. And I think you are going to elect Dwight Blackmore to Congress in his place. And I think you are going to elect Frank Lausche Governor of Ohio.

If you do that, you will be voting in your own interests, and when you vote in your own interests on the second of November, you cannot do anything else but vote the straight Democratic ticket, and I won’t be troubled with the housing problem. I will live in the White House 4 more years.

Now, that will be entirely to your interests. You will have a Congress who believes in the people, and you will have a President who has shown you right along that he believes in the welfare of the country as a whole, and not in the welfare of just a few at the top.

Akron, heart of the rubber industry, a big labor town, solidly Democratic, had been expected to give the Democratic standardbearer a good reception, however dismal his prospects. But the welcome at Akron was “tumultuous,” everything that Cincinnati failed to provide, and more. People jammed the streets three and four deep, an estimated sixty thousand, in what was reported in the national press as “the biggest political show in the city’s history,” everyone “cheering wildly” as Truman passed. The Akron Armory was packed. It was the perfect, grand finale for the day and Truman was radiant.

“I have lived a long time—64 years—and I have traveled a lot,” he told the crowd, “but I have never seen such turnouts as I have seen all over this great country of ours…. The Republicans have the propaganda and the money, but we have the people, and the people have the votes.That’s why we’re going to win!”

Reporters traveling with Truman agreed it had been one of if not his best day of the campaign. By conservative estimates, the day’s crowds totaled 100,000 people, even before Akron.

By eleven that night he was back on the train and heading west again. At 8:00 A.M. the next morning, at Richmond, Indiana, he was out on the rear platform ready to start another day.

It had been known for some while that Newsweek magazine was taking a poll of fifty highly regarded political writers, to ask which candidate they thought would win the election. And since several of the fifty had been on the train with Truman during the course of the campaign—Marquis Childs, Robert Albright of the Washington Post, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune—there had been a good deal of speculation about the poll. It appeared in Newsweek in the issue dated October 11, and on the morning of Tuesday, October 12, three weeks before election day, at one of the first stops in Indiana, Clark Clifford slipped off the train to try to find a copy before anyone else. The woman at the station newsstand pointed to a bundle wrapped in brown paper, telling him to help himself. “And there it was!” remembered Clifford years afterward.

Of the writers polled, not one thought Truman would win. The vote was unanimous, 50 for Dewey, 0 for Truman. “The landslide for Dewey will sweep the country,” the magazine announced. Further, the Republicans would keep control in the Senate and increase their majority in the House. The election was as good as over.

Returning to the train, Clifford hid the magazine under his coat. With the train about to leave, the only door still open was on the rear platform.

So I walked in. President Truman was sitting there, and so I cheerily said, “Good morning, Mr. President.” He said, “Good morning, Clark.” And I said, “Another busy day ahead.” “Yes,” he said…. So I walked off…and I got almost by him when he said, “What does it say?” And I said, “What’s that, Mr. President?” He said, “What does it say?” And I said, “Now what does what…?” He said, “I saw you get off and go into the station. I think you probably went in there to see if they had a copy at Newsweek magazine.” And he said, “I think it is possible that you may have it under your jacket there, the way you’re holding your arm.” Well, I said, “Yes, sir.”

So I handed it to him…. And he turned the page and looked at it…[and] he said, “I know every one of these 50 fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.”

Truman put the magazine aside and made no further mention of it. “It just seemed to bounce right off of him,” Clifford remembered.

There were three stops in Indiana, four crossing Illinois, where farmers on tractors waved small flags or held up hand-lettered “Vote for Truman” signs.

“I was with Truman in the central part of the state,” wrote Paul Douglas, Democratic candidate for the Senate. “There was great applause, and there were constant shouts of ‘Give ‘em hell, Harry’…and he was at home with the crowd…he was simple, unaffected, and determined. We were proud of him.”

At Springfield after dark old-time campaign flares burned, the streets were filled with people. No one could come to Springfield without thinking of Abraham Lincoln, Truman said in his speech.

I just wonder tonight, as I have wondered many times in the past, what Lincoln would say if he could see how far the Republican party has departed from the fundamental principles in which he so deeply believed. Lincoln came from the plain people and he always believed in them….

He crossed into Wisconsin and Minnesota. At Duluth, where he rode in an open car with Hubert Humphrey, fully half the population, some sixty thousand people, lined Superior Street for two miles, crowding so close in places that the car brushed their clothes.

At St. Paul, an overflow crowd at Municipal Auditorium whistled, stamped, and shouted as he delivered one of the best fighting speeches of the campaign.

Now, I call on all liberals and progressives to stand up and be counted for democracy in this great battle…. This is one fight you must get in, and get in with every ounce of strength you have. After November 2nd, it will be too late…. The decision is right here and now.

But we are bound to win and we are going to win, because we are right! I am here to tell you that in this fight, the people are with us.

The crowd at St. Paul numbered 21,000—15,000 inside the auditorium, another 6,000 outside. Dewey, in his appearance at St. Paul two days later, drew only 7,000.

Heading east again, Truman said there were going to be “a lot of surprised pollsters,” come November 2.

Some of the Dewey people were beginning to worry. When Dewey asked his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, how he thought Truman was doing, Hagerty said, “I think he’s doing pretty well.” Dewey replied that he thought so, too.

When at Kansas City Dewey met privately with Roy Roberts of the Star, he was told the farmers of the Middle West were defecting from the Republican ticket in droves and that he had better do something about it quickly. Time was now describing Dewey’s crowds as only “mildly curious,” his speeches as “not electrifying.”

“Our man is ‘in,’” reporters were assured by the Dewey staff. “He doesn’t have to win votes, all he has to do is avoid losing them.” Dewey himself told Taft that he had found over the years that when he got into controversies he lost votes—an observation Taft thought disgraceful.

There was much that Dewey could have said in answer to Truman. The “do-nothing” 80th Congress was after all the Congress that had backed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Truman’s assault on the Taft-Hartley Act failed to note that a majority of his own party in the House had voted approval and then to override his veto. The evil influence of Wall Street on the Republican Party, as described by Truman, might have been made to sound a bit hollow, had it been pointed out that such important figures within his own official family as Harriman, Lovett, and Forrestal had all come to Washington from Wall Street. Truman’s dismissal of Henry Wallace had been a fiasco. His handling of the railroad strike might well have been made a major issue. “The only way to handle Truman,” Taft wrote later, “was to hit every time he opened his mouth.” But Taft was a cantankerous man and Dewey was determined to stick to his own strategy.

Meantime, a “slight misadventure” at a town called Beaucoup, in Illinois, had raised a stir. Just as Dewey was about to speak at Beaucoup, his train had suddenly lurched a few feet backward toward the crowd. There were screams, people fell back in panic. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey blurted angrily into the microphone. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise….”

The cold arrogance of the remark did Dewey great damage. The story appeared everywhere, and with it, the observation of the engineer—“the lunatic”—who said, “I think as much of Dewey as I did before and that’s not very much.”

With only two weeks to go, a new Gallup Poll showed Dewey’s lead cut to six points. In the seclusion of the Governor’s Mansion at Albany, Dewey ordered a showing of all the newsreels of the campaign and what he saw left him greatly disturbed. He was losing ground steadily, he was told. But when his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, put through calls to some ninety Republican committeemen and women around the country, all but one urged him to keep to the present strategy.

Among professional gamblers, the betting odds against Truman on the average were 15 to 1. In some places, they were 30 to 1.

Besides the gamblers’ odds, the opinion polls, the forecasts by columnists, political reporters, political experts, Truman by now had the majority of editorial opinion weighed heavily against him. His frequent claim that 90 percent of the papers opposed his election was a campaign stretch of the truth. It was 65 percent, which in fact meant overwhelming press support for Dewey, and especially since it included virtually all the biggest, most influential papers in the country. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Star, the Kansas City Star, the St. LouisPost-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal all endorsed Dewey. The Detroit Free Press called Truman intellectually unqualified. The Chicago Tribune, though far from admiring the liberal Republican candidate, simply dismissed Truman as “an incompetent.”

An editorial backing Truman, such as appeared in the Boston Post, under the heading “Captain Courageous,” was a rare exception. Harry S. Truman, said the Boston paper, was

as humbly honest, homespun and doggedly determined to do what is best for America as Abraham Lincoln.

In standing by his party and its inherent principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, he has emulated other great Americans—Jefferson, Jackson, Cleveland, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Alfred E. Smith. Like them, in the words of the old song, he—

Dared to be a Daniel,

Dared to stand alone,

Dared to hold a purpose firm

    Dared to make it known.

By that token he should win. America likes a fighter.

More representative were such conclusions as drawn in the Los Angeles Times: “Mr. Truman is the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.”

Even papers that expressed an open fondness for the President as a man chose not to support him. “However much affection we may feel for Mr. Truman and whatever sympathy we may have for him in his struggles with his difficulties,” said a front-page editorial in the Baltimore Sun,“to vote him into the presidency on November 2 would be a tragedy for the country and for the world.”

For Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, George Elsey, for everyone riding the Truman train, the campaign had become an unimaginable ordeal—interminable, exhausting in a way comparable to nothing in their experience.

“If you’re winning, you’d be surprised how you can withstand fatigue,” Clifford would say later. “If you’re losing it becomes oppressive…. They were long, long days. I was young and strong, and in perfect health. From time to time I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.”

The candidate, who bore the main brunt, seemed indefatigable, his outlook entirely positive. Between speeches he could lie down and go immediately to sleep, however pressed others were, however rough the road bed. “Give me 20 minutes,” he would say.

“Strain seemed to make him calmer and more firm,” Jonathan Daniels recalled. At no point in the entire campaign did any of the staff, or the press, or his family ever see Truman show a sign of failing stamina, or failing confidence.

Once during a lull en route to St. Paul after the stop at Duluth, Truman had asked George Elsey to write down the names of the forty-eight states, after which he gave Elsey the number of electoral votes for each and told him how they would go. By his count he would win with 340 electoral votes. Dewey would have 108, Strom Thurmond 42, Henry Wallace none.

“He was not putting on a show for anybody,” Elsey would recall. “Obviously he wasn’t trying to influence or persuade or sell me. This is what the man himself believed.”

“He either honestly believes he will win…or he is putting on the most magnificent and fighting front of optimism that any doubtful candidate ever did,” wrote Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune.

The Truman staff was another matter, Andrews noted. They all appeared “a bit grim.”

The work went on from seven in the morning until past midnight, day after day, until they lost all sense of time, until every day became merged with every other and everything became a blur. Margaret would remember the world beginning to seem like an endless railroad track. She would sit by the window and take idle snapshots of the passing countryside—telephone poles whizzing past, empty plains, country roads that seemed to lead nowhere.

As Ross wrote, the President was driving himself “unmercifully,” and no one on the staff wished to do any less. Ross, “the old philosopher,” suffered from arthritis and heart trouble, yet worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, knowing how much Truman counted on him. “For years afterward,” Clifford said, “I’d sometimes wake up at night in a cold perspiration thinking I was back on that terrible train.”

And day by day, steadily, the crowds grew larger. Clearly, something was happening. The mood of the crowds, their response to Truman was changing. People seemed always to be happier after hearing him speak.

“I remember thinking,” said Clifford, “ ‘Well, I don’t know whether we’re going to make it or not, but, by God, I bet if we had another week we would surely make it.’ There was something rolling…. We could sense it and the newspapermen could sense it.”

Robert C. Albright, the veteran political correspondent for the Washington Post, speculated, “Could we be wrong?”

“We’ve got them on the run and I think we’ll win,” Truman wrote to his sister from the White House on October 20. After a day in Washington, he had flown to Miami, where 200,000 people filled the streets. From Miami he flew north to Raleigh, where there were “people all along the way from the airport which is fifteen miles out of town.”

Things were looking decidedly more hopeful on several fronts. In Berlin, with improved landing facilities and more efficient air-traffic control after months of experience, the airlift was plainly succeeding at last, against all odds and forecasts. At his desk in the Oval Office on Friday, October 22, Truman authorized the dispatch to Berlin of still more of the giant C-54 transports, another twenty-six planes. “The airlift will be continued until the blockade is lifted,” General Clay declared triumphantly in Berlin. Winter supplies for the city were guaranteed.

Back on his train again, Truman was telling a delighted crowd at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that the GOP stood for “Grand Old Platitudes,” and at a thunderous rally at Hunt Armory in Pittsburgh, he declared, “I am an old campaigner, and I enjoy it.”

His opponent, Truman said, acted like a doctor whose magic cure for everything was a soothing syrup called unity. And here were the American people going for the usual once-every-four-years checkup.

“Say you don’t look so good!” Truman said, acting the part of the doctor.

“Well, that seems strange to me too, Doc,” he answered, as the voice of the people. “I never felt stronger, never had more money, and never had a brighter future. What is wrong with me?”

“I never discuss issues with a patient. But what you need is a major operation.”

“Will it be serious, Doc?”

“Not so very serious. It will just mean taking out the complete works and putting in a Republican administration.”

The audience roared with laughter. He had made the cool, letter-perfect Dewey a joke at last.

Chicago went all out. Politicians who had taken part in the great Roosevelt rallies of 1936 and 1940 said they had never seen anything like it. Possibly as many as fifty thousand people marched in the parade from the Blackstone to Chicago Stadium. Another half million lined the route. Marching bands blared, fireworks burst overhead. Yet, oddly, not everyone was cheering. Here and there, remembered Paul Douglas, were people with tears in their eyes. “The newspapers had convinced them that Truman was going to lose, and they believed that the gains they had made under the New Deal were going to be taken away. They seemed to feel something precious was about to be lost, and they wanted to come out and show their sympathy arid support for the doughty little warrior who was doing battle for them against such great odds.” Privately, Douglas felt that he, too, like Truman would go down to defeat in his bid for the Senate.

At the packed stadium, to a crowd of 24,000 Truman delivered his most savage speech of the campaign, a wild attack, uncalled for, in which he said a vote for Dewey was a vote for fascism. The authors of the speech were again David Noyes and Albert Carr, whose main purpose, Noyes later said, was to provoke Dewey into fighting back, a strategy Truman accepted. “An element of desperation comes into a campaign,” Clifford would say in retrospect. “And fatigue leads to it.”

Dewey was properly outraged, so much so he drafted a new speech for his own scheduled appearance at Chicago, but then was persuaded by his advisers to drop it, not to get into a slugging match with Truman. He mustn’t get nasty, mustn’t make mistakes with victory so close. Reportedly, Dewey’s wife said that if she had to stay up all night to see him tear up what he had written, she would do it.

“They have scattered reckless abuse along the entire right of way coast to coast,” Dewey would say only in Chicago, speaking of Democrats in general, “and now, I am sorry to say, reached a new low in mudslinging…. This is the kind of campaign I refuse to wage….”

Truman offered no explanations or apologies. He was on his way east, and the “tide was rolling.” Dewey’s “Victory Special” would follow directly after him a day later.

At Boston a quarter of a million people banked Truman’s parade route, cheered and yelled and enjoyed the obvious enjoyment written all over the candidate’s face. To the packed house at Mechanics Hall, Truman said Republican talk of unity was all “a lot of hooey—and if that rhymes with anything, it is not my fault.”

On Thursday, October 28, after nine stops and nine more speeches in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the Truman campaign reached New York, where the outpouring of humanity and enthusiasm exceeded everything thus far. Had Truman’s whole career gone uncelebrated until now, the roaring, ticker-tape welcome that New York gave him would have made up for it. Over a million people turned out. Arriving at Grand Central Station in late afternoon, Truman set off on a nine-mile tour through the city, through the October twilight, led by a thundering motorcycle escort of a hundred machines. Truman was perched on the top of the back seat of an open car. Bess and Margaret followed six cars back.

The confetti, ticker-tape and [shredded] telephone book demonstration along 42nd Street was extraordinary [wrote Meyer Berger in The New York Times]. It fell in great flurries and much of it landed on the Open cars. It curled and twisted from high windows. It fell in other places like driven snow. Through it all, the President’s figure, at times, was only dimly seen. He was smiling and he never stopped waving to curb crowds and to men and women clustered at high windows….

As he rolled through Seventh Avenue, in the garment district, loudspeakers, cranked to full volume, blared “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

He made three rousing outdoor speeches—at Union Square, City Hall, and Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side—spoke at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, then again that night, his fifth speech of the day, at Madison Square Garden, where two of his old nemeses, Albert Whitney and Harold Ickes, joined him on stage while the band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” A crowd of sixteen thousand roared its approval when Truman—evoking the memory of Al Smith, Robert Wagner, and Franklin Roosevelt—pledged his faith in the New Deal, pledged his support of Israel, and again, as at Pittsburgh, brought down the house with another doctor story. For weeks, he said, he had had the odd sensation that someone was following him. It had troubled him so he asked the White House physician about it, but the White House physician had said not to worry. “There is one place where that fellow is not going to follow you—and that’s into the White House.”

The race nearly over, Truman was determined to finish strong. Friday the 29th, under a clear blue sky, in what by now was being described as “Truman weather,” he covered thirty-six sunlit miles through the city. He was seen and cheered, police said, by 1,245,000 people. There was not a discordant note through the whole day. Tugs on the East River tooted a greeting. In the Bronx, crowds screamed: “Hi, Harry” and “Hi, Margaret.” “You can throw the Galluping polls right into the ash can,” he told a delighted throng in Queens. If the campaign was only a ritual, as said so often, then it was a ritual people loved and they loved him for embracing it with such zest.

In Harlem he made his only civil rights speech of the campaign. It was no impassioned personal declaration, but focused on the work of his Civil Rights Commission and its “momentous” report. Nonetheless, his appearance marked the first time a major party candidate for President had stumped Harlem, and after reminding his almost entirely black audience that he had already issued two executive orders to establish equal opportunity in the armed services and federal employment, he vowed to keep working for equal rights and equal opportunity “with every ounce of strength and determination I have.” The cheering in Harlem was the loudest of all.

When he rose to speak at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that evening, the audience gave him a twelve-minute ovation.

For months efforts had been made to persuade Eleanor Roosevelt to say something, anything, to help Truman—efforts that Truman himself refused to have any part in—but all to no avail. From Paris, where she was attending the United Nations session, she wrote to Frances Perkins that she had not endorsed Truman because he was “such a weak and vacillating person” and made such poor appointments. Now, at the last minute, she changed her mind, hoping to help the Democrats to carry New York.

“There has never been a campaign where a man has shown more personal courage and confidence in the people of the United States,” she said in a broadcast from Paris.

The scene of the final rally of the campaign, and the last platform appearance Harry Truman would ever make as a candidate for public office, was the immense Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, where there was not an empty seat.

Discarding the speech efforts of his staff, he went on the attack, lashing out one last time at the Republican Congress, the Republican press, the Republican “old dealers,” and the Republican candidate. The stomping, cheering crowd urged him on.

He felt afterward that he had done well. In any case, he had done the best he knew how.

The odyssey was over. Sunday, October 31, Halloween, was spent at home at 219 North Delaware Street. “Home!” remembered Margaret. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Truman worked on an election-eve radio address to be delivered from the living room the following night.

From the bottom of my heart I thank the people of the United States for their cordiality to me and their interest in the affairs of this great nation and of the world. I trust the people, because when they know the facts, they do the right thing….

Election day, up at five, he took his usual morning walk, read the papers, and had breakfast. Then, trailed by a swarm of reporters and photographers, he, Bess, and Margaret went to Memorial Hall three blocks away on Maple Avenue and voted.

A final Gallup Poll showed that while he had cut Dewey’s lead, Dewey nonetheless remained a substantial five points ahead, 49.5 to 44.5. The betting odds still ranged widely, though generally speaking Dewey was favored 4 to 1.

The New York Times predicted a Dewey victory with 345 electoral votes. “Government will remain big, active, and expensive under President Thomas E. Dewey,” said The Wall Street Journal. Time and Newsweek saw a Dewey sweep. The new issue of Life carried a full-page photograph of Dewey “the next President” crossing San Francisco Bay by ferry boat. Alistair Cooke, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, titled his dispatch for November 1, “Harry S. Truman, A Study in Failure.”

Changing Times, the Kiplinger magazine, announced on its front cover in bold, block type, “What Dewey Will Do.” Walter Lippmann wrote about the work Dewey had cut out for him in foreign policy. Drew Pearson, who thought Dewey had run “one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent years,” surveyed the “Dewey team,” the “exciting, hardworking, close-knit clique” that would be moving into the White House. Marquis Childs questioned whether the Democratic Party could ever be put back together again, while in their final column before election day the Alsop brothers worried over “how the government could get through the next ten weeks with a lame-duck president: Events will not wait patiently until Thomas E. Dewey officially replaces Harry S. Truman.”

For Truman there were but two irregular, entirely unprofessional samplings to take heart from. One was from Les Biffle, the Senate Secretary, who, on his own, posing as a “chicken peddler,” had traveled about rural areas asking people how they felt about the election. Truman needn’t worry, Biffle had reported—the common people were for him. The other was from the Staley Milling Company of Kansas City, which had taken a “pullet poll” among farmers who bought chicken feed in sacks labeled “Democratic” or “Republican.” The Democratic feed had pulled well ahead, but then the company decided there must be something wrong and so abandoned its polling efforts.

Among the campaign staff, the state of physical and emotional exhaustion, the sense of relief that finally the ordeal was over, all but precluded any capacity for rational judgment of the outcome. Their devotion to the President was greater than ever, but that, of course, was another matter. Yet some now honestly thought he might just make it. In Washington, after a quiet day at the White House, Eben Ayers worked out his own remarkable assessment of the situation in the privacy of his diary:

Were it not for all these predictions and the unanimity of the pollsters and experts, I would say the President has an excellent chance. All the signs that I see indicate it. The crowds which have turned out for him on his campaign trips have grown steadily…. I cannot believe they came out of curiosity alone. Other conditions are favorable to the President, the general prosperity of the country. It is contrary to political precedent for the voters to kick out an administration in times of prosperity.

The Dewey personality and campaign has not been one to attract voters. He is not liked—there is universal agreement on that. I have repeatedly asked individuals, newspapermen and others, if they could name one person who ever said he liked Dewey and I have yet to find one who would say “yes.” The Dewey campaign speeches have dealt only with national “unity,” with the promise to do things better and more efficiently. He has not discussed issues clearly or met them head-on at any time. I have repeatedly asked my wife if it is possible that the American people will vote for a man whom nobody likes and who tells them nothing.

Late in the afternoon of election day, Truman decided to disappear from the scene. It was an odd move and one never quite explained. The impression was he wanted to be alone, simply to get away from everyone and everything and be by himself. Only his immediate family and the Secret Service knew where he was going.

The Secret Service was about to have a changing of the guard at 219 North Delaware. At 4:30 a Secret Service field car, a black four-door Ford carrying the night shift, pulled into the driveway behind the house. The day shift was ready to leave, to drive back to Kansas City, to presidential headquarters at the Muehlebach Hotel.

A crowd had gathered in front of the house. Truman went out the kitchen door and climbed into the back seat of the Ford with Agents Henry Nicholson and Gerard McCann on either side of him. Agent Frank Barry took the wheel and Jim Rowley, head of the detail, got quickly into the front seat beside the driver. The car pulled away, drawing no attention.

They drove to Excelsior Springs, the little resort town across the Missouri in Clay County, and checked into the Elms Hotel, the same place Truman had escaped to sixteen years earlier, crushed by disappointment the night he learned he was not to be Tom Pendergast’s choice for governor.

The sprawling three-story stone-and-timber hotel was the latest of several that had occupied the site since mineral springs were discovered there in the 1880s. Its chief attractions were seclusion, peace, and quiet. Franklin Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and Al Capone were all known to have escaped from public view at the Elms. On this November night the place was nearly deserted.

The rooms picked by the Secret Service were on the third floor rear, at the end of a long hall. Truman, who had left home without baggage, borrowed bathrobe and slippers from the hotel manager and went for a steambath and a rubdown, after which, at 6:30, he had a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of buttermilk sent up to his room. As he ate, he switched on the bedside radio.

The first final returns were from a town in New Hampshire called Hart’s Location, where the vote, including two absentee ballots, was Truman 1, Dewey 11. By eight o’clock Missouri time, Dewey was ahead in such key eastern states as New York and Pennsylvania, but Truman was leading in the popular vote overall, nationally.

About nine, Truman called Jim Rowley into the room. He was going to get some sleep, Truman said, but Rowley was to wake him if anything “important” happened.

“We all, of course, stayed awake,” remembered Agent McCann. “There was nothing to do but stay awake.”

The head of the Secret Service, James J. Maloney, was in New York, having decided Governor Dewey was certain to be the next President. Maloney and five of his men had taken up positions outside an upper-floor suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, where Dewey was relaxing with family and friends waiting to go down to the packed Roosevelt ballroom to announce his victory.

The crowd outside 219 North Delaware had grown larger, filling the sidewalks on both sides of the street and much of the front lawn. A stream of automobiles passed steadily by, their drivers slowing to see the excitement or to call to friends. Newspaper and radio correspondents had set up headquarters across the street, on the porches of the Luff and the Noland houses.

The night air was cool. Lights burned in every window of the Truman house, though the shades were all drawn except in the window of the upstairs hall, where a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt could be plainly seen.

Reporters were counting on the President to make an appearance. “We waited and waited and waited,” remembered Sue Gentry of the Examiner, for whom, like others who lived in the neighborhood, it was turning into one of the most exciting nights ever in Independence. For by 11:00P.M., though several commentators and the Republican chairman, Brownell, were still predicting a Dewey victory, Truman, incredibly, was still ahead in the popular vote. The crowd on the lawn began singing—“For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

Then the porch light went on and Margaret came out. She stood on the porch smiling and making a hopeless gesture with both arms.

“Dad isn’t here,” she announced. “I don’t know where he is,” she said, which wasn’t true.

The reporters were incredulous. “We couldn’t believe it,” remembered Sue Gentry. Some of the crowd began drifting away.

The lights in the windows remained on all night, as they would remain on in houses all over town and all over the country.

“What a night,” Margaret wrote in her diary, conscious that she was at the center of history in the making. By midnight Truman was ahead in the popular count by 1 million votes.

I haven’t been to bed at all. I’ve been running up and down the stairs all night answering the phone on the direct-line telephone [to the Presidential Suite at the Muehlebach] to Bill Boyle who gave me the returns. We are ahead, but at about 1:30 A.M. we hit a slump—then gradually came up again. Dad has slipped away to Excelsior Springs and the reporters are going crazy trying to find him. They have offered me anything if I’ll just tell them in which direction he went.

Sometime near midnight, Truman awoke and switched on the radio, picking up NBC and the clipped, authoritative voice of political commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, the voice that had reported Munich in 1938 and that to much of America was the very sound of the news. Though the President was ahead by 1,200,000 votes, Kaltenborn said, he was still “undoubtedly beaten.” Truman switched him off, turned over, and went back to sleep.

Through their vigil over the next several hours, Agents Rowley, Nicholson McCann, and Barry also stayed tuned to NBC. “And all of a sudden,” remembered Rowley, “about four in the morning comes this thing that the tide has changed. And so I figured, ‘This is important!’ And so I went in and told him. ‘We’ve won!’ And he turns on the radio.”

Truman, Kaltenborn was saying, was ahead by 2 million votes, though Kaltenborn still did not see how Truman could possibly be elected, since in key states like Ohio and Illinois the “rural vote,” the Dewey vote, had yet to be tallied.

“We’ve got ‘em beat,” Truman said. Rowley was told to get the car ready. “We’re going to Kansas City.”