V

The country was flabbergasted. It was called a “startling victory,” “astonishing,” “a major miracle.” Truman, said Newsweek on its cover, was the Miracle Man.

He had won against the greatest odds in the annals of presidential politics. Not one polling organization had been correct in its forecast. Not a single radio commentator or newspaper columnist, or any of the hundreds of reporters who covered the campaign, had called it right. Every expert had been proven wrong, and as was said, “a great roar of laughter arose from the land.” The people had made fools of those supposedly in the know. Of all amazing things, Harry Truman had turned out to be the only one who knew what he was talking about.

Actress Tallulah Bankhead sent Truman a telegram: “The people have put you in your place.” Harry Truman, said the radio comedian Fred Allen, was the first President to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk.

A few papers had predicted a close election. A Washington correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black paper, had also described how, in theory, Truman might win. John L. Clark of the Courier had traveled with the Truman train part of the time and had taken seriously the size of the crowds. Victory for the President in twenty-three states outside the South, plus a break in the South, or an upset in California or New York, could spell victory for the President, Clark wrote, though he did not predict this would happen. Nor did the author Louis Bean, who, in a book published in July, How to Predict Elections, also offered the theoretical possibility of a Truman upset.

As it was, Truman carried 28 states with a total of 303 electoral votes, and defeated Dewey in the popular election by just over 2,100,000 votes. In the final tally, Truman polled 24,105,812, Dewey 21,970,065.

Dewey, who won in 16 states, had 189 electoral votes. Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond each polled slightly more than 1,100,000 votes. Thurmond, with his victory in four southern states, had 39 electoral votes. Wallace, who failed to carry a single state, thus received no votes in the Electoral College.

The outcome in the congressional races was 54 Senate seats for the Democrats, 42 for the Republicans. In the House the Democratic victory was overwhelming, 263 seats to 171.

Though Dewey had carried the three industrial giants of the Northeast, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as his own home state of Michigan, Truman had defeated him soundly in thirteen of the country’s biggest cities and captured the Republican stronghold of the rural Midwest, carrying Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Iowa, “the very citadel of Republicanism.” Truman held on to seven states in the South, despite Strom Thurmond. He carried the four border states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and his own Missouri, where he won by more than a quarter of a million votes. In the West, where at the start only Arizona had looked safe for the Democrats, he took every state but Oregon.

Truman also held Dewey to a smaller part of the total vote nationwide (45.1 percent) than Dewey had in 1944 running against Roosevelt.

As would be pointed out, Truman’s margin of victory in such key states as Ohio, Illinois, and California had been narrow. He won Ohio by a bare 7,000 votes, Illinois by 33,000, California by 17,000. A switch in any two of these three states would have left him with less than a majority in the Electoral College and thrown the decision to the House of Representatives. Had Dewey won in all three states, then Dewey would have eked out victory in the electoral vote and thus won the presidency, while Truman finished in front in the popular tally. A cumulative shift of just 33,000 votes apportioned to the three states would have done it.

But it was also true that a similar shift in other states would have made Truman an even bigger winner. Truman very nearly won in New York, for example, and unquestionably would have had it not been for Henry Wallace, who rolled up half a million votes in the state (which was half Wallace’s national total). “I think the mistake was not giving more time to New York. We should have carried New York,” Clark Clifford would say. Dewey won there by only 61,000—in his own state—and New York meant 47 electoral votes. Had there been no Henry Wallace, or a Strom Thurmond, Truman might well have gained another 85 electoral votes, giving him an Electoral College landslide.

Efforts to explain why the impossible had happened began at once, as did, understandably, a great deal of soul searching among reporters, editors, and broadcasters who had fallen down on the job so very conspicuously.

To H. L. Mencken, who delighted in the outcome exactly because it “shook the bones of all…[the] smarties,” the answer was simply in the contrast of the two contestants as they presented themselves to the voters. “Neither candidate made a speech on the stump that will survive in the schoolbooks, but those of Truman at least had warmth in them,” wrote Mencken in one of his last columns, at the close of a long career of appraising the American political scene. “While Dewey was intoning essays sounding like the worst bombast of university professors, Truman was down on the ground, clowning with the circumambient morons. He made votes every time he gave a show, but Dewey lost them.”

To Dewey himself, it had all turned on the farm vote. “The farm vote switched in the last ten days,” he claimed in a letter to Henry Luce, “and you can analyze figures from now to kingdom come and all they will show is that we lost the farm vote….”

Joe Martin, who with the new Democratic majority in the House was to be Speaker no longer, said the fault was with the Republican Party, which had “digressed” too far from the people. Like many of the old guard, Martin and Taft both thought Dewey had run an abysmal campaign. “You’ve got to give the little man credit,” said Arthur Vandenberg, in a somewhat patronizing tribute to Truman. Taft, furious, said, “I don’t care how the thing is explained. It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House.”

To the surprise of many, it would turn out that the Democrats had spent more on the campaign than the Republicans, the common impression to the contrary, $2,736,334 compared to $2,127,296—though many of the largest donations to the Democrats came pouring in after the fact, after November 2, some $700,000 in postdated checks.

A special study drawn up by the Republican Policy Committee would conclude, in essence, that the Republicans had only themselves to blame. They had “muffed” their best chance in sixteen years to win the presidency and keep control of Congress. The fault was mainly with the Dewey strategy and the Dewey performance, his “aloofness,” speeches “high above the voters’ heads,” the mistake of “swallowing uncritically the Democratic propaganda.” Dewey, said the report, had been “drugged” by the polls, and thus “sacrificed the initiative.” Truman’s hard-hitting assault on the 80th Congress, “however unprincipled and demagogic,” had been “brilliant” since it had enabled him to “divert the battle” away from his own and his party’s record. “He succeeded in arousing public indignation…. The Democratic sweep in Congress and its retention of the presidency is eloquent testimony to the brilliance of their strategy.”

As amply substantiated by a number of studies, the farm vote, the labor vote, the black vote, and the vote of the West had all counted heavily in Truman’s success and in the Democratic sweep overall—just as the Rowe memorandum had forecast.

Nor was there any question about the value of the kind of campaign Truman chose to run. His big effort in Texas, for example, gave him the largest majority in Texas of any state. The extra swing by automobile that he made in the traditionally Republican counties of downstate Illinois turned the tide there and was decisive in carrying Illinois. The campaign through rural Ohio on October 11, the whistle-stop day that had seemed to others a wasted effort, apparently did make a difference. In counties that Dewey had carried in 1944, Truman was the winner.

Ethnic minorities voted strongly for Truman. Catholic voters, too, it was found, had gone Democratic in large majorities. In some predominantly Catholic wards in Boston and Pittsburgh the vote for Truman exceeded past tallies for Al Smith and FDR.

In the noise and excitement of the Presidential Suite after Dewey conceded, Truman reportedly said, “Labor did it.” But while several of the biggest unions in the country did work hard to get out the vote and supplied major financial backing for his campaign, John L. Lewis and Alvanley Johnston were in Dewey’s camp, and to lose in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan was hardly a sign that labor had carried the day.

More important, as Dewey said, was the farm vote and here, just as the Truman forces foresaw, the drop in the price of corn played a part. Once, in 1921, falling grain prices had bankrupt haberdasher Truman. Now they helped keep President Truman in the White House. Of the eight largest corn-producing states, he carried all but two.

Black support for Truman had been overwhelming. He polled more than two thirds of the black vote, a percentage higher than ever attained by Franklin Roosevelt. In such crucial states as Ohio and Illinois it could be said that the black voter had been quite as decisive as anyone in bringing about a Truman victory. Speaking of Truman’s civil rights program and its impact on the election, J. Howard McGrath called it both honest statesmanship and politically advantageous. “It lost us three Southern states, but it won us Ohio, Illinois, would have carried New York for us if it had not been for Henry Wallace, and it was a great factor in carrying California.”

The precarious state of the world also appeared to have benefited the Truman campaign, and particularly as it became clear that the Berlin Airlift was a resounding success. Several of Truman’s sharpest critics, Walter Lippmann among them, now also grudgingly concluded that even the “inept” Vinson affair had proved a political net gain for Truman after all. “The bear got us,” said Dewey’s staff man, Elliott Bell, referring to the Russian menace.

Also, clearly, a host of strong Democratic candidates were a major factor. In Illinois, most notably, Truman’s slim but crucial margin of 31,000 votes stood in sharp contrast to the resounding triumphs of Paul Douglas in his senate race and Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for governor. Douglas won by 400,000 votes, Stevenson by a still more astonishing 570,000 votes.

Hubert Humphrey had won his senate race in Minnesota. Estes Kefauver, who had campaigned in a coonskin cap, was the new Senator-elect from Tennessee, another state in the Truman column. Democratic candidates for governor had won in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Frank Lausche had been elected governor in Ohio by a margin of more than 200,000 votes.

Predictions of a Dewey landslide, it was widely believed, had lulled Republican voters into a state of false complacency. Had the polls not been so one-sided and unanimous, many argued, there would have been a bigger Republican effort, fewer Republican “stay-at-homes” on election day, and a Dewey victory. But a study of the campaign conducted by analyst Samuel Lubell for the Saturday Evening Post indicated quite the opposite. Republican victories in the industrial East, said Lubell, had been largely the fault of apathy among old Roosevelt voters who had concluded Truman didn’t have a chance. “Far from costing Dewey the election, the [Democratic] stay-at-homes may have saved him almost as crushing a defeat as Landon suffered in 1936.”

George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and other public opinion specialists were openly dumbfounded. He didn’t know what happened, Gallup said. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. Why I don’t know,” Roper admitted.

From later studies, it appears the polls were reasonably accurate up until mid-October, the point when Gallup completed his final survey of the campaign for the forecast that was released just before election day. The fault was probably not that the polls were imperfect, but that they were two weeks out of date. And it was in those final two weeks apparently that a massive shift took place.

Nearly everywhere in the country, it seems, a large number of people who agreed that Dewey was certain to win, and who no doubt would have bet on his winning, went to the polls and voted for Truman.

In Ohio, “up and down the state,” reported William Lawrence of The New York Times, not a single Truman voter with whom he talked had expected Truman to win. “But a majority of the ‘little people’ from the mines, mills and farms, having made their decision quietly and thoughtfully, went out and voted for him anyway.”

Two Ohio farmers, joking about the dissatisfaction of a neighbor who had voted for Dewey, were overheard saying, “What’s the matter with that fellow anyway? Can’t he stand four more years of prosperity?”

“I kept reading about that Dewey fellow,” said another man, “and the more I read the more he reminded me of one of those slick ads trying to get money out of my pocket. Now Harry Truman, running around and yipping and falling all over his feet—I had the feeling he could understand the kind of fixes I get into.”

He had talked all summer of voting for Dewey, a farmer in Guthrie County, Iowa, told a reporter. “But when voting time came, I just couldn’t do it. I remembered…all the good things that have come to me under the Democrats.”

She voted for Truman, said Freda Combs of Decatur, Illinois, because he was “the common man’s man.”

To his immense readership in every part of the country, Walter Lippmann explained the outcome as a posthumous triumph for Franklin Roosevelt. The election, Lippmann said, was simply another victory for the New Deal.

It was a view with which Truman modestly concurred. “It seemed to have been a terrific political upset when you read the papers here in this country,” Truman would write in response to a letter of congratulations from Winston Churchill. “Really it was not—it was merely a continuation of the policies which had been in effect for the last sixteen years and the policies that the people wanted.”

But to Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, as to most others who had witnessed the campaign firsthand, what it had all come down to was Harry Truman’s own “gallant battle,” his faith in himself and in the voters. As a barnstormer, the President was “surely the best of his time.”

There was something in the American character that responded to a fighter, said the Washington Post on its editorial page. “The American people admire a man with courage even though they don’t always agree with him,” wrote Drew Pearson, who had been as blatantly mistaken in what he wrote prior to November 2 as almost anyone in journalism. “You just have to take off your hat to a beaten man who refuses to stay licked,” conceded the ultra-conservative New York Sun.

Richard Strout, in The New Republic, would describe election night as an experience no political writer would ever forget:

There was personal humiliation for us as a prophet, but a glowing and wonderful sense that the American people couldn’t be ticketed by polls, knew its own mind and had picked the rather unlikely but courageous figure of Truman to carry on its banner.

The feeling was widespread that so heavy a blow to the prestige of the polls could only be good for the country. As Eben Ayers wrote, “There has been a danger, it has seemed to me, that the polls would reach a point, if they continued to be right, where they could easily control the outcome of an election.”

Some of the most intense and interesting of all postmortems went on at the New York headquarters of Time Incorporated, where telegrams from readers poured in saying, “Ha, Ha, Ha!” A “burden of doubt” had been cast over Time and Life, the editors were “deeply unhappy,” said editor-in-chief Henry Luce in a confidential memorandum to his department heads. Luce blamed himself as much as anyone. “I personally paid less attention to this campaign than to any previous campaign in my lifetime,” he admitted. Reporters and editors had been deluded not just by the polls but by politicians in both parties. Everybody should have known better, everybody should have taken his job more seriously, Luce said, and worked right to the end—“like Harry Truman did!”

To Luce the main cause for Dewey’s defeat was Dewey. “His personality was against him.”

The managing editor of Time, T. S. Matthews, took the position that there was nothing new about the press being wrong on elections. The press was often out of touch with the popular will.

I think the press has been pretending to much more wisdom (or is it smartness?) than it had any right to claim, and has been getting away with murder for some time [Matthews wrote to Luce]. The plain fact now appears to be that (as far as politics is concerned, at least) the press hasn’t known what time of day it is for years.

The great mistake now would be to see Truman as a political miracle-worker. “It was not a one-man miracle—that’s too easy—but an unsuspected, overlooked, misreported national phenomenon.”

But to the managing editor of Life, Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr., the problem centered on bias. “Of course, we did not intentionally mislead our readers,” he wrote.

But I do think that we ourselves were misled by our bias. Because of that bias we did not exert ourselves enough to report the side we didn’t believe in. We were too ready to accept the evidence of pictures like the empty auditorium at Omaha and to ignore the later crowds. We were too eager to report the Truman “bobbles” and to pass over the things that were wrong about the Republican campaign: empty Dewey speeches, the bad Republican candidates, the dangers of Republican commitments to big business. I myself had many misgivings about these things but thought that what the hell, the election was already decided, we could get after the Republicans later….

Truman’s victory, said Thorndike, was “primarily a personal triumph.”

And this, as it turned out, was the conclusion of Time in its first issue after the election. “He did it all himself,” said the magazine in tribute to Truman the politician. He was the “new champion” in American politics, “the absolute boss of a resurgent Democratic party.”

“TRUMAN WORKS A POLITICAL MIRACLE,” ran the headline on the lead story in Life. Truman was now “the durable hero in shining spectacles,” “one of the fightin’est men” who ever went through a campaign.

To such staunch Truman loyalists as Sam Rayburn and George Marshall, to the weary White House staff workers who had been with him all the way, there was never any question as to why Truman won. He had done it by being himself, never forgetting who he was, and by going to the people in his own fashion.

Harry Truman deserved 90 percent of the credit, said Sam Rayburn. “You have put over the greatest one-man fight in American history,” wrote Marshall to Truman on November 4. “You did exactly what you told me and what nobody else believed possible.”

“I think that Harry Truman grew, too,” wrote Charlie Ross, “grew spiritually.” Truman had campaigned so hard, said Ross, because he genuinely believed the essential welfare of the country was at stake. He wanted peace in the world, prosperity at home, and he wanted to make the Democratic Party truly the party of the people. Also, wrote Ross, there was a “purely personal” motive. “He had been described as a little man, fumbling, inept, not measuring up to the President’s job. He had a human desire to prove his detractors wrong.”

Like others, Clark Clifford thought Dewey’s people had done a poor job. “I think Dewey’s whole campaign was a mistake…. They were greedy and dumb, and anxious to get back to power.” But that was not the explanation for Truman’s success. Nor did Clifford think it was due to extraordinary political acumen on Truman’s part.

It wasn’t in my opinion because he was a skilled politician that he won. He was a good politician…a sensible politician…. But that wasn’t why he was elected President…. It was the remarkable courage in the man—his refusal to be discouraged, his willingness to go through the suffering of that campaign, the fatigue, the will to fight every step of the way, the will to win….

It wasn’t Harry Truman the politician who won, it was Harry Truman the man.

Early the morning of Thursday, November 4, as Truman stepped out onto the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan during a brief stop in St. Louis, photographers snapped the picture that would be remembered and enjoyed more than any other of the campaign. Truman was smiling, chatting with reporters, when someone handed him a copy of the Chicago Tribune, his least favorite newspaper, across the front of which ran the huge, soon-to-be famous headline: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Holding the paper aloft with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, the man who had been given no better than a fighting chance seemed to be saying not only, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” but that in America it is still the people who decide.

Like some other photographs of other presidents—of Theodore Roosevelt in a white linen suit at the controls of a steam shovel in Panama, or Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, or Franklin Roosevelt, chin up, singing an old hymn beside Winston Churchill on board the Prince of Wales in the dark summer of 1941—this of Harry Truman in 1948 would convey the spirit of both the man and the moment as almost nothing else would.

On Friday, November 5, Truman returned to Washington in triumph. The welcome was the biggest, most enthusiastic outpouring for a President in the history of the capital. So great had been the excitement in the city the day before that the papers had forecast crowds of perhaps half a million people. But at least 750,000—two thirds of the city—lined his route from Union Station to the White House.

The day was warm, sunny, perfect. Truman, Bess, Margaret, Vice President-elect Barkley and his daughter, Mrs. Max Truitt, and Howard McGrath rode in a huge, seven-passenger open Lincoln, with two Secret Service men standing on the rear bumper. Truman and Barkley sat up on the back of the rear seat.

Passing the stone-fronted offices of the Washington Post, Truman looked up to see a big sign strung across the second floor: WELCOME HOME FROM CROW-EATERS.

The day after the election, the staff of the Post had sent a telegram asking him to attend a “Crow Banquet,” to which all newspaper editorial writers, political reporters, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would be invited. The main course was to be old crow en glâce. Truman alone would be served turkey. Dress for the guest of honor would be white tie, for the others, sackcloth. In response Truman had written that he had “no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eat crow figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”

Confetti showered down. A band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Truman waved his hat and smiled.

At the White House, he stepped to a microphone on the North Portico to say thank you. The whole stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, all of Lafayette Square, everywhere, as far as he could see, there were people, waving, cheering, calling out to him.