Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Disintegration of the Democratic Party

  “Whither Harry S. Truman?”

  “The Buck Stops Here!”

  “Can He Swing the Job?”

  “I Was Amazed at How Calm He Seemed in the Face of Political Disaster”

  The Surging GOP

  “You Are Getting as Much Publicity as Hitler”

  “It Is a Total ‘War of Nerves’”

  “The Defeat Seemed like the End of the World”

  “Dewey’s Hat Is Tossed into Ring”

  “Wall Street and the Military Have Taken Over”

  “There’ll Be No Compromise”

  “I Will Not Accept the Political Support of Henry Wallace and His Communists”

  “For Better or Worse, the 1948 Fight Has Started”

  The Conventions

  “We Have a Dreamboat of a Ticket”

  “With God’s Help, You Will Win”

  “What Is at Stake Here Is the Very Survival of Western Civilization”

  Photos

  The Campaigns

  “A Profound Sense of What’s Right and What’s Wrong”

  “What Exciting Times You Are Having!”

  “As for Me, I Intend to Fight!”

  “They Are Simply a ‘Red Herring’”

  “There Is Great Danger Ahead”

  “The All-Time Georgia Champion of ‘White Supremacy’”

  “We’re Going to Give ’Em Hell”

  “The Presidency of the United States Is Not for Sale!”

  “You Will Be Choosing a Way of Life for Years to Come”

  “The Democratic Party Was Down to Its Last Cent”

  Election Climax

  “This Was the Worst Mistake of the Truman Campaign”

  “Could We Be Wrong?”

  “The Campaign Special Train Stopped with a Jerk”

  “We Are Engaged in a Great Crusade”

  “I Stand by My Prediction. Dewey Is In.”

  “Tens of Thousands, and Hundreds of Thousands! How Can He Lose?”

  “Under No Circumstance Will I Congratulate That Son of a Bitch”

  “Dewey Defeats Truman”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2020 by Albert Baime

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Baime, A. J. (Albert J.), author.

  Title: Dewey defeats Truman : the 1948 election and the battle for America’s soul / A.J. Baime.

  Other titles: 1948 election and the battle for America’s soul

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019042905 (print) | LCCN 2019042906 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328585066 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328588593 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Presidents—United States—Election—1948. | United States—Politics and government—1945–1953. | Truman, Harry S., 1884–1972. | Dewey, Thomas E. (Thomas Edmund), 1902–1971. | Wallace, Henry A. (Henry Agard), 1888–1965. | Thurmond, Strom, 1902–2003.

  Classification: LCC E815 .B35 2020 (print) | LCC E815 (ebook) | DDC 324.973/0904—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042905

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042906

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photographs: W. Eugene Smith / The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

  Author photograph © Derek Joseph Giovanni

  v1.0620

  Every vital question of state will be merged in the question, “Who will be the next President?”

  —Alexander Hamilton

  It is not just a battle between two parties. It is a fight for the very soul of the American government.

  —Harry Truman, Chicago Stadium, October 25, 1948

  Introduction

  A GROUNDSWELL OF WHITE NATIONALISM. Impeachment headlines. A president caught in a bitter public feud with his own Congress. A resurgence of populism. A game-changing new form of media. A chief executive aiming fake news accusations at the national press. War and terrorism in the Middle East. A booming economy, with historically low unemployment. The FBI on the trail of a major presidential candidate regarding a possible Russian conspiracy.

  The year was 1948.

  This book is about the first postwar presidential election, which was the first election to play out on the “television machine” and was the most shocking electoral upset in the history of the United States, at least up until 2016. In the years after 1948, it was commonly said that all Americans could remember exactly where they were on two occasions: when they heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and when they learned the result of the 1948 presidential election. Harry S. Truman’s campaign was called at the time “the most colorful and astonishing political campaign in modern American history,” “a gigantic comedy,” “the wildest campaign of the century.”

  The impetus for this book is another I wrote, The Accidental President, published in 2017; it covers the first four months of Truman’s presidency, when an obscure vice president with relatively little formal education found himself suddenly in charge of a world war following the death of Franklin Roosevelt. (Readers who consumed that book may want to skim chapter three in this one, which covers Truman’s history and thus some familiar details.) While researching that book, I realized that the challenges of peacetime, in the wake of a global conflict and the birth of the atomic age, could be equally staggering. In the run-up to his longshot bid to be elected in his own right, Truman faced the founding of Israel and the start of the 1948 ­Arab-Israeli War. He desegregated the military. He launched the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift. The explosive Alger Hiss espionage charges set off the “Red Scare.”

  The year 1948 saw a brutal and at times deadly struggle in which black southerners sought to exercise their right to vote. It witnessed the beginning of a historic realignment of the Democratic “Solid South,” which transformed states like Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia into the Republican strongholds they remain today.

  Documents of the time express startling fear on both sides of the aisle that Moscow would attempt to meddle in the American election. One campaign official wrote in a secret memo in 1947 that “the Kremlin will sponsor political disturbances everywhere it can throughout the next twelve months . . . It will try to influence the result of the 1948 election by every means conceivable.”

  The Operation Sandstone atomic-bomb tests, anxiety that World War III could break out at any moment—all of this formed the stage upon which the election campaigns unfolded. The shifts in the tides of power moved with ruthless force, creating the geopolitical world of the future, our world of today.

  Dewey Defeats Truman will bring readers inside the situation rooms of four campaigns: Harry Truman’s Democratic Party, Thomas Dewey’s Republican Party, Henry Wallace’s breakaway Progressive Party (which was largely controlled by a secre
t cell of Communists), and Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic Party (the “Dixiecrats,” a campaign of unapologetic white supremacy). While the election’s victor is the ultimate focus of the book, my goal was not to favor one candidate’s policies over another, but rather to state the facts and how they were perceived at the time. Although two of these candidates performed poorly in the end, their stories in retrospect are extraordinary. Oftentimes we can learn as much from election losers and charismatic political misfits as we can from the winners.

  I have tried as often as possible to let original documentation unfold this narrative—to allow these historical characters to bring themselves to life through their own memorandums, diaries, and oral histories. The expectation I set for myself was this: If they could read this book today, they would find it fair, factual, and expressive of the almost desperate urgency that fueled their quests for the presidency. As the New York Times put it just before Election Day in 1948: “The fate of the nation and of civilization is at stake.”

  Truman believed that history repeats itself. “The history of the world,” he wrote, “has moved in cycles and . . . very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past six thousand years.” My guess is that readers will find the election season of 1948 uncannily relevant today.

  At the same time, I am hoping readers will find inspiration in this book. During 1947–48, the bipartisan discourse was mercilessly vitriolic—as it is today. Yet when faced with a national emergency, Democrats and Republicans came together to launch some of the most enduring policies in the country’s history (the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan). These leaders realized that their duty as public servants was not to their parties but to all Americans, in the vital struggle for the future.

  A. J. BAIME

  OCTOBER 30, 2019

  Part I

  The Disintegration of the Democratic Party

  The loud outcry against President Truman exceeds anything we have heard in a long time. There is about it a savage quality.

  —​Washington Post, October 11, 1946

  1

  “Whither Harry S. Truman?”

  “ALL IN,” A SECRET SERVICE man said.

  It was 7 p.m. on August 14, 1945. A White House usher closed the door to the Oval Office and Harry Truman stood from behind his desk, staring out at a crowd of some two hundred perspiring radio and newspaper reporters who had just pushed their way in. Klieg lights from newsreel cameras glared off the president’s wire-rim spectacles. A row of cabinet officials stood behind him, and at the edge of the room, the First Lady, Bess Truman, was seated on a couch, her hands folded in a ball on her lap. Truman held up a statement in his right hand and began to read. All in the room knew what this address would communicate, but still, the words had the effect of an electric shock.

  “I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese Government,” Truman said, “in reply to the message forwarded to that Government by the Secretary of State on August 11. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.”

  The president’s full statement took a few minutes to read. His final words were, “That is all.”

  When the doors to the Oval Office opened, reporters holding notepads dashed out to spread the news around the globe. World War II—the most destructive conflagration ever, a war that had consumed some sixty million human lives—was over.

  Within minutes the news hit the radio. Outside on the streets of the nation’s capital, the doors of churches, offices, theaters, and bars burst open, pouring frantic Washingtonians into the hot August night. Impromptu jitterbug contests broke out on street corners. Drunks swung bottles while standing atop cars. At the White House gates, people began to amass, and within an hour of Truman’s declaration, a crowd bigger than the capacity of Yankee Stadium—some seventy-five thousand people—stood out on Pennsylvania Avenue. They began to chant: “We want Harry! We want Harry!”

  Inside the executive mansion, Truman was busy making phone calls. He called his ninety-three-year-old mother, at her home in Grandview, Missouri. (“That was Harry,” Mamma Truman said after hanging up. “Harry’s such a wonderful man . . . I knew he’d call.”) He telephoned the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was still reeling from the death of her husband, Franklin, just four months earlier. “I told her,” Truman later recalled, “that in this hour of triumph I wished that it had been President Roosevelt, and not I, who had given the message to our people.”

  Meanwhile, the “We want Harry!” chanting grew in decibels. The din became irresistible, and so Truman and his wife stepped out onto the White House lawn. Looking fit in a creased and buttoned double-breasted blue suit, the sixty-one-year-old president made a V sign with his fingers as Secret Service men hustled around him. A news photographer jumped forward and froze the moment in black-and-white celluloid. “[Truman] was on the White House lawn pumping his arms like an orchestra conductor at tens of thousands of cheering Americans who suddenly materialized in front of the mansion,” recalled one person present in the crowd. It was “the wildest celebration this capital ever saw.”

  White House aides brought out a microphone and a loudspeaker and placed them in front of Truman. He had always been an awkward public speaker, but on this occasion, it did not matter. No one cared. When he began to speak, the crowds instantly hushed.

  “This is a great day,” Truman said, “the day we’ve been waiting for. This is the day for free governments in the world. This is the day that fascism and police government ceases in the world. This is the day for Democracy.” He paused, taking in the moment. He had spent a lifetime reading history, studying the sagas of past presidents, never in his wildest dreams imagining that he would become one of them. He knew then that the challenges awaiting him in the near future were beyond anything any president had ever confronted before.

  “We are faced with the greatest task with which we have ever been faced,” Truman said into the microphone. That task was to bring freedom to humanity all over the world and cultivate peace and prosperity at home. “It is going to take the help of all of us,” the president stated. “I know we are going to do it.”

  * * *

  All around the globe on this night, chaos reigned.

  In the Far East, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldered under radioactive clouds from the atomic bombings on August 6 and 9. Two days before Truman announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, the first aerial photos of Hiroshima post-detonation appeared on the front page of the New York Times. It was almost impossible to understand what this new weapon was, how it could harness the power of the universe, and what it would mean for the future. The secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, put the situation in perspective, writing in his diary the day after the Hiroshima bombing, “Everyone seemed to feel that a new epoch in the world’s history had been ushered in. The scramble for the control of this new power is going to be one of the most unusual struggles the world has ever seen.”

  In Europe, surviving populations clawed out of the rubble from nearly 2.7 million tons of bombs dropped by Allied airpower between 1940 and 1945. Huge numbers of people were without food and water. In France, according to the nation’s Ministry of Public Health, more than half of the children living in industrial areas had rickets. A third of the children in Belgium were tubercular. The US State Department estimated that nine million displaced persons were homeless in Europe—many of them Jews who had survived Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Some of the most gruesome death camps—Ausch­witz, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück—had only recently been liberated, revealing the true depth of Nazi madness. At Auschwitz, the liberating Red Army had discovered more than fourteen thousand pounds of human hair.

  In June 1945 the State Department had sent a lawyer named Earl G. Harrison to investigate the concentration camps, and his now-famous r
eport—delivered to Truman just days after the president announced the surrender of Japan—painted a picture of a desperate situation. The occupying Allied forces in Europe had little resources to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews, who were still dying in large numbers, right before their eyes. “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them,” Harrison wrote.

  In the Middle East, Soviet, French, British, and American troops occupied the homelands of increasingly bitter ethnic and sectarian tribes. China was on the brink of a Communist revolution. The British government was destitute and desperate for loans. The United States and Soviet Union, meanwhile, were emerging from the war as history’s first two global superpowers, and relations between the two were declining profoundly.

  “Secular history offers few, if any, parallels to the events of the past week,” reported CBS radio news anchor Edward R. Murrow, at the time of Japan’s surrender. “And seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

  In Washington, the nation’s elite politicians and officials were set to confront a scintillating mystery. Truman was a new president, a vice president who had risen to the Oval Office just four months earlier upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt. His obscurity confounded the world. What exactly did he intend to do as president of the United States? The atomic bombs had ended the war so unexpectedly quickly, there had been no time to plan for the postwar future, and the American people knew little about their new president’s politics.

  How would the administration handle the staggering challenge of converting to a peacetime economy? What would be the administration’s policy regarding the Soviets and the bomb? What was Truman going to do about the millions of American workers who would now be laid off from domestic wartime jobs and pushed out of factories? How many of the 12.2 million men in uniform would be allowed to come home and resume their lives, and when?