Historical Figures Series Thomas Dewey and His Battle for The Republican Party, Part 4: How Truman Was In Worse Shape Going Into The Fall Campaign - And How Dewey Snatched Defeat From The Jaws of Victory

 

The 1948 Presidential Campaign was one of the most significant ones in American history. It was the last one where television would not be a factor in the result  (after the Conventions there were no real television events). Perhaps more importantly it is to date the last real Presidential election where there were so many legitimate choices for the Presidency beyond the two party system.

In the history of American political democracy, there have only been three national campaigns where the electorate had the option of four candidates. Not coincidentally, all of them involved splits in one of the major parties. In 1860, the fractures between the Southern and Northern branches of the Democratic Party became irrevocable, leading each faction to nominate a candidate: Stephen Douglas in the North, John Breckinridge of the South. This split essentially assured the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War that followed.

In 1912, the battle between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft over the direction of the Republican party led to the Progressive wing walking out and forming what would be called The Bull Moose Party. This split led to the election of Woodrow Wilson that fall and more importantly, the dominance of the conservatives over the liberals in the GOP.

Harry Truman’s problems going into the 1948 campaign were actually worse than either of those. He faced revolts from both the left and right wings of the party, and each one was an attack on a different branch of his policy.

The revolt on the left flank had actually begun two years earlier. After Truman became President, in order to assure the New Dealers he was still on their side. FDR had  appointed his predecessor as Vice President Henry Wallace to Secretary of Commerce. This decision quickly became one of the bigger conflagrations of his Presidency.

Wallace had always been immune to the dangers that Stalin and the Soviet Union seems to present a post-war America. That reason had been one of the major reasons the old guard had done everything in their power to get Wallace off the ticket in 1944. Truman had kept Wallace on for continuity during the early years of his administration.

In September of 1946 Wallace addressed Madison Square Garden in what was ostensibly a campaign for the Democratic chances in New York State. In it Wallace made a speech in which he deleted several key passages that had to do with Truman’s policy towards the Soviets:

“On our part, we should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States.”

Truman’s secretary of state Jim Byrnes threatened to resign if Wallace wasn’t removed. Wallace didn’t change his opinion. Later a letter that Wallace leaked showed that Wallace was justifying a Soviet dominated ‘security zone’ in Eastern Europe and hinted the administration was plotting  a ‘preventive war’ against Russia. Truman demanded Wallace resign.

Wallace might have been a fool among certain members of the old guard, but he was considered a lion by the New Deal liberals and the far left of the party. Over the next year he began to edit a magazine and assemble what he would eventually refer to as first Gideon’s Army and eventually become known as the Progressive Party, a name had provided a measure of electoral success in the 1912 and 1924 Presidential campaign.  Many famous signed on board – but few of them were actual political ones. Wallace was counting on the fact that a recent poll from Gallup said that six percent of Americans thought the Government was ‘too hard on Communism’. Initially this seemed like a major threat to Truman’s reelection. The problem, however, was that Wallace was susceptible to flattery – and much of the flattery would come from members of the Communist party. Still, as 1948 began, it looked very much like Wallace could gather as many five million votes and in states like New York or California, that could be the difference.

Just as prominent threat was coming from Truman’s problem with domestic policy, specifically civil rights. This was odd considering that Truman was from Missouri. His mother Martha had retain Confederate sympathies until the day she died in June of 1947. Indeed when Truman had been put on the ticket in 1944 Southerners had rejoiced considering some of the openly racist terms he used well into his second term in the Senate. But Jim Byrnes, who was more qualified than Truman to be President but had even less racially enlightened views, had been kept off the 1944 ticket because African-American votes were starting to become critical in Democratic electoral politics for the first time. Many had feared that Byrnes on the ticket would have cost FDR the election in 1944, where with Truman on the ticket black votes had ensured New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania had stayed in the Democratic column.

As much out of electoral strategy than moral goodwill Truman began to court what was then called “the Negro vote’ actively. This was prominently done because he feared that Wallace would be more likely to wean them away from the Democrats in 1948.

In December of 1946, Truman signed an executive order creating the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights.  In February of 1948, he gave a speech on black civil right in which he dealt with the poll tax, anti-lynching members . (He also argued for Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood, reform of naturalization laws and self-rule for the District of Columbia.

Truman had been given this advice from Clark Clifford, who told him that ‘the South can be considered safely Democratic and the risks to the party were minimal’. It was a major miscalculation. Throughout the South, governors, Congressman and Senators attacked even the mild speeches about this. Strom Thurmond, then the strapping forty-six year old governor of South Carolina became one of the vocal activists against this. At the Jackson-Jefferson dinner, he gave a series of pro-south demands, insisting the rule that two-thirds of the delegates be required to nominate a Presidential candidate, which had been abolished in 1936. For a century that rule had unofficially given the South veto power over any candidate that didn’t support white Supremacy (and in the period between the end of the Civil War and FDR’s nomination all but guaranteed that the Democrats would only control the White House twice in nearly seventy years.) McGrath ignored Thurmond’s demands, including his insistence that civil rights not be a part of the Democrat platform in 1948.

It is worth noting that even in 1948, the march of time was starting to roll past the segregationists in the South. In April, it overturned legislation in South Carolina designed to subvert the right for blacks to vote. But no one could pretend the resistance and outrage were not real – or a threat. That May, a new party was formed in Mississippi featuring delegates and spectators from several Southern states – but just as with the Progressives, few elected officials.  Only three governors: Thurmond, Mississippi’s Fielding Wright and Arkansas’ Jim Laney – attended the conference. This party would call itself the States Rights’ party but become christened the Dixiecrats.

The fissures in the party were so glaring in 1948 along with Truman’s apparent other weaknesses that both the Democrats and Republicans spent much of the year seeking out a candidate that seemed undefeatable: Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the forces at Normandy.  The Republicans ended their search in late 1947. The Democrats targeted him early in the fall of 1947 and kept after him right up until the convention began. Eisenhower kept denying it and finally made it very clear on July 9^th he would not be a candidate and basically told his proponents that even if they nominated him, he would not accept. There will still forces trying to find someone else throughout the days leading up to the convention – Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, even Florida senator Claude Pepper. They all got refused.

The convention in Philadelphia was gloomy almost from the beginning. While Hubert Humphrey’s speech on civil rights galvanized the throng, it led to the official walkout of two of the Southern delegations. The Dixiecrat party was going to nominate a candidate. Richard Russell stood as an opposition force for the South and got 263 Southern votes from the convention before withdrawing.  The mood was gloomy. It did not help that Truman’s first choice for the Vice Presidency – Douglas -turned him down. Only a galvanizing keynote speech by Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley had inspired life into the convention. Barkley had been in the Senate for six terms by that point and had been leader of the Democrats in the Senate since 1937. Despite the fact he would be 71 when he took office, he agreed to serve as Vice President under Truman. (Perhaps he was tired of waiting, he had mentioned as a Vice Presidential candidate at every Democratic Convention since 1928.) Even in his speech, he gave no promise of victory.

When Truman came out to give his acceptance speech at 1:54 AM, everyone thought they were looking at a lame duck. Truman made it very clear he did not think so. In his opening lines, he uttered a phrase that electrified the crowd: “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it – don’t you forget it!”

Truman’s speech did not mention Thomas Dewey once. Instead he attacked the Republican Congress. He called them a failure (which was a misnomer, as we’ll see). Then he spat out a challenge that has lasted into political history:

“On the twenty-sixth day of July, which out in Missouri we call ‘Turnip Day’, I am going to call Congress back into session!”

This set the note of Truman’s campaign. He would not really campaign against Dewey but rather the Republican controlled Congress, which quickly became labeled “the Do-Nothing Congress” That, as much as anything else, became the anchor around Dewey’s neck.

The Republican Congress had managed some major accomplishments of Truman’s – they had passed the Marshall plan, reinstated the peacetime draft and armed forces unification. Where they clashed on every measure was domestic issues. And this had as much to do with Robert Taft, the shadow majority leader. When the Congress had come to a close, several key proposals including housing, the minimum wage, civil rights, social security and agriculture were unsettled.  Even Republican friendly papers admitted this was a shaky track record going into an election year. And by calling Congress back into session, Truman had boxed the Republican leaders into a corner. If they enacted his agenda, Truman would get the credit. If they rejected it they would be damned as obstructionist. Dewey, who could see the danger, strongly advised Taft to accommodate Truman. Taft bluntly refused: “We’re not giving that fellow anything.” As a result Taft -as much as Truman – had given himself an issue he could campaign on all fall long.

By this point, the other major problems with his campaign – the Progressives and the Dixiecrats – were becoming far less of an issue than it seemed. Wallace’s momentum had begun to deflate as the Cold War worsened and he increasingly started to sound out of touch.  The Dixiecrats represented a more real one in the South – but ironically, they couldn’t find unity.  No Senators or Congressman joined the rump caucus that came that August and they eventually settled on Thurmond as President and Wright as their Vice President. They hoped to take a way anywhere from 70 to eighty electoral votes, throw the election into the House and get a candidate who would be more accommodating to their needs. Considering that by the fall of 1948 both Truman and Dewey were among the more liberal candidates on civil rights, it’s hard to know who that would have been.

The pundits, however, were either unaware of these realities or unwilling to acknowledge them. From the start of the campaign until the end, every major pollster gave Dewey a significant lead in the popular and electoral vote. They did so even as they watched both men campaign for office and their virulently different styles.

Dewey had been a stiff campaigner in 1944 but in the final months he had become vicious and fully willing to go on attack. And it was not as if there wasn’t a lot to go on attack for. Truman had been incompetent in his early days, the Congress had some truly effective pieces of legislation, it had arranged bipartisan foreign policy and the domestic condition in America was bad. Instead he campaigned almost entire on platitudes, refused to even really put much of an effort to campaign for Republican senators or Congressman who might be in danger. His entire attitude throughout the campaign was essentially: Republicans can do everything Democrats wanted to do, only better.”

The warning signs, for the record, were coming early throughout the campaign. Only Herbert Brownell, Dewey’s most trusted advisors advocated for a tougher campaign. Everyone else in his inner circle urged caution and Republican dignity. Their delusions bordered on the ridiculous.  Their reaction to the excited attendance at Truman’s rallies was crowds don’t mean anything. When some reporters predicted Dewey’s defeat were told by their editors not to print or even suggest the idea.

Truman’s campaign, by contrast, was louder, more fun – and extremely vitriolic. On October 25, he actually border on demagogic, in a radio address where he compared the Republicans in Congress as the equivalent of Hitler, calling them fascist tools. Dewey was so enraged that he was going to shred his lackluster speech and reply to Truman in kind. His wife begged him not too. His coterie of insiders insisted that there was no change needed to win. So he kept on being bland.

While Dewey deserves his share of blame for running a bland campaign, it’s worth noting that this approach was completely and utterly aided and abetted by a media that absolutely abandoned its responsibilities. All of the public opinion surveys, all of the journals that served as gatekeepers basically seemed to have decided in August that Dewey was going to win and ignored any troubling evidence like the campaign or the crowds. Elmo Roper, a major pollster, suspending polling on September 29  and never resumed it. Life Magazine published a front-cover story with Dewey as ‘The Next President’. Dewey later argued that overconfidence kept millions of Republican voters from turning out at the polls.

And it’s worth noting that Dewey’s stiff and utterly lackadaisical attitude had affected one very critical Republican. Nina Warren, the wife of the Vice President to be, walked into the Oakland polling place and privately marked her ballot on election day for Harry Truman. Warren himself loathed every aspect of the campaign: once saying that he wished he could call somebody a son of a bitch.

On election night 1948, Truman led early on. H.V. Kaltenborn famously said on the radio: “While the President is currently leading in the popular vote, we feel assured the late returns will elect Dewey by a large majority.” Truman had a lot of fun mocking him going forward. He was the only person that night perfectly sure of his victory, going to sleep before the final returns were called.

The final popular count would have Truman ahead by 2 million votes. Truman would carry 28 states and 302 electoral votes. Dewey would carry sixteen states and 189 electoral votes. He would carry six states he had lost in 1944, including New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. However, in the latter two states in particular, the concentration of Henry Wallace voters was by far the strongest. Wallace received nearly half a million votes in New York states, while only carrying 1.1 million nationwide. The Dixiecrat rebellion made an impact: Thurmond did carry Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and South Carolina which amounted to 39 electoral votes. But the rest of the South went uniformly for Truman and the African-American vote did largely go to Truman on election day, with the Democrats taking 80 percent of the African-American vote.

But Dewey’s campaign was a large factor. His tone from start to finish was confident, bland and insipid. His decision to pick Warren as his running mate did not work: California went Democratic that year. Dewey barely bothered to campaign in Ohio and shutdown his San Francisco office in mid-October. He had fundamentally ignored much of the Midwest and had ended up losing states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota that he’d carried four years earlier. Above all Dewey’s entire behavior throughout the campaign had led many to believe firmly in the fact that he was cold and unlikable compared to the amicable and energetic Truman.

Dewey’s hopes for becoming President ended on Election day that year. But as we shall see, his influence on the party was far from over. In the last article in this series, I shall look at how Truman’s vitriolic electoral victory paradoxically planted the seeds for the Republican return to power in which Dewey would lend influence that would affect the party for the next quarter century.