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 9th 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.
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