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 trade.permissions@hmhco.com 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 PictureCollection 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 secret
