“It was the authors of the Declaration of Independence who stated the principle that all men are created equal in their rights, and that it is to secure these rights that governments are instituted among men,” Truman said. “It was the authors of the Constitution who made it clear that, under our form of government, all citizens are equal before the law, and that the Federal Government has a duty to guarantee to every citizen equal protection of the laws.”
The speech was the culmination of Truman’s 1948 civil rights campaign. “Immediate and far-reaching repercussions were expected from the South,” wrote the New York Times’s Anthony Leviero. “The President and his advisors apparently had weighed whatever risks were involved in his declaration.”
Just hours after Truman’s Harlem speech, Henry Wallace made his own address there, appearing at the Golden Gate ballroom at the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, for the final speaking engagement of his campaign. It was perhaps his angriest. Wallace looked out from his podium and saw a predominantly black audience. He said that Truman’s civil rights agenda was nothing but “shallow, hollow, worthless promises.”
In the past, Truman had supported the congressional campaigns of Democrats from the South, Wallace said—men who supported white supremacy. Thus, Wallace claimed, the president had “invited the Dixiecrats, the race-haters, the lynch boys, the poll-taxers right back into the camp. And they’re coming back.”
When Wallace finished, he walked off the stage and headed back to his farm in upstate New York, where he would be voting two days later.
Strom Thurmond held a rally in Austin, Texas, that day, nearing the end of a sweep that had taken him throughout the state and to Louisiana. Thurmond’s drumbeat had not changed. He called Truman’s civil rights program “a Federal horsewhip to sting us into line.” Dewey’s campaign had been all about “soothing and meaningless” platitudes. While Thurmond had no chance of national victory, he still insisted that his efforts were not in vain.
“Our campaign is based on the belief that we can prevent either Truman or Dewey from winning a majority of the electoral votes,” he told a crowd in Beaumont, Texas, on October 31. “In that event, the House of Representatives will choose a President who is dedicated to the preservation of local self-government.”
Truman’s civil rights proposals were “un-American,” Thurmond said. Even if the States’ Rights Democratic Party campaign failed on Tuesday, he went on, it had “accomplished our most important objective . . . to restore the Southern States to a position of respect from every political party.”
On the morning of October 30, the Truman Special pulled out of Grand Central Station, bound for Missouri. Truman napped in his berth. Bess and Margaret had reached the end of their patience. They wanted the campaign to be over.
As the train barreled west, Truman’s speechwriters met to put together an address for the president’s final campaign appearance, at the massive Kiel Auditorium that night in St. Louis. Events had been so pressing, there had been no time to draft the speech, so it was a last-minute effort. The race in Truman’s home state of Missouri was a nail-biter; this St. Louis event had to go well. “On the last long ride . . . ,” recorded speechwriter John Franklin Carter, “all of us had picked some pieces of lovely speeches which we had composed from time to time during the campaign, and for one reason or another, hadn’t been delivered. We got together a final script for St. Louis.”
That afternoon, Truman was back at his table in the Ferdinand Magellan, reviewing the speech that his writers had prepared. By this time, his old friend John Snyder, the secretary of the Treasury, was aboard, bound for his hometown of St. Louis. Truman told Snyder that he was “considerably amazed at the lack of punch” in the speech his aides had given him.
Snyder asked, “Are you going to deliver this speech in St. Louis?”
“I am not,” Truman answered.
There was no backup. Truman would speak entirely off the cuff, with no script, to the entire nation via radio.
By this time, the speech he was not going to use had been mimeographed and distributed to the journalists on board the train. They too were intensely weary and had already typed out their stories for the next day’s papers.
“We got to St. Louis and there was a cold, nasty rain falling,” recalled Carleton Kent of the Chicago Times, “but Kiel Auditorium was jammed to the gunnels.” “There were so many people there,” noted Robert Nixon of the International News Service, “that the firemen had to clear the aisles because of the regulations. There was a large overflow crowd outside the auditorium where loudspeakers had been set up so that people could listen to the President’s speech.” When Truman appeared, radio men hit a signal and took the broadcast nationwide.
“Thank you my friends,” Truman yelled over the noise of the crowd. “I appreciate most highly this reception in St. Louis, but bear in mind that I have got to talk to the whole United States tonight . . .”
Again, the crowd roared.
“I can’t tell you how very much I appreciate this reception on my return to my home State. It touches my heart—right where I live . . . I know that when Missouri feels this way, we are on
