31
“Tens of Thousands, and Hundreds of Thousands! How Can He Lose?”
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
—Abraham Lincoln
AT 10 A.M. ON ELECTION DAY 1948, the door to the Truman home at 219 North Delaware Street in Independence, Missouri, opened and Harry, Bess, and Margaret emerged. North Delaware was normally a quiet street but neighbors had gotten used to crowds gathering outside the Truman home. On this day, there was a mob scene out front. The Trumans descended to the cement sidewalk, and the Secret Service escorted them along the five-minute walk to Memorial Hall.
The brick neo-Georgian building was a special place for the Truman family; as a young local politician, Truman himself had led the charge to build Memorial Hall* in honor of World War I soldiers who had lost their lives. When the building first opened, back in 1926, Truman was an obscure county judge. Now, twenty-two years later, he walked through these doors again, to cast his vote for himself for president.
Inside the polling station, an election judge named Emma Flowers called out the name of “Harry S. Truman, 219 North Delaware.” Truman stepped forward and checked his registration card. The clerks handed him ballot #101, Bess #102, and Margaret #103. It was Margaret’s first time voting in a presidential election. The Trumans filled out their ballots in booths, and after the president dropped his into the ballot box, someone in the crowd asked him, “How do you think it will go, Mr. President?”
“Why, it can’t be anything but victory,” Truman said.
Another voice called out, “Are you going to sit up for the returns, Mr. President?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “I think I’ll go to bed. You don’t know anything till tomorrow. I expect to be at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City at 10 o’clock tomorrow—if everything holds together.”
Dewey and his wife slept late in their suite on the fifteenth floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, rising at 9:30 a.m. At noon, the candidate and his wife walked out of an elevator surrounded by a phalanx of police officers, who parted crowds to allow the Deweys to make it to their “NY #1” black limo out front. They motored to their polling place at the School of Industrial Art at 121 East Fifty-First Street with a police escort.
In the basement of the school, Thomas and Frances Dewey cast their votes, then stood smiling in front of the ballot box for photo and newsreel cameras.
“Well,” Dewey said, “that’s two votes we got anyhow.”
Henry Wallace awoke early on Election Day at his farm in rural South Salem, New York. He drove his wife and a press secretary to the nearby public library in the village of Lewisboro, a 148-year-old white colonial building where there was already a small crowd lined up to vote. This district was almost entirely Republican, and at 8:05 a.m., Wallace and his wife cast two of the very few votes that would go to the Progressive Party at this polling station. Camera flashbulbs popped in their faces when they exited the polling booth.
When asked if he would estimate the total votes he thought he would earn nationwide, Wallace declined to answer, saying he would get “more votes than the pollsters say.”
The Wallaces climbed back into their car and returned to the farm, where they spent the day tending to their floral gardens and their chickens. In the afternoon, they headed for the Progressive Party’s headquarters in New York City, where they would await word of Wallace’s fate.
Strom Thurmond traveled from Columbia, South Carolina, to the town where he grew up and where the Thurmond name had been known for generations—Edgefield—to cast his vote. With his wife and his mother, he made his way through Edgefield’s familiar county courthouse and up the stairs to the second floor, shaking hands with hometown friends along the way.
His wife—who at twenty-two was voting for the first time—cast her ballot first, followed by Thurmond’s mother and finally Thurmond himself. Before leaving the courthouse, the governor gave a final statement: “They said back at Philadelphia [at the Democratic National Convention in July] that southern leaders had no place to go. Well, we’ve gone back to the people themselves, and today they’re going to let us know what they think about the matter.”
All over the country, long lines formed at polling stations. In Alabama, election officials had managed to keep Truman’s name off the ballot, so anyone who wanted to vote for the president had to write his name in. Thus Dewey was the only candidate on the ballot in every state. Other presidential candidates included the white nationalist Gerald L. K. Smith of the Christian Nationalist Party, John Maxwell of the Vegetarian Party, Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party, and Claude A. Watson of the Prohibition Party.
Clouds blanketed much of the country and rain was anticipated in the evening along the Eastern Seaboard. In the town where Tom Dewey was raised, and where his mother still lived—Owosso, Michigan—local businesses and small-town political leaders had a big celebration planned, for this was to be the most exciting day in the town’s history. In Truman’s hometown of Independence, no celebration was planned.
All over the South, voters headed for the polls hoping there would be no violence. Separate polling stations were set up for black Americans, who lined up to cast their votes while nervously watching over their shoulders. The murder of Isaiah Nixon—the twenty-eight-year-old black man killed in southern Georgia because he voted in a primary election—was fresh in their minds.
Local populations had their eyes on key special-issue referendums. In Kansas, where sales of liquor had been outlawed for sixty-eight years, voters would decide if the state would become “wet” once again (it would). In South Carolina, voters would decide if the state would remain the only
