Nearby to Truman, Eddie Jacobson stood in a daze. “I cried and I prayed for this,” he said aloud.
A fuse blew out and the hotel suite turned suddenly semi-dark, but no one seemed to notice. Truman’s brother Vivian, a Missouri farmer all his life, had his arms around the president, and from the crowd the words “Four more years” could be clearly heard.
The news began to spread. In New York City, lights from the Times Square Tower beacon switched to a steady beam pointing south, a declaration of Truman’s victory, as Times Square below filled with revelers. One man told the New York Times reporter Meyer Berger, “It’s something like the night President Roosevelt died. You can’t quite believe it. You have to talk it over with someone—anyone—to make sure you’ve got it right.” Many blocks south, alarm spread across Wall Street. The stock market fell into a near freefall upon news of Harry Truman’s victory.
In California, the head of the Democratic state committee Harold I. McGrath rode a taxi to work that morning through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. “It was the most exhilarating personal experience,” he recalled, “an experience of personal achievement where everything felt good.”
Truman had won his home state of Missouri. In Independence, after Dewey conceded, Mayor Roger Sermon declared a holiday and all the students were released from school. A sprawling crowd had come together for an impromptu celebration outside the town’s Memorial Hall. By this time, enough votes had been tabulated to show that the Democrats would regain control of the House of Representatives, which was expected, but also of the Senate, which was not. So the president would begin his first full term with a friendly Congress and all hopes of success. After the sun had set, Truman made an appearance in front of Memorial Hall. He stood on the steps and looked out at thirty thousand of his hometown friends. It was the biggest gathering ever assembled in the town’s history.
“It was not my victory . . . ,” he said into a microphone. “It was not for me but for the whole country. I want everyone to help me in working for the welfare of the country and peace of the world.”
Dewey was originally scheduled to appear at the campaign party in the Roosevelt ballroom at 9 p.m. on November 2. He did not appear until 1 p.m. the next day. Some 150 reporters were on hand for the most solemn political press conference any of them would ever recall. Dewey forced a smile for the photographers.
“Can we regard the pictures as done?” he asked them. “Will you let us go ahead without any more interruptions?”
The photographers obliged.
Dewey said, “Anything I can tell anybody here that they don’t already know?”
One reporter shouted, “What happened Governor?”
“I was just as surprised as you are, Dick, and I gather that is shared by everybody in the room as I read your stories before the election.”
“Looking back, was it an error of strategy or tactics?”
“No,” Dewey said. “Governor Warren and I are both very happy. I talked with him—that we waged a clean and constructive campaign and I have no regrets whatsoever.”
One reporter asked, “What do you think were the chief factors?”
“I think that would be impossible to answer at this date,” Dewey said. “I would have to study it and get more opinions and read what you write over the next few days. I am no better able to guide you than before the election.”
When asked if he would ever consider running for president a third time, Dewey responded with an emphatic syllable.
“No.”
33
“Dewey Defeats Truman”
IT WAS THE GREATEST ELECTORAL upset in the nation’s history, and the press had to answer for its role in calling it wrong.
The Denver Post: “We, and the rest of the American press, have an awful burden of explanation to offer for this refutation of our ‘expert’ opinion. For the fact is that we have failed abysmally in putting a finger on the real pulse of America.” The Boston Daily Globe: “President Truman’s victory in his race for election to the White House will go down in the books as one of the political miracles of all time.” Marquis Childs in the Washington Post: “We were wrong, all of us, completely and entirely, the political editors, the politicians—except for Harry S. Truman. And no one believed him.” Newsweek put out an “Election Special” on November 4. On the cover was Truman’s smiling face and two simple words below it: “Miracle Man.” “If the 1948 election proved nothing else,” the magazine concluded, “it demonstrated that everyone accepted the rules but Harry S. Truman. He defied them. And he won.”
That morning of November 4, the second full day after election night, Truman left Kansas City’s Union Station, ensconced within the very familiar walls of the swaying Ferdinand Magellan. Bess and Margaret were with him. The Magellan had turned out to be an apt symbol for his campaign, for it was named after the sixteenth-century explorer who had risked life and limb to discover the unknown. In fact, Truman had traveled more miles on his campaign than Magellan ever did.
On the way back to Washington, Truman stopped in St. Louis. Someone gave him a copy of a November 3 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune—yesterday’s paper. He stood on the back platform of his train car and waved the Tribune at crowds who had amassed to see him. At that moment, the news photographer W. Eugene Smith snapped a photograph of a moment forever imprinted in the American consciousness. Arguably, no president in history had ever been captured with a facial expression of such unbridled joy. Time magazine would later comment that Smith’s photo was “the greatest photograph ever made of a politician celebrating victory. Period.”
Truman held up the newspaper so its headline could be clearly read: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
In Washington, DC, on the morning of November
