Johnston had been the man behind some of the most vicious attacks on Truman’s civil rights program. It had been Johnston—an outspoken white supremacist—who had publicly humiliated Truman months earlier at the Jackson-Jefferson Day Dinner by buying tickets to reserve a table right in front of the stage where Truman was to speak, and then boycotting the event so that the highly visible table remained empty. Now here Johnston was to make amends.
The well-wishers lined up in such great numbers to shake Truman’s hand, it took the president twenty-two minutes to get from the Magellan to his automobile, at which point the motorcade began to snake through the city. Bess, Margaret, J. Howard McGrath, and others sat in the back of the open seven-seater. When they passed the Washington Post building, they saw a big sign waiting for them: WELCOME HOME. FROM THE CROW-EATERS. The Post editors had sent Truman a telegram inviting him to a “crow banquet,” in which the newspapers’ writers and editors would enjoy a main course of “crow en glace.”
“I will never forget that ride to the White House,” Margaret recorded. “Every band in the world seemed to be playing ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry.’”
At the White House, a microphone had been set up on the North Portico. Truman and Barkley thanked a crowd that stretched out farther than their eyes could see, all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. Once Truman entered the White House, however, the very moment he was out of view of all those cameras, he was cornered by a very nervous J. B. West, the White House chief usher.
“I am afraid you’re going to have to move out right away,” West said.
More scaffolding had been erected, and construction workers were legion. The place was not safe for inhabitation.
“Doesn’t that beat hell!” Truman said. He knew he was moving out, but he did not know that—win or lose—he was moving out now. “Here we’ve worked ourselves to death trying to stay in this jailhouse,” he said, “and they kick us out anyway!”
As the Trumans prepared to move across the street to Blair House—an official government home typically used to host foreign dignitaries—the congratulatory letters poured in. One arrived from the president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who mistakenly called Truman’s victory a “re-election.” Since Israel declared its independence nearly six months earlier, sixty-two thousand Jewish refugees in Europe had immigrated to the new country, Weizmann said in his letter. “We have special cause to be gratified at your re-election because we are mindful of the enlightened help which you gave to our cause in these years of our struggle.”
Around the globe, State Department officials reported on the reaction to Truman’s victory. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin’s second-in-command, Vyacheslav Molotov, praised a rejection of a “most aggressive program of the Republican Party and Dewey.” It was the closest the Soviets could come to saying something nice about Harry Truman. In Paris, the US Embassy reported, “papers of all political persuasions see Truman election as ‘victory of [the] people over Wall Street,’ with Gallup and bookies still being mentioned as lesser losers.” In Nanking, the crumbling Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek issued a statement: “The world looks hopefully to his [Truman’s] leadership in the difficult four years which lie ahead.” From Lisbon, the US Embassy reported that “opinion frequently expressed even by man in [the] street [is] that ‘now there will be no war.’”
Meanwhile the condolence letters poured into Dewey’s mailbox. “I think the future historians will regard your defeat as one of the most important turning points in American history,” Alf Landon—the 1936 Republican nominee—wrote Dewey on November 19, 1948. An uncle of Dewey’s wrote him on November 4, “Aunt Marsh and I want you to know that we are very sick over the election, all day yesterday we went around feeling as if something inside had died, and I guess it has when we realize that the voters of this great country would select such a man as a leader.”
One Republican named Thomas W. Pierce wrote his friend Dorothy Bell Rackoff, who had been a delegate from New York at the Republican National Convention, five days after the election: “I have been like many other Republicans—literally picking up the pieces scattered about us by the ceiling that began crashing down on us late Tuesday night. Outside of Pearl Harbor itself I do not know of another single great event that has quite so much disturbed my mental equilibrium.”
The overwhelming surprise left innumerable millions of people, at home and abroad, with a question on their lips that would baffle historians for generations to come.
How could the pollsters and the press have been so wrong?
What actually happened?
Following Election Day, the New Dealer Harold “Old Curmudgeon” Ickes wrote a friend, “It was not an ‘election’ but a ‘revolution.’” The ballot box had revealed newly crystallizing power bases, new campaign processes showing effective results, and a renewed sense that, in America, anything could happen. The final tally had Truman with 303 electoral votes and twenty-eight states to Dewey’s 189 and sixteen states, with Strom Thurmond carrying four states—Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama—and 39 electoral votes (one breakaway electoral vote in Tennessee also went in the Thurmond column). The popular vote went to Truman, 24,105,810 to 21,970,064. While Henry Wallace picked up zero electoral votes, he earned roughly 1,156,000 votes nationally, about 13,000 less than Thurmond.*
According to a postmortem statistical analysis done by the Republican National Committee, the election was the closest since 1916, and just twenty-nine thousand votes could have changed the entire outcome, if properly distributed in the states of Ohio, Illinois, and California.
The Democrats picked up seventy-five seats in the House of Representatives and nine
