Others drew a different conclusion. Truman had, some astute observers noted, done much to win the election way back at the Democratic National Convention in July, when he called Congress back into a “Turnip Day” emergency session. The plan was to put a spotlight on the Republican schism between the conservative Congress and the more liberal politics of Thomas Dewey. After the election, Dewey refused to relinquish his fight for a more liberal GOP. In a speech three months later, he addressed straight-on the ideological split that plagued his party. Some Republican members of Congress boycotted the speech. Others praised the failed 1948 candidate for pulling the curtain off the party’s dark secret, which was in fact no secret at all.
“The Republican party is split wide open,” Dewey told a crowd in Washington early in 1949. “It has been split wide open for years, but we have tried to gloss over it . . . We have in our party some fine, high-minded patriotic people who honestly oppose farm price supports, unemployment insurance, old age benefits, slum clearance, and other social programs. These people consider these programs horrendous departures into paternalism . . . These people believe in a laissez-faire society and look back wistfully to the miscalled ‘good old days’ of the 19th century.”
If the Republican Party did not start looking forward and embrace some measure of New Deal thinking, Dewey said, “you can bury the Republican party as the deadest pigeon in the country.” From the perspective of many decades later, Dewey’s words do not hold up, as the presidency of Donald Trump can attest.
And what of the pollsters themselves? George Gallup’s first reaction was that the people who accounted for his polling numbers did not show up at the voting booths, because they assumed Dewey had it won. “Which voters stayed home?” he asked his readers, rhetorically. Elmo Roper was the pollster who stopped polling altogether weeks before the election because, he claimed, Dewey was “as good as elected,” so there was no more point in taking polls. Now Roper had this to say: “I could not have been more wrong and the thing that bothers me at the moment is that I don’t know why I was wrong.”
One theory emerged that the pollsters erred in their sampling process, that they failed to do enough to tally the opinions of low-income voters who were less approachable and more likely to be suspicious of poll takers. In the end, these voters came out for Truman. Another, more valid theory supported Gallup’s excuse: that Dewey voters were so confident, they did not bother to vote. Numbers backed up this claim; Dewey drew about forty thousand fewer total votes than he had four years earlier against FDR. The logical conclusion was that some Republican voters stayed home because they thought their vote did not matter. How many of them later regretted that decision?
“It’s open season on the pollsters,” Edward R. Murrow said over CBS radio. “But it ought to be pointed out that they are accused of nothing except being wrong. No one claims, so far as I know, that they were ‘bought’ or that they deliberately attempted to influence the outcome by contributing to despondency and alarm, or by inducing complacency in the Republican ranks. They were just wrong, and in the field of information and ideas this is no crime.”
Ultimately, the story of the election—and of its outcome—centers on its main character. On November 3, Senator Vandenberg was in his Washington office chewing on a cigar when a member of his staff asked him what he thought about Truman’s victory. Vandenberg stopped, pulled the cigar from his lips, and said, “You’ve got to give the little man credit. There he was flat on his back. Everyone had counted him out but he came up fighting and won the battle. He did it all by himself. That’s the kind of courage the American people admire.”
Epilogue
AFTER THE 1948 ELECTION, Thomas Dewey finished out his second and then third terms as governor of New York before retiring from public service at the end of 1954. He was highly instrumental in convincing Dwight Eisenhower to run for president in 1952, and helped Ike secure the Republican nomination over Robert Taft. During the 1948 campaign, when Dewey and Ike had famously sat together for the surprise photo op on the porch of Dewey’s farmhouse in upstate New York, both men believed that one of them was going to become the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover. They were right, but ironically, wrong about which of the two of them it was going to be.
For the rest of his life, Dewey kept a cordial relationship with Truman. When, in 1950, Truman made the highly controversial decision to send US troops to fight on the Korean peninsula as part of United Nations armed forces, without the official consent of Congress, Dewey cabled the White House: “I whole-heartedly agree with and support the difficult decision you have made today to extend American assistance to the Republic of Korea in combatting armed communist aggression.” When six months later Truman survived an assassination attempt that left a Secret Service man and a would-be assassin dead, Dewey sent Truman a note expressing “heart-felt gratification that no harm came to you or to your family.”
Dewey had said before he ran in 1948, “I deliberately decided that I was not going to be one of those unhappy men who yearned for the Presidency and whose failure to get it scarred their lives.”
