On March 16, 1971, Dewey was in Florida, golfing with the Boston Red Sox slugger Carl Yastrzemski. Dewey was scheduled to fly out that night to attend the engagement party of President Richard Nixon’s daughter, at the White House. Instead, he died of a heart attack in his Miami hotel room. He was sixty-eight years old.
After the 1948 election, Henry Wallace left the Progressive Party, which did field a candidate in 1952, only to win less than a quarter of a percent of the national vote. After that, the party disintegrated and Henry Wallace faded into obscurity.
Throughout 1948 Wallace had led an antiwar, anti–Truman Doctrine, anti–Marshall Plan campaign that attempted to blame the Cold War not on the Soviets but on US policy. After 1948 he had an about-face. He came to the opinion that the Soviets were in fact a Cold War enemy. In 1950 he concluded, “Today, I am convinced that Russia is out to dominate the world.” As for his Gideon’s Army antiwar stance, that too disappeared. Wallace also endorsed Truman’s decision to send troops into Korea in 1950. In an article published in 1952 called “Where I Was Wrong,” he called the USSR “utterly evil.”
In 1964 Wallace was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. He died a year later.
Strom Thurmond won well over a million votes in the 1948 election. A month after the election, Thurmond visited his daughter Essie Mae at the college she was attending in South Carolina. They met secretly in the office of the college’s president.
“How could you have said all those terrible things?” she asked him, according to her recollection of the conversation.
“What things?” he responded.
“About Negroes.”
“Essie Mae,” she remembered him explaining, “there is no man in the country who cares more about the Negroes than I do. I think you know that.”
She kept probing him, and as she recalls, he told her, “It’s the South, Essie Mae. It’s the culture here. It’s custom. It’s the way we live. You don’t go to England and tell them to get rid of the Queen and the royalty. That’s not fair, either, but it’s the custom. They got rid of the royalty in Russia, and what do you have? Communism! A police state. It’s no different from Hitler.”
Thurmond’s career in government remains unprecedented. In 1954 he became a Democratic senator from South Carolina. In 1964 he mirrored his state of South Carolina and much of the South by switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Thurmond supported Barry Goldwater in 1964, against the Democrat Lyndon Johnson, in large part due to the civil rights issue. While Johnson supported the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, Goldwater was against it.
Thurmond went on to become the first and only man to remain in the Senate at the age of one hundred, and he is still one of the longest-serving senators in US history. He died in 2003, in the town where he came from—Edgefield. Six months later, seventy-eight-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams revealed that Strom Thurmond was her father. She published Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond in 2005, revealing the intimate details of her relationship with Thurmond. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
After the 1948 election the southern states that Thurmond represented—the Solid South of the Democratic Party going back to the 1870s—began to migrate to the Republican Party. Today, this region has been solidly for the GOP for half a century. Going back to 1964, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama have tipped Democrat only once, for Jimmy Carter in 1976. In 2016 South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana all cast their electoral votes for Donald J. Trump.
Four days after the 1948 election, Truman and an official party that included Bess, Margaret, vice president–elect Alben Barkley, and over a dozen others ventured aboard the USS Williamsburg, bound for the naval base at Key West, Florida. There would be volleyball and fishing trips, poker, and plenty of bourbon. The president’s party numbered thirty people, in addition to more than forty reporters and fifteen members of the Secret Service. When they got to the island, according to the president’s official log, “the largest crowd ever assembled at Key West” came out into the streets to welcome them.
In Key West, however, the business of running the federal government continued to press firmly on Truman’s shoulders. Urgent cables came through the communications room set up at the Key West Naval Station—from Israeli president Chaim Weizmann, with an “urgent appeal” for help as Arab armies were launching a new offensive; from Chiang Kai-shek, who reported that the US-backed Chinese government was about to fall and that “the communist forces in central China are now within striking distance of Shanghai and Nanking.”
Soon after Truman’s return to the White House from Florida, former State Department official Alger Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury relating to his denials of accusations that he had been a Communist spy. Cold War paranoia spread across Washington and beyond like a contagion.
But at the same time, the American people wanted to party, too. In a twist of fate that no fiction writer could have dared to write, the Republican Eightieth Congress—expecting to take control of the White House in 1948—had voted to up the ante on the Inauguration Day festivities, with an unprecedented $80,000 budget. That money was now at Truman’s disposal. A million people filled the streets for the 1949 inaugural fete, the first to be televised. One hundred million more listened via radio. There were jet-propelled bombers roaring overhead, thirty bands playing, more than forty floats motoring by in a parade, and an inauguration dinner featuring “Salad Margaret” and “Sandwiches Independence.” The man who administered the thirty-five-word
