Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul

cell of Communists), and Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic Party (the “Dixiecrats,” a campaign of unapologetic white supremacy). While the election’s victor is the ultimate focus of the book, my goal was not to favor one candidate’s policies over another, but rather to state the facts and how they were perceived at the time. Although two of these candidates performed poorly in the end, their stories in retrospect are extraordinary. Oftentimes we can learn as much from election losers and charismatic political misfits as we can from the winners.

I have tried as often as possible to let original documentation unfold this narrative—to allow these historical characters to bring themselves to life through their own memorandums, diaries, and oral histories. The expectation I set for myself was this: If they could read this book today, they would find it fair, factual, and expressive of the almost desperate urgency that fueled their quests for the presidency. As the New York Times put it just before Election Day in 1948: “The fate of the nation and of civilization is at stake.”

Truman believed that history repeats itself. “The history of the world,” he wrote, “has moved in cycles and . . . very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past six thousand years.” My guess is that readers will find the election season of 1948 uncannily relevant today.

At the same time, I am hoping readers will find inspiration in this book. During 1947–48, the bipartisan discourse was mercilessly vitriolic—as it is today. Yet when faced with a national emergency, Democrats and Republicans came together to launch some of the most enduring policies in the country’s history (the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan). These leaders realized that their duty as public servants was not to their parties but to all Americans, in the vital struggle for the future.

A. J. BAIME

OCTOBER 30, 2019

Part I

The Disintegration of the Democratic Party

The loud outcry against President Truman exceeds anything we have heard in a long time. There is about it a savage quality.

—​Washington Post, October 11, 1946

1

“Whither Harry S. Truman?”

“ALL IN,” A SECRET SERVICE man said.

It was 7 p.m. on August 14, 1945. A White House usher closed the door to the Oval Office and Harry Truman stood from behind his desk, staring out at a crowd of some two hundred perspiring radio and newspaper reporters who had just pushed their way in. Klieg lights from newsreel cameras glared off the president’s wire-rim spectacles. A row of cabinet officials stood behind him, and at the edge of the room, the First Lady, Bess Truman, was seated on a couch, her hands folded in a ball on her lap. Truman held up a statement in his right hand and began to read. All in the room knew what this address would communicate, but still, the words had the effect of an electric shock.

“I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese Government,” Truman said, “in reply to the message forwarded to that Government by the Secretary of State on August 11. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.”

The president’s full statement took a few minutes to read. His final words were, “That is all.”

When the doors to the Oval Office opened, reporters holding notepads dashed out to spread the news around the globe. World War II—the most destructive conflagration ever, a war that had consumed some sixty million human lives—was over.

Within minutes the news hit the radio. Outside on the streets of the nation’s capital, the doors of churches, offices, theaters, and bars burst open, pouring frantic Washingtonians into the hot August night. Impromptu jitterbug contests broke out on street corners. Drunks swung bottles while standing atop cars. At the White House gates, people began to amass, and within an hour of Truman’s declaration, a crowd bigger than the capacity of Yankee Stadium—some seventy-five thousand people—stood out on Pennsylvania Avenue. They began to chant: “We want Harry! We want Harry!”

Inside the executive mansion, Truman was busy making phone calls. He called his ninety-three-year-old mother, at her home in Grandview, Missouri. (“That was Harry,” Mamma Truman said after hanging up. “Harry’s such a wonderful man . . . I knew he’d call.”) He telephoned the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was still reeling from the death of her husband, Franklin, just four months earlier. “I told her,” Truman later recalled, “that in this hour of triumph I wished that it had been President Roosevelt, and not I, who had given the message to our people.”

Meanwhile, the “We want Harry!” chanting grew in decibels. The din became irresistible, and so Truman and his wife stepped out onto the White House lawn. Looking fit in a creased and buttoned double-breasted blue suit, the sixty-one-year-old president made a V sign with his fingers as Secret Service men hustled around him. A news photographer jumped forward and froze the moment in black-and-white celluloid. “[Truman] was on the White House lawn pumping his arms like an orchestra conductor at tens of thousands of cheering Americans who suddenly materialized in front of the mansion,” recalled one person present in the crowd. It was “the wildest celebration this capital ever saw.”

White House aides brought out a microphone and a loudspeaker and placed them in front of Truman. He had always been an awkward public speaker, but on this occasion, it did not matter. No one cared. When he began to speak, the crowds instantly hushed.

“This is a great day,” Truman said, “the day we’ve been waiting for. This is the day for free governments in the world. This is the day that fascism and police government ceases in the world. This is the day for Democracy.” He paused, taking in the moment. He had spent a lifetime reading history, studying