—Harry Truman, April 1948
IN NOVEMBER 1947—one year from the presidential election—a secret memo began circulating the White House entitled “The Politics of 1948.” The document was written by a Democratic operative named James H. Rowe Jr. and had fallen into the hands of Clark Clifford. Clifford knew that Truman mistrusted Rowe, as they had had differences of opinion in the past, but the piece itself, Clifford thought, was brilliant. (Many years later the Washington Post would describe it as “one of this century’s most famous political memorandums.”) Clifford strengthened Rowe’s polemics with the help of his assistant George Elsey, and delivered the memo to the president bearing his own byline, figuring that Truman would not take seriously a document authored by Rowe.
In remarkable detail, this memo dictated the road map for the Democrats’ 1948 campaign, and for the next year it would remain in the president’s desk drawer for easy reference.
“The basic premise of this memorandum—that the Democratic Party is an unhappy alliance of Southern conservatives, Western progressives and Big City labor—is very trite, but it is also very true,” the Rowe-Clifford memo said on the first page. “And it is equally true that the success or failure of the Democratic leadership can be precisely measured by its ability to lead enough members of these three misfit groups to the polls on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, 1948.”
The memo’s conclusions:
The Democratic Party was “in profound collapse . . . The blunt facts seem to be that the Party has been so long in power it is fat, tired, and even a bit senile.”
Although competition in the GOP was taut, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York would be the Republican nominee. “He will be a resourceful, intelligent and highly dangerous candidate.”
Henry Wallace was also highly dangerous to Truman. “There is something almost messianic in his belief today that he is the Indispensable Man.” Wallace’s campaign was “motivated by the Communist Party line.” The Communists “give him a disciplined hard-working organization and collect the money to run his campaign.” Not only would Wallace get the backing of Communists and far-left-wingers, he could even win the support of the Soviet Union, the document noted. From the Soviet point of view, Wallace could not win, but he could pull enough votes from Truman to ensure that the Republicans won. The Soviet Union had strong reasons for wanting the Democrats to lose, the Rowe-Clifford memo claimed:
Moscow is . . . convinced there is no longer any hope that the Truman administration will submit to the Russian program of world conquest and expansion [the memo read]. From the Communist long-range point of view, there is nothing to lose and much to gain if a Republican becomes the next President. The best way it can help achieve that result, and hasten the disintegration of the American economy, is to split the Independent and labor union vote between Truman and Wallace—and thus insure the Republican candidate’s election.
Would the Soviets support Wallace’s campaign? And if so, how?
To win in 1948, Truman had to court farmers (who traditionally voted Republican), laborers, Jews, and—perhaps most of all—black Americans. The story of the black vote in America was in one way rather simple. From the Civil War until the New Deal, blacks tended to vote Republican because of their devotion to Abraham Lincoln. In 1936, however, FDR won a majority of the African American vote (only 28 percent voted for the Republican candidate Alf Landon), and the Democrats had maintained strong black support since then.
Yet now it appeared that African Americans were veering back to the GOP. “The Negro bloc, which, certainly in Illinois and probably in New York and Ohio, does hold the balance of power, will go Republican,” the document read. Thomas Dewey had been relentlessly and successfully courting the black vote in New York, and even the conservative faction of the GOP had done the same, while the “Southern Senators of the Democratic Party,” the memo pointed out, were sure to make any real progress in any real civil liberties movement impossible under a Democratic administration.
Unless the administration were to make “a determined campaign to help the Negro (and everybody else) on the problems of high prices and housing—and capitalize politically on its efforts—the Negro vote is lost.”
If the Democrats made such “a determined campaign” to go after the black vote, the white Southern Democrats with their Jim Crow traditions would be incensed. Still, the document’s writers believed it was “inconceivable” that the South would “revolt” from the Democratic Party. Despite bitter resistance among Southern Democrats to Truman’s civil rights position, “the South can be considered safely Democratic.”
“The conflict between the President and the Congress will increase during the 1948 session.” With the current Republican-controlled Congress, Truman had no chance of pushing through any of his major plans, and thus he had no choice, the memo concluded, but to go all-out against his opposition Congress and engage in a political bare-fisted fight. “The strategy on the Taft-Hartley Bill—refusal to bargain with the Republicans and to accept any compromises—paid big political dividends. That strategy should be expanded in the next session to include all the domestic issues.”
The stakes had never been so high. “The future of this country and the future of the world are linked inextricably with his [Truman’s] reelection.”
The map was drawn, the plan in place. Now Truman had to put it into action.
“It was clearly apparent to all of us in the White House staff,” recalled adviser George Elsey, “certainly to the president himself, that the 1948 State of the Union message would be the opening gun.” As Elsey wrote in a memorandum at the time, Truman’s January 1948 State of the Union had to be “controversial as hell, must state the issues of the election, [and] must draw the line sharply between Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic Platform will stem from it, and the election will be
