—Harry Truman to his sister, Mary Jane, October 5, 1948
16
“A Profound Sense of What’s Right and What’s Wrong”
FOR THE ROUGHLY 150 MILLION Americans in the summer of 1948, the first postwar presidential election was a landmark like none other. Anyone over the age of ten years old could vividly recall what life had been like during the Great Depression and during a war that had killed some 60 million human beings worldwide. Now, three years after the war’s end, a vast majority of Americans were seeing signs of prosperity, despite high prices on many consumer goods, and new innovations that pointed to a future where anything seemed possible—but only if humanity could keep World War III from destroying it all.
The economy of the United States had arguably never been so strong. Unemployment was just 3.6 percent. The construction industry built $7.7 billion worth of new homes in the first half of 1948—a record high. Since the beginning of World War II, stock prices of railroad companies, utilities, and industrials had roughly doubled on average. While inflation continued to worry everyday consumers (“The prices of food products have surged upward to the highest level in history,” according to a July 1948 report from Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers), the fact remained that the economy was robust and times were good.
For years, due to wartime rationing, consumer products of all kinds had been difficult to obtain. Now a new and uniquely American consumerism was emerging. Big supermarket chains like A&P and Safeway were opening superstores in cities and towns, while department stores like Marshall Field’s and Macy’s—the largest department store, which sold over $170 million worth of retail in 1947—were reaping profits. The most popular whiskey was Seagram’s, the most popular cigarette was Lucky Strike, and the most popular car brand was Chevrolet. The appetite for these products seemed insatiable.
Americans were particularly car crazy in the summer of 1948, and motorcycle crazy too. Ford unveiled the first all-new postwar model, the 1949 Ford, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on June 8, 1948. More than a hundred thousand orders came in during the next thirty days. Cadillac debuted the first tailfin on its 1948 line. A motorsport impresario by the name of “Big Bill” France founded a series of stock car races called NASCAR. In Southern California, a group of motorcycle fanatics founded a club called the Hells Angels.
The year 1948 saw the first flying machine to break the sound barrier, at an altitude of over seventy thousand feet—a jet called the Bell X-1 in the hands of test pilot Chuck Yeager. An inventor named Edwin H. Land had debuted the first instant camera—the Polaroid—which would go on sale later in 1948. Bell Laboratories unveiled the first transistor radios. The first bikini bathing suit appeared, named for the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. The first national television nightly news program aired—Camel Newsreel Theater, named for its sponsor, Camel cigarettes, the nation’s second-most-popular brand of smokes. Americans were fascinated with flying saucers. Babies were being born in record numbers. The professor of entomology and zoology Alfred Kinsey released his study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which “stirred up the greatest biological commotion in the U.S. since Darwin,” noted the August 2 issue of Life, the nation’s most popular magazine.
Offices were full of new inventions, like the Ediphone voice-recognition dictation device and the Remington Rand electric adding machine. Office buildings in some big cities had elevators that were no longer controlled by a man in a tie who stood inside the elevator car all day working the up/down lever, thanks to the Otis Electronic Signal Control. Explained Business Week in its July 10 issue: “You can now summon an elevator by simply touching a plastic arrow in the landing fixture.”
The most exciting new technology was, of course, the television. The president of RCA, David Sarnoff, declared in the summer of 1948 that the television was going to change American life as much as Henry Ford’s Model T had. “As television grows on an international scale,” Sarnoff wrote that summer, “it will rove the globe for programs and literally make all the world a stage, as Shakespeare envisaged it.” The applications of television cameras seemed limitless. Cameras could be mounted on the noses of “robot rockets,” Sarnoff claimed. TV could also be the greatest educational tool ever known.
Television’s first big test would be the 1948 election. For the first time, Americans would get to see their candidates in real time. They would be able to see famous political writers speaking, rather than just the words that thumped out of their typewriters, making the new media instantly and immeasurably powerful. Ultimately, television would be able to capture the human experience of political victory and defeat as Americans had never seen it before.
The Truman campaign began in earnest with a meeting on the night of July 22, at 8 p.m., in the State Dining Room of the White House. Funneling in was a motley crew of Truman friends—hardly a big hitter among them. As the former secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described this bunch: “The political figures who surround the President . . . could all be blown out by one sure breath, as are candles on a birthday cake.”
Here was Attorney General Tom Clark of Texas—a jowly, cigar-wielding Dallas lawman. Here were the young liberal political advisers Oscar Ewing and Oscar Chapman. And here was Matt Connelly of Massachusetts, Truman’s appointments secretary. None of these men had ever held any major elected political office. The only man with any bona fide clout was Judge Sam Rosenman, the fedora-sporting New Dealer and speechwriter.
The first purpose of this meeting was the subject that drives all political campaigns: money. Who would lead the finance committee? Where would funding for the campaign come from? Truman’s daughter would later recall, “The lack of money in the party war chest was literally terrifying.” Five days before
