“Yes,” Wallace answered, “we’ll go through.”
The next night, in Burlington, North Carolina, raw eggs, tomatoes, and an ice-cream cone rained down on Wallace’s car as he arrived at a speaking event. An angry crowd of several hundred whites refused to let him enter the hall where members of Gideon’s Army had gathered to hear him speak. He stood outside his car next to a police officer for fifteen minutes, incredulously staring out over a raucous assembly of hecklers.
“I would like to see some indication that I am in the United States!” he shouted. But the protest against him continued.
When Wallace did take the stage, boos greeted him, and another egg hit him. He tried to compose himself, beginning his speech with eggshell stuck in his hair and yolk running down his white shirt. When the candidate finished his speech and headed back to his car, a police guard followed closely, with one officer drawing his gun. Wallace headed for Mecklenburg, North Carolina, where a similar scene awaited. More eggs. More tomatoes. More signs: SELL YOUR JUNK IN MOSCOW, HENRY.
Wallace spoke at the courthouse in Mecklenburg because no hall or theater would rent the Progressive Party space. “I believe there are people in Mecklenburg County who still believe in human rights,” he shouted over taunts.
In Dallas, Wallace was awoken after midnight by a Western Union messenger bearing a telegram that read, “Get out of town!” At another event, the window of a car containing two Wallace staffers—one white, one black—was smashed.
The national reaction to Wallace’s trip South was a mix of outrage and apathy. By one reporter’s account, the Wallace campaign had been targeted by twenty-seven eggs, thirty-seven tomatoes, six peaches, two lemons, an orange, and one ice-cream cone. But it had also shed light on a dark American truth. Wallace’s chief treasurer, a Georgia-raised black man named Clark Foreman, who had once witnessed the lynching of a black man when he was in college, years earlier, called Wallace’s southern odyssey “the greatest blow against slavery since the emancipation proclamation.”
“As the direct result of Henry Wallace’s trip through the South,” wrote one journalist in the New York Star, “millions of Americans who were not aware of the meaning of discrimination in the South have suddenly been jolted. Segregation is no work of fiction, but a brutal fact. The conflict between American democracy and segregation hit home to millions.”
Years later, looking back on this trip, Wallace would describe his encounter with “human hate in the raw.” He had never experienced anything of the kind before, he said, and could not imagine doing so again.
20
“There Is Great Danger Ahead”
THE EXECUTIVE MANSION WAS PHYSICALLY crumbling. “The White House Architect and Engineer have moved me into the . . . Lincoln Room—for safety—imagine that!” Truman wrote in his diary on August 3. He wrote his sister on the tenth of that month, “Margaret’s sitting room floor broke in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling. They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the red parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath.”
The problem was kept a highly guarded secret. “Can you imagine what the press would have done with this story?” the president’s daughter later wrote. “The whole mess would have been blamed on Harry Truman. The White House would have become a metaphor for his collapsing administration.”
As engineers and architects hammered on walls and peeled back ceilings to reveal the building’s old bones, staffers and the Democratic National Committee were working overtime piecing together an itinerary for Truman’s campaign appearances. He was going to travel aboard the Ferdinand Magellan train car, as he had done in his “nonpolitical” trip two months earlier in June, crisscrossing the nation. He aimed to give more speeches and make more campaign appearances than any presidential candidate in history.
The tour would kick off Labor Day weekend in Detroit. To rest up beforehand, and to escape the structural problems of his current home, the president went on vacation. On August 20 Truman left the White House for a cruise aboard the presidential yacht—the USS Williamsburg. With a crew of advisers, poker buddies, a Secret Service detail of a half-dozen agents, and the White House physician, Dr. Wallace Graham, accompanying him, the Williamsburg left Pier 1 at the Navy base in Washington under the command of Captain Donald J. MacDonald.
For the next nine days Truman lounged on the ship’s deck, paced its length in his bathing suit, and worked in his cabin as the party cruised Chesapeake Bay. At night, the group watched movies—Key Largo starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and The Emperor Waltz with Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine. Truman loved boats. He could relax and be Harry instead of Mr. President. “In the intimacy of the ship,” remembered George Elsey, “his language was unguarded.” That said, Truman was so respectful of women, he never told what Elsey called “dirty stories.” “He would laugh if others told them, but his repertoire was confined to political anecdotes, scatological only if they involved a politician.”
It was a brief respite from a troubled world. In Palestine, the Arab-Israeli War had reached a temporary truce under the watchful eye of a United Nations mediator, Folke Bernadotte of Sweden. There was almost no hope that the truce would last. Jews in America were thrilled with the surprising strength of the fledgling Israeli army. At the same time, the State Department was alarmed. In the process of claiming territory, the Israelis had pushed some three hundred thousand Palestinians out of their homes and were refusing to allow them to return, creating a humanitarian crisis. “The situation is becoming daily more critical as cold weather sets in,” a State Department official informed Truman.
In Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, was locked in direct negotiations with Joseph Stalin and his number two, the impossibly irascible Vyacheslav
