Campaign staffers had worked out what they’d hoped would be a smooth-running assembly line of facts, figures, and ideas for the president. Truman had Clark Clifford on board to handle the big speeches. “I lived in a little tiny stateroom where I slept and ate and wrote,” Clifford remembered. “My big task in the campaign was to do the writing for the President.” Clifford’s assistant George Elsey would handle the shorter whistle-stop addresses. Truman would give these talks impromptu, using note cards full of relevant facts supplied by Elsey and his team. Elsey remembered, “I was armed with briefcases filled with notes and outlines for the first few days with the promise that the daily pouch flown from Washington to wherever we might be would have more from Batt”—Bill Batt at the secret research unit in Washington.
Truman staffer Charlie Murphy would write rough drafts of bigger speeches from his office in the White House, to send to Clifford for rewrites. “I worked at it night and day, every day,” recalled Murphy of the campaign. “The pattern that evolved was that we would send a draft of a speech from here [the White House] at night, it would be flown by courier plane that would land wherever that train was before day in the morning.” The speech would make its way into the hands of Clifford, who would work on it personally with Truman.
Everyone on board and at the White House—apart from Truman—believed that his chances at victory were near null. The only shot he had was to put on a campaign so surprising, it would take the nation by storm. “He was on his own five-yard line,” Clifford recalled, “there were only three minutes left, and the only thing that could win the game for him was a touchdown. Now, why would he just go ahead and run plays through the line? He had to try any sort of innovative, surprising, startling kind of tactic that might work because he had everything to gain and nothing to lose.”
On the first night aboard the Truman Special en route to Detroit, Truman had his whole staff to dinner. At a quarter after eight the next morning, the train pulled into Grand Rapids, where the president was set to give his first whistle-stop speech. Truman stepped out onto the Magellan’s back platform. He would remember the sight for the rest of his life.
It was pouring. Grand Rapids was a Republican stronghold. Still, some twenty-five thousand people were huddled under umbrellas and out in the elements. Rows of state police officers stood drenched in their uniforms. These were the first words in Truman’s first official campaign-tour speech of 1948: “My, what a wonderful crowd at 8:15 in the morning,” he said into his microphone. “It is a great day for me. It is a great day for you. I am just starting on a campaign tour that is going to be a record for the President of the United States.”
What the people of Grand Rapids saw was not the man they thought they would. This was no stiff oratory, no FDR-like prose. There was nothing formal about it.
“The record proves conclusively that the Republican Party is controlled by special privilege; and that the Democratic Party is responsive to the needs of the people,” Truman said. “Now the necessity that faces us is one of voting on November 2d. You must register, you must vote, if you expect to get a square deal in this great Nation. Doesn’t do any good to talk about voting, if you are not on the books. Doesn’t do any good to talk about voting, if you sit around on election day, too lazy to turn out. The interests of this great Nation are such that every man and woman of voting age in this country ought to turn out and vote on November 2d.”
After his talk, Truman was ushered into a special train car designed for guests. Nearly four dozen local officials were there expecting a handshake—the heads of over a dozen auto union divisions, of the carpenters union, the plasterers union, the sheet-metal workers union, the financial secretaries typographical union. There was the head of the Democratic County Club, the former mayor of Lansing, the head of the Eleanor Roosevelt League, plus candidates for county clerk, state senator, and the US Congress. Labor Day Queen Miss Elayne Balance was on hand to present a bouquet to the First Daughter.
The train was on a strict schedule. All of this—the extemporaneous speech, the meet-and-greet—had to occur in fifteen minutes. Somehow, Truman managed to shake all the hands and the train moved on.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the president, the campaign had reached what Margaret Truman called “the first major crisis.” The advance man, Chapman, was in Detroit, where Truman was scheduled to make his first major speech downtown in Cadillac Square that afternoon. The speech was set to go live nationwide on radio, but radio executives told Chapman they would need the $25,000 fee for the broadcast up front, or they would be forced to cancel. Chapman frantically contacted union leaders, but no one had that kind of cash on hand. A Truman aide happened to run into the wealthy Democratic governor of Oklahoma, Roy J. Turner, at a cocktail party at the Statler Hotel in Washington that day, and pleaded with Turner for help.
“Well, that broadcast is going to be made,” Turner said. He got out his checkbook and wrote a check. “That broadcast goes on,” he said.
When the train reached Detroit at 1:40 p.m., Truman and his entourage funneled into a row of limousines and rode downtown for the day’s main event. Thousands lined the roads along the route. In Cadillac Square, 125,000 people stood awaiting the president. A nationwide radio audience listened in. Detroit was the spiritual home of the American
