“As you know,” Truman said from the speaker’s platform, “I speak plainly sometimes. In fact, I speak bluntly sometimes. I am going to speak plainly and bluntly today.” The crowd roared. “These are critical times for labor and for all who work,” Truman said. “There is great danger ahead.” Citing Taft-Hartley he warned voters of “the boom and bust” that lay ahead if Thomas Dewey was elected president. “The ‘boom’ is on for them, and the ‘bust’ has begun for you.” He warned of the predatory businessman with “a calculating machine where his heart ought to be . . . Labor has always had to fight for its gains. Now you are fighting for the whole future of the labor movement . . . I know that we are going to win this crusade for the right!”
After the Detroit speech, Truman sat with Margaret and motored in the back of a limo north out of the city, followed by cars holding camera crews from all three television networks. Along the trip, police estimated, a half million people stood on the sides of the roads.
The president’s appointments secretary Matthew Connelly recalled the ride: “Along the highway from Detroit to Pontiac I’d see people alongside the highway. This was not organized and there were a lot of them out there . . . This tells me what I want to know.” Others saw the turnout through a lens of colder logic. “A President can always bring people out,” recalled Jack Bell, the top political reporter for the Associated Press, who was traveling with the Truman campaign. “Even if they are not going to vote for him, even if they hate him, people want to see the President in person you know . . . Most of them never saw a President.”
In Pontiac, fifteen thousand people heard Truman speak. In Flint—“Vehicle City,” where General Motors, the largest corporation on earth, was originally founded—an audience of thirty-five thousand turned out. Then it was back to the train to head south to Toledo, Ohio, where eighty-six local officials—from the city mayor to union representatives to journalists from the local newspapers and radio stations—were waiting to shake Truman’s hand. By the end of the first night of campaigning, the train was full of weary people who wished they could take showers.
Truman was sixty-four years old, vigorous and in good health. Still, the staff questioned whether any man his age—healthy or not—could continue at this pace up until November 2.
21
“The All-Time Georgia Champion of ‘White Supremacy’”
ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 7, the day after Truman’s Detroit speech, Thomas Dewey gathered several of his advisers in the governor’s mansion in Albany and switched on the radio. Five hundred miles due west, at the Masonic Temple on Temple Avenue in Detroit that night, the former governor of Minnesota and current president of the University of Pennsylvania—Harold Stassen—officially kicked off the GOP campaign with a blistering rebuttal to Truman.
“Yesterday in Detroit,” Stassen began, “the American people were given an additional reason why there should be a change in the White House and Governor Thomas E. Dewey should be elected in November as the next President of our country.” Truman’s speech in Detroit, Stassen told a packed house, was “an extreme demagogic appeal to set class against class.”
Stassen blamed Truman for the nation’s high prices, for setting off “the inflationary spiral from which this country is still suffering.” He blamed Truman for the housing crisis, which was acute in Detroit, where the poorest neighborhoods were among the most overcrowded in the country. He blamed Truman for “an all-time high record of strikes and work stoppages” that caused workers to lose over a billion dollars in wages. He told his audience that the surprisingly big crowds that had turned out to see Harry Truman only did so because union bosses had threatened people with a “$3 fine for nonattendance.”
“With a record of little judgment and less faith,” said Stassen, “he [Truman] once again sets himself up as a prophet and attempts to arouse in America an unreasoning, nameless fear of future depression, unemployment and chaos if he is not retained in office.” Truman, said Stassen, was “a colossal failure.”
When Stassen walked off the stage, he took a phone call from Dewey. “He said he listened to the speech, liked it, and thanked me for it,” Stassen recorded. This was no surprise; Dewey had read and approved every word of it ahead of time.
The day after Stassen’s rebuttal speech, the nation’s political spotlight shifted to an unlikely place—Georgia, where the Democratic primary race for the state’s governorship was heating up. Traditionally, Republicans had no shot at winning a big election in Georgia, and the Democratic primary would in fact choose the next governor. This year the party faced a crisis, and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats were a looming threat.
The state’s political crisis had begun in 1946. The governor-elect that year, Eugene Talmadge, died before he could take office. The state constitution had no apparatus to name a successor, and three men laid claim to the position. Since none of them could point to any precedent or law that would make such a claim stand, Georgia’s secretary of state, Benjamin Fortson, paralyzed from the waist down, hid the governor’s office state seal under his wheelchair cushion until the
