As the train chugged west, the president’s campaign strategy began to emerge. “You know the issues in this campaign are not hard to define,” he told an audience in Rock Island, Illinois. “The issue is the people against the special interests, and if you need any proof of that, all you need to do is to review the record of this Republican 80th Congress.”
In Truman’s speeches, Thomas Dewey was never mentioned. Truman aimed to run not against the Republican candidate, but against the Republican Congress, the Congress elected two years earlier, led by conservatives Robert Taft of Ohio, Joe Martin of Massachusetts, and Charles Halleck of Indiana. The line between the policies of Truman and the policies of the more liberal Republicans Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren was a gray one; in many ways—Palestine, civil rights, an increase in Social Security benefits—the two platforms resembled each other. The line between Truman and the Eightieth Congress, however, was stark and clear.
“While I knew that the southern dissenters [from the Democratic Party] and the Wallace-ites would cost some Democratic votes, my opponent was the Republican Party,” Truman later wrote in his memoirs. “The campaign was built on one issue—the interests of the people, as represented by the Democrats, against the special interests, as represented by the Republicans and the record of the Eightieth Congress. I staked the race for the presidency on that one issue.”
When the Truman Special pulled into Dexter, Iowa, at 11:15 a.m., on September 18, Truman and his entourage filed into cars while maintenance men with the Pennsylvania Railroad climbed aboard to service the train. “This was another blistering hot day,” recalled one journalist present. The sun beat down on the president, who had already made six whistle-stop speeches that day. Truman was scheduled to speak to farmers at the National Plowing Contest, held at the private farm of Mrs. T. R. Agg, the widow of the dean of Iowa State College. When the president arrived, he was stunned to see that ninety thousand people were on hand, and if tradition were to hold up, a vast majority of these farming people were going to vote Republican.
In one field, rows of glistening luxury cars were parked, many sparkling new Cadillacs among them. In another field, a surprising number of private airplanes formed their own rows; event organizers were wandering around complaining that all these private aircraft had been parked in the wrong place. A correspondent from London’s BBC, Leonard Miall, saw these airplanes and drew a conclusion. “You know farmers tend to vote their pocketbooks,” he recalled. “The moment that I saw the number of private aircraft illegally parked in the wrong parking place for the plowing match I began to wonder whether the farmer’s vote was going to be so solidly Republican in the ’48 election as it was expected to be.”
When Truman climbed up onto the speaker’s platform, he stood under a huge sign reading WELCOME TO IOWA and looked out at a vast audience. He knew that he was addressing some very wealthy Americans. The Depression had ravaged this part of the nation, but farming communities like these had bounced back. Since 1940, the purchasing power of farmers had risen 70 percent, compared with 50 percent for the rest of the country. Bank deposits and currency among farmers had quadrupled during that time. Farmers in 1948 were enjoying a prosperity they had never known. One Iowa farmer told a reporter on this day, “I have my own airplane; my son has his own airplane. We both own Cadillacs . . . The depression hit the farmer first and hit him hard . . . [But] today, I have more money than I know what to do with or even count myself.”
Toward the end of his speech, Truman raised the issue of the Commodity Credit Corporation. He knew that this crowd would catch on fast to the importance of the CCC, but he did not know that he was about to hit on a point that would have a major impact on the outcome of the election. The CCC was a government-controlled bank of sorts that stabilized farm income and farm commodity prices. In June the Eightieth Congress had passed a law that rewrote the charter. An obscure provision did away with storage bins that the government had previously used to help farmers with especially large harvests. Without these bins, farmers would have no way to store their grains if the harvest turned out to be surprisingly good; they would have to sell them all at once, and prices would thus drop precipitously. Truman noted:
Now the farmers need such bins again. But when the Republican Congress rewrote the charter of the Commodity Credit Corporation this year, there were certain lobbyists in Washington representing the speculative grain trade . . . These big-business lobbyists and speculators persuaded the Congress not to provide the storage bins for the farmers. They tied the hands of the administration. They are preventing us from setting up storage bins that you will need . . . When the farmers have to sell their wheat below the support price, because they have no place to store it, they can thank this same Republican 80th Congress that gave the speculative grain trade a rake-off at your expense.
The crowds showed Truman little enthusiasm—a smattering of applause and that was it. The significance of his remarks was not yet apparent. Within weeks, however, during the harvest, the prescience of Truman’s speech would become brutally obvious to farming communities across the country.
When he was done, he stepped into the crowd to perform a publicity stunt. Using mules and a plow, he demonstrated his farming prowess gained from years on his own farm as a young man in Missouri, by plowing a perfectly straight line. Then it was back to the train. Two Secret Service agents—James J. Rowley and Henry J. Nicholson—were on the train, gauging the dim response to the president’s Dexter speech when Truman boarded.
Nicholson said, “There was not much of a demonstration
