“The Truman show was threadbare and visibly unsuccessful, getting hardly more response than politeness demanded,” columnist Joseph Alsop wrote from aboard the Dewey Victory Special. “The Dewey show was opulent. It was organized down to the last noise-making device. It exuded confidence. And it got a big hand. The contest was really too uneven . . . One felt a certain sympathy for the obstinately laboring President.”
On both campaign trains, however, riders were inevitably vexed by the endless miles, the galaxies of faces at each stop, the shrill whistles of train porters, the uncomfortable humidity of the train cars. Aboard Dewey’s train, Frank McNaughton of Time magazine captured the experience in a cable he sent out at one stop in Wyoming.
Life begins at nine o’clock with a five-minute layover at some Tanktown . . . There are about a hundred out to see the candidate . . . The loudspeaker just broadcast, ‘All interested in seeing Governor Dewey please walk to the rear of the train.’ You listen to the cut and dried back platform speech on the wonders of the country, the future of the west, unity, and all the stock phrases until at each stop you are ready to scream for mercy. Thus it goes all day long. At night stops, you hustle into a hotel room . . . and try along with a hundred others to get a crack at a shower bath, a bit of dinner, a bit of battery fluid for your dynamo, before covering the major show. You wave and flirt with the girls along the parade route, but your heart isn’t in it. Anything to relieve the boredom . . .
Winslow, Arizona. Flagstaff, Ash Fork, Prescott, Phoenix. Dewey stumped for Republican members of Congress, touching on issues without making commitments, always ending with: “And now, I want to introduce you to Mrs. Dewey.” The crowds seemed perfectly satisfied. The Republican National Committee’s Barak Mattingly summed up the Dewey campaign with five simple words: “Things are looking good everywhere.”
In mid-September, from the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, Strom Thurmond announced the Dixiecrats’ campaign itinerary. There would be no trip to California, no visit to Chicago or Boston, no appearance anyplace that would not welcome Thurmond’s pro-segregation message. Thurmond was headed back to the nation’s capital, then to Baltimore, followed by a tobacco festival in La Plata, Maryland, then on to Virginia and North Carolina.
From his office, Thurmond read a statement for reporters, admonishing Truman for not campaigning in South Carolina. “I had hoped,” Thurmond said, “that he would come to our State and explain to our people why he saw fit to betray the principles of Jefferson and abandon the historic position of the Democratic Party on States’ Rights by sending his so-called civil rights message to Congress.”
Thurmond’s campaign still stood on a single-issue platform: the ability of states to make their own laws regarding race and segregation. He took no stance on the Berlin crisis, nor on inflation, the Taft-Hartley law, or housing or tax reform. He had huge support in his home state, where George Gallup had him running at 52 percent of the vote as of mid-September, with Truman in second at 26 percent. Numerous newspapers had embraced Thurmond, papers like the Charleston News and Courier in South Carolina, which defended “the white man’s party,” and the Nashville Banner of Tennessee, which stated in an editorial, “The Democratic South finally is moving to cleanse the party temple. As did Hercules, at work on the Augean stables, it can be done in a day. That day is November 2.”
Thus far, the polls outside of Thurmond’s base showed little enthusiasm for him. In Texas, where he had hoped his campaign would gain traction, Gallup had him with only 6 percent of the vote. In Kentucky—another state where Thurmond was hoping to do well—Gallup gauged him at only 5 percent. In North Carolina, he was running at 13 percent. The numbers were far below what the Dixiecrats had hoped. Only in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and potentially Florida was the Thurmond phenomenon catching on.
For Democrats, however, Thurmond represented a threat that went beyond the electoral votes in 1948. What would be the ultimate consequences of the southern revolt?
For the first time in well over half a century, the GOP was seeing real opportunity in these southern states. One document that began to circulate among Truman operatives in September was a memo called “Analysis of the Southern Democratic Revolt.” It predicted that the Dixiecrats were going to cost Truman a sum of thirty-two electoral votes, from Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina. Beyond 1948, however, it appeared that Republican candidates could gain a foothold in these states.
In North Carolina, which the GOP had carried only once going back to 1872, “the Republicans [have] an excellent chance to capture 14 electoral votes,” the analysis concluded. In Florida the election was “considered fertile territory for a Republican campaign.” The entire region—what had been the Solid South of the Democratic Party—could present a new conservative GOP alignment going forward. The analysis concluded:
A grass roots sentiment against Truman and the National Democratic Party exists. A part of the sentiment is based on the racial issue . . . The situation indicates both a regional party and a fight by the Republicans to gain a permanent foothold. The day calls for bold action. Alabama and Mississippi Democrats have broken a tradition of 80 years. If the Republican party campaigns in North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida, there may well be the commencement of new party alignments in the United States.
(That realignment would eventually happen, but not until the 1960s and ’70s. No evidence exists that Thurmond understood the irony of his campaign: He wasn’t creating a lasting new party; he was setting up a new power base for Republicans—and would eventually become one, himself, in 1964.)
Thurmond arrived in Washington,
