Westbrook Pegler continued to print acidic attacks on Wallace. On September 21, Pegler claimed in his column to have obtained two more of the guru letters that Wallace had allegedly penned to Nicholas Roerich years earlier. “I am now ready,” Pegler wrote, “to take care of Wallace any time he dares to deny that he wrote this historic nonsense.” Pegler quoted these humiliating letters copiously, including this line: “I have hard fighting ahead which I can survive only by keeping close to the great ones.” By this time Wallace was close to almost no one. All the powerful figures of his past—from Eleanor Roosevelt to the powerhouses of the New Deal to Harry Truman himself—had abandoned him.
24
“You Will Be Choosing a Way of Life for Years to Come”
ONE NIGHT ABOARD THE Ferdinand Magellan after another grueling day of whistle-stops, Truman sat reading over a speech he would be making in Denver the following day—a speech that would be aired nationwide on radio. The clatter of rail wheels formed a background drumbeat. Bess was in the train car’s galley talking over the menu for the next day’s meals (she was on a low-salt diet).
“It was a typical Truman family evening,” recalled Margaret, who was sitting across from her father, “unchanged by the admittedly unique circumstances surrounding it. We were hurtling into the climax of the wildest presidential campaign in history. My father was fighting for his political life, and for something even more important—his political self-respect as a man and President. Yet the atmosphere in the Ferdinand Magellan was calm, tranquil to the point of serenity.”
The train would be stopping at 11:05 p.m. in Junction City, Kansas, where Truman would make another whistle-stop speech. Sitting quietly in his chair—probably clutching a bourbon and water—his eyes rose from the page he was reading to the speedometer mounted on the wall right above Margaret’s head.
“Take a look at that thing,” Truman said.
Margaret turned and looked. The speedometer read 105 mph. “Wow,” she said, concern clouding her face. She moved over to the window to look out at the blur of darkness—the vast Kansas prairie at night—rushing by.
Truman said, “Do you know what would happen if that engineer had to make a sudden stop?” He paused. “If he had to stop suddenly, we would mash those sixteen cars between us and the [locomotive] engine into junk. Don’t say a word to your mother. I don’t want her to get upset.”
The door opened and press secretary Charlie Ross walked in. Truman had known Ross since grade school; Charlie had in fact been valedictorian of Truman’s graduating class at Independence High School in 1901. Now, forty-seven years later, Ross was one of Truman’s most trustworthy advisers. He wanted to know how the president was doing with the Denver speech. Truman said it was fine, then he said, “Charlie, send someone to tell that engineer there’s no need to get us to Denver at this rate of speed. Eighty miles an hour is good enough for me.”
The next morning, the Trumans awoke and looked out their windows to see stunning views of the Rocky Mountains. “We arrived in Denver at 8:50 a.m.,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “Dad made a speech to about 25,000 people after a parade with thousands of people on the street.” On the following night, in a national radio speech from within Colorado’s State Capitol building, Truman threw his campaign into the next gear. From here on out, there would be more anger, more sarcasm, more all-out attack on the “do nothing” Eightieth Congress.
“Election day this year, your choice will not be merely between political parties,” he said, with Colorado governor William Lee Knous standing beside him. “You will be choosing a way of life for years to come. This is a fateful election. On it will depend your standard of living and the economic independence of your community.” The Republicans were “puppets of big business,” “the same breed that gave you the worst depression in history.”
“Today,” he told his crowd, “I want to talk to you about what the Republican Congress has been doing to you, and to your families, and to your country.” Over and over, he accused the Republican Congress of selling out the American people to the “profiteers.” Six times, Truman denounced Wall Street. If the Republican Congress was not stopped, he said, it was going to turn the western part of the country into “an economic colony of Wall Street.” If the Republican Congress was not stopped, he said, it would destroy the West’s natural resources—its forests, its water.
His message in Denver aimed to incite anger and perhaps stoke fear. “We shall have to fight the undercover Republican sabotage of the West,” Truman railed.
With five weeks to Election Day, Truman was making no progress, if the newspapers were to be believed, and his increasingly populist tone left the pontificators surprised—even angry. “It is difficult to see how you could put a campaign on a lower plane,” the columnist Frank R. Kent declared in the Los Angeles Times the day after Truman’s Denver speech. “The most blatant demagoguery . . . in politics has piled higher than ever before.”
One of the nation’s two most respected pollsters, Elmo Roper, wrote in his newspaper column that he was finished with polling for the rest of the campaigns; there was no longer any point, because “Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected to the Presidency of the United States.” The Atlanta Constitution stated on its editorial page: “Nowhere is there any enthusiasm for Harry S. Truman. Even those who support him do so largely because they have less enthusiasm for Tom Dewey.”
The only real base Truman seemed to have in his corner was made up of labor
