With the presidential election all but decided, according to overwhelming public opinion, attention turned to the heated battle to capture control of the Eighty-First Congress. The Republicans held a 245 to 185 lead in the House, and a 51 to 45 lead in the Senate. “One can reasonably deduce that the makeup of the House should not be altered greatly by Dewey’s election, although here and there seats will change hands,” concluded the Alsop brothers in their syndicated column in mid-September. As far as most could see, however, the battle for the Senate was on. Democrats were campaigning hard to capture Senate seats in Illinois, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Minnesota, hoping to narrowly regain control.
The Truman Special rolled on, through the Colorado Rockies and into Utah, where the president spoke to a crowd of twelve thousand people at the Mormon Tabernacle. Then it was on to Reno, Nevada, the “famous divorce city,” as Margaret wrote in her diary. That night, the train crossed the border into California and the pine and juniper forests of the Sierra Nevada, into the high-elevation town of Truckee. Truman was scheduled to travel the entire length of California in a desperate fight for the state’s twenty-five electoral votes. The polls showed him far behind Dewey in California, but gaining.
By the time Truman arrived on the West Coast, fatigue had begun to chip away at the staff’s morale. Clark Clifford had broken out in a severe skin rash. “I was besieged by an attack of boils,” he recalled. “It was a nightmare. For years afterwards I’d sometimes wake up at night in a cold perspiration thinking I was back on that terrible train. It was a real ordeal. I don’t know quite how I got through it except I was young at the time and strong and vigorous.”
Any time the train stopped for more than a few minutes, Truman campaigners and reporters would dash for laundromats in hopes of washing the stale odor out of their clothes, and to find some soap and a shower. The only shower on the train was in the president’s suite in the Ferdinand Magellan. Deodorant was a rare find in stores (a new “stick form” version called Bar-It had just come to market that summer, for a dollar, plus tax). “What weeks of travel can do to your looks!” Margaret recalled. “I had a strong inclination to burn all my clothes.” “When to get our laundry done became something of an obsession,” recalled Clifford.
In the swaying Ferdinand Magellan, the First Lady and the First Daughter had fallen into the habit of incessant bickering. “My mother and I love to argue,” Margaret later wrote of life aboard the Truman Special, “and one of the great frustrations of our life as a family has been my father’s constant refusal to join us in our favorite sport.” Meanwhile the men played cards. “The thing I remember most clearly,” noted Jack Bell of the Associated Press, “was that there was a poker game going at the end of the press car twenty-four hours a day, with a two dollar limit game, seven card hi-lo stud, low hole card wild.”
Newsmen could hear Truman’s speeches from inside the press room on the train, so they grew lazy and stopped going outside to do any reporting. The most exercise their legs would get was during trips to the bathroom and bar car. The press corps believed they were covering a loser, and it showed. “Many of the reporters who traveled on our train had been condescending,” remembered Margaret. “Contempt was lying around in hunks. But the people came to listen. What they heard came straight from my father’s heart.”
Around the time Truman entered California, something began to happen on the campaign trail, although the reporters traveling with the president failed to notice. In town after town, the whistle-stop speeches continued to draw surprising turnouts, and Truman’s speeches were connecting more and more with audiences, who saw him as a fearless underdog fighting for survival on the biggest public stage on earth. The crowds began to feel his energy, and to pull for him, as if they wanted him to succeed. People would yell, “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” And he would shout back, “I’m just telling the truth about them [the Republicans] and they think it’s Hell!”
“We had tremendous crowds everywhere,” Truman wrote his sister from aboard the train. “From 6:30 a.m. in the morning until midnight the turnout was phenomenal. The news jerks didn’t know what to make of it—so they just lied about it!”
“I never saw anything in my life like the enthusiasm with which the President was greeted at some of these what we called ‘whistle stops,’” recalled aide Robert Dennison. “There were more people there than the population of the whole damn county. They came for miles, sometimes at the most ungodly hours, 5:30 a.m., 6 a.m. . . . And you could tell that they loved the President and loved his family.” “Even after twenty-five years,” recalled reporter Robert Nixon, “I can still see in my mind actual scenes of what happened. I can see the President . . . standing on the rear platform at his whistle stop speeches and the crowds at certain little towns and hamlets. I can remember the words he spoke and the things he did.”
To his staffers, and to his family, Truman was unwavering in his confidence. “He fought, and fought, and fought,” recalled Clifford. “He worked like a dog. He worked sixteen hours a day, day after day, week after week, and month after month. And at no times during the whole campaign did I ever hear him utter a word
