It was common knowledge aboard the train that not even the president’s wife believed he could achieve his goal. One day, Truman was having breakfast with Bess and the executive director of the women’s division of the Democratic National Committee, India Edwards, on the Ferdinand Magellan. Bess and India had known each other for years and were stark opposites in style and persona, which made moments like this ever so slightly awkward.
“You know, sometimes India,” Truman said to Edwards as Bess looked on, “I think there are only two people in the United States who really think I’m going to be elected President . . . They’re both sitting at this table and one of them is not my wife.”
The battle for the Golden State was critical; only three states held more than California’s twenty-five electoral college votes (New York, forty-seven; Pennsylvania, thirty-five; Illinois, twenty-eight). This fight would climax with a group of successive rallies in the nation’s fifth-largest city—Los Angeles, with its growing movie industry. Truman was scheduled to host his biggest rally yet at Gilmore Stadium—which until recently had been the home of the Los Angeles Bulldogs, the city’s professional football team—on September 23. Dewey was set to appear the following night, at the Hollywood Bowl.
All forecasts had Dewey and Warren carrying California, but by less than was expected. Earl Warren posed a peculiar problem for Truman. The Republican VP candidate from San Francisco had won the California governorship in 1942, and when he campaigned for reelection in 1946, he won both the Democratic and Republican primaries. California was split between a liberal majority along the coast and a more conservative populace in the farm belt that ran through the entire interior. Both embraced Warren, and his record showed that he and Truman agreed on most major issues.
“It will be extremely difficult to attack Mr. Warren on his record or generally on his stand on issues of the day,” according to a Truman campaign memo, “since in the majority of the instances he is in accord with the Democratic program.”
A bigger problem for Truman was that his campaign had once again run out of money. When the Truman Special hit San Francisco on September 22, there was no hall for the president to use for his first major West Coast speech, because so much of the budget had been reserved for his appearance in Los Angeles, the following day. The Democratic National Committee had arranged for Truman to speak for free on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. The head of California’s central party committee, Howard I. McGrath (no relation to J. Howard McGrath), had to pony up $400 of his own money so that lighting equipment could be rented to allow television cameras to broadcast Truman’s speech, which was set for 8 p.m. West Coast time.
“We were startled when the crowd assembled at the City Hall,” recalled McGrath. “With absolute conservative estimates, we had over 35,000 people standing in the dark in the air in the park in front of the City Hall.” Then it was off over the Bay Bridge to Oakland, where Truman ripped into the Republican Congress, blaming it for high prices, the housing shortage, and poor education in schools.
“The most significant thing about the failures of this Republican Congress is that they show so clearly the attitude of the special interests who dominate the national Republican Party. Their actions set a definite, clear pattern. And that means a lot to your future,” Truman told twenty-two thousand audience members in Oakland. “Big business interests in the East . . . control the Republican party.”
Truman was opening himself up to criticism that he was trying to create class conflict to benefit his campaign. The argument was hard to refute, but still, the president seemed to wholly believe everything he was saying.
Thanks to campaign-finance man Louis Johnson, money trickled in, enabling the train to roll on. The day after Truman’s Bay Area appearances, he headed south through the farm belt, turning up the heat on the GOP. In Fresno, he personally attacked the district’s Republican congressman Bertrand W. Gearhart: “You have got a terrible congressman here in this district. He is one of the worst . . . He has done everything he possibly could to cut the throats of the farmer and the laboring man. If you send him back, that will be your fault if you get your own throat cut.” In Bakersfield, Truman railed the Republican Congress for sabotaging the Democrats’ farm program.
In Los Angeles, after nightfall, he was late for his speech due to street traffic. Some one hundred thousand people lined the streets to see his car roll by. Billboards trumping the Dewey-Warren ticket were everywhere. As the motorcade pulled toward the stadium’s north gate, Truman could see the beams of forty searchlights in the night sky, reminding him that he was in the transplanted capital of the global movie business (New York City had been its home until recently). The stadium was filled to capacity; “you couldn’t put any more in with a shoehorn,” recalled California state senator Judge Oliver J. Carter. On a stage festooned with American flags, the master of ceremonies, actor George Jessel, stood at the microphone making idle remarks to kill time, while sitting in chairs onstage were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, whose hit movie Key Largo was playing in theaters. The crowd grew restless, and audience members started yelling out: “We want Bogey!” “Let Margaret sing!” “You tell ’em, Harry!”
Finally, Truman arrived, and the crowd came alive. “This is a championship fight,” Truman said, and the crowd responded as if it actually was.
In the hardest-hitting speech on Communism of his entire campaign, Truman launched a seething attack on Henry Wallace. Here in Los Angeles, the Red Scare was a major story. Less than a year earlier, ten Hollywood screenwriters had been charged by the US Justice Department with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions in front
