“Your horse is eight years old and he’s not a very good horse,” the president joked.
The crowd roared with laughter as the man sheepishly turned and rode away.
Truman did not mention civil rights in Texas, but his integrated audiences spoke for him. Small numbers of black Americans showed up to hear him speak. At one whistle-stop, Truman shook the hand of a black woman, ignoring the boos from hostile whites. “In some towns,” remembered Dawson, “they didn’t even want the black voters to come down to the train. We just told them they were going to come. The President wanted them there.”
On Sunday, September 26, John Nance Garner—former vice president under FDR—hosted the Truman campaign in tiny Uvalde, Texas. When Truman arrived, a marching band played for him and four thousand citizens turned out—at 5 a.m. “Cactus Jack” Garner hosted what Margaret called “the most tremendous breakfast in the history of the Truman family.” There was white-winged dove, bacon, ham, fried chicken, scrambled eggs, rice in gravy, hot biscuits, local honey, and peach preserves. Truman gave Garner a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. “Medicine,” the president said, “only to be used in case of snakebites.”
In Bonham, Texas, the hometown of Sam Rayburn, the congressman and former Speaker of the House arranged a reception with the current Texas governor, Beauford Jester, who had courageously come out in support of Truman’s civil rights efforts. In between handshakes and another parade, Truman met aboard the train with the ambassador to the Soviet Union, Walter Bedell Smith, who had flown in to confer with the president about the emergency in Berlin. When asked if there was going to be war, Smith answered, “That question is too deep for me to answer.” By the time Truman made it to the stage that night in the hamlet of Bonham, twenty-five thousand people were out in the streets to hear Truman blast the Dewey campaign for serving up “unity” speeches without defining what he meant by the term.
“If we did have unity,” Truman asked, “what kind would it be?” He answered his own question: “It would be unity in giving tax relief to the rich at the expense of the poor . . . Unity in refusing to give aid to our schools . . . Unity in letting prices go sky high in order to protect excessive profits . . . Unity in whittling away all the benefits of the New Deal.”
By the time the Truman Special crossed the Oklahoma border, Truman had given twenty-two speeches in Texas, most of them extemporaneously. The Texas visit had been riotously successful and the campaign was depending on the state’s twenty-three electoral votes, but once again, news came in that the money had run out. “We were headed for Oklahoma City,” recorded correspondent Robert Nixon. “There was a lot of oil wealth aboard. The Democratic Party was down to its last cent . . . Word got around that we were going to have to call off the campaign trip. The train would be broken up, and we would have to make our way back to Washington on our own. That’s how desperate it was.”
The socialite Perle Mesta, known as “the hostess with the mostest” for the parties she threw in Washington, DC, was aboard. She went into the bar car where the wealthy oil men were drinking cocktails and made an announcement: The campaign was running out of cash. Mesta waved a check of her own. “And to keep this from happening,” she said, “here’s my check for $5,000.”
Donors pulled out their checkbooks. The train was able to continue forward. But for how long, no one could say.
In Oklahoma City—the last major stop of this cross-country trip—Truman arrived late for his speech. “The President and everybody else piled off of the train into cars at the station,” recalled one of the newspapermen on board. “We had motorcycle police and we went roaring through downtown Oklahoma City at 80 miles an hour, sirens screaming. Why somebody wasn’t killed you often wonder. We roared into the fair grounds with dust flying, brakes screeching, and tires skidding.” Onstage, Truman took aim at his opponents again. The Republicans had attacked him relentlessly for his “red herring” comment, claiming that he was responsible for Communists who had infiltrated American government.
I should like the American people to consider the damage that is being done to our national security by irresponsible persons who place their own political interests above the security of the Nation. I regret to say that there are some people in the Republican Party who are trying to create the false impression that communism is a powerful force in American life. These Republicans know that this is not true. The time has come when we should take a frank and earnest look at the record about communism and our national security . . .
Our Government is not endangered by Communist infiltration . . . The FBI and our other security forces are capable, informed, and alert . . . The Republicans ought to realize that their failure to deal with the big practical issues of American life, such as housing, price control, and education, is too plain to be hidden by any smoke screen. They ought to realize that their reckless tactics are not helping our national security; they are hurting our national security. I am forced to the conclusion that Republican leaders are thinking more about the November election than about the welfare of this great country.
Eighteen times, Truman was interrupted by applause from an audience of roughly twenty thousand people. When it was over, he headed back to his train. But the Truman Special was going nowhere. The Democratic National Committee had spent the campaign’s last funds on the Oklahoma City radio broadcast. “We ran out of money, and we didn’t have enough to get the train out of the station,” Truman later explained. “I had to get on the phone and raise the money to get out
