In nearly every town, the crowd was bigger than expected. What did it all mean? On the night of October 16, from aboard the Truman train, the Washington Post’s Robert C. Albright typed four prophetic words onto a sheet of paper, as the train rolled through West Virginia: “Could we be wrong?”
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“The Campaign Special Train Stopped with a Jerk”
THUS FAR, DEWEY HAD EXECUTED his plan perfectly. He appeared the apotheosis of composure. All he had to do to get elected, he believed, was to not make any mistakes. On October 13, however, he made a major one.
Dewey was speaking on the back platform of his train in the farming town of Beaucoup, Illinois, when, inexplicably, the train lurched backward straight toward the crowd of spectators. Dewey braced himself as frightened shouts came from the crowd, from spectators who thought for a moment that they might get crushed by a campaign train car weighing hundreds of tons. Dewey’s temper got the better of him.
“That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” he said into his microphone. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise, but I guess we can let him off because nobody was hurt.”
The next day’s newspapers recounted the event. One pun slipped past the news-desk editors: “The campaign special train stopped with a jerk.” The train’s engineer, a thirty-year-old war veteran named Lee Tindle, was not happy about being called a “lunatic” by the Republican nominee for president of the United States. He said he was not going to vote for Dewey anyway. “I think as much of Dewey as I did before,” he said.
What seemed like a minor moment blew up into something bigger. Dewey’s comment was interpreted as cold and uncaring toward working people, an accusation the Republicans had heard before. Dewey had in fact offended the biggest block of voters in the country: unionized labor. Truman saw an easy opportunity to rally railroad unions to his cause, accusing Dewey of insensitivity toward the plight of workers. From the back platform of the Ferdinand Magellan, in the town of Logansport, Indiana, the president praised his own “wonderful train crews” that had carried the campaign all around the country. “They’ve been just as kind to us as they could possibly be.” Railroad workers painted LUNATICS FOR TRUMAN on the side of boxcars.
Dewey tried to ignore the barbs. But he was also seeing the newspaper stories about the spectacular crowds turning out for his opponent. He too sensed that something amazingly unlikely might be happening. On October 18, five days after the train-jerk debacle, Dewey’s train pulled into Buffalo. He sought out a campaign aide named John Burton.
“Johnny,” Dewey said, “we are slipping, aren’t we?”
Burton agreed; there was cause for worry. He explained that Truman had recently lured a crowd of ten thousand people soon after sunrise in a pouring squall, in Albany of all places—practically in the backyard of the New York governor’s mansion.
One thing that had become clear on the campaign trail: No matter how hard the candidate tried, Dewey could not turn on the charisma the way Truman could, the way Roosevelt had. “He didn’t really like handshaking,” remembered Herbert Brownell. “He wasn’t good at it . . . He worked harder, studied longer than anyone else . . . He organized people. He was a really good fighter.” But the handshaking? The ability to create human connection? “He just could not do.”
Even so, all the data continued to show Dewey way out in front. The New York Times polled twenty correspondents in twenty states, and published the results on October 4. Dewey, it was predicted, would carry fourteen of those states, many of them by wide margins, including the big prizes of California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. The latest Gallup poll of sixteen states showed Dewey ahead in all but one, while another survey of New England states showed Dewey carrying all of them but Rhode Island. The day after the train-jerk incident, the columnist Richard Strout wrote that Dewey’s election was “as certain as anything can be in the course of American politics.”
Dewey continued onward, pounding away on his unity theme. He campaigned through Minnesota for GOP senator Joseph H. Ball, who was locked in a critical race against the thirty-seven-year-old Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey (later to serve as vice president in Lyndon Johnson’s administration). In Indiana, Dewey visited with the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Charles Halleck. Dewey was beginning to court the powerful right-wing faction of the GOP in Congress, of which Halleck was a pillar, in hopes that he would have friends on Capitol Hill, once he became president.
But Dewey’s staff was getting jittery. Letters continued to flood into the Albany mansion and campaign headquarters in Washington, urging the candidate to change his course. “I am worried,” wrote Helen Brigham of Hollywood, California. “Truman, with his barnstorming, name calling, and harping on one string—the 80th Congress—is winning friends from the largest class he appeals to. So I should like to ask why Mr. Dewey and Mr. Warren don’t reply to him.”
“Don’t float in, fight your way in by slugging (as well as the Democrats are doing),” wrote Grace Burdick of San Diego, California, on October 21. “For heaven sakes fight!!”
It was still not too late for Dewey to change course, and finish out the campaign with an all-out attack. But he thus far refused to do it, and his wife, Frances, supported him in that decision.
Dewey’s team announced the final itinerary of the campaign’s climactic weekend before Election Day. The governor would speak in Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and New York, in that order. His final campaign push followed a path identical to Truman’s; Dewey would be close on Truman’s heels in each of those four cities.
Henry Wallace refused to let up. His whole campaign had become about increasing the pressure on Truman. “I tell you,” Wallace told a crowd in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 19, “Harry S. Truman has abdicated .
