The state where Wallace had the most traction was New York, where he was expected to earn 11 percent of the vote, a number that most analysts believed would guarantee Dewey’s victory. Without Wallace on the ballot, those 11 percent of mostly liberal voters could have been expected to cast their votes for Truman. Which meant that Wallace was likely to cause Truman’s defeat in one of the most critical states. The Wallace campaign still mattered—a lot.
Nevertheless, outside of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Wallace was now all but ignored. At one point, he reached St. Louis and entered a room to find an audience of only a hundred people to hear him speak. The chairman of this event, Reverend Charles G. Wilson, was on hand to introduce Wallace. The mood was dark.
“I see a lot of faces that aren’t here, faces of people who were with us a year ago,” Wilson said. The reverend openly called himself “a tired liberal” and “confused.” He told his small audience that he was ready to “sit this one out” and “crawl into a hole.”
It was hardly the introduction Wallace desired. When he spoke, he tried to blow life into the room. “I’m not tired,” he said. “I’m not confused, and I’m very happy to be here.” He waited for applause, but very little of it came.
Wallace admitted that supporters were abandoning him. “I can’t help feeling that their chief governing motive is that they hate Henry Wallace,” he told his audience. “I don’t know why they hate me. I’m still holding the door open for them. I used to say they’d come along after Truman was nominated. But they didn’t come flocking to us the way I hoped.” Again, he refused to repudiate the Communists who supported him—especially in the fight against segregation. “If they want to help us out on some of these problems, why, God bless them, let them come along.”
Wallace called on his Gideon’s Army to keep on marching. But so few marchers were left. The following week, Gallup’s latest numbers showed Wallace polling at just 3.5 percent of the national vote, half of what it had been at the beginning of 1948.
On October 18, with two weeks to go until Election Day, Truman’s airplane landed in Miami. It was as close as he would come to Strom Thurmond’s base movement. Truman would avoid entirely the four states where Thurmond was now expected to win—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The First Family was set to attend the thirtieth National Convention of the American Legion, so Truman could write off the trip as nonpolitical and pay for it out of the president’s travel fund, as the campaign coffers were once again running on empty.
“There was a parade through Miami and Miami Beach to the Roney Plaza Hotel, which is really gorgeous, all mirrors and antique white furniture,” Margaret wrote in her diary. Along the route, roughly two hundred thousand Floridians came out. In an airplane hangar with twelve thousand Legionnaires on hand, Truman tried to put into perspective what it was like to be an American president, facing the possibility of yet another war, feeling the responsibility for the lives of American soldiers and so much more.
Let me say here again, and as plainly as I can, that the Government of this country, like the American people as a whole, detests the thought of war. We are shocked by its brutality and sickened by its waste of life and wealth . . . The use of atomic weapons and bacteriological warfare, in particular, might unleash new forces of destruction which would spare no nation . . . We shall spare no effort to achieve the peace on which the entire destiny of the human race may depend.
Nowhere in Florida did Truman mention civil rights. Below the Mason-Dixon line, stumping for civil rights would have come across as tone-deaf. For over a year now, the influential Democratic politicos from the South had pressured Truman to drop his stance on civil rights, and among them was Florida’s governor, Millard F. Caldwell. Yet it was clear that Truman was going to push this issue as far as it would go. Even if he did not campaign for civil rights in Florida, the people knew where he stood.
At one point during the campaign, Truman got a letter from an old friend named Ernest Roberts, who was close enough to the president to address him as Harry, and whose missive put the civil rights issue into a perspective that many Americans, and especially southerners, at this time embraced.
“You can win the south without the [civil rights program],” Roberts wrote Truman, “but you cannot win the south with it. Just why?? Well, you, Bess and Margaret, and shall I say, myself, are all Southerners and we have been raised with the Negroes and we know the term ‘Equal Rights.’ Harry, let us let the South take care of the Niggers, which they have done, and if the Niggers do not like the Southern treatment, let them come to Mrs. Roosevelt.
“Harry,” Roberts continued, “you are a Southerner and a D— good one so listen to me. I can see, you do not talk domestic problems over with Bess??? You put equal rights in Independence and Bess will not live with you.”
Truman wrote back, listing recent lynchings that had occurred in the
