“It is not just a battle between two parties,” Truman said of this election. “It is a fight for the very soul of the American government.”
“So emotional was Mr. Truman that he stumbled over words at times,” recalled the Chicago Daily Tribune’s Willard Edwards. The New York Times’s front page the next day ran a banner headline: “President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascist Tool.” The speech was the most inflammatory of any of the campaign’s, and one of its writers, David Noyes, later acknowledged that it was partly crafted to lure the GOP opponent into an open slug match.
Dewey heard Truman’s speech over the radio while aboard the Dewey Victory Special, which left Albany that night, bound for Chicago. Listening to Truman compare him to Hitler, Dewey’s face contorted with rage. He had finally had enough. Sitting across from him were his advisers—pressman James Hagerty, Edwin Jaeckle, and advertising maven Paul Lockwood. Dewey held a draft of the speech he was scheduled to deliver in Chicago the night after Truman’s Windy City rally. It was another “high-minded” address on unity. Dewey said he wanted to “tear it to shreds.”
He took a poll of the room and every one of his aides disagreed. Dewey should stick to the plan, they said. His wife was in the train car and she said, “If I have to stay up all night to see that you don’t tear up that speech, I will.”
The Dewey Victory Special pulled into Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station at 4 p.m. the next day. A reception committee and motorcade was on hand to transport the Dewey party around downtown, where 125,000 people greeted him on the streets. That night, on the same stage where Truman spoke the night before, Dewey received an ovation lasting two minutes and forty seconds. ABC television cameras were rolling, while NBC was taking the speech nationwide via radio. He started in—“Thank you so much for this glorious welcome”—and was immediately interrupted again by applause. Dewey then defied his team and unleashed the first attack speech of his campaign.
The purpose of this campaign is clear. It’s to bring something better to our country than the confusion, inconsistencies, weakness and bitterness that we now have in Washington . . . We all know the sad record of the present administration. More than three years have passed since the end of the war. It has failed tragically to win the peace. Instead, millions upon millions of people have been delivered into Soviet slavery while our own administration has tried appeasement one day and blustered the next.
Dewey berated his opponent for his “weakness” and “incompetence,” for the administration’s “grave problems and troubles.” Truman had reached a “new low in mud-slinging.” The Democratic party was a “failure, with their party split in all directions . . . Its candidates have spread fantastic fears among our people . . . scattered reckless abuse . . . attempted to promote antagonism and prejudice.”
Forty times, Dewey had to pause for applause. This is what most of his fans had wanted all along: a fighting spirit, a response to the populism that was infuriating countless Republican voters. Dewey had finally delivered.
The night of Dewey’s Chicago speech, Truman arrived in Cleveland, where he had a special message he had been saving for just the right moment. The message was for the newspapermen and the pollsters who had been reporting on his perceived failures through the entire campaign and for most of his presidency.
By Truman’s estimation, 90 percent of the daily newspapers were against him. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Star, the two biggest papers in his home state of Missouri—the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star—all had endorsed Dewey. Over the past few months, newspaper columnists had leveled every insult imaginable at the president. That very week, the Los Angeles Times would call Truman “the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.” Also that very week, the Chicago Daily Tribune would call him “an incompetent” and worse. The columnist Westbrook Pegler had called Truman “a sorry and pathetic squirt,” “the little squealer who broke the rules,” and “a tacky county commissioner in a scene of historic humiliation.”
As Truman saw it, the newspapers and radio stations were “operated, or subsidized by the same private interests that always benefited from Republican economic policies,” he later wrote. He resented “the commonplace practice of distorted editorials and slanted headlines in the press and of outright misrepresentation in the daily offerings of the columnists and commentators. The worst offense of all was the editing and distorting of the facts in the news.”
Truman saw the inner workings of the media as a conspiracy to favor one candidate over another using what amounted to fake news. It was the pollsters who had done the most damage, and it was the pollsters whom Truman attacked on the night of October 27, before a packed Cleveland Municipal Auditorium:
Now, these Republican polls are no accident. They are part of a design to prevent a big vote, to keep you at home on November 2nd, by convincing you that it makes no difference whether you vote or not. They want to do this because they know in their hearts that a big vote spells their defeat. They know that a big vote means a Democratic victory, because the Democratic Party stands for the greatest good for the greatest number of the people. The special interests now running the Republican Party can’t stand a big vote—they are afraid of the people. My friends, we are going to win this election.
The next night, the Dewey Victory Special rolled in for a gala event in the same hall. It was packed, and the crowd stood for an ovation lasting three minutes and twenty seconds. Dewey attacked Truman for using divisiveness for his own political gain. The Dewey-Warren campaign, the Republican
