Upstairs, after breakfast, Truman gathered about a dozen of his aides to go over the day’s speeches, at the table in his suite’s dining room. Among those present was Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s former haberdashery partner and now owner of Westport Menswear in Kansas City. Jacobson had the president’s ear on the Zionist issue; he had been lobbying for months in support of the Israeli cause.
Present also was Philleo Nash, Truman’s special assistant for minority affairs. It had been Nash who had fought for the idea of Truman making an appearance in Harlem. He had been in Washington the night before and had gotten a call demanding his presence in New York immediately. Everyone in the Truman camp had been working on the Madison Square Garden Palestine speech for the twenty-eighth, and so no one had gotten to writing the final draft of the biggest speech of October 29—a civil rights address Truman was scheduled to give in Harlem at 3:50 p.m.
Nash arrived in New York at 5 a.m. Now he was at the table with Truman. “Mr. President,” he said, “I brought up a draft of a speech on civil rights for the Harlem rally.”
“Well, I’ve been waiting a long time to get this taken care of,” Truman responded, according to Nash’s account. “We should have done it sooner.”
Nash handed over the speech, and Truman read the whole thing aloud—a hard-hitting civil rights polemic. When he finished, he looked around the room and said, “Well, anybody who isn’t for this ought to have his head examined.”
Some at the table raised concern over the speech. Was it going too far? The race was tight in states like Tennessee and Kentucky, where many voters were against Truman’s civil rights stand. Should Truman go so far out on a limb?
“Of course we have to do it,” he said. “We should have been doing it all along.”
Nash raised the idea of using the term unity in the speech, picking up on Dewey’s theme and making it their own. “Unity is basically a weak concept,” the president said. “It isn’t only the way Mr. Dewey’s been handling it and has been talking about it. We should be doing what’s right even if we can’t be united about it. And this speech is about what’s right.”
Just before noon, Truman exited the Biltmore Hotel, surrounded by Secret Service agents. He climbed into an open car and his motorcade moved down Forty-Third Street, making a left on Fifth Avenue, where the crowds were thick on either side. Truman’s tour would carry him sixty-six miles on this day. According to police accounts, 1.245 million people would see the president.
At Larkin Plaza in Yonkers, New York, he blamed the Republican Congress for the current housing shortage. Congress was controlled by the real estate lobbyists, he said. In the Bronx, he taunted Dewey as his “little shadow.” Then the motorcade moved over a bridge and pulled up to Dorrance Brooks Square at St. Nicholas Avenue and 136th Street, a park named for an African American soldier from Harlem who had died fighting for his country in World War I. Harlem’s black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, estimated the crowd in the park at half a million people. Harlem had crime issues, and the Secret Service agents were concerned for the president’s safety.
A speaker’s platform had been built on the edge of the park, and a group of black ministers from the Ministerial Alliance welcomed Truman to the stage. Truman had been invited to Harlem to accept a humanitarian award. People were shouting “Pour it on, Harry!” A group of students from the City College of New York led a chant of “Give ’em hell, Harry!” The Amsterdam News had officially endorsed Dewey, but one would never know it from the enthusiasm of this crowd.
The ministers led a lengthy prayer, and then a strange silence fell over the scene. Philleo Nash was unnerved. “All of a sudden, there was a big crowd, but a silent crowd,” he recalled. “Well, this is rather ominous, rather frightening. I had my back to the crowd and I just wondered whether I’d been wrong in urging that this [Harlem speech] be done and that the people who said it wasn’t safe were right.” He turned around and what he saw stunned him. “I saw why they were silent . . . Almost everybody in that crowd was praying, and they were praying for the President, and they were praying for their own civil rights . . . They thought it was a religious occasion.”
A minister named Dr. C. Asapansa-Johnson spoke first, followed by New York’s mayor, William O’Dwyer. Truman sat listening, against a backdrop of red, white, and blue bunting, while the mayor urged the crowd to vote for Truman. This was a turnaround for O’Dwyer, who just three months earlier had been one of the many Democrats seeking to draft Dwight Eisenhower to take Truman’s place at the top of the party ticket.
Harlem was not going to get Give ’Em Hell Harry. Truman was going to give this crowd something different entirely—a sober speech on an issue that touched on the very essence of Americanism. When it was his time, Truman approached the microphone and began to speak, thanking the ministers for honoring him with their invitation.
“This, in my mind, is a most solemn occasion. It’s made a tremendous impression upon me,” Truman said.
He recommitted himself
