Truman (20 page)

The lash was almost as harsh on the shoulders of the somnolent, warring, defeatist delegates as on the despised Republican Party ‘of special privilege'. It was not a visionary general offering his legions new frontiers or a freedom from fear. It was a sergeant-major telling his squad to get off their backsides. It worked rather well. They sat up. They listened. They cheered. For a moment they almost thought they might win.

Truman had one skilful ploy in his speech. The Republicans meeting in the same hall three weeks before, had adopted a liberal candidate and a notably liberal platform, substantially at odds with the record of the 80th Congress. If Truman was going to make a success of his strategy of portraying them as a party of reactionary ogres he had to expose the contradiction and keep that Congress
to the fore. So he announced that he was using his presidential powers to summon it back for a special fifteen day session on July 26th. During these fifteen days he invited the Congress to do a good four years' work: to deal with rising prices, the housing problem, education, civil rights, and to provide for an increased minimum wage, a national health programme and extended social security benefits. He topped off this extravagant ice-cream sundae of satirical propaganda by offering a ready-made disparaging nickname for the special session. July 26th, he said, was called ‘Turnip Day' in Missouri. A local jingle advised people to ‘sow your turnips wet or dry' about then, but most of the few who knew it thought it referred to the 25th rather than the 26th.

However both the name and the idea served their purposes. It was a fairly outrageous use of executive powers which produced predictably exaggerated howls of execration from the other side. ‘Never in the history of American politics has a Chief Executive stooped so low,' pontificated Senator Brooks of Illinois. The ploy was good, rather undignified, partisan propaganda. However, Truman was not running on non-partisan dignity. He left that to Governor Dewey, the young statesman, still well under fifty, again as in 1944 the Republican candidate.

Dewey had to fight harder for the nomination in 1948 than in 1944. It was regarded as a much more worthwhile prize, an almost certain key to the White House. He had two serious rivals. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, son of a president, effective party leader in the Senate, disdainful of the tricks of political packaging but widely respected and even revered, the core and conscience of the Republican Party; and Harold Stassen of Minnesota who had made himself something of a boy wonder as a successful governor in his early thirties, who was as liberal and internationalist as Dewey, over whom he physically towered, and a great deal more genial.

However, Dewey, whatever he lacked in warmth and stature, had a beautifully oiled machine and once he had decisively beaten Stassen in the Oregon primary, both in debate and votes, looked the favourite, although not irresistibly so. He was ahead on the first two ballots and won on a landslide on the third. Earl Warren, Governor of California and future Chief Justice, was unanimously chosen as vice-presidential candidate. The Convention was one of the best organized in American history. There was enough
uncertainty to create interest, but not enough bitterness to leave dangerous wounds. Few doubted that it was a prelude to victory.

The ticket, with New York and California, was excellently balanced geographically, much better than the Democratic one with Missouri and Kentucky. But it was not balanced ideologically. Warren was as liberal as Dewey. He was also as bland.
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However there was nowhere else for right-wing Republicans to go. The strain on their loyalties did not begin to approach that needed for a break. The ideological splits and the prospects of the erosion of votes were all within the Democratic Party.

Dewey behaved throughout the campaign with dignity and decency. He also behaved with complacency. He was totally dedicated to being President, but at least equally dedicated to being a good one. He was uninterested in collecting cheap plaudits or scoring demagogic points on the way. This was the good side of his somewhat cold personality. If it was true, as a New York Republican lady was reputed to have said, that it was difficult to decide which was the chillier experience, having Tom Dewey ignore you or shake you by the hand, it was also true that he was intellectually honest and rarely stooped to conquer.
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His most brazen demagogic point during the 1948 campaign was to claim that the Republicans would not have to spend a lot of time and money rooting Communists out of the government because they would not have them in in the first place. This elipsis apart, his pronouncements on how to deal with internal Communism were impeccable ('You can't shoot ideas with a gun' ‘We will not jail anybody for what he thinks or believes'), and a model which his successors would have done well to follow. The principal lesson which he drew from his 1944 joust with Roosevelt was that he did better when he behaved as a statesman and worse when,
exceptionally, he took the low road, notably in a vituperative Oklahoma City speech.
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With this experience behind him, with his confidence bolstered by every poll and every editorial writer, the choice between stooping and conquering never seriously presented itself to him. All he needed to do was to avoid gaffes and remain securely ahead. He made few gaffes. He appeared to remain securely ahead. He behaved like an incumbent president and never mentioned Truman's name. In the words of one reporter he rarely left ‘a high road of rich baritone homilies'.
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Truman naturally and happily fell into the inverted role of the challenger. But he was not running against Dewey any more than Dewey was running against him. He was running against a mixture of the 80th Congress and the reactionary aspects, real and imaginary, of the Republican tradition. As a result the two main candidates of the 1948 campaign were, for different reasons, like darkened ships which passed in the night without recognition or engagement.

Dewey's confidence was not based exclusively upon the polls. These were not in fact as annihilating of Truman as is commonly assumed in retrospect. The Roper Poll, which had achieved an impressive record for accuracy in the later Roosevelt elections, gave Dewey 46.3% against 31.5% for Truman in early August. Gallup at approximately the same date gave Dewey a lead of 48% to 37%. On September 9th Roper (on material collected in August) showed Dewey still leading by 44.2% to 31.4% and foolishly announced that he was giving up polling as the issue was so far beyond doubt. But on September 24th Gallup only gave Dewey 46.5% against 39% for Truman. On the eve of the election Gallup had narrowed the gap to 49.5% over 44.5%, and the Crossley Poll confirmed this with 49.9% against 44.8%. While Dewey was never out of the lead, these later figures, particularly when seen against the big movement since August, do not now look like a solid basis for certainty.

They were however buttressed by other considerations. It looked as though Truman would be still weaker in the Electoral
College than in the popular vote. While they might not do a great deal for themselves, Thurmond and Wallace would surely at least have this effect. Thurmond would rob him of a part of the hitherto solid South, and Wallace would make it impossible for him to carry some of the populous northern states, most notably New York, which had been safely in the Roosevelt column. In fact both these things happened: Thurmond won in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina and the Wallace vote demonstrably robbed Truman of New York, Michigan and Maryland. But Truman, even though he also lost Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which had been for Roosevelt in all his four elections, was able to ride these defeats.

In addition there was the low repute of the President, the low morale of the Democratic Party (most of them thought they were fighting to hold governorships and Congressional seats, with no hope of the White House), and the crippling shortage of funds which went with this. Truman was sometimes cut off the air before he had finished a broadcast speech because there was no money with which to pay for a little extra time. In Oklahoma City, at the end of September, Margaret Truman says that they did not have enough money ‘to get the train out of the station' without an on the spot fund-raising effort.
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Against all the evidence Truman pretended from the beginning that he would win. Whether he believed this in August and September is impossible to say. His letters and private writings are silent upon the point. The pretence had to be complete. What can be authenticated, however, is that for the last three weeks of the campaign he was operating on a basis of genuine and (as it turned out) accurately based confidence. On October 13th, as the campaign train steamed south through eastern Minnesota, he sat with George Elsey at the dining table and wrote out a state-by-state prediction. It was about 85% accurate, with most of the errors on the side of optimism. He gave himself 340 electoral votes; he got 303. He gave Dewey 108; Dewey got 189.

Truman campaigned harder than Dewey. He did it almost all by train, and depended essentially on direct contact with the electorate and short speeches from the rear platform. Television was still of negligible importance, the number of his radio broadcasts was limited by money (his voice was not very good for that medium in any event) and although he occasionally addressed large
rallies—23,000 in Chicago, 12,000 in Philadelphia—these set-piece occasions, unlike the Roosevelt practice, were not the core of the campaign.

He did no journey by aeroplane. The train was quite an elaborate affair of sixteen coaches. Truman travelled in the rear car, which had been specially built for Roosevelt and contained bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, dining-room and sitting-room. Next was a dining car converted into a suite of offices for his staff. Then came a newsroom, then a signal corps car, followed by sleeping and living accommodation for all the assorted personnel, including about sixty journalists and photographers.

After a short Labor Day foray into Michigan the first main trip began on September 18th and ended fifteen days later. He covered eighteen states, out to San Francisco by Chicago, Iowa and the mountain states, down to Los Angeles, through the sunbelt and back by St Louis. He worked himself very hard, starting at 5.45 a.m. on his first full day and making his last appearance at 8.10 p.m. On some days he made as many as sixteen speeches. ‘Truman was at his best,' Irwin Ross wrote, ‘in his whistle-stop appearances.' Mr Ross also gives us a succinct account of the shape of his speeches on such occasions:

‘Truman's impromptu talks held to no set sequence, but they usually contained the same ingredients: a plug for the Democratic candidate for Congress or the Senate, a passing reference to the local college or baseball team (sometimes only the local weather was worthy of note), a brief exposition of some problem of local or national concern (housing, farm price supports, public power) which the Republicans had managed to muck up, and a plea for his audience to register and vote. The final turn in his routine was to introduce his wife and daughter. “And now I would like you to meet Mrs Truman,” he would say, at which point the blue velvet curtain behind him would part and the First Lady would appear to smile at the crowd. “And now my daughter Margaret,” or in southern states “Miss Margaret” … Crowds were large, curious, good-natured, but not especially enthusiastic.'
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Reporters who made the trip found it very difficult to estimate whether Truman was gaining votes. The crowds were certainly
friendly, but were they convinced? What did they make of the contrast between the hyperbole of his language in denouncing the Republicans and the flat folksiness of his delivery? Did they find his appeals to them to keep him in the White House so that he might not suffer ‘from a housing shortage on January 20th, 1949' as embarrassing as did most of the members of his staff? Did they find him lacking in dignity for a president or agreeably close to their interests and style? Would they rather have been listening to one of Dewey's carefully prepared set-piece orations, dealing in sonorous depth with a single major topic? All of these questions remained unanswered when the train got back to Washington on October 2nd. But one thing was already certain. The election was probably lost, but the campaign was not a flop. Three million people had turned out to see him. They appeared to have enjoyed listening to him. He had enjoyed talking to them. There would be no problem of his maintaining his morale until November 2nd.

Truman next set out on his travels on October 6th. He then did a three-day tour of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and up-state New York. The crowds had become very big, and the President was reported as being in crackling form throughout. The limited importance of either of these considerations is however underlined by the fact that Truman succeeded in losing all four of the ‘Roosevelt' states covered by this expedition.

On the last day of this trip the news of the aborted ‘Vinson mission' to Moscow had broken. This was, to say the least, amateurishly handled. At the end of his transcontinental journey Truman was persuaded by two of his speech-writers that it would be good politics, and maybe good diplomacy too, to send the Chief Justice on a special peace mission to Stalin. It was a gesture rather than a negotiation which was planned, for it was never clear what Vinson was intended to say when he got to Moscow, and he had little foreign policy experience and no personal
entrée
to the Russians. However it could be argued that with tension high over Berlin and all the traditional channels of negotiation clogged, such a public display of America's desire for a peaceful solution might remove some part of Russian suspicion.

Clearly however it required careful consideration with the Secretary of State. Marshall was in Paris where he had just agreed with the British and French foreign ministers that there was no point in further seeking direct negotiation with the Russians on
Berlin, and that the three Western powers should rather jointly submit the issue to the Security Council. Marshall was therefore bound to be against the Vinson proposal. Truman however did not bother to discover this before he had, first, persuaded a reluctant Vinson that it was his duty to perform the mission, and, second, had told Charles Ross to negotiate with the broadcasting networks for a half hour of ‘non-political' time for the evening of Tuesday, October 5th. Not unnaturally, in the middle of an election, they asked what the presidential speech was to be about. Ross told them ‘in confidence'.