THIRTY-TWO or THIRTY-THREE

A Story of the 1948

Presidential Campaign

 

by

STEPHEN P. THOMAS

Read at the meeting of The Chicago Literary Club held

November 3, 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

THIRTY-TWO or THIRTY-THREE

by Stephen P. Thomas

Delivered November 3, 2008

         

                   October, 1948.  I was 10 years old.  These are my first memories of a Presidential campaign.  We lived in East Peoria, Illinois, not far from the rambling Caterpillar  Tractor Company factory buildings and railroad yards which dominated this small community across river from Peoria, Illinois, a river town.   It is fair to say that we lived both on the wrong side of the river and on the wrong side of the tracks.  Still, it was home;  my father could walk to work at the factory; and my sister and I could walk to Roosevelt grade school (named for Theodore Roosevelt) which was squeezed into a small area between the nearby P&PU (Peoria and Pekin Union railway)  tracks and a parallel roadway which led up a hill and south toward Pekin, Illinois, county seat of Tazewell County, home of Everett Dirksen (1896-1973) a U.S. Senator from 1950 to 1969. Two blocks to the north were the east-west tracks of the TP&W (Toledo, Peoria and Western) railway.    We lived in a small, rented frame house.  We were not ‘wealthy’, but never felt poor.  The railroad tracks are still there, as well as our little house, now much altered,  but the school and factory buildings are gone.

 

                   We  knew something about everyone who lived in the nearby houses in our immediate neighborhood.  Next door, across the alley from us was the Patterson residence.  A small brick bungalow with a brick garage and a huge portrait of Thomas E. Dewey plastered on the entire  Patterson garage door with a spotlight which highlighted it from dusk to dawn.  “VOTE FOR TOM DEWEY, REPUBLICAN” was splashed in large letters at the top of the display.   Nowhere else in our modest neighborhood was such dramatic political signage to be found. 

 

                   My mother said simply:  “Pat is a Republican.  We are Democrats.”  My father’s first name was ‘Owen’, but everyone called him ‘Tom’.  This was to distinguish him from his brother ‘Ernest’ whom everyone called ‘Tommie’.  Tom, Tommie, Thomas.  It was clear to us.  After the Dewey portrait had been on the Patterson garage for a few days, I would hear on the school playground:  “Hey, Steve, is that your dad’s picture on the garage next door?  Looks just like him?”  My father did resemble Tom Dewey, including the pencil thin mustache, and he was also called ‘Tom’.   But we were Democrats because Mr. Roosevelt (Franklin Roosevelt) had brought the country out of the Depression and guided us during wartime which was now over.  My only prior memories of the Presidency were three years earlier in 1945 with the deaths early in that year of President Roosevelt in April and my mother’s father in June, both major events in our little household.

                    To my parents what was important about Harry Truman was simply that he was a Democrat and could be trusted to think of ordinary people.   Pat Patterson was to us a grouchy next door neighbor with a snarling dog and a Republican.  Down the street was the Shute family.  Our good friends.  Don was a Navy veteran and school principal.  Betty was a school teacher and mother of two boys and a girl, friends to my sister and me to this day.  Don had a Basset hound named George.  Don would say:  “George, would you rather be dead or vote Republican?”  Whereupon George  would lie down with all four paws pointed skyward. 

                   Harry Truman was not widely known when he succeeded to the Presidency, and he was not a popular political figure by 1948.  He was expected to be defeated by Dewey, Governor of New York, who had lost to the iconic Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.  Throughout most of  the 1948 campaign Dewey was far ahead of Truman in the polls.  Much of this polling was done by telephone and in cities.  Only later was it demonstrated that speaking to people who had telephones automatically excluded about 75% of the voting population. And more than half of the population was still rural.  We had no telephone at home.  Neighbors across the street took the call concerning my grandfather’s death, and relayed it to my as he was father walking  home from work (they did not feel they should convey such news to my mother directly). 

                    My father spoke  to my mother in our presence immediately upon entering.  After pausing inside the door, he looked up at her and said:   “Pete died today. I’m sorry.”  It was her 31st birthday.  I can still hear her anguished response, as if a knife had pierced her heart.   Her father had died of a second or third heart attack at age 66 planting crops with horses.  America had been feeding itself and much of Europe during and after the World War II years.  His son-in-law, married to my mother’s sister, soon came home from Europe (after spending the winter in the midst of  the Battle of the Bulge) to harvest those fields in the fall of 1945, fields he would continue to farm for the next 50 years. 

                   Why was Truman so unpopular in 1948?  First, he was an accidental President, a surprising last-minute choice by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 to replace the incumbent Henry Wallace.  The record is pretty clear that Truman did not covet or seek either the Vice Presidency or the Presidency.  Upon Roosevelt’s death a few months into his fourth term, Truman at age 60 was sworn in as the thirty-third  President after serving as Vice President for just eighty-two days.  Truman always insisted that he was the thirty-second President, not the thirty-third, because Stephen Grover Cleveland was erroneously counted twice, as both the 22nd and 24th President, with his two non-consecutive  terms separated by the Benjamin Harrison (23rd) Presidency.

                   As Truman assumed the Presidency in April, 1945, the War was almost over in Europe, but not in the Pacific where the Battle of Okinawa was raging, a battle which resulted in far more casualties than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.  This was just two months following bloody Iwo Jima where the Japanese displayed their willingness to fight to the last man. Truman decided to approve the use of atomic bombs against Japan shortly after being informed in Potsdam of the successful test explosion on July 16.  Roosevelt had told Truman nothing about the Manhattan Project, and no one knew whether the bombs would work as designed.  Atom bombs were dropped on Japan on August 6 and August 9, and the Pacific War was soon over.

                   This Truman decision was not broadly controversial at the time and was not an issue in the 1948 campaign.  But there were plenty of other troubles.  Wage and price controls, present throughout the World War II years, were not renewed by Congress.  Prices moved up sharply and labor strife was everywhere.  There were strikes in 1946 by 800,000 steelworkers;   GM autoworkers went on strike; also the coal miners; at various times in 1946 nearly 3,000,000 union workers were on strike; this was followed by a threatened strike by railroad workers which Truman decided would be intolerable.  He went before Congress to ask for authority to draft railroad workers en masse into the Army.  This legislation was approved 306-13 by the House and rejected 13-70 by the Senate.  Truman had not been briefed by Roosevelt on decisions taken at Yalta earlier in 1945.  Later in 1945 he found an increasingly hostile Stalin at Potsdam, who was now facing off with Truman and Atlee instead of Roosevelt and Churchill, the latter having lost post-War elections in Britain.  The Cold War was starting; and Truman was surprised by the public reaction to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Missouri in March, 1946 which Truman attended.  He even pretended not to have known what Churchill was going to say.  Not true.  Churchill had given Truman a copy of the speech.

                   The United States people were tired of war, of a war economy and of constant talk of war. In the months before the 1948 political convention the Berlin Airlift had been approved by Truman, and the  $13   billion Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe was reluctantly approved by Congress.  Consumer goods remained in short supply. With goods no longer rationed or subject to price controls,  prices increased.  Wages actually were decreasing with the flood of returning veterans entering the labor pool.  Americans were clamoring for cars and houses, not more tanks and warplanes.  Many did not care for Truman’s strong position on civil rights.  He had integrated the Army by Executive Order in July 1948 at the same time banning racial discrimination in Federal employment.   He had asked Congress for strong civil rights measures without success.  Against this backdrop of a nation ill at ease with their economy and prospects, Truman was nominated in Philadelphia in July, 1948 despite a “dump” Truman movement and third party opposition by the Progressive’s left-leaning Henry Wallace and the Dixiecrats’ Strom Thurmond.

                   The 1948 general election would be held in a little more than 100 days.  Truman took two actions.  First, on July 26, “Turnip Day”,  he called the Republican Congress back into session directing that they  adopt legislation to give effect to the civil rights plank in their own platform  This did not happen.  Second, Truman took to the rails.  Before Air Force One there was an eighty-three foot railcar called the Ferdinand Magellan, 142 tons of armor plate and three-inch bulletproof glass originally outfitted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1942.  To all appearances it was an ordinary drab green Pullman car, but it carried Harry S. Truman 31,700 miles during the Presidential campaign of 1948. It was both an Oval Office and a moving campaign headquarters on wheels from which Truman’s 1948 campaign was largely conducted.  He made more than 350 public speeches during the campaign, many at what were contemptuously referred to by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio as no more than “whistle stops”  -  small towns where Truman would speak from the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan.   If a crowd was gathered,  Truman would signal the train to stop and speak to the citizens.  He would not mention Dewey by name, preferring to express his opposition to Republicans in general, and the “do nothing” Republican majority in Congress elected in 1946.  In Seattle someone shouted “Give ‘em hell, Harry” and the phrase became emblematic of the campaign.  “Plain speaking” it would later be called.  Here is a sample of Truman’s stump speech of the day:

          The Republican party candidates are going around talking to you in high-sounding platitudes trying to make you believe that they are the best people to run the government.  They had complete control of the government from 1920 to 1932.  Look what they did to it!   I have been trying to get the Republicans to do something about high prices and housing ever since they came to Washington.  They killed price control and the housing bill.  What do you suppose the Republicans think you ought to do about high prices?  Senator Taft says: ‘If consumers think the price is too high today they will wait until the price is lower.’  There is the Republican answer to the high cost of living.  If it costs too much, just wait.  If you think fifteen cents is too much for a loaf of bread, just do without it and wait until you can afford to pay fifteen cents for it.  When a bunch of Republican reactionaries are in control of the Congress, then people get reactionary laws.  The only way you can get the kind of government you need is by going to the polls and voting the straight Democratic ticket on November 2.  Then we will get good housing and prices that will be fair to everybody and keep sixty-one million people at work and income distributed so that the farmer, the workingman, the white-collar worker, and the businessman get their fair share of that income.  That is what I stand for.  That is what the Democratic party stands for.  Vote for that, and you will be safe!  [Oct. 7, 1948, Elizabeth, NJ]

 

                   Meanwhile, Tom Dewey was campaigning on a chorus of platitudes:

          We propose to install in Washington an administration which has faith in the American people, a warm understanding of their needs and the competence to meet them.  We will rediscover the essential unity of our people and the spiritual strength which makes our country great.  America’s future is still ahead of us.

The object, it seemed, was to say nothing substantive and offend no one.  Ethyl Barrymore and Alice Longworth Roosevelt, Theodore’s daughter, famously observed of Dewey that he looked just like the figurine of a bridegroom on the top of a wedding cake.  In tiny Beaucoup, Illinois, a hamlet located a few miles east of St. Louis, on his own whistle stop tour, Dewey’s train stopped, then abruptly lurched a few feet backward scattering the crowd.  No one was injured.  Dewey first called the engineer a “lunatic”, and then added:  “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise.”  After this remark was widely reported in the press the engineer observed:  “I think as much of Dewey as I did before and that’s not very much.”

 

                   Truman was also the subject of many barbs such as a parody on Eubie Blake’s great song with the title line altered to read: I’m just mild about Harry.  Also:   To err is Truman.  Or as in the following exchange: He: Truman is the weakest President since Franklin. She: But Truman came just after Franklin.  He:  I meant Franklin Pierce.  She: Oh!

                   Finally, it was election day.  Many of you know how this story ends.  Truman won in almost all of the 48 states, the exceptions in the West being Oregon and four plains states – the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas; four states in the South went to Thurmond and the Dixiecrats: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina;  In the Midwest Dewey won only in Indiana and Michigan;  while Dewey won most of the New England states, he carried his own state, New York, by just 60,000 votes and would have lost there had Henry Wallace not been on the ballot.  Truman had 49.6% of the popular vote to Dewey’s 45.1%.  Truman retired early on election night, was awake for a few minutes at midnight to hear some hand wringing by radio commentator, H. V. Kaltenborn. He woke at dawn to be advised of the Chicago Tribune’s DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN headline which appeared in at least one of the 11 press runs of the Tribune on that day.  Around noon Dewey finally conceded defeat, having waited because close results in Ohio, California and Illinois (all won by Truman with less than a 1% margin) could have affected the outcome.

                   Back to East Peoria, Illinois on Wednesday, November 3, 1948.  At school recess I was headed down a crowded stairway leading to the playground when someone shouted:  “Hey Steve, did you hear, your guy Truman won?”  My reaction  -- I was anticipating mostly  the atmosphere at home, rather than the fate of the Western world  ---  was to say in a muffled voice.  “Oh.  Good news!”

                   Two footnotes.  A few months after the 1948 election the wife of our grouchy neighbor with the Dewey poster on his garage disappeared, never to return.  She left behind a young son, and many years later was found living in Texas with a Post Office employee in whose company she had left our town.  Moral of the story: be careful how you vote.  You may not lose your life, but you could lose your wife.

                    And George Shute, our other neighbor’s  Basset hound I mentioned earlier:  upon his passing Don wrote a moving tribute which reads in part as follows:

OBITUARY NOTICE

GEORGE SHUTE, age 8, died in his sleep from overweight, overcare, oversleep, and underexercise.  He is interred back of the feed mill on Passover Lane, Havana,  Illinois.  Inscribed on his headstone, ‘I led a dog’s life which ain’t bad.’  There is no truth to the rumor he preferred death to another bath.  George Shute lived and died a Democrat, voting the straight ticket.

 

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