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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