Truman(50)

All of these issues had to be faced with lonely courage rather than the gregarious self-confidence which comes with a back-drop of popular esteem. Personally and politically Truman suffered a wounding spring and summer. His rising ratings of 1947 proved to be a false dawn. A sharp plunge began that autumn. By April 1948, his Gallup approval rating was down to 36%, almost as low as in 1946. On February 17th the Democrats had suffered a sensational loss in a by-election in the Bronx, one of their safest seats; the victor was not a Republican but a supporter of Henry Wallace. This accompanied by serious sulking in the South made it look as though the Democratic Party under Truman’s pilotage was losing both its left and its right wings. There were some who did not hesitate to point this out to him. Ickes wrote with a special venom: ‘You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity, or of being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry. Have you ever seen the ice on a pond break in every conceivable direction under the rays of the warming spring sun? That is what has happened to the Democratic Party under you, except that your party has not responded to bright sunshine.’11

Meanwhile his own personal contribution was to get involved in two unfortunate controversies. A few people close to him (Edwin Pauley in a big way and General Wallace Graham, his doctor, in a small way) were exposed by the Senate Appropriations Committee as having engaged in commodity speculation, acting allegedly on inside knowledge. This might not have mattered too much had not Truman denounced such speculators in October as particularly heinous contributors to inflation. Still more controversially he decided to build a stone balcony between the second and third floors (in American parlance) on the south front of the White House. It was against the advice of the Commission of Fine Arts. It was regarded as presumptuous interference with a national monument by a peculiarly temporary and unaesthetic tenant. Apart from anything else it would involve the re-designing of twenty dollar bills. However Truman persisted in creating this ‘monument to a Missouri mule’ as it was sometimes called. The passage of time has tended to justify him in this, as in bigger things. It certainly improved the amenity of the White House, and probably the appearance too, for it got rid of the canvas awnings, which were always previously used in summer, and would look more cluttering today than they did in 1948. At the time, however, it seemed a singularly ill-judged enterprise for Truman to undertake in what was so widely assumed to be the last year of his presidency.

This was the background against which he formally announced his candidature on March 8th. At this stage at least it looked as though there was no direction in which he could go except up. That however proved an illusion. His declaration, so far from being steadying, coincided with the beginning of a widely-based but ill-considered ‘draft Eisenhower’ (and ‘dump Truman’) campaign which continued from then until the threshold of the Democratic Convention in mid-July.

It began, paradoxically, on the left of the party. During March and the first week of April two of the Roosevelt sons, several important labour leaders, both the (liberal) senators from Alabama (one of whom, Sparkman, was to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952) as well as the equally liberal Senator Pepper of Florida all issued anti-Truman and broadly pro-Eisenhower statements. Colonel Arvey, the effective boss of Chicago, joined in the chorus from a slightly different angle. The common keynote of the statements made them particularly wounding. It was not just that they preferred Eisenhower. They were all predicated on the view that Truman was incompetent, unappealing and unelectable. It was his duty to the party to withdraw. ‘I hope (he) will not be a spite candidate like Henry Wallace’ one of the labour leaders said. On April 12th, Americans for Democratic Action formally repudiated his candidature and urged one of Roosevelt’s former dark horses, Justice William O. Douglas, as an alternative if Eisenhower would not run.

There is not the slightest indication that Truman was ever tempted towards withdrawal by these disavowals and appeals. Once he had got over his hesitations of 1946-7 it was the mule-like rather than the modest side of his character that was to the fore.

He privately denounced the liberals.4 In public he mostly ignored them. He had come to a more realistic view of Eisenhower’s intentions than they had: ‘General Eisenhower, I am sure, is not a candidate for President’, he wrote unusually temperately in a political letter at the end of April, ‘and I don’t think he would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket anyway—his whole family are Republicans and I know them all.’12