Truman(53)

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’.10 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.16

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.