That evening Truman attended an informal impromptu celebration of 40,000 people in Independence, and on the following day took the train back to Washington. At St Louis, where there was a huge crowd at the station, he held up the famous Wednesday morning edition of the Chicago Tribune, with the headline ‘Dewey defeats Truman’. In Washington there was more than a solitary Dean Acheson to greet him on the railroad platform. ‘Barkley and I must have shaken hands with at least five or six hundred—some of them Johnnie come lately boys,’ he did not fail to note. (He felt the same way about $750,000 in back-dated cheques which Louis Johnson received for campaign funds after the result.) However it was all highly satisfactory after the troughs which Truman had been through, and the crowds which greeted him between union Station and the White House were immense and enthusiastic. There were only two immediate snags. The first was that Bess Truman had a bad sore throat, and that the President had to be up at 3.00 a.m. administering medicine to her on the night after his return. The second was that the White House was falling down. It was already propped up inside like a mine working, and immediate arrangements had to be made for a move across the street to Blair House, which was expected to be for ten months but in fact extended to forty. First, however, he was able to get away to his beloved submarine base at Key West for two weeks.
How did this spectacular and unexpected victory occur? To take a downbeat aspect first, it was achieved on a very low poll. Only 51% of the electorate voted. That probably favoured the Democratic Party, which was somewhat better organized at local level, although certainly not better funded at national level. On the popular vote Truman was significantly although not magnificently ahead. He had a lead over Dewey of 4½%, which would be equivalent in a British constituency election to a majority of about 2,500. He just failed—by 0.4%—to get over half of the votes cast, but he compensated for this by keeping Dewey to a slightly lower percentage of the total than he had achieved against Roosevelt in 1944. Truman had to contend with Wallace and Thurmond, which Roosevelt never had to do.11 Thurmond polled nearly 1,200,000, just over 2%, and because he was geographically concentrated got nearly 8% of the votes in the Electoral College. Wallace did a shade worse, more or less up to expectations in New York, from which state he got nearly a half of his national total, but was badly down in California, thought to be his other pillar. Geographically unconcentrated, however, he got no votes in the Electoral College.
Even without his 50%, Truman nonetheless gained a higher percentage than any British Prime Minister since the war, over 7 points more than Mrs Thatcher in 1983; 2 points more than Lord Wilson in 1966, half a point more than Lord Attlee in 1945. Nonetheless his result, under the Electoral College system, could have been easily overturned, or at least put into the House of Representatives. It was not dissimilar from the Kennedy result in 1960, although his popular majority was greater. Truman carried Ohio by only 7,000 and California by 17,000. A switch of 12,000 votes in these two states would therefore have left the House to decide. In Illinois the majority was only 33,000. A switch of another 17,000 there would have given Dewey an absolute victory. In a poll of nearly 50 million a well distributed shift of 29,000 votes, just over .05 per cent of the total, could have produced a reversal.
Truman immediately attributed his triumph to union support ‘Labor did it’, he was reported by the New York Times as having said on the morning after. It is certainly true that in spite of the upsets of 1946 the leaders of both the AFL and CIO worked far more committedly in that campaign than they ever had before, and probably carried most of their members with them; only the ever-aberrant John L. Lewis, flanked this time by Alvanley Johnston, were for Dewey. They also provided the necessary money and foci of organization for his campaign. Several of his most successful major rallies were labour-sponsored. Yet, when all that is said, to suggest that a candidate who lost in Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania was carried to victory on the backs of the union leaders is verging on the fanciful. It was much more the farmers who ‘did it’. This was certainly Dewey’s view, and it was substantially borne out by Truman’s remarkable string of successes across the Middle West, the mountain states and the Pacific. For a Missouri Democrat to carry Kansas suggested that something was stirring deep in the farm belt. One cause was a fall in the price of corn from $2.25 a barrel in July 1948 to $1.26 in October. It was not dissimilar to the 1921 decline. Then it bankrupted Truman. In 1948 it was a major factor in keeping him in the White House. It was a triumph of his campaign that this collapse was blamed not on the incumbent president, but on the outgoing Congress and the candidate who was tarred with their brush.