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The U.S. presidential election of 1948 is considered by most historians as the greatest election upset in American history. Virtually every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) indicated that incumbent President Harry S Truman would be defeated by Republican Thomas Dewey. Truman won, overcoming a three-way split in his own party.
Nominations
Republican Party nomination
Both major parties courted general Dwight Eisenhower, the most popular general of the war. He had been promoted and supported by New Dealers, who saw him as the best alternative to President Truman, but his political views were unknown in 1948. Eisenhower refused any nomination. The Republicans returned to their 1944 nominee, Thomas E. Dewey, head of the pro-New Deal liberal wing of the party; he was the incumbent governor of New York. He had done fairly well against the popular FDR in wartime. Every commentator expected Dewey would easily beat the unpopular Truman.Many liberal Democrats wanted Truman off the ballot; without Eisenhower they lacked a candidate, so Truman's renomination was assured.
Progressive Party nomination
A new Progressive Party was created afresh in 1948 with the nomination of Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's Vice President. Truman fired him as Secretary of Commerce in 1946 when he went public to oppose Truman's firm stand against the Soviet Union. Wallace's 1948 platform opposed the Cold War, the Marshall Plan and big business. He also campaigned to end discrimination against blacks and women, backed a minimum wage and called for the elimination of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.Democratic Party nomination
On July 12, the Democratic National Convention convened in Philadelphia (in the same hall in which the Republicans had nominated Dewey). Spirits were low: the Republicans had taken control of both houses of Congress and a majority of state governorships during the 1946 midterm elections by running against Truman, and his administration did not seem to have become more popular. Indeed, left-leaning Democrats had already split off to revive the Progressive Party and nominate Henry Wallace. Morale sank even further when some three dozen Southern delegates, led by Strom Thurmond, walked out of the convention in response to an announcement by Truman that his platform would advocate the passage of civil rights laws. Nonetheless, the dispirited Democrats nominated the incumbent President as their candidate by July 14th.Dixiecrat Party nomination
The Democratic delegates who had bolted the Democratic convention over Truman's civil rights platform formed a separate party, which they named the States Rights Party. More commonly known as the “Dixiecrats”, the party's main goal was continuing racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws which sustained it. South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, who had led the walkout, became the party's presidential nominee.General election
Campaign
Given Truman's sinking popularity, Dewey seemed unstoppable. Top Republicans believed that all their candidate had to do to win was avoid major missteps; in keeping with this advice, Dewey carefully avoided risks. He spoke in platitudes, trying to transcend politics. Speech after speech was filled with empty statements of the obvious, including the now-infamous quote “You know that your future is still ahead of you.” An editorial in The (Louisville) Courier-Journal summed it up best: “No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.” Quoting The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, November 18, 1948.Truman, on the other hand, decided to pull the gloves off, ridiculing his opponent's refusal to address issues directly, and scornfully targeting the Republican-controlled 80th Congress. The 80th Congress, led by Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, was much more conservative than Dewey, and was fixated on rolling back Roosevelt's New Deal. However, under Dewey's leadership, the Republicans enacted a platform at the 1948 convention which called for expanding social security, more funding for public housing, civil rights legislation, and promotion of health and education by the federal government.
Truman exploited this rift in the party by calling a special session of Congress on “Turnip Day” (referring to an old piece of Missouri folklore about planting turnips in late July) and daring the Republican Congressional leadership to pass its own platform. The 80th Congress played right into Truman's hands, delivering very little in the way of substantive legislation during this time. From then on, Truman dubbed them the “Do-Nothing Congress”. Truman simply ignored the fact that Dewey's policies were considerably more liberal, and ran against the conservative tendencies of the 80th Congress. For his part, Dewey remained aloof, and followed the advice of his campaign staff that he not descend to Truman's level. This was a major mistake.
Truman toured -- and transfixed -- much of the nation with his fiery rhetoric, playing to large, enthusiastic crowds. “Give 'em hell, Harry,” was a popular slogan shouted out at stop after stop along the tour. However, the polls and the pundits all held that Dewey's lead was insurmountable, and that Truman's efforts were for naught. Indeed, Truman's own staff considered the campaign a last hurrah. The only person who appears to have considered Truman's campaign to be winnable was the President himself, who confidently predicted victory to anyone and everyone who would listen to him.
Results
Thurmond's Dixiecrat party took away much of the Democratic Party's traditional base in the “Solid South”, but did not spark the wholesale revolt in the South that had been predicted. (He carried only four states.) Wallace wooed away some voters from the left wing of the Democratic Party, but far fewer of them than pundits had predicted. In part, this was because of Wallace's failure to repudiate the endorsement of the Communist Party, a blunder that severely undermined his popularity. He wound up with just over 2.4 percent of the popular vote. The Dixiecrats, for their part, held no attraction whatseover for voters outside the South, with Thurmond receiving a slightly smaller percentage of the popular vote than Wallace. Thus, despite the significant split in the Democratic base, Truman won on November 2, shocking even the most seasoned political observers of the day. The Chicago Tribune had gone so far as to print “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” on election night as its headline for the following day. A famous photograph shows Truman grinning and holding up a copy of that newspaper.
Truman's victory was attributed to his marginal wins in the large swing states of Ohio, California, and Illinois, all three of which he won by less than 1%. The three states carried a combined total of 78 electoral votes. A similarly narrow margin garnered Idaho's electoral votes for Truman. Dewey countered by carrying New York and Pennsylvania, the states with the most electoral votes at the time, as well as Michigan, but it wasn't enough to give him the election. Thurmond's handful of electoral votes was not enough to deny Truman the electoral-vote majority.
The 1948 election marked the second time in American presidential election history that the winning candidate won despite losing Pennyslvania and New York (the first time being the 1916 election - later such elections included 1968, 2000, and 2004). It also marked the first time that the winning candidate lost Pennsylvania, New York, and so much as a single southern state (the only other time this has happened was the 1968 presidential election).
Source (Popular Vote):
Source (Electoral Vote):
(a) In New York, the Truman vote was a fusion of the Democratic and Liberal slates. There, Truman obtained 2,557,642 votes on the Democratic ticket and 222,562 votes on the Liberal ticket.
(b) In Mississippi, the Dewey vote was a fusion of the Republican and Independent Republican slates. There, Dewey obtained 2595 votes on the Republican ticket and 2448 votes on the Independent Republican ticket.
See also
Notes
Further reading
- Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson. Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond (2005)
- Richard Norton Smith. Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (1984)
External links
Navigation
United States presidential elections | 1948 elections
Elezioni Presidenziali degli Stati Uniti del 1948 | Wybory prezydenckie w USA, 1948
"United States presidential election, 1948"