United States presidential election, 1948
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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.
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[edit] Nominations
[edit] Republican Party nomination
Both major parties courted general Dwight Eisenhower, the most popular general of World War II. 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.
Following Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency (the longest tenure in U.S. history), this election cycle marked the return of meaningful presidential primaries. The Republican contest was between New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, General Douglas MacArthur, Ohio Senator Robert Taft and California Governor Earl Warren.
The frontrunner was Stassen, who was making the second of his numerous runs for the presidency and had not yet garnered a national reputation as a perennial presidential bridesmaid. He had won the Wisconsin, Nebraska and West Virginia primaries and was running ahead in the polls when he agreed to debate Dewey just prior to the Oregon primary.
Dewey trounced Stassen in this, history's very first presidential debate, and the NY Governor was on his way to a second nomination, although he didn't have nearly enough delegates to win on the first ballot. Governor Earl Warren received the vice presidential nomination by acclamation.
| Ballot | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas E. Dewey | 434 | 515 |
| Robert Taft | 224 | 274 |
| Harold Stassen | 157 | 149 |
| Arthur Vandenberg | 62 | 62 |
| Earl Warren | 59 | 57 |
| Joseph Martin | 18 | 10 |
| Douglas MacArthur | 11 | 7 |
[edit] Progressive Party nomination
Meanwhile, the Democratic party had fragmented. A new Progressive Party—the name had been used earlier by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Robert M. La Follette, Sr. in 1924—was created afresh in 1948 with the nomination of Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's vice president before Truman. Truman had fired him as Secretary of Commerce in 1946 when Wallace 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.
Sen. Glen H. Taylor of Idaho, a country music star, was given the second spot.
[edit] 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 any more popular since then. Left-leaning Democrats had already split off to Wallace's Progressives. 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, 947 dispirited Democrats voted to nominate the incumbent President as their candidate (against 263 for Sen. Richard Russell, Jr.) by July 14. Truman selected Kentucky Senator Alben W. Barkley as his running mate, who was nominated by acclamation.
[edit] 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 Democratic Party. More commonly known as the “Dixiecrats”, the party's main goal was continuing racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws that sustained it. South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, who had led the walkout, became the party's presidential nominee. Mississippi Governor Fielding L. Wright received the vice presidential nomination.
[edit] General election
[edit] Campaign
Image:Thomas E. Dewey 1948 campaign NYWTS.jpg
Given Truman's sinking popularity and the three-way split in the Democratic Party, Dewey seemed unbeatable. 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.”<ref>Donaldson, Gary A. (1999). Truman Defeats Dewey. The University Press of Kentucky. Quoting The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, November 18, 1948.</ref>
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 for a wave of relentless, and blistering, partisan assaults. 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 had enacted a platform at the 1948 convention that 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 would prove to be 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.
In the final weeks of the campaign, American movie theatres agreed to play two short newsreel-like campaign films in support of the two major-party candidates; each film had been created by its respective campaign organization. The Dewey film, shot professionally on an impressive budget, featured very high production values, but somehow reinforced an image of the New York governor as cautious and distant. The Truman film, hastily assembled on virtually no budget by the perpetually cash-short Truman campaign, relied heavily on public-domain and newsreel footage of the President taking part in major world events and signing important legislation. Perhaps unintentionally, the Truman film visually reinforced an image of the President as engaged and decisive. Years later, historian David McCullough cited the expensive, but lackluster, Dewey film, and the far cheaper, but more effective, Truman film, as important factors in determining the preferences of undecided voters.
[edit] 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 less than 2.5 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. Part of the reason why Truman's victory was such a shock is that many of the projections were based on phone surveys, which, at the time, led to a higher-than-representative sample of affluent voters. Much of Truman's support came from the lower- and middle-class voting blocs.
Truman's victory can be attributed to many factors: his aggressive, populist campaign style; Dewey's lack thereof; a rare shift in public opinion during course of a general election; general public approval of Truman's foreign policy, such as the Berlin Airlift; and widespread dissatisfaction with the what Truman called the "do-nothing Republican Congress." In fact, it was essentially a Democratic year, as the Democrats not only retained the presidency but recaptured both houses of Congress, as well.
Truman narrowly carried 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 narrowly 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).
| Presidential Candidate | Party | Home State | Popular Vote | Electoral Vote | Running Mate | Running Mate's Home State | Running Mate's Electoral Vote | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Percentage | |||||||
| Harry S. Truman | Democratic(a) | Missouri | 24,179,347 | 49.6% | 303 | Alben William Barkley | Kentucky | 303 |
| Thomas Edmund Dewey | Republican(b) | New York | 21,991,292 | 45.1% | 189 | Earl Warren | California | 189 |
| James Strom Thurmond | Dixiecrat | South Carolina | 1,175,930 | 2.4% | 39 | Fielding Lewis Wright | Mississippi | 39 |
| Henry Agard Wallace | Progressive/American Labor | Iowa | 1,157,328 | 2.4% | 0 | Glen H. Taylor | Idaho | 0 |
| Norman Thomas | Socialist | New York | 139,569 | 0.3% | 0 | Tucker P. Smith | Michigan | 0 |
| Claude Watson | Prohibition | 103,708 | 0.2% | 0 | Dale Learn | Pennsylvania | 0 | |
| Other | 46,361 | 0.1% | 0 | Other | 0 | |||
| Total | 48,793,535 | 100.0% | 531 | Total | 531 | |||
| Needed to win | 266 | Needed to win | 266 | |||||
Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1948 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (August 1, 2005).
Source (Electoral Vote): Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (August 1, 2005).
(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.<ref name="split_tickets">Statistics of the Presidential and Congressional Election of November 2, 1948 (PDF). Official website of the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives. Retrieved on February 18, 2006.</ref>
(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.<ref name="split_tickets" />
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
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[edit] Further reading
- Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson. Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond (2005)
- Donaldson, Gary A. (1999). Truman Defeats Dewey. University Press of Kentucky.
- Gullan, Harold I. (1998). The Upset That Wasn't: Harry S. Truman and the Crucial Election of 1948.
- Karabell, Zachary (2001). The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election.
- Mosteller, Frederick (1949). The Pre-Election Polls of 1948: Report to the Committee on Analysis of Pre-Election Polls and Forecasts. Social Science Research Council.
- Neal, Steve (2003). Miracle of '48: Harry Truman's Major Campaign Speeches & Selected Whistle-Stops. Southern Illinois University Press.
- Reinhard, David W. (1983). the Republican Right since 1945. University Press of Kentucky.
- Richard Norton Smith. Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (1984)
- Schmidt, Karl M. (1960). Henry A. Wallace, Quixotic Crusade 1948. Syracuse University Press.
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it:Elezioni Presidenziali degli Stati Uniti del 1948 pl:Wybory prezydenckie w USA, 1948 fi:Yhdysvaltain presidentinvaalit 1948
