Mark Malcomson
American Elections, Part 1: 1948 - Truman and Dewey

Mark Malcomson | American Elections, Part 1: 1948 Truman and Dewey

- Thanks.

• Brilliant. Welcome everyone, on a quite nice evening in London, you know, sort of early autumn, late summer, and hopefully wherever you guys are, it will be pleasant itself. So, this is the first one of a series that’ll take us up to, actually, the night before the election. I got a series of basically half a dozen election specials, and what we’re looking at is since the Second World War, what have been the big elections? Now, big isn’t necessarily just about, you know, dramatic landslide wins or sort of changes. It’s also about which of the elections have been interesting, as well. Sometimes you get big wins. I think 1984 would be a great example of that. You got this massive landslide for Reagan against Walter Mondale, but to be honest, it was quite a dull election. It was kind of almost a foregone conclusion right the way through, and as a result, it doesn’t go down as one of the kind of nail biters, or one of the ones that is interesting for a whole series of different reasons. Now, what I’ve done is I’ve picked my favourite post-war elections in terms of, you know, what actually happened, the characters that were involved, et cetera. Now, that is wholly subjective, and I’m sure some of you will agree and disagree with me around the ones that I’ve chosen. I’m sure, given the choice, you’ve possibly come up with a different combination, but the idea really is starting chronologically, and the night before November 5th or November 4th, we will do 2016, which is obviously one of the most unexpected, controversial, wild rollercoasters of an election in history, but we’ll kind of pace ourselves every few weeks around each one of the different elections.

So what we’re going to do is have a similar format each time, and kind of talk about the election itself, but also, I’m a firm believer that elections don’t just happen. Elections are always a product of the election before, and in some cases, the election before that. And what I mean by that is that you sometimes have an incumbent, which obviously means you are a direct result of the one before, because you’ve got a president that’s running again for a second term, or in the case of Franklin Roosevelt, for a third or a fourth term, but that’s different from what I’m talking about. So you’ve got the the kind of, yes, I won the last election and I get another go, but often the tone is set. A party goes down to a defeat, whether it’s expected or unexpected, and you get a chance for that party to regroup and challenge its logic and its assumptions about how it’s going to operate the next election. You’ve obviously seen over the last 70-plus years huge evolutions in the way elections are conducted. If you think about it, back in the 1940s, there was radio, still a relatively recent invention in the 30, 40 years before that, but you have, by the 1960s, people watching television and televised debates. Televised debates become a part of the annual cycle by 1976. After that, you get much more around the internet, and then now, you’ve got a huge influence for the last decade or so around social media, so the way elections are conducted has changed a lot. And also, you know, and we’ll talk about it today when we’re talking about 1948, is, you know, transport’s changed.

You know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first presidential candidate in 1932 to fly to the convention to accept the nomination, and that was a radical thing. Without aeroplanes now, most candidates wouldn’t get anything done, because they hop from television market to television market, from battleground state to battleground state, and they’re using transport all the time to be able to move around to that degree. Nixon famously said that in 1960, he was going to campaign in every state, which he did. He still ultimately lost, as well, we’ll discuss, but there’s a different approach each time. The idea that you campaign in every state kind of then became a why would you? There are so many given states that you know one side or the other is going to win. Why don’t you focus on the swing states? And, you know, as we go through this next two months, we’ll be hearing a lot about what’s going on in today’s world, and about the focus on, I think, what it is now, seven key states that both sides thinks will decide the election. So elections have changed as time goes on. Elections have modified, they’ve adapted. There are very few elections in the nature of the way of they’ve run is radically different than the one before, but as an evolution happens, the ebb and the flow of elections really kind of moves and changes over time. The one I’ve chosen to start off with is 1948. For those of you who came to my Truman class, two Truman classes earlier this year, I’m quite a fan of Truman. He’s a really interesting character in a way that somebody who’s quite uninteresting can be very interesting. And it’s fascinating about this particular election, because with the exception of 2016, it’s probably the most unexpected election result, certainly in the last century, maybe even longer ago than that. It was given as a foregone conclusion, as we’ll discuss, and it’s a chance to look at received wisdom.

Obviously, 2016 came as a mighty shock for lots of people. 1948 became one for very, very different reasons. So as I said, each election starts with the election before, accept my premise here, please, but in reality, this election starts three elections before, four, in fact, elections before. You go back to the election of 1932. 1932, you have the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, he is running for reelection at the end of his first term. He had won by a massive landslide in 1928, and had vanquished the then governor of New York, and all things looked possible. He looked like he was going to be one of the great presidents. Within a year of his presidency starting, the Great Depression began, and kept on going. We don’t necessarily think. we think now is the Great Depression. At the time, it was a stock market crash, and then it became something else and became something else. And over time, it became something systemic, endemic, right the way through the American and the global economy, destroying lives and livelihoods everywhere. So by 1932’s election, he is an incumbent president of a country in very bad shape. Franklin Roosevelt runs against him, runs a really positive, “We can make things different,” change campaign, and wins by a massive landslide. And the interesting piece around this is it’s not Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s fascinating in his own right, and obviously, is the only president to win more than two elections.

He won four elections, and was president for over 12 years. Not talking about that so much, but what was interesting is in 1932, he chose his running mate, a guy called John Nance Garner. John Nance Garner was the speaker of the House of Representatives, so obviously, a very senior politician in the country. Speaker of the House is incredibly powerful within the House, and therefore, in the legislature in the States. So he traded in the power and the prestige of the speakership to become Roosevelt’s vice president. He came to regret it, and he’s famous. He was a Texan, a bit known as for his coarse approach, and he was known as Cactus Jack. And one of the famous quotes, which has always been cleaned up, which is “The vice presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” What he actually said was, “It isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss,” but yeah, sensibilities aside. By the time he gets to 1940, or the party gets to 1940, obviously, the precedent is that the president stands down after two terms. That’s what Washington did, and every president since then have not tried for a third term. It was an unwritten rule. However, the Great Depression, and then what was the war in Europe, it had yet to become global, Roosevelt used that as a reason to run again, and Garner was already chafing with Roosevelt. He’d deposed him on the court packing system. There was a number of things that they were starting to disagree about, but he also saw himself as the heir of parents. Vice presidents often get to go next, and he was starting to build his own campaign team, and he was assuming that that campaign team would take him through to the presidency. The Democrats were very popular. It’s only eight years since the Republicans had been thrown out, and they had not been forgiven. They wouldn’t be forgiven for 20 years, and I would argue that electing Eisenhower in ‘52 really wasn’t forgiveness, because Eisenhower was a Republican by choice, but not necessarily in his DNA.

Now, I’d hate to use the phrase Republican in name only, but he could have been a Democrat. Both parties courted him, he was above the fray, but at certainly eight years in, whoever had the Democrat badge would’ve almost certainly won, and Garner felt that it was his turn. He set up a campaign, Roosevelt played his cards close to his chest, but then declared, and Garner basically took his toys home back to Texas and retired. Years later, when Lyndon Johnson is offered the vice presidency nomination by John Kennedy, Johnson phones Garner and says, “You know, as a Texan and you’ve been here, what would you do?” And Garner’s like, “Do not touch it. You are incredibly powerful as the majority leader in the Senate. Why would you get involved in any of this?” Et cetera, et cetera. Johnson decided against taking Garner’s advice, and for the first three years or so of being vice president, hated every minute of it, and often thought he’d made a catastrophic mistake in terms of his power and his prowess. And then of course, on 22nd of November, '63, all of that changed, and Johnson became president for five years. So, you know, say what you like about the vice presidency, it’s worthless most of the time until one day it isn’t. And also, one of the things about being vice president is you do get to be first in line when it comes to being president, nomination for your party next time.

There is a lot to be said for the fact that vice presidents go to funerals, they go and do campaigning in midterms, they do a lot of the donkey work of the party, and they gain a lot of chips. It’s not surprising Joe Biden, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson were all vice presidential candidates, Walter Mondale, who then went on to run for the presidency. Now, the thing is these vice presidents tend to get the nomination, it’s quite rare that they actually then win the presidency. So, you have 1940, and what Roosevelt does is he chooses his agriculture secretary, a guy called Henry Wallace, to become his running mate. Henry Wallace is very much on the left of the Democrat Party. It wasn’t a universally popular decision, but Roosevelt was at the peak of his powers within the party and within the country, and the party acquiesced to appointing Garner, sorry, Wallace as his vice president. Interesting, Wallace had been agriculture secretary for the first eight years of Roosevelt’s term, and his father, under a Republican president, had been agriculture secretary from 1921 to '24. So, you know, coming from Iowa, you pretty much always get given, Tom Vilsack, people like that, you kind of get given agriculture, 'cause that’s what they do. No disrespect to people from Iowa, by the way. So, he becomes vice president, he’s vice president for four years, expects and wants to stay on as vice president. The party’s having none of it. The conservatives in particular in the party don’t like his extreme liberal side to him, but also don’t like the fact that he’s pro-Soviet Union. Is he pink or is he red? There’s a lot of debate. Anyway, with Roosevelt’s health being in bad shape, and everybody knowing he’s running for a fourth term, they just can’t take a risk on Garner being a heartbeat away in a heart that’s not in great shape, so they deposed Garner. Roosevelt is unhappy about it, but isn’t in a position to argue, really.

And then there’s a lot of toing and froing about who becomes the nominee. I’ve discussed this before, but essentially, Harry Truman becomes the Democrat nominee for Vice President in 1944, and there’s no conclusive, kind of, I’ve read lots of different versions of this, but there’s no conclusion going, “This is actually what happened in this order.” There’s a lot of speculation about he said this to him, and et cetera, a lot of smoke-filled room stuff, but in reality, it came down to the fact that Harry Truman was a nice guy, and as far as I can work out, nobody hated him, whereas a lot of the other leading candidates were very good, high profile, but they had a faction or a part of the party who was steadfastly against him. So in a way, Truman gets the nomination as not necessarily completely a compromise candidate, but a bit of a compromise candidate in terms of the fact that he’s solid. He’s not going to cause us any problems, and that would be fine. So Henry Wallace becomes commerce secretary, and Harry Truman gets elected along with Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 as vice president, and at this point, I’ll start to share my slides. I’ve just got a few slides that will hopefully come through. Yeah. So this is the ticket, Franklin Roosevelt from New York, Harry Truman from Missouri, and they win by a landslide. The funny thing about Roosevelt, 'cause his first two elections were such massive landslides, the second two were, well, they were, you know, they weren’t as big a landslides as the first ones, but by, put it this way, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would be very, very happy to have the size of both popular vote and Electoral College wins that Roosevelt had in his third and fourth elections.

So Truman becomes vice president, and then 82 days later, he gets a phone call while he is over in Congress, and told to come straight back to the White House. He comes straight back to the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt takes him into a private room and said, “Harry, the president is dead,” and that is how Harry Truman found out he was the most powerful man on earth. He then completes the remaining three years, and, you know, basically 250 days of his running mate’s term. It’s difficult, it’s massively challenging, because you’ve got a country going from war footing, which has pulled the economy and employment out of the still, the doldrums of the Great Depression, but then you all have all sorts of challenges of the soldiers coming back from the war expecting good jobs. You have a lot of women who’ve entered the job market, because there’s a capacity that needs to be filled, who aren’t necessarily willing to go back to the role that they played before. You have expectations among African Americans who fought in the war, that civil rights are now going to take a priority. You have all of this in terms of a domestic kind of pressure cooker. In addition, the world goes to hell in a hand basket.

Now, in one way, you could argue that, you know, well, you’ve just had a war, that’s bad enough, but actually, what you see is that the, you know, the Soviet Union is absolutely in its element. It’s taken control of most of Eastern Europe, and it is pressing against democracy, and pressing against the West, as we become known as, in virtually every theatre, from the Middle East, from the Far East, from Italy, from France, and Greece, and Turkey, in Africa and in South America, there’s basically contagion. You know, Stalin and his minions are basically having the opportunity, and they have the upper hand in so many ways around the world. So as a result, Truman faces, as a very inexperienced kind of a person who hasn’t been a cabinet member, he is been a senator, but he’s very much a local politician at heart, he gets thrown out the deep end. I personally think he does a tremendous job. He deals with things that he was not prepared for, and a lot falls to the negligence of Franklin Roosevelt for not including his vice president in the decision-making or the information pool before he became president, so famously, Truman does not know that there is a thing called the atomic bomb. Not only will he find out about it, he will be the only person in history that has ever, you know, authorised the use of it on two occasions. He has a steepest learning curve. All presidents have a massive learning curve, but he has one of the steepest learning curves in history. 1946, you have the midterm elections, and the midterm elections are catastrophic for the Democrat Party.

The Democrat Party loses both the Senate and the House of Representatives. It’s seen as an indictment of Truman. What it is, is really, you know, you are now 14 years into an administration and people are bored, and people are fed up, and people are angry and there’s nobody else to blame. Herbert Hoover isn’t around anymore, so you can’t really point to him, and so the Democrats get a kicking, and obviously, the president, as with every midterm where the party gets a kicking, the president takes a big portion of the blame for that. So Truman has seemed to have led his party in the first electoral test he’s had on his own into a disaster. A byproduct of what happens, which is very important, is that the Republicans, now controlling both Houses, push through the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution. The Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution is very, very important, and it plays such an important part to the next, you know, decade, 'cause when Truman becomes, you know, president, you know, the Republicans are concerned that the Democrats might just have a hold on the presidency forever. And you know, they think that they’ve got to do something to return to the status quo, the accepted status quo before FDR, which was that you limit to two full terms any president who is going to run. So, you can have two terms, and they don’t have to be contiguous, as we might find out in November, but you can’t have more than two full terms, and that’s what Washington had set down as the unwritten rule, and the Republicans basically said, “Well, you know, FDR broke the unwritten rule that everybody else had followed, and we need to now make that unwritten rule written.”

They create the Twenty-Second Amendment, it’s ratified. There is one interesting piece around it, which is that affects both Truman, but also ultimately affects Lyndon Johnson, is that if you are a vice president who inherits the presidency through death, disqualification, whatever it might be, if you are in the first half of that person’s presidency, then you finishing that term counts towards your presidency. So therefore, in the case of Truman, had it existed prior to him becoming president, he would’ve been considered to have had done a term by 1948, that would’ve been his first term, and he’d only been eligible to run for one more term. If you became president in the second part and the last two years of the presidency before, that doesn’t count. So theoretically, you can now have a situation where a president can be president for just shy of 10 years, but can’t be the president for any longer. They did put a grandfather clause in, which was, I think, actually quite classy, and they basically said, “This doesn’t apply to the person in charge when this is ratified,” and that was Truman. So Harry Truman was able, and could have run again in 1952, which is getting ahead of ourselves, but essentially, and this does matter hugely as time goes on, Twenty-Second Amendment goes through as a result of the Democrats losing both the House and the Senate. So you have that situation, Truman’s done badly, and you’re going into the 1948 election. So, let’s look at the different bits of the part. Lots of speculation. Truman isn’t really, as vice presidents who inherit the presidency, you know, there’s always a legitimacy question. Well, they didn’t earn it.

They were only, you know, he was there because of FDR, and he was only there because FDR put him in at the last minute after they got rid of Wallace, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a question about legitimacy around Truman. It’s also he’s just not terribly, terribly popular, and as a result, there is an assumption that he won’t win, and he potentially can’t win. So Democrats scramble around, but ultimately, they settle on the fact that Truman will be their candidate. Now, we’ll come back to this in a minute, but you’ve got Truman in place as the Democrat candidate. The Republicans, and this goes back to my theory about you look at the election before and see what happens. The election before in 1944, the candidate for the Republican Party was Tom Dewey, who was the governor of New York. Interestingly, being governor of New York in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s was a really good way of getting your party’s nomination irrespective of party. Al Smith had got it in 1928 for the Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt was a governor of New York, and Tom Dewey was a republican governor of New York. He wins the nomination in 1940, and does a lot better than people expected. He was expected to lose, but he didn’t lose as badly as people thought. Also, you know, he was young, and they thought, “Well, actually, come 1948, now FDR isn’t on the ticket, let’s actually go to Dewey, 'cause he’s kind of proved his metal. He can run a campaign.” Now, interestingly, his campaign wasn’t brilliant in some respects. He was seen as very aggressive, and there was a certain element of, you know, you don’t attack the grand, old man, and as a result, you know, there were people both in the Democrat Party, but also the Republican Party, was, well, “He just was rude and offensive,” and it was that Roosevelt, whether you liked him or hated him, was doing a really good job, and he was trying hard, et cetera, et cetera.

Roosevelt had almost gone into that kind of monarchy situation of you don’t attack him, and basically, Dewey had gone in quite hard. Anyway, Dewey gets the nomination. As you can see, Dewey was still young. He’d almost got the nomination in 1940, but he was considered too young then, and it went to Wendell Willkie instead, so this is now the second time he gets the nomination proper. You will see that he has a moustache. He is the last presidential candidate, unless somebody proves me wrong, to ever have a moustache. It’s now seemed to be one of those things that is cursed. A lot of people talked about Dewey’s appearance. People didn’t like the moustache, and there was a comment that he looked like the little man on a wedding cake. He was very dapper, he was very prim, he was very proper, but there was something that was a bit standoffish, not warm about him. And interestingly, again, around the campaign from the campaign before is he learned from that campaign in 1944, and swung his campaign from being aggressive and forthright, et cetera, to being very laid back and inverted, presidential. He decided that he was going to not be prosecutorial, he was not going to go after Truman. Truman was damaged enough. He was bound to win, and therefore, he had to win with grace and with style. So, in fact, if you look back in history, Tom Dewey basically played the wrong election in each 1940 and 1948. He should have been more presidential in 1944, probably still wouldn’t have won, but it didn’t help him there, and in 1948, by staying back and aloof, he doomed his candidacy as particularly against Harry Truman who was so much more forceful than anybody expected him to be.

So Dewey gets the nomination, and, you know, sets up for what is a campaign that everybody expects is just going to sail towards the presidency. If that wasn’t bad enough, Truman’s in trouble before he starts, he’s not very popular, everybody assumes he’s going to lose. You have ¾ of the American newspapers endorse Dewey, you know, everything stacked against him, but it gets worse. Essentially, two things happen, or two people happen in 1948. We’re used now to the occasional third-party candidate. We don’t take them very seriously. Most of us old enough to remember Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992. He gets 19% of the vote, but gets no Electoral College seats, votes. So third-party candidates are interesting, but they’re interesting as a little “Trivial Pursuit” piece of who was that third-party candidate, but it doesn’t really matter, but in 1948, it looked like it might do. And what you see is these two gentlemen at either sides of the Democrat Party split. On one hand on the left, as you are looking at it, the bald gentleman, just in case it’s reversing, was a guy called Strom Thurmond. Strom Thurmond was the young, at that point, governor of South Carolina, an arch segregationist, a racist of every colour when it was that kind of Southern respectability around racism, and he splits the Democrat Party and the Southern Democrat Party off against the mainstream part of the party with Truman. What you saw is you forget that Roosevelt had this amazing coalition of Northern liberals, Midwest farmers, and Southern racists, let’s be honest about it, and he somehow did the four-ring circus to keep all different parts of the party together. This is where it fractured. And Thurmond broke off, he created what becomes known as State’s Rights Democrats or Dixiecrats, and they set their own kind of Southern Party for the presidency.

So he peels off. When we talk nowadays about the Solid South, we often think about it being the South of the Republican. It’s a Republican Solid South, but obviously, post the Civil War, and really, until the 1950s, the Democrats were the Solid South. '60s, it starts to fray, and by the '70s, it’s gone, started swinging to the Republicans. So, he’s breaking off a bunch of states that if he wins in them, will cause enormous amounts of damage to Truman’s chances, because that’s his bork. That’s a whole lot of Electoral College votes that would normally be going to Truman. On the other hand, our old friend, Henry Wallace, spurned vice president, now had been commerce secretary until Truman had been forced to sack him in 1944, because, sorry, 1946, because he was saying that the Soviet Union was a lot nicer than people said, and why were we being so mean to them? Wallace is an interesting character. There’s a whole separate lecture I could give on Wallace, but ultimately, either he was very left wing or he is very naive, or he is very populist. One way or the other, he had a base within the Democrat Party, but it didn’t live up to expectations, but still, he had the opportunity of peeling off more liberal voters from Truman’s and Roosevelt’s coalition. So essentially, you have Harry Truman, this is the Democrat Party, Strom Thurmond peels off one side, and Henry Wallace peels off the other side, and that’s pretty disastrous. So both parties have their conventions in Philadelphia, as then rival Southern Convention to nominate Thurmond, and they then go to start campaigning. Opinion polls were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are now.

You could argue opinion polls might be sophisticated now, but they don’t often get the right results, but then people didn’t opinion poll anywhere near as much, and also, they stopped opinion polling quite early on in the campaign. So the campaign goes into September, classically, Labour Day, which we’ve just had, is the traditional start of the campaign, although you wouldn’t really believe it nowadays, and as a result, it’s a foregone conclusion. Tom Dewey is going to win. It’s going to be a landslide for Dewey. Truman will be sent back to his, you know, house in Missouri. He hasn’t even got a house in Missouri, he has to buy one when he finishes the presidency, but that doesn’t quite happen as quickly as possible, and there’s going to be three months where Harry Truman finishes his job. Harry Truman decides, although nobody really believes him, that he’s going to win, and he can win. He’s a very unarrogant, but self-confident man. Self-confident and arrogance often go hand in hand, but Harry Truman believed in his own abilities and his abilities to change things, but at the same time, he also would just say, “Right, okay, well, I’m going to give this my best shot, and I think I can do it.” And what he did was he decided, whilst we’ve just said that Dewey ran an almost presidential campaign, which is sit at home a lot, do a few speeches, make them very bland, don’t offend anybody, assume that everything will turn out all right. Harry Truman almost positions himself as the challenger. You know, you had this role reversal in the way campaigns run, where Truman is essentially running as a challenger, and Dewey is almost running like an incumbent who’s trying to rise above the fray.

And Harry Truman undertakes this huge tour around America by train, again, right back to the beginning I was saying about the different modes of transport and how things have changed. This was not just about, you know, planes, they were there now by this point. You could go round by planes, but the reality was trains got you around to a hell of a lot of places, and Harry Truman, they had at the back of the train opened, they had the presidential seal, as you can see there, and a train would pull into a station, and it could be a small town or medium-sized town, Harry Truman would say a few words, and then the train would pull out, but the whole town would turn out because it was the president. And this train went all around America, and particularly in the Midwest, where there was an assumption that because Dewey had done well in the Midwest and in the farmlands in 1944, he would win it again. To this day, yeah, it’s always perceived that Dewey lost because he lost the farmlands. I’m not completely convinced about that, but Truman campaign, “Give 'em Hell, Harry!” Go around, make sure that they know you are a fighter, and Americans like a fighter. And there was this, he’d go from state to state, from town to town, campaigning, as if everything depended on it. As I said, Dewey is running a very, very different above-the-fray campaign, almost what we call sometimes a front porch campaign, where the media can come to him. He can maybe do a few things, but otherwise, this is beneath me, this campaigning stuff.

So Truman’s doing that, and the other stroke of genius he has is that, remember, 1946, both House of Representatives and the Senate who’ve gone to the Republicans, by this point, you have a real split. Dewey is quite moderate for a Republican, but the House and the Senate are quite right wing, and there is a whole series of things that the House and the Senate want to do that Dewey has not got in his platform. And what Truman does, which is a stroke of political genius, which by the way, if I was Joe Biden, I’d be thinking about something like this at the moment, is he calls back Congress, and he says, “Right, you are in charge of both houses. You say you’re going to do all of these things when the president becomes a Republican, go and do them. Go on, I dare you,” and they don’t. And what Truman does by turning the tables on the Republican Party, he calls them the Do Nothing Congress, is they achieve nothing. They won’t get anything done. And if they get it done, it’ll be things you don’t want them to do anyway. So there’s a real disconnect between this nice guy, Dewey, who’s the front man saying sort of liberal things, and saying, “We’ve accepted all bits of the new deal,” but to be honest, it’s not true, these guys are nasty. They’re not going to pull this off at all, and it sticks. People start to think of the Republican Party like, “Oof, that’s not great.” You know, “I’m wedded to… "I might be fed up with the Democrats, but I like what they’ve done. I like social security, I like a lot of the things that they’ve done to rejuvenate the economy.” So the Do Nothing Congress becomes a millstone around Dewey’s neck, and he can’t do anything about it, because he is not even in Congress, but still, all the way through, the election campaign is assuming that the election is going to go to the Republicans, and the House and the Senate will stay Republican.

Everybody assumes it’s going to be a landslide. This is just a cartoon from the time. It’s just endemic of, you know, Dewey’s going to win all of these states. And by the way, there’s a concern of even the ones that will be in the Democrat column. They won’t necessarily be for Truman, they might be for Strom Thurmond, so you’ll have states that will peel off. And as you get to Election Day, Truman is banging on and carrying on, just travelling around the country, but at the end, everybody assumes he’s going to lose. And you go to bed on the night of election night, and the assumption is that Dewey will be triumphant, not just win by a bit, but will win by a landslide. And the newspapers assume that’s the case, the early prints and newspapers all have got their leaders ready, they’ve got their big articles. Alistair Cooke famously had written an article to send back to Britain, which was talking about how Truman was a failure, and that was all ready to be published. Everybody’s kind of pump primed, and then election night starts to happen, and the early results come in for Truman, but then they think, “Well, but this is the East Coast, it might be different,” et cetera. And as the night wears on and into the early morning, and into the later morning, Truman maintains this lead, and in some states, it is very, very close, but Truman’s lead keeps on consolidating, and at 11:14 in the morning, so, you know, good, good, ooh, 16 hours after the term finishes, the vote finishes, Dewey sends a telegram to Truman congratulating him on winning.

In the end, what’s quite fascinating is the actual result. So if you think the blue is Truman, the red is Dewey, and the yellow is Strom Thurmond, what actually happens is a popular vote, and I think this is important to remember. So, the underdog doesn’t win by some weirdness of the Electoral College. Truman gets 49.5% of the vote. You know, he’s there, he’s done better than quite a lot of presidents since then who’ve won by considerable margins. He gets basically half the vote, the guy that was massively the underdog. Dewey gets 45%, so 4.5% behind. Strom Thurmond gets 2.4%, come back to that in a minute, and Henry Wallace gets 2.3%. This is where the vagaries of the electoral system will play out in a second. What you see here in terms of the map is swathes of blue, but the blue is mostly in the West, the South, and to some degree, in the Midwest. What Dewey wins is New England and the Northeast, so wins Pennsylvania, wins the massive prize of New York, which is, at that point, the biggest Electoral College votes. Doesn’t win Massachusetts or Rhode Island, but that they focus, his strength is there, the exact opposite of today, where we tend to think of that part of the country very much as staunch Democrats, and then he wins that swathe in the mountain states down the middle, but you also look at Strom Thurmond.

Strom Thurmond does pull four states away from the Democrats. He wins in his own South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and he wins them handily, he wins them by a big majority, but if you look at the way that translates into Electoral College, Truman gets 303 votes, Dewey, 189, Strom Thurmond, 39, and then despite having the same amount of votes, Wallace, because he hasn’t got the geographical strength where it’s all concentrated in one place, that that same amount of votes translates into no Electoral College votes for Wallace. There’s an argument to say that even if you take those four states out of it, Truman still wins, and wins convincingly, and he wins the popular vote. So you’ve got a situation where Truman really has pulled out a victory from the jaws of defeat, but also, actually, there’s a very good argument to say where, right at the beginning, I posited the idea that Thurmond and Wallace were weakening Truman by peeling off votes from either side. They also strengthened Truman. So this is one of the things that Truman came to believe, was actually because the racist right and the liberal left, both abandoned him, he appeared a lot less scary, and a lot more moderate than the Democrats could paint him, because you couldn’t paint him as the mad liberal or the Southern friend in the North. So reality, I think Wallace certainly did him a favour, but also, bizarrely, I think Thurmond did it as well.

So before I’ll take a couple of questions, the last slide has to be this, of course. I go back to what we were talking about just before, which was the assumptions that the newspapers and everybody else went into. So the Chicago, just above the line, the “Chicago Tribune” famously has “Dewey defeats Truman” as its headline the next morning, and Harry Truman there, holding it up, was probably still, to this day, the most iconic picture from any election in history, and with a sheer grin on Harry, the mischievous grin on Harry Truman’s face. Not only has he won, but he just really wants to kind of stick it to the press who have done him down all the way through the campaign and through the first levels of his presidency. Just one last point about the Electoral College. Had Thurmond’s vote held up, and his Electoral College done well, and Dewey clawed three states, California, Illinois, and Ohio, if I go back a second, California, 25 votes, Illinois, 28, and Ohio, 25 votes. They were all decided by less than 1% of the vote. Now, 2016, 2020, very close votes in a number of states, but these were big Electoral College vote states, and if they had gone into the other column, you’d have had Dewey. If one or two of them had gone into the other column, you wouldn’t have had a president who’d got to the right limit, and they wouldn’t have got over, today, what would it be? 270 votes then, obviously, there were less states, and you would’ve been thrown into the House of Representatives for the election, because nobody won an overall majority in the Electoral College.

And there was a little bit there that’s worth thinking about in terms of what-ifs, you know, if you follow me, you know I like my what-ifs, which was that had that happened, that’s where Strom Thurmond, Strom Thurmond never thought he was going to win, but Strom Thurmond thought if he could become the power broker in the Electoral College, he might be able to do what had happened in 1876, where the Electoral College was essentially hung, and there was a battle between Samuel Tilden, another governor of New York, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio, and the South was able to bargain and change the way the national policy was going, which enabled the, basically, defanging of reconstruction. So Thurmond thought that, actually, he had an opportunity there of changing things, had it been closer, and it could well have been. So anyway, I will stop you there. I’ll stop sharing slides, and I am happy to just have a look now at some of the questions, if you gimme a second. I’m just looking there. So, yes.

Q&A and Comments:

Clive points out that Harry Truman’s middle initial was S, and it didn’t actually stand for anything. It was Harry S. Truman, but it wasn’t anything in particular, and it was because it was meant to be a nod to both grandparents had names beginning with S. So it was they couldn’t decide which one, so it was just S, but I think it’s just America’s predisposition of always having three-letter acronyms, LBJ, JFK, FDR. You’ve got to have a middle initial. I’m just Mark Malcolmson. I could never become president in the United States for a whole series of different reasons.

Q: Shelly points out saying, “Knowing he was gravely ill, why didn’t FDR prepare Truman or give him any specific role?”

A: It is one of the great questions of modern history. Why that didn’t happen is beyond me, and I think it’s… It’s a shocking dereliction of duty, and actually, as much as FDR was a great man, and maybe it was he just couldn’t envisage his own death, whatever, but it’s your job. It’s, you know, as chief executives of a company, they’ve got to ensure succession planning in terms of… Every organisation, part of your job as being in charge of it is to make sure there’s an orderly succession after you, and given his health, given his background, the fact that he had polio, the fact that he was exhausted by 12 years of running the economy and running a war, why he didn’t prepare his vice president better is one of the great mysteries, and it is, frankly, as somebody who’s quite a fan of his, it’s completely negligent, in my view.

Q: So “How would I compare?” Shelly also asks, “How would I compare 1948 elections to Churchill’s first election after World War II?”

A: Interestingly, I’m a big fan of Clement Attlee. Clement Attlee and Harry Truman have a lot in common. They both followed incredibly charismatic wartime leaders in Churchill and Roosevelt. Both of them were very, very understated. Churchill famously said of Attlee, “An empty car pulled up and Clement Attlee got out,” but Truman and Attlee were truly great men, in my view. They were faced with a nation, were both faced with nations that were broken by the war, I think Britain, more so, and they had to remould what their nation stood for. So, I would actually say Attlee’s win in '45 and Truman’s win in '48 were a validation of hardworking politicians who were trying to make the peace rather than deal with the war, which takes a different type of character, et cetera.

So, they are, I’m seeing… Helen talks about her father voting for Wallace. That’s tremendous. And that’s mostly it. “In the unwritten two-term rule, Goodwin in her bio, Doris Kearns Goodwin of Teddy Roosevelt indicated the worst mistake Teddy Roosevelt made was to announce that he would not run for a third term halfway through his second term.” Yes, and actually, Teddy Roosevelt would’ve been in that category, you could argue, that would’ve been his first term was the other president’s. So, you know, even McKinley got assassinated very early on in the first year of his second term of presidency, so, Teddy Roosevelt could have easily argued that had he gone again in 1908, he was only running for president for a second time, and I think, tactically, he became the perpetual spoiler after that, to be totally honest. Anyway, hopefully I’ve answered some of the questions. Thank you very much for joining me tonight. In a week’s time, we lurch forward to 1960, probably my all-time favourite election, which, of course, is Nixon versus John Kennedy. So hopefully, we get a chance to see you then, but in the meantime, thank you for joining me tonight, and have a lovely rest of the day/evening.