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In 1948, Harry S. Truman and Alben W. Barkley were elected president and vice president of the United States, defeating Republican nominees Thomas E. Dewey and Earl Warren. Truman, a Democrat and vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, had ascended to the presidency upon Roosevelt's death in 1945. He announced his candidacy for election on ...
- Give 'em hell, Harry!
- "I'm Just Wild About Harry"
Down in the polls and under fire within his own party, Truman alone remained confident of his victory. On the morning after the election, Americans rose to news of the most surprising comeback in presidential election history. In Missouri, Truman learned of his victory at 4:00am, when a Secret Service agent woke him.
The 1948 United States presidential election was the 41st quadrennial presidential election.It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1948. In one of the greatest election upsets in American history, incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman defeated heavily favored Republican New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, and third-party candidates, becoming the third president to succeed to the ...
- Missouri
- Democratic
- Harry S. Truman
- Alben W. Barkley
- Overview
- Historical background
- The conventions
United States presidential election of 1948, American presidential election held on Nov. 2, 1948, in which Democratic Pres. Harry S. Truman defeated Republican Thomas E. Dewey.
The roots of the 1948 election date to 1940, when Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to run for an unprecedented third term as president. He was challenged unsuccessfully by his vice president, John Nance Garner, and eventually chose as his running mate Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture. In 1944, when Roosevelt decided to seek a fourth term, party conservatives, especially Southerners, opposed Wallace’s renomination. Truman, a respected U.S. senator from Missouri who was admired by the public at large, was nominated to take Wallace’s place. On April 12, 1945, just 82 days into his fourth term, Roosevelt died. During that period, Truman had met with the president only twice, and Roosevelt, apparently unaware of how ill he was, made little effort to inform Truman about the administration’s programs and plans, such as the program that would soon produce the atomic bomb.
Truman successfully concluded the war against Germany, brought the United States into the United Nations, and engineered the surrender of Japan through the deployment of the atomic weapon. As his term progressed, however, his popularity diminished, as did that of the Democratic Party, and by the time the 1948 election was on the horizon, he was about the only politician in the United States who thought he had a chance to win election. The Republicans had triumphed in the congressional elections of 1946, running against Truman as the symbol of the New Deal. That electoral victory seemed to indicate that the American people had tired of the Democrats and had grown weary of reform. Some Democrats, believing Truman had no chance, tried to tempt Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to seek the Democratic nomination, but he demurred. They also tried to persuade Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas to run, but he also declined. Still, Truman was confident in his position. In February, at the Jefferson-Jackson day dinner in Washington, D.C., which many Southerners boycotted because of his civil rights program, he declared, “I will tell you who is going to be the next president of the United States. You are looking at him right now!”
The Republican National Convention met in Philadelphia, June 21–25, 1948. It was a relatively tranquil affair, particularly in comparison with what would take place in Philadelphia the next month at the Democratic convention. The Republican convention, the first ever to be televised, nominated New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey (also the party’s nominee in 1944) as its presidential candidate and California Gov. Earl Warren as Dewey’s vice presidential running mate. The Republicans adopted a platform that called for the ending of segregation in the military, an equal rights amendment for women to the U.S. Constitution, support for the recognition of Israel (which had declared independence earlier in the year), abolition of the poll tax, and strong enforcement of anticommunist regulations.
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The Democratic National Convention convened in Philadelphia, July 12–14, 1948. The convention was marked by intense conflict, particularly over civil rights. Though a stronger civil rights plank was rejected, the Democratic platform did call for the desegregation of the military, enraging Southerners particularly. (Truman would issue Executive Order 9981 desegregating the military on July 26.) The Mississippi delegation, along with more than a dozen members of the Alabama contingent, left in protest. Still, Truman was nominated on the first ballot, beating Richard B. Russell, a U.S. senator from Georgia, who received the overwhelming backing of the Southern delegates who remained in the hall. The keynote speaker, Alben Barkley, a U.S. senator from Kentucky, was nominated as Truman’s vice presidential running mate without opposition. Particularly notable at the convention was the address by Hubert H. Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis, Minn., who made a passionate plea in favour of a stronger civil rights plank and whose city had adopted the country’s first municipal fair employment law, arguing:
To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.
Within a few days of the convention’s end, a group of Southerners met in Birmingham, Ala., and formed the States’ Rights Party, popularly labeled the Dixiecrats. The delegates nominated South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond as their candidate for president. Worsening Truman’s chances for reelection was also the defection of liberal Democrats, who broke with the president over his hard-line opposition to the Soviet Union. Many of these liberals supported the candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, who ran as the Progressive Party candidate for president.
The Campaign and Election of 1948: The Democratic Party’s poor showing in the 1946 mid-term congressional elections—in which the Republican Party took control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time since 1928—considerably dimmed Truman’s prospects for re-election in 1948. Indeed, a public opinion poll ...
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Jun 12, 2006 · Few people believed that President Harry S. Truman had a chance of winning the 1948 presidential election. The three great national polling organizations all predicted that Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, his Republican opponent, would win by a wide margin. The press was equally certain of a Dewey victory, for the odds against the ...
Election night. Dewey, Thomas E. Thomas E. Dewey entering a voting booth on Nov. 2, 1948. As the returns rolled in on election night, Truman took a narrow lead, but political commentators still believed that Dewey would ultimately win. Emblematic of this was the Chicago Daily Tribune ’s decision to distribute a paper with the famous headline ...
