DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN

An absorbing chronicle of the months leading up to the extraordinary 1948 presidential election.

In this insightful look at the players and issues that dominated the campaign, Baime, whose previous book was The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World (2017), focuses on the years following Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, leading to Truman’s surprising triumph in the 1948 election. Without downplaying the seriousness of the postwar problems confronting the new president, the author pays particular attention to how they affected his chances for election given his opponents on both the left and the right. These included Henry Wallace, FDR’s one-time vice president, who ran as a Progressive candidate in the 1948 election; Strom Thurmond, founder of the States’ Rights Democratic Party (popularly known as the Dixiecrats); and Thomas Dewey, the popular New York governor and Truman’s main rival. Truman had some unfortunate stumbles in his first years as president, and seemingly everyone—including his wife and daughter—believed that he could never actually win a presidential election. “To err is Truman” was a “popular quip” at the beginning of his presidency. Compounding his woes, Republicans won both houses in the 1946 midterms by a landslide. However, despite his hostility to what he called the “Do-Nothing Congress,” he passed major bills like the Marshall Plan and championed civil rights legislation, which so infuriated the South that many switched allegiance to the Dixiecrats. In 1948, Truman’s name was purposely left off the ballot in Alabama. Baime engagingly chronicles how Truman campaigned vigorously and creatively. Each speech on his whistle-stop tours was tailored to his audience; a documentary, The Truman Story, and a comic-book version of his biography were released in October 1948; and Eleanor Roosevelt gave a stump speech that was broadcast on radio to the entire nation. There were TV and newspaper ads as well.

Even readers familiar with Truman’s presidency will be engaged by the story of the campaign that came before.