With Pluck and Plain Language, Unlikely Saga Began on a Hot July Night

It was sweltering that night in Philadelphia, and the Democrats were a bedraggled lot. Hardly a delegate at the Democratic National Convention thought President Harry S Truman could win the election. His ratings were low. People used to wink at each other and say: “I’m just mild about Harry.”

Half a century ago on that July 15, the Democrats nominated an incumbent president in an election that remains a remarkable political story with an appealing moral: that in America, the people rule. And that it ain’t over till it’s over. Every underdog politician since then has looked at the 1948 election and taken heart. Some have even won.

Certain that Truman was doomed, the party’s liberals and big-city bosses first tried to draft Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he would not bite. They thought about beckoning liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, but that movement also went nowhere.

Resigned to sticking with Truman, who had replaced their hero when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office, the liberals decided to force Truman to accept a strong civil rights plank.

But that caused even more dissension. Handy Ellis, an Alabama delegate, took the floor and announced the South was bolting.

“We bid you goodbye,” he said, and with that 13 Alabamians and the 23-member Mississippi delegation grabbed their state standards and stomped out.

Later, the Southerners would hold a rump convention as the States Rights Party and nominate the governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond--then a Democrat--as its candidate.

Some of the disenchanted liberals also would break away to nominate former Vice President Henry A. Wallace as the Progressive Party candidate.

There was even thought of dumping Truman in favor of the convention’s keynote speaker, log cabin-born Sen. Alben Barkley of Kentucky, 70.

The country thought New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee, was a shoo-in.

So it was a desultory bunch of discouraged Democrats who waited in the convention hall for Truman to accept the nomination.

Truman started talking. And to the surprise of the Democrats, he gave a stem-winding speech that had them hollering and stomping.

And he surprised everybody by calling the Republican Congress back into special session with a challenge to enact the progressive platform of education, health and civil rights that the GOP had adopted at its Philadelphia convention a month earlier.

The Republicans called it a cheap trick. They gave Truman the silent treatment when he addressed the special session. He asked for an array of liberal legislation the Republicans had rejected in the regular session. Eleven days later, Congress adjourned with a barren record.

The rest is a classic come-from-behind story.

Certain of success, Dewey limited himself to high-minded political platitudes during his “Victory Special” train tour. Truman barnstormed the country on a 31,000-mile “whistle-stop” tour. He made hundreds of speeches from the back of his train, blistering the “do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Congress.”

That Congress had passed a law making it impossible for the government to lease additional bins for grain storage--and farmers reaped a tremendous harvest that summer with no place to store it. Farm prices fell for the first time since the depressed 1930s, and farmers blamed the Republicans.

Still, every poll predicted a Republican landslide. Truman didn’t believe it. He wrote his sister on Sept. 2 predicting that he would remain a prisoner in the White House: “It looks like another four years of slavery.”

The country liked his plain language and his pluck--he sometimes spoke at night in pajamas, and always introduced Bess, his wife, as “The Boss.”

The country chose the underdog, and it wasn’t all that close. Of the 48 states, Dixiecrat Thurmond won four, Wallace carried none, the GOP’s Dewey took 16 and Truman swept 28.