Not only that, he did it without spending mega bucks and lying about his opponent. It was on this day in 1948 that Harry S. Truman managed one of the great election upsets in American history, beating the Republican governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, for the presidency. Truman had been doing badly in the polls in part because hed come into office after Franklin Roosevelts sudden death on April 12, 1945, and hed never really lived up to Roosevelts reputation. Truman wasnt well known, and people painted him as a country bumpkin from Missouri, with no college degree. Republicans took control of the Congress in the mid-term elections in 1946, and factions of the Democratic Party were splitting off into the Progressive Party and the Dixiecrats. Two months before the election, the pollster Elmo Roper announced that he was going to stop surveying voters, because Truman was so far behind. But Truman didnt give up. He set out on his Whistle Stop Tour, with a private railroad car outfitted with a sound system so that he could pull into small towns and give speeches directly from the train. That fall of 1948, he traveled 21,928 miles, just short of the distance around the world, and he delivered more than 300 speeches, including the first speech ever delivered by an American president to a black audience in Harlem. On Election Day, he went to bed early, after a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. When he woke up around midnight and turned on the radio, they were reporting that he was ahead in the popular vote by more than 1 million, but the announcer said that he was still undoubtedly beaten. It turned out that he had won 303 electoral votes to Deweys 189. Not a single news organization in the country had predicted the election correctly. Two days after the election, Truman was making an appearance in St. Louis and somebody handed him a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. He held the paper over his head, and that became the source of the famous photograph. An unsigned editorial in the conservative New York Sun said of Trumans upset victory, You just have to take off your hat to a beaten man who refuses to stay licked.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 16:07:44 +0000
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