FDR's death from a brain hemorrhage in April 1945 put Vice President Harry Truman in charge. A one-term Senator, the bespectacled Truman had only been vice president for three months when he took the Oath of Office, a job he was unprepared for. Yet the limitations of his character and experience quickly became apparent. A product of the Teddy Pendergast machine in St. Louis, he started out as an amateurish public speaker, although in time he developed into a fiery orator. Truman was often prone to stick to bad ideas or implement good ones in a half-cocked way, and he was known for angry FYI remarks and letters when things didn't go his way. He also shared a Grant or Harding tendency to hand public offices to his crooked friends from back home.Truman presided over the closing stages of World War II; Germany surrendered on May 8, ending the war in Europe. The war in the Pacific continued and it seemed necessary to invade Japan until the atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert that summer. Truman ordered its use, and more than 100,000 dead Japanese and two incinerated cities later, Tokyo threw in the towel.
The transition back to a peacetime economy was painful and serious inflation, huge labor strikes, racial unrest, and shortages of raw materials plagued the United States in 1946. Republicans, using the slogan "Had enough?", took advantage to seize control of Congress in the midterms, the first time both houses were under their rule since 1930, and with Truman's overall unpopularity they had good reason to feel the White House was within reach after 16 long years. The 80th Congress, which included two freshmen Congressmen named Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, convened in January 1947 and promptly forced the president to remove certain New Deal policies, cut taxes, and pass the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act as well as the 22nd Amendment, which limited the president to two terms (although it did not apply to Truman himself).Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower was tapped by both parties to run in 1948, but he declined and so the contest came down to Ohio Senator Robert Taft, former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, and New York governor and 1944 Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. Other possibilities were Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, California governor Earl Warren, and General Douglas MacArthur. However, Stassen and Dewey were considered the two front-runners. On May 17, the two held a debate on the radio in Portland, Oregon, the first-ever radio debate between two candidates. The high point of the debate was when Stassen proposed outlawing the CPUSA, to which Dewey replied that he would firmly oppose such a measure on 1st Amendment grounds; to ban the speech of those we disagreed with, he said, made us no better than Hitler or Stalin.
The RNC was held in Philadelphia on June 21-25, the first party convention broadcast on the new medium of television. Dewey was easily nominated for another go at the presidency. He chose Earl Warren as his running mate and most polls believed the Republican ticket was all-but a lock for the White House.Truman meanwhile had a less enthusiastic response from his own party and his chances of being reelected were considered low. The DNC was held in Philadelphia from July 12-15 to renominate him and the biggest source of division came from Southern Democrats. At the convention, the Democrat Party for the first time in its history adopted a civil rights plank, although Northern and Western liberals felt it didn't go far enough. Speaking at the convention, Minneapolis mayor and Senatorial candidate Hubert Humphrey called on the South to "step out of the shadow of states rights and into the sunshine of human rights." Truman came down on the side of the more aggressive civil rights plank in part because Democrat leaders hoped to get an expanded share of black votes. Southern delegates stormed out of the convention hall in protest. Truman tapped Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for his running mate, but he declined, so the president instead went with Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley.
Upset Southern Democrats held their own convention in Birmingham, Alabama on July 17 and nominated a protest ticket, the States' Rights Party, consisting of South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond and Mississippi governor Fielding Wright. The Thurmond-Wright ticket did not expect to win the election, but hoped to split the electoral vote and force it into the House of Representatives where they could jawbone Truman or Dewey into make concessions on civil rights for their support. The other hope was to prove the Democrats could not win without the South and thereby be dissuaded from future civil rights support.As a further complication, ex-Vice President Henry Wallace had broke with the Truman Administration's newfound hardline anti-Soviet stance and ran on the third party Progressive ticket, a coalition of ex-New Dealers, idealistic liberals, pacifists, and outright communists. Wallace criticized the Marshall Plan for enslaving Europe to the dollar, and his apparent pro-Soviet stance made him highly unpopular; he was booed and had garbage thrown at him at campaign stops. But he seemed the only idealist during the increasing gloom of the Cold War.With the Democrats split three ways, Dewey's victory came off as a foregone conclusion, a sentiment helped along by a largely friendly media. The New York governor limited his speeches to vague generalities and avoided partisan attacks on Truman the way he'd done on FDR four years ago. Dewey offered few definitive plans for his presidency, merely uttering platitudes such as "Our rivers are full of fish" and "Our future lies ahead."
Truman seemed doomed; he lacked support from major Democrat power brokers such as organized labor, and even his own family believed he had no chance. But the wiry president disagreed; against all odds, he was convinced he could pull it off and so launched an aggressive "whistle stop" campaign that focused heavily on his backyard in the Midwest, a region of the country he understood well. The folksy Truman ignored Dewey and instead focused his ire on what he called the "do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Congress." He defended the New Deal and charged that a Republican victory would take Americans back to the dark days of 1932.The Chicago Tribune ran a headline reading "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN", but as the returns came in on the night of November 2, it had become clear that Truman pulled off an upset victory, taking 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189 and 49% of the popular vote to 45%. Strom Thurmond, who was only on the ballot in a few Southern states, carried the electoral votes of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama (Truman was not on the ballot in that state), and South Carolina, plus one Tennessee elector, and 2% of the popular vote. Democrats also retook both houses of Congress. Truman won most of the Western states and a significant part of the Midwest and the Solid South. Dewey's votes came mainly from parts of the Midwest and from the Northeast, in part because key Democrat voting blocs such as organized labor failed to turn out in those states. In the end, Truman's aggressive campaigning and everyman personality had won the day against the stiff, arrogant, and evasive Dewey, compared by the acerbic Alice Roosevelt to "the groom on a wedding cake."
>>18389702this election was when the Democrats and the South started to part ways which led to the racist Dixiecrats becoming a core Republican constituency
>>18389710Officially Truman was not on the ballot only in Alabama, but in the other three Thurmond states he was listed as essentially a third party candidate.
Thurmond was also on the ballot in North Dakota (literally why?)
>>18389733>is in the Senate until age 100 when he couldn't even shit without assistance
>>18389744That's how seniority works. The longer a Congressman or Senator is in office, the more powerful they become.
>>18389759This was the last election before South Carolina introduced state-issued secret ballots.
Dewey was running off some awful polling data and it didn't help that the print media in the 40s was mostly Republican controlled. Most of the data came from rich old money Northeastern WASPs which had always been a solid Republican bloc and just assumed it was the national sentiment.
>>18389774Truman had an excellent and extremely well-prepared campaign team that would research the town he would be stopping in and find out about their local history, culture, etc so he could reference them in speeches. Dewey just felt like an automaton giving generic, meaningless speeches about nothing. Truman was the first presidential candidate to really campaign in the modern way where the candidate eats at McDonalds, does pancake flipping contests at county fairs, kisses babies etc.
>>18389774They'd stopped even doing polls by the fall and Wallace basically diverted any criticism that could be levied at Truman for being a communist sympathizer.
Dewey was a fearless guy, he waged a war on organized crime in New York long before RICO statutes, so no FBI help only his own state's resources, and he put his life in danger targeting guys like Dutch Schulz and Lucky Luciano.
>>18389774Polling data in the 40s was still pretty much in its infancy and especially didn't survey rural voters which comprised a lot of Truman's coalition. They focused mostly on urban voters just because they were more accessible.
This was the closest the Electoral College ever came close to be deadlocked post 12th amendment and in a multi-party system. Had Ohio and California voted for Dewey(Truman only won them 0.24% and 0.44% respectively), Thurmond's run would have been successful. >>18389774>>18389805The polls were off of course, but they did capture Truman's increasing momentum as time went on.
>>18389744But he could still grope women without assistance, so he was in peak form.
Thurmond was such and evil and backwards man. I can only wonder who delivered his eulogy...
>>18389839>Thurmond was such and evil and backwards man. I can only wonder who delivered his eulogy...I can't tell you that without diverting the thread to modern politics that are off topic for /his/. (^:
>>18389746not what the Founders intended either, they expected a term or two and you go back to your farm. traveling to the capital was also physically demanding back then and a geriatric literally would not have been able to do it.
>>18389839The funniest thing about him was that, in retrospective, he ran for President at the start of his national career. He only had one year as governor of South Carolina then.
>>18389805Think they used phone surveys? But phones were a bit of a luxury item in the 40s and a lot of poorer people didn't even have one.
>>18389844>traveling to the capital was also physically demanding back thenThey should have made it even more demanding. The capital should be somewhere in southwest Missouri in-between the Mississippi Ohio and Missouri river basins.
>>18389852Sorry I meant southeast* Missouri
>>18389852Jefferson pls
Dewey's campaign was so much like a precursor of Hillary's, the same boring non-campaign, the same arrogance and expecting to win by doing nothing because some cherry picked polls taken from your own party's donors said you had a 90% chance to win, ignoring your opponent as he's running a swinging populist campaign...
>>18389857Jefferson just looked out for Virginia(which led to its political occupation by the DC suburbs down the line), he would not agree to move the capital to the heart of America
>>18389858+a 90% friendly media
>>18389860I heard he wanted Colombus to be rhe capital
Truman's everyman crudities resonated with Ma and Pa. Dewey played it safe, even though he had shown in '44 that he could be an aggressive campaigner, and his speeches used silly, empty slogans like "Our future lies ahead of us." He didn't campaign much. The Democrat civil rights plank helped get black voters aboard. Also it probably helped when Wallace said Truman was too tough on the Soviets.
>>18389805most polls had stopped in September, one poll from early October had Dewey winning by 53% of the vote which showed that the gap was closing a bit
>>18389710>The Chicago Tribune ran a headline reading "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN"That particular paper was a Republican-controlled one, they predicted Dewey not only wins but Republicans retain control of Congress.
>>18389858Dewey was a very good candidate - the best the Republicans could have nominated - and was on track to win comfortably, Truman pulled an absolute masterclass with the special session of Congress which the Republican majority could not have handled any worse even if they tried, they were the ones who gave Truman the victory, not Dewey's campaigning or lack thereof. Meanwhile in 2016 the first thing to note is that Hillary forced herself to the nomination even though VP Biden was by far the better candidate(he didn't run just because "it was her turn" of course), and the only things which really had an impact during the campaign were the Access Hollywood tape, which was offset by Comey briefly reopening the email investigation. We can conclude from this that Hillary's loss was probably already baked in due to her baggage with the emails, unlike Dewey who was the best candidate available and would have won without a huge congressional Republican blunder.
>>18389841We got a sticky for the new pope being elected, I don't see why the delivery of a eulogy at a (presumably) religious funeral wouldn't be considered humanities :^)
>>18389877We really should have got a sticky for Kissinger dying
the Soviet blockade of Berlin that summer no doubt helped Truman as he was able to deliver a tough response to it
>>18389847Polls in the 40s were usually taken from phone surveys or vehicle registrations at a time when those were far from universal.
>>18389885poorer people were more likely to use party lines which weren't very private so you would be not as likely to answer surveys
>>18389861The media had a lot of the same issue in the 40s we see today, they were generally rich, elite people remarkably out of touch with ordinary wagecucks.
>>18389830>But he could still grope women without assistance, so he was in peak form.At Storm Thurmond’s funeral people joked that they’d have trouble closing the casket because of his massive penis. Earlier in life he fathered a daughter with a black woman and quietly supported her for years.
>>18389893They were never not that way, yes even in the supposed "golden ages" of journalism where they got to pretend to be the underdog against the big bad Nixon
as others said, Thurmond was much like George Wallace in 68, he was hoping to split the Democrat vote and force it into the House where he could extract concessions from the winner
>>18389710>DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
>>18389903Wallace was splitting both Nixon and Humphrey, Thurmond split Truman exclusively. Still when you look at the statewide margins Thurmond came closer to getting what he wanted.
>>18389702>FDR's death from a brain hemorrhageAriel Sharon was also a "king"-like figure in Israeli politics and he also died from a brain hemorrhage, though in his case he was in a coma for years because his family wanted to milk his salary
The polls throughout the FDR-Truman administrations nearly always gave Republicans an advantage since the media was then largely Republican-controlled (they also thought Alf Landon was a lock in 36). I believe it was only since the 50s-60s that the media started to become a Democrat-controlled business because by 60 they were already slavering over JFK's cum.
>>18389922>they also thought Alf Landon was a lock in 36Precisely one poll found Landon winning, every other poll had FDR as the winner albeit underestimating the scale of his victory.
>>18389710The party split turned out to not be as destructive to Truman as it might have seemed, because Wallace drew away suspicions that the administration had communist plants in it (which was silly anyway since Truman had done a 180 from FDR's policy of friendly US-Soviet ties and relations between the two superpowers were quickly deteriorating by 47). The States Rights ticket also drew away Dixiecrat support from Truman, and at this early stage Republicans were already working to cleave the South off from the Democrat orbit.
>>18389936>and at this early stage Republicans were already working to cleave the South off from the Democrat orbit.Do you realize Earl fucking Warren was on their ticket that year?
>>18389858Hillary also didn't campaign except in safe Democrat states she had no risk of losing.
>>18389702>only eight Florida electoral votes back then
>>18389950Florida was a barely habitable swamp shithole back then and prior to the interstate system it had a rather poor road network.
>>18389946She campaigned heavily in Pennsylvania, where she lost.
Truman traveled 22,000 miles in total and gave 352 campaign speeches. Dewey...made 16 speeches. The detachment of the leftist and Dixiecrat wings of the Democrat Party also helped him look safely centrist while Dewey had to deal with his party's /pol/tard wing represented by Taft and Bricker.
>>18389959Some /pol/tards also wanted to draft MacArthur to run since he was a huge hero of that crowd back then.
>>18389959>taft and bricker>/pol/tardsThey were basically Goldwaters. Taft supported desegregating the army and fought against the KKK early in his career. They would have probably opposed the '64 CRA for the same reasons Goldwater did, but you don't really understand what /pol/ is if you think that made them "/pol/tards"
>>18389871in fact Truman's campaign team had an electoral map that almost predicted the election outcome perfectly, the only state they got wrong was New York
>>18389959that is a hell of a lot of traveling to pull off back when they had to rely on railroads and propeller aircraft
>>18389974Goldwater would have been considered a dangerous extreme leftist by current year /pol/tards and Trumpoids, which is ironic, because Trump has much more in common with someone like Bernie Sanders than Goldwater with any of them.
As others said, Dewey did campaign aggressively in 44 but it didn't work out for him (although FDR was a far harder target to attack than Truman) and he got cold feet and was afraid to do anything controversial this time around.
>>18389990You are overthinking it. Dewey was the heavy underdog in '44 but the favorite in '48. The fact is even if he campaigned intensively he would have lost because of Truman's special session of Congress and the Berlin airlift. Just like Hillary would have still lost in Wisconsin even if she had visited there (people ignore that she campaigned constantly and spent tons of money on Pennsylavania and Florida but still lost there). In other words, the underdog has to campaign heavily while the favorite just needs to avoid blunders. Dewey was a great candidate and didn't blunder, congressional Republicans did.
>>18389702Truman was inexperienced in 45-46 and didn't really know what he was doing which is why he allowed the GOP to grab Congress out from under him, but by 48 he had become a considerably smarter politician and out-maneuvered them.
>>18389959recognizing Israel also helped him get the Jewish vote (yes that was already safety Democrat but can't have hurt and probably increased their turnout)
>>18389885It was worse than that. The problem in 48 was the pollsters' use of quota polling in which they ordered professional interviewers to find people who fit a variety of quotas representative of the electorate. That led them to systematically (across several elections) overestimate the Republican vote.
>>18390006An even more serious flaw in the method of quota sampling is the fact that ultimately the choice of who is in the sample is left to the human element. Recall that other than meeting the quotas the interviewers were free to choose whom they interviewed. Looking back over the history of quota sampling, one can see a clear tendency to overestimate the Republican vote. Gallup nonetheless predicted FDR would win in 36, 40, and 44, but that was more luck than anything. They and all the other polls ran out of luck in 48 and it proved quota polling was a faulty system.
>>18390010Also, James Farley was a Democrat boss who had a reputation for accurately calling elections. He thought most voters had made up their minds by convention time and that the general elections were a pointless circus. He was a bigger deal than Nate Silver is today, and everyone took him seriously. They basically stopped polling in the fall, which failed to account for the first October surprise.
>>18389906The paper thing was only the Chicago Tribune. Polling was not a sophisticated science yet back then. The Tribune had a system where they went to press earlier than other papers even before results were in the East. They relied on an analyst with a good track record. They engaged in a little wishful thinking as they were staunch Republicans and not at all unbiased.
>>18389707Dewey's own platform was relatively liberal/centrist and Truman challenged the Republican Congress to pass their candidate's platform.
Gallup missed the final results by 9.5% which was nowhere near as bad as this by a "gold standard pollster" in big 2024
>>18389702The last time a Democrat won without New York.
>>18390032the fact that both Dewey and Wallace were from NY might have been why
>>18390002This actually was a factor btw. Wallace strongly endorsed the creation of a Jewish state and was getting significant support from Jews so Truman didn't want to lose those votes.
Dewey looked like fucking Vincent Price.
>>18390019Truman moved to set the tone with the special session. Taft and co.'s reasoning was that Truman is practically a lame duck since his loss is all but guaranteed, so they shouldn't do anything that he publicly demanded them to. It backfired massively on them.
>Truman presided over the closing phases of the Second World War. Germany surrendered on May 8, V-E Day, and the fighting in Europe was done. But Japan showed no sign of quitting and it was feared that the only resolution was a ground invasion of the islands that might leave as many as a million American servicemen dead or wounded. The invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa had produced a combined 118,000 American casualties and the Navy had a number of ships damaged or sunk from Japanese kamikaze attacks. If it was this expensive to take these little islands, the cost of invading Japan itself was something nobody even wanted to think about.>However, there was a solution. Exiled scientists who fled the Nazis, led by Albert Einstein, wrote FDR back in 1939 about the possibility of constructing a super weapon by splitting uranium atoms to unleash an awesome amount of energy that might be able to destroy an entire city in one blast. Some $2 billion was allocated to the so-called Manhattan Project despite the skepticism of some in the military. With British assistance, the top secret program was pushed forward, not in the least because it was feared that Germany might get there first. FDR did not live to see the atomic bomb bear fruit; it was first detonated in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.
>Truman gave his approval and the bomber Enola Gay unleashed its deadly cargo over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6. The blast instantly killed 70,000 people and left a charred crater where the city had stood. Still Japan did not surrender. Two days later the Soviets declared war and invaded Manchuria; Japanese resistance swiftly collapsed. On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, leaving 40,000 dead. At last the Emperor Hirohito met his generals and told them further resistance was futile. Japan threw in the towel the next day, provided the emperor retain his throne. This was accepted, and World War II was over.>The United States had sustained 1 million battle casualties in the war, of whom 1/3rd were killed or mortally wounded. Modern medical tech allowed the death toll from wounds and disease to be significantly reduced. The US mainland was spared any enemy guns or bombs save for a few mostly useless Japanese attempts to fly bomb-bearing balloons over the West Coast. America had intact territory and infrastructure when most of the world lay in ruins.
>World War II was the cleanest and most well-executed war the US ever fought, one reason being the war preparations that began over a year and a half before Pearl Harbor, and the fact that nearly all Americans were on the same page when it came to winning without the political divisions that marred other conflicts. A new crop of war heroes emerged in Nimitz, MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Bradley, and the generalship of the US military was overall first-rate. American industry had been able to support war on two fronts while also supplying Britain and the Soviets with materials, and overall war production stood as one of the 20th century's most miraculous feats, refuting Herman Goering's boast that Americans could only build consumer goods.>Although the government planned and managed the war effort to a greater extent than other conflicts the US fought, this was done without serious impairment of anyone's civil liberties, save for the 110,000 luckless Japanese put in internment camps, or African-Americans who had to deal with ironic situation of fighting the world's greatest racist with a segregated army, and to come home to a country where they were still not regarded as equal citizens. Fortunately, however, the defeat of the Nazis discredited scientific racial theories and made the end of Jim Crow inevitable.
>As the dust settled, trouble was brewing and Joseph Stalin was the main author of it. The Soviet dictator's divisions were occupying Eastern Europe with no desire to leave any time soon and erecting puppet communist governments there.>The fundamental gulf in political systems and world view between the US and USSR would have been a problem anyway, but there were many long-running disputes about to come to a head. Moscow didn't forget that American troops intervened in the Russian civil war, or that the US did not extend diplomatic recognition to the USSR for 16 years. The Soviets were also not let in on the Manhattan Project and Lend-Lease aid was abruptly ended in 1945.>Stalin's main aim was to ensure Soviet security from future invasions by creating a wall of satellite governments in Eastern Europe. The USSR was utterly exhausted from the brutal war, twenty million of its citizens dead, and wanted nothing more than a rest to lick their wounds, but nobody in the West knew this.
>As with World War I, the country had to demobilize and return to peacetime conditions. This was done relatively easily and quickly and Congress provided generous stipends with the GI Bill to allow returning veterans to obtain a college education (if they were white--African-Americans regrettably were excluded from GI Bill benefits). War factories and other installations were shut down and sold off with the naive idea that they would never be needed again. Price controls were lifted, though Truman refused to budge on lifting rent controls until Congress forced him to. Inflation soared 33% between 1945-47.>A wave of paralyzing strikes that hit the country in 1946 helped allow the Republican sweep of Congress that fall. The 80th Congress, feeling that organized labor had gotten out of control, decided to take action. The Taft-Hartley Act forbade closed shops and made unions liable for all damage resulting from jurisdictional disputes among themselves. Union leaders, though not workers, had to swear that they were not communists. Truman vetoed the bill but Congress overrode him. Despite considerable grousing from the unions, Taft-Hartley in the end did not significantly hurt organized labor and at least 14 million Americans claimed AFL-CIO membership by 1950.>Black laborers remained underprivileged, but many felt that a change was coming--the defeat of Hitler had made institutionalized racism less popular, Truman desegregated the armed forces, and Major League Baseball became integrated when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson.
>>18389974>>18389985People still talk about /pol/ like it’s some nazi place when it’s now full of brown commie Muslims and commie latinxes only united in their hatred of Jews and Jeets. It’s not 2016 anymore uncs. Twitter and instagram are more far right today than /pol/.
>>18390205Neither neo-nazis or third-worldists are particularly similar to the conservative wing of the Republican party in 1948.
