Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America’s Soul, by A. J. Baime (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). My rating: 5 of 5.
You know the photo. Truman, grinning, holds up the newspaper with the headline that got the election wrong. What you may not know is how unlikely that grin was. A year and a half earlier, almost nobody in his own party thought he could win. This book explains how he did it.
What the book covers
Baime follows Truman out of Roosevelt’s shadow and through the 1948 campaign. The Democrats split three ways, with Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights ticket in the South and Henry Wallace’s Progressive campaign on the left. Abroad, the Soviets blockaded West Berlin. Thomas Dewey ran a careful, confident campaign that assumed victory. Truman got on a train and talked to anyone who would listen. The hardcover runs about 432 pages and reads quickly.
What stayed with me
An unlikely president. “Truman had no college degree. He had never had the money to own his own home,” Baime writes. He had never been a mayor or a governor. He later said he had become the most powerful man in the world by accident. That background is a large part of why voters trusted him.
The fall in the polls. In about a year, Truman’s approval rating dropped 50 points, landing at 37 percent before the 1946 midterms. His party lost Congress. By any normal measure, he was finished.
Health care, in 1945. On November 19, 1945, Truman asked Congress for a national health insurance program for working Americans. It went nowhere, but the date surprised me. The debate is older than most of us assume.
The National Security Act. While running for his political life, Truman also signed the 1947 law that created the CIA, the National Security Council and an independent Air Force, and folded the War and Navy Departments into what became the Department of Defense. That alone would define most presidencies.
The special session gambit. Dewey and Truman agreed on more than you might expect, including civil rights. Truman called the Republican Congress back into session in the summer of 1948 and dared it to pass Dewey’s own platform. When it did not, he had his campaign theme.
A new class arrives. The 1946 midterms that went so badly for Truman also brought Joseph McCarthy, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon to Congress. You can watch the next twenty years of American politics taking shape in the background.
Who should read it
Anyone who likes a good underdog story, anyone interested in the presidency, and anyone who thinks the polls have settled an election before the votes are counted. It pairs well with David Pietrusza’s 1960, which picks up several of the same characters twelve years later.
Quotes are short excerpts credited to the author. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The price you pay does not change. I read this book on my own, and no one asked me or paid me to review it. See Disclosures.