Book Review: 1948 Harry Truman’s Improbable Victory and the Year That Transformed America
David Pietrusza is one of my favorite authors of American political history, and anything written about the 1948 election is like mind porn to an American political history geek, so Pietrusza's latest book 1948: Harry Truman’s Improbable Victory and the Year That Transformed America had all the natural ingredients to be a great read. It's a very good book, though not quite as good as the author's two earlier forays into numerically titled presidential election tomes (the exceptional 1960 - LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies and the amusing 1920: The Year of Six Presidents).
This book isn't as much an analysis of the most famous upset in US Presidential election history, as it is a series of anecdotes, many of the unbelievable for their fly-on-the-wall quality. Going into the 1948 election, it seemed as if Harry Truman was a dead duck come November. The Democratic party had split into several factions, with the left wing supporting former Vice President Henry Wallace, and the southern segregationists backing Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. Many of those who remained in the party viewed Truman as a lightweight, as someone in over his head. He had alienated labor, a huge supporter of the Democratic party. He had delicate issues such as civil rights and the fate of the Jews displaced as a result of the second world war, and inflation was rampant and seemingly out of control. Meanwhile, the Republicans looked like they had a sure winner in crime-busting New York Governor Thomas Dewey. The entire media seemed to have elected Dewey without the formality of a vote and many leading Democrats such as Eleanor Roosevelt and her son James viewed Truman as a pariah.
Pietrusza tells the story of how Truman turned things around by drawing support from Wallace and his Progressives, who became fractured from their association with the Communist Party, and how he limited the loss of support to segregationists by seeming to be all things to everyone on the issue of civil rights. He also describes how Thomas Dewey snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by running a sterile campaign that failed to fight back against attacks, failed to showcase the candidate in swing states, and that paid the price of assuming victory rather than earning it.
Readers looking for an analysis of the 1948 election are better off reading Zachary Karabell's excellent book The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election. Pietrusza leaves the reader wondering whether Truman's victory was the result of a masterful campaign strategy or just dumb luck, and he covers his bases by writing in such a way that both are possible, without committing to any verdict on Truman. But what makes this such an enjoyable read are the stories Pietrusza tells, and he's got a million of them, from the way the candidates' spouses felt (according to Pietrusza, Mrs. Earl Warren, the wife of Dewey's running mate, dreaded the possibility of her husband winning and actually voted for Truman) to how the Chicago Tribune came to post the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman".
Although this isn't Pietrusza's best book, that's much like saying that Lou Gehrig wasn't the greatest New York Yankee. It's is still a great read either for the history geek, or for someone who just likes to read gossip about a President and his contemporaries.
This book isn't as much an analysis of the most famous upset in US Presidential election history, as it is a series of anecdotes, many of the unbelievable for their fly-on-the-wall quality. Going into the 1948 election, it seemed as if Harry Truman was a dead duck come November. The Democratic party had split into several factions, with the left wing supporting former Vice President Henry Wallace, and the southern segregationists backing Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. Many of those who remained in the party viewed Truman as a lightweight, as someone in over his head. He had alienated labor, a huge supporter of the Democratic party. He had delicate issues such as civil rights and the fate of the Jews displaced as a result of the second world war, and inflation was rampant and seemingly out of control. Meanwhile, the Republicans looked like they had a sure winner in crime-busting New York Governor Thomas Dewey. The entire media seemed to have elected Dewey without the formality of a vote and many leading Democrats such as Eleanor Roosevelt and her son James viewed Truman as a pariah.
Pietrusza tells the story of how Truman turned things around by drawing support from Wallace and his Progressives, who became fractured from their association with the Communist Party, and how he limited the loss of support to segregationists by seeming to be all things to everyone on the issue of civil rights. He also describes how Thomas Dewey snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by running a sterile campaign that failed to fight back against attacks, failed to showcase the candidate in swing states, and that paid the price of assuming victory rather than earning it.
Readers looking for an analysis of the 1948 election are better off reading Zachary Karabell's excellent book The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election. Pietrusza leaves the reader wondering whether Truman's victory was the result of a masterful campaign strategy or just dumb luck, and he covers his bases by writing in such a way that both are possible, without committing to any verdict on Truman. But what makes this such an enjoyable read are the stories Pietrusza tells, and he's got a million of them, from the way the candidates' spouses felt (according to Pietrusza, Mrs. Earl Warren, the wife of Dewey's running mate, dreaded the possibility of her husband winning and actually voted for Truman) to how the Chicago Tribune came to post the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman".
Although this isn't Pietrusza's best book, that's much like saying that Lou Gehrig wasn't the greatest New York Yankee. It's is still a great read either for the history geek, or for someone who just likes to read gossip about a President and his contemporaries.