1948

Party

Democratic

Republican

States' Rights

Candidate

Harry S. Truman

Thomas E. Dewey

Strom Thurmond

Electoral Count

303

189

39

Popular Vote

49.5%

45.1%

3.0%

Key Terms: 1948 Election

  1. "Give-em Hell Harry"

  2. public opinion polls/"an infant science"
  3. Upset of '48/Chicago Tribune blunder
  4. inflation, strikes, taxes
  5. "do-nothing Congress"
  6. Wallace and the Progressives
  7. Civil Rights/Dixecrats

Key Terms: Truman Administration

  1. Hiroshima/Nagaski

  2. H-bomb
  3. Potsdam/Cold War
  4. Doctrine/Containment
  5. Berlin air-lift
  6. Iron Curtain Speech
  7. Marshall Plan
  8. NATO
  9. AEC/Baruch Plan
  10. NSC/CIA
  11. Taft-Hartley Act
  12. Upset of '48
  13. Fair Deal fails
  14. Fall of China/Korean War
  15. Rosenbergs/Hiss/HUAC
  16. Red Scare/McCarthyism

In Kansas City, Missouri, a feed-supply company conducted an informal poll: decorated the feed sacks with elephants and donkeys and had farmers register their political preferences by the sacks they chose. By early September, after 20,000 farmers in six Midwestern states had been polled in this way and 54 percent had picked the Democratic sacks, the firm abandoned the survey. "We read the Gallup and Roper polls that were all for Dewey," announced a company official, "and we decided that our results were too improbable."

Dewey's running mate, Earl Warren, was frustrated by Dewey's insistence on a low-key campaign. "I wish," he once muttered, "I could call somebody and S.O.B.!"

After his defeat Dewey vacationed in Arizona. One day he went out behind his hotel, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, squatted down in the dust, and began pitching pennies with his two boys. When his wife warned that photographers might catch him in an undignified pose he told her: "Maybe, if I had done this during the campaign, I might have won."

Presidential Campaigns, Paul F. Boller, Jr., Oxford University Press, New York, 1984.