cover image The Upset That Wasn't: Harry S. Truman and the Crucial Election of 1948

The Upset That Wasn't: Harry S. Truman and the Crucial Election of 1948

Harold I. Gullan. Ivan R. Dee Publisher, $24.95 (255pp) ISBN 978-1-56663-206-5

On the 50th anniversary of Harry Truman's famous presidential ""upset,"" Gullan, a contributor to Presidential Studies Quarterly, has written a nuts-and-bolts political history of the 1948 presidential election. Truman, it seems, always played the turtle to his opponent's hare. When his haberdashery business failed he was recruited by T.J. (""Boss"") Pendergast to run for District Judge, and he won. In 1934, he was elected to the Senate; in 1944, he became FDR's vice president; and five months later he was president. At the end of WWII, the country converted from a war- to a consumer-oriented economy; GIs faced labor unrest, angry farmers and unemployment when they came home. The country turned Congress over to the Republicans in 1946 and Truman's approval ratings plummeted--and the 1948 election was right around the corner. Gullan's emphasis is on personality: GOP nominees Thomas E. Dewey (""the little man on the wedding cake,"" according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth) and Earl Warren (""that dumb Swede,"" said Dewey); third-party candidates Strom Thurmond of the ""Dixiecrats"" and Henry Wallace of Progressive Labor. Gullan makes several salient points. Dewey, in reality, may have been more liberal than Truman; for all the excitement of the close election, 1948 had the lowest voter turnout in 20 years; and it may have been the emerging power of the black vote, according to Theodore White, that made Truman president. This is a very readable history focusing on the 30th president, one of the great gut politicians of the century. (Dec.)