Democratic Party of the United States

The Democratic Party of the United States emerges in these episodes as more than the party of a sitting president: it is a coalition whose fortunes depended on congressional power, contested nominations, campaign organization, and the ability to hold together voters with different regional and social interests. Its defining reversal came in 1948, when Harry S. Truman won the presidency and Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress. The later contests over Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, and John F. Kennedy show that electoral success did not give Truman command of the party’s future.

Governing Between Defeat and Cooperation

The party’s position in government changed sharply after the 1946 midterm elections, when Republicans took control of Congress. Truman returned from Florida accepting the voters’ verdict, but argued that the country’s domestic and foreign problems remained, and that foreign policy in particular should be a national rather than a party program. He anticipated conflict with the Republican majority while presenting his own standard as action for the welfare of the country, irrespective of partisan advantage.

The Democratic administration’s response to congressional resistance was not simply to abandon its proposals. When Congress balked, Truman asked again, pressing for national compulsory health insurance funded through payroll deductions and universal military training for young men. The proposals faced an unreceptive legislature, but their persistence reflected a governing approach that continued to put the party’s domestic program before Congress even when passage was unlikely. The account also presents the tension behind that approach: a president could make the case and renew the request, but could not thereby secure legislative agreement.

Foreign policy sometimes created room for cooperation across party lines. As the administration considered aid to Greece and Turkey, Truman called congressional leaders together for a meeting at which George C. Marshall set out the danger of further Soviet expansion. The question was framed as whether the United States would act or lose ground by default. Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican authority on foreign affairs, offered support for a forceful appeal to Congress. Truman’s stated agreement with Marshall and the prospect of Vandenberg’s backing show how a Democratic president could pursue a policy that the account describes as national rather than narrowly partisan. Party control mattered, but did not define every political alignment.

Nominations and the Work of Campaigning

The party’s choices were shaped in part by the bargaining and sudden shifts of its conventions. In one closely watched convention contest, Henry Wallace led Harry S. Truman on the first ballot, 429 votes to 319. At the start of the second ballot, support from the New York delegation moved Truman ahead. The contest tightened again before Alabama’s John Bankhead withdrew and cast his state’s votes for Truman; South Carolina followed, and other delegations joined the movement. The episode demonstrates how a nomination could turn through delegation decisions within the convention, rather than through a settled party consensus formed in advance.

Campaign organization also extended beyond the candidate’s public appearances. In 1948, Democratic National Committee publicity director Jack Redding recruited Michel Cieplinski, a Polish-language newspaper manager in New York, to arrange translations of Truman’s releases for foreign-language newspapers and radio stations. The material reached audiences in Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Swedish. With an estimated 35 million Americans born abroad, including 11 million eligible voters, the operation addressed a substantial electorate through channels that other campaigns had not used in the same way. The account stresses that Truman’s personal campaigning was only one part of the effort: Redding, Howard McGrath, and others worked behind the scenes despite knowing how unfavorable the odds appeared.

The 1948 Coalition and Electoral Reversal

The scale of the Democratic victory in 1948 overturned expectations of a Dewey landslide. Truman carried 28 states and received 303 electoral votes, defeating Thomas E. Dewey in the popular vote by more than 2.1 million: 24,105,812 to 21,970,065. Dewey won 16 states and 189 electoral votes. Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond each received slightly more than 1.1 million votes, but their results differed sharply: Wallace carried no state, while Thurmond won four southern states and 39 electoral votes.

The victory reached beyond the presidency. Democrats won 54 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 42, and 263 seats in the House to the Republicans’ 171. Truman carried thirteen of the country’s largest cities and won much of the rural Midwest, including Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. He also held seven southern states despite Thurmond’s candidacy, won the border states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Missouri, and carried every western state except Oregon. Dewey retained important northeastern industrial states and his home state of Michigan, but those wins could not offset the breadth of the Democratic map.

Later analyses identified the farm, labor, Black, and western votes as important to Truman’s success and the broader Democratic sweep. Ethnic minorities supported him strongly, and Catholic voters went Democratic in large majorities. The campaign’s regional work mattered too: Truman’s effort in Texas produced his largest state majority there; an additional automobile swing through Republican counties in downstate Illinois helped decide that state; and the rural Ohio whistle-stop day, which some observers had dismissed as wasted effort, preceded Democratic victories in counties Dewey had carried in 1944. These results made the party’s win a coalition achievement, not simply the consequence of one candidate’s style.

The apparent failure of the polls was part of the story. Later studies suggested that polling had been reasonably accurate until mid-October, but that the last major forecast was already two weeks old by election day. In the final weeks, many voters who expected Dewey to win nevertheless voted for Truman. The party’s victory thus exposed a gap between public predictions and private electoral decisions, while the campaign’s late effort connected with voters who had not appeared likely to decide the contest for Democrats.

Truman’s Continuing Influence and Its Limits

After the 1948 victory, Truman’s standing did not give him control over every nomination. Returning from Europe in 1952, he tried, unsuccessfully, to secure the Democratic presidential nomination for Averell Harriman rather than Adlai Stevenson. Truman argued that the country needed a president who wanted the job and questioned whether Stevenson possessed the fighting spirit required to win. He also urged Stevenson to learn how to reach ordinary voters. But the convention nominated Stevenson, and Truman promptly endorsed him, declaring his support and promising to help the ticket. His swift shift from preferred alternative to party campaigner showed a continuing attachment to Democratic unity even when his own choice had lost.

Truman remained active in party politics after Stevenson’s defeat. He told Lyndon B. Johnson that the Democrats could not win unless they remained a party of the people. At the Democratic National Committee’s nationwide celebration of Truman’s seventy-fifth birthday, he said he had no favorite candidate for 1960 yet, but intended to take part and wanted a nominee capable of winning. His comments joined electoral pragmatism to a claim about the party’s identity: popular reach was not merely a campaign technique, but a condition of Democratic success.

In 1960, Truman favored Stuart Symington and Lyndon B. Johnson, doubted Stevenson’s prospects for another run, and regarded John F. Kennedy as too young and inexperienced. His opposition included concern about Kennedy’s past approval of Joseph McCarthy and distrust of Kennedy’s father; he also doubted that a Catholic could win, recalling the earlier defeat of Al Smith. Yet Kennedy’s visit to Truman at the Truman Library ended with Truman telling him he would do nothing to hurt him. When the Kennedy–Nixon contest began, Truman joined the campaign and traveled through nine states, delivering thirteen speeches and appearing in parades and press conferences. His activity marked a final return to the campaign trail, but the party’s changing generations and its nomination process remained larger than the influence of any one former president.