Excelsior Springs was a resort town across the Missouri River in Clay County whose seclusion gave Harry S. Truman a private refuge on election night in 1948. The Elms Hotel there had sheltered him once before, after an earlier political disappointment; sixteen years later, it became the hidden vantage point from which he followed a presidential contest widely expected to end in his defeat.

A Resort Built for Retreat

The Elms was a sprawling, three-story hotel of stone and timber, one of several establishments built on the site since mineral springs were discovered there in the 1880s. Its attractions were privacy, peace, and quiet. Franklin Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and Al Capone were among those known to have sought refuge there, and on the November night Truman arrived, the hotel was nearly deserted.

The hotel’s seclusion had a personal history for Truman. Sixteen years earlier, he had escaped to the Elms after learning that Tom Pendergast had not chosen him for governor. The same place would again receive him at a moment of political uncertainty, although this time he was a sitting president waiting to learn whether voters would return him to office.

The Election-Night Hideaway

On election night, the Secret Service drove Truman from his home at 219 North Delaware Street to Excelsior Springs. He left without baggage and checked into the Elms with agents. The rooms selected for the party were at the rear of the third floor, at the end of a long corridor—a discreet arrangement in a town where the hotel was already nearly empty.

Truman borrowed a bathrobe and slippers from the hotel manager, took a steam bath and a rubdown, then ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich with a glass of buttermilk in his room. As he listened to the returns on the bedside radio, reporters searched for him elsewhere. His daughter, answering a direct-line telephone at the presidential suite in Kansas City, fielded calls from campaign manager Bill Boyle while reporters offered her anything for information about which direction her father had gone.

Returns Through the Night

The first returns gave little reason for confidence: in Hart’s Location, New Hampshire, Truman received two votes and Thomas E. Dewey eleven. By eight o’clock Missouri time, Dewey led in key eastern states, even as Truman held a lead in the national popular vote. Near midnight, Truman woke and tuned in NBC. Political commentator H. V. Kaltenborn said that Truman was still undoubtedly beaten, despite the president’s lead of 1.2 million votes. Truman switched off the radio and went back to sleep.

The Secret Service agents remained awake, following the same broadcast. At about four in the morning, agent Jim Rowley heard that the tide had turned and went to tell Truman that they had won. Truman turned on the radio, heard that he was ahead by two million votes, and concluded that they had Dewey beaten. He ordered the car prepared so they could return to Kansas City.

A Place of Political Reversal

The Elms gave Truman distance from the press and a place to wait while the returns unsettled the confident forecasts of a Dewey victory. Its role in the night was deliberately modest: a borrowed robe, a small meal, a radio, and a room at the end of a hallway. From that quiet setting, the election’s reversal reached him not as a public spectacle but through a late-night broadcast and a trusted agent’s report.

The hotel also joined two very different episodes in Truman’s political life. In both, he had gone to Excelsior Springs after a setback or apparent uncertainty; in 1932 he came away disappointed, while in 1948 he left after learning that he had won reelection. The familiar retreat thus became the threshold between an anxious night out of public view and his return to Kansas City as the victor.