Jack Redding

Jack Redding, publicity director for the Democratic National Committee, helped shape the 1948 campaign beyond the speeches and train stops for which Harry S. Truman became famous. His work treated publicity not as decoration but as an organized contest over how voters encountered the candidate: through local news, foreign-language papers, and the movie theaters that reached millions. The campaign’s public face was Truman himself, but Redding helped make its scattered appearances and messages work together.

Role in the 1948 Campaign

Truman’s campaign drew on several kinds of effort, including his own relentless appearances and the work of people behind the scenes. Redding later described the political “classic unities” as essential to a campaign, arguing that when its elements came together their effect exceeded the sum of their parts. That coordination mattered especially because the people working for Truman understood the odds against them. Redding’s contribution was practical: he identified channels through which the campaign could reach audiences and converted political setbacks into publicity opportunities.

An earlier example came during Truman’s western tour. After Truman called the 80th Congress the worst in history, Republicans answered with attacks of their own. Robert Taft objected to the spectacle of a president criticizing Congress at “whistle stops.” Redding and Democratic Party Chairman Howard McGrath saw an opening in Taft’s description. They sent telegrams to the mayors of thirty-five western towns and cities on Truman’s route, asking whether the mayors agreed that their communities were merely whistle stops. The replies, including one rejecting the label for Eugene, Oregon, turned a put-down into a public exchange about the towns themselves. The tactic made local communities, rather than only the politicians trading insults, part of the story.

Reaching Foreign-Language Audiences

Redding also expanded the campaign’s communications beyond the English-language press. He recruited Michel Cieplinski, manager of a Polish-language newspaper in New York, to arrange translations of Truman press releases for foreign-language newspapers and radio stations around the country. The material was taken up readily and carried substantially as written in Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Swedish. The potential audience was large: the account notes that 35 million Americans were foreign-born and that 11 million were eligible to vote.

McGrath understood the electoral importance of foreign-born voters and the relevance to them of Truman’s foreign policy and immigration position. That connection gave the multilingual publicity more than a purely technical purpose: it placed campaign messages before communities for whom the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and immigration policy could matter directly. The translations made those messages available through outlets their readers and listeners already used.

Redding’s outreach also included a visual appeal to Polish-American readers. Truman sat for a portrait by Tadé Styka, a Polish artist who had been a Republican but became a supporter after hearing Truman address Polish editors about world affairs and Poland’s concerns. Truman privately complained about posing and described the result in his diary as a “stuffed-shirt picture.” Yet when Styka presented the portrait at a White House ceremony in October, all seventy-two Polish newspapers in the country ran an image of it along with the artist’s praise of Truman. Redding regarded the coverage as a political triumph: a formal portrait had become a vehicle for favorable attention across a nationwide press network.

Film, Newsreel, and the Candidate’s Image

The campaign’s strongest publicity intervention was a ten-minute film intended for movie theaters. The Republican Party was financing a film about Thomas E. Dewey, while Truman’s campaign had no money for a comparable production. Redding threatened to have theaters picketed as unfair unless they made a balancing Truman story available. The response came from the movie industry, which agreed to produce one without charge; Universal Newsreels undertook the work after winning a coin toss.

With little time and a need to keep costs down, the production, The Truman Story, was assembled almost entirely from existing newsreel footage. Its material gave the film an air of authenticity that the account contrasts with Dewey’s largely staged production. Truman appeared as a neighbor: greeting people on Independence streets, visiting Eddie Jacobson in his store, and going to Grandview to see his mother. The film also showed him performing the work of the presidency—signing the Truman Doctrine, supporting the Marshall Plan, addressing Congress, reviewing troops, and conferring with Secretary Marshall beside the large globe in the Oval Office. The juxtaposition made the candidate’s local associations and national responsibilities parts of one continuous public image.

The film’s reach made the arrangement particularly valuable. The United States had approximately 20,000 theaters, and the weekly movie audience in 1948 was about 65 million. In the campaign’s final week, the two-reel production played in theaters throughout the country. Redding later called it the campaign’s most important publicity break, emphasizing that during the last six days, moviegoers anywhere in the United States could see the President’s story. Its distribution gave the campaign a national medium that did not depend on voters attending a rally or seeking out a newspaper report.

Significance

Redding’s work complemented rather than replaced Truman’s personal campaigning. He helped convert a Republican attack into a local publicity exchange, translated campaign material for multiple language communities, used Styka’s portrait to secure broad Polish-language coverage, and pressed the film industry to provide a free cinematic counterpart to Dewey’s production. Each initiative used a different medium, but all addressed the same problem: how to make Truman visible and intelligible to voters who might not encounter him directly.

The evidence presents Redding as one of the organizers who made the campaign more than a sequence of Truman’s appearances. His account of political unity captures the logic of his efforts: speeches, press coverage, cultural recognition, and film could reinforce one another when coordinated. The film’s combination of neighborly scenes and presidential duties especially condensed that strategy, linking the familiar candidate to the responsibilities of his office. Redding’s importance lies in this behind-the-scenes work of arranging how the campaign reached the public, not in a claim that publicity alone determined the result.