Ohio

Ohio became a demanding test of Harry S. Truman’s 1948 reelection campaign, a state where daunting Republican strength met the Democratic candidate’s insistence on taking his appeal directly to voters. The campaign’s October 11 journey crossed 350 miles, with eleven speeches in eleven communities; its reception changed the mood of the day and offered a striking counterpoint to predictions that the contest was already decided.

A formidable electoral landscape

Ohio’s twenty-six electoral votes were at stake, but the state looked like an unlikely place for Truman to make a decisive impression. It was described as a Republican stronghold: it had a Republican governor, nineteen Republican congressmen to four Democrats, and two prominent Republican senators, Robert Taft and John Bricker. In 1944, some rural Ohio voting had favored Thomas E. Dewey by as much as 70 percent. Truman nevertheless planned to spend much of October 11 in the countryside, where the previous election’s figures made the campaign’s prospects appear especially bleak.

William Boyle, who managed Truman’s itinerary, had urged him to campaign in Ohio. The choice meant investing a day in a state where many observers saw little reason to expect a return. Dewey, who had carried Ohio against Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, was so confident of winning it again that he did not actively campaign there. During one Ohio stop, he remained in his train compartment with the blind drawn rather than step onto the rear platform to greet a waiting crowd. The contrast with Truman’s planned procession through small communities would become part of the day’s meaning: one candidate treated the state as secure, while the other traveled through it as if its voters still had to be won.

The October 11 route

The day began in Cincinnati at 7:00 in the morning, in cold rain. Streets between the station and the Netherland Plaza Hotel were deserted, and the campaign’s prospects seemed as gray as the weather. From Cincinnati, Truman’s train headed north on the B&O Railroad to Hamilton and Dayton, then continued through Sidney, Lima, Ottawa, and Deshler. It turned east for Fostoria, Willard, and Rittman, before ending the day in industrial Akron. Towns such as Ottawa and Willard struck some observers as unlikely destinations for a presidential campaign, but the route deliberately carried Truman through places that conventional electoral calculations might dismiss.

In eleven speeches over a fifteen-hour day, Truman returned to familiar themes: the high cost of living, adequate housing, what he regarded as the shortsightedness of the Republican-led 80th Congress, opposition to the Taft-Hartley Act, and his desire for peace. He praised Franklin Roosevelt and, in Akron, embraced the New Deal’s entire philosophy as his own, promising to build on it toward a better way of life. His addresses were not identical scripts. Much of what he said was spontaneous, and he repeatedly spoke to his audiences as ordinary Americans whose interests, he argued, were not being served by powerful interests at the top.

Crowds and a change in momentum

From Hamilton onward, the crowds were large and responsive. At Hamilton, ten thousand people spilling out in all directions marked a dramatic change from the deserted streets Truman had encountered in Cincinnati. Frank Lausche, Ohio’s former governor, had boarded the train in Cincinnati uncertain whether association with the candidate would help his own political prospects. The size of the crowds altered his assessment: after riding in a Dayton motorcade past fifty thousand people, he abandoned his plan to leave the train there and stayed aboard.

The reception reached its high point in Akron, the heart of the rubber industry and a strongly Democratic labor city. An estimated sixty thousand people filled the streets three and four deep, and the Akron Armory was packed. Truman, radiant at the end of the day, told the crowd that while Republicans had propaganda and money, Democrats had the people and the votes. Contemporary reports described the welcome as tumultuous and the city’s biggest political show. Conservative estimates put the day’s crowds at 100,000 even before the Akron gathering. The journey had begun under conditions that made the effort seem pointless; by night, the crowds had supplied a vivid answer to that expectation.

Ohio and the late campaign shift

The state’s significance extended beyond the spectacle of one day. Later analysis suggested that the polling error in 1948 may have reflected timing more than the surveys’ accuracy: George Gallup’s final survey was completed in mid-October, about two weeks before the election. In those final weeks, voters who expected Dewey to win nevertheless went to the polls and voted for Truman. Ohio offered a telling example. A reporter for The New York Times found that the Truman voters he spoke with across the state had not expected their candidate to prevail; voters from mines, mills, and farms had made their choices quietly and cast them despite the prevailing expectation of defeat.

The October 11 tour does not, by itself, establish how Ohio voted or isolate the cause of the national result. It does show what the state represented to the campaign: a formidable Republican terrain, a route through communities often considered too small to matter, and audiences whose response contradicted the appearance of inevitability. Ohio’s place in the account rests on that contrast between forecast and encounter. The campaign’s confidence was not secured by a favorable beginning; it grew as Truman met voters along the route and found crowds willing to hear him.