Harry Truman by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online

first whistle stop of the day. It was only a small city, but 7,000 persons were roaring their approval of Harry Truman there in the middle of the morning. Lausche could not believe his eyes. Then came Dayton. People were practically standing on each other’s shoulders in the station, and they spilled out of it to stop traffic in all directions. “Is this the way all the crowds have been?” Lausche asked cautiously.
    “Yes,” Dad said, “but this is smaller than we had in most states.”
    Mr. Lausche swallowed hard. “Well,” he said, “this is the biggest crowd I ever saw in Ohio.” When we pulled out of Dayton on the way to Akron, Lausche was still aboard.
    Of all the thousands of people who climbed on and off the campaign train during these hectic weeks, there are two men who stand out in my mind. One was Jake More, who captured the state of Iowa, almost single-handedly. He was not an officeholder. He was, quite simply and in the plainest terms, a Truman believer. My father stirred something deep in him, which convinced him that a victory was possible when everyone else said defeat was a certainty. He appeared with us on the campaign train, and then after we left the state, he never stopped working for the ticket. As a result, Iowa went Democratic for the first time in years.
    The other man was Aaron H. Payne, a Chicago lawyer whose clients included Joe Louis. He was the first black man to address a national Republican Lincoln Day dinner (in 1940). He paid his way aboard the train with his own money, and he campaigned for Dad throughout the Midwest in September and October the same way. He told Martin S. Hayden of the Detroit News: “Harry S. Truman has done more for my people than Franklin D. Roosevelt ever did.” His goal was to replace every dollar and every vote that the Dixiecrats cost the party with a black dollar and a black vote. Later, we found out that Payne had had tremendous influence in helping us carry four predominantly black wards in Cleveland. Since we won Ohio by a little more than 7,000 votes, it is no exaggeration to say that his influence was crucial.
    In Los Angeles, my father decided to deal with the attack from the left. By this time, it was clear that the Progressive party was dominated by hard-core Communists. Wallace did nothing to diminish this impression with his almost unbelievable naïveté. “I would say that the Communists are the closest things to the early Christian martyrs,” he said at one point; at another time, he said that he thought the American Communist party platform for the campaign was at least as good as the Progressive platform.
    But instead of lambasting the Progressives as agents of a foreign power, Dad spoke out of his deep respect and affection for the two-party system. In one of his greatest speeches, he urged California’s liberals to return to the Democratic fold. “The simple fact is that the third party cannot achieve peace, because it is powerless. It cannot achieve better conditions at home, because it is powerless. . . . I say to those disturbed liberals who have been sitting uncertainly on the outskirts of the third party: think again, don’t waste your vote.”
    My father’s speeches undoubtedly had a great deal to do with bringing the state into the Democratic column, but the immediate reception we received was cool. Jimmy Roosevelt’s negative influence was still strong in the California Democratic Party. Although he had accepted Dad as the Democratic nominee, his enthusiasm was invisible, and the state party reflected this fact. The low point was reached on September 23, when Dad spoke in Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles. In spite of the fact that Ronald Reagan - considered a rather left-wing Democrat at the time - and other Hollywood notables were on the platform, only about 10,000 people showed up. Thomas E. Dewey had attracted almost twice that number the previous night at the Hollywood Bowl. The problem was lack of advance