The Line Squall

The Line Squall

(TIME, July 26, 1948) -- The first warning thunderclap came on the second night of the convention.

For an hour that evening the sodden delegates had sat through a memorial service to Franklin D. Roosevelt, only half aware of the ceremony's bad taste, bored by its dreariness. "We are here to honor the honored dead," rasped New York's Mayor O'Dwyer. "Won't you please act accordingly?" But neither Bill O'Dwyer's pleas, nor prayers, nor singing, nor oratory dented the delegates' torpor. The rumble of conversation continued to fill the air, only subsiding a little when Congresswoman Mary Norton presented the credentials committee's report.

The fluttering of thousands of cardboard fans gave the effect of a wheatfield in a freakish wind, across which photographers' bulbs flashed like heat lightning. Then a grim- faced Negro loomed on the platform.

He was announced as George L. Vaughn, a delegate from St. Louis and a member of the credentials committee; he wanted to submit a minority report. The majority had agreed to seat the Mississippi delegation. But the Mississippi delegation, Vaughn charged, intended to walk out if Harry Truman's civil rights program was incorporated into the platform and if Harry Truman was nominated. He clenched his fist, yelling: "Three million Negroes have left the South since the outbreak of World War II to escape this thing. I ask the convention to give consideration . . ."

The squall broke.

It broke in a vast, excited, ugly roar. Temporary Chairman Alben Barkley pounded his gavel. He ordered a voice vote on Vaughn's report. Although it had been agreed in committee not to have a roll call, Northern delegates shouted into their floor microphones, demanding one. But they could not be heard. The floor mikes were dead. Chairman Barkley asked for ayes and nays. Deadpan, he listened to the response and ruled that the majority report had carried. The Mississippi delegation was accredited.

But the disturbance was not squelched. Directly under the rostrum, Chicago Boss Jake Arvey and Adlai Stevenson, candidate for governor of Illinois, continued to yell at the chair. California's hulking Chairman Jack Shelley, an ex-University of San Francisco football tackle, plunged up the aisle to the platform, roaring for recognition. They all wanted it to be announced that their delegations had voted against Mississippi. On the platform Shelley barked into the ear of Sergeant at Arms Leslie Biffle: "You'd better not cut the mikes on us tomorrow when we start talking on civil rights."

Wings of the Storm. Tomorrow was bound to be stormier. The platform still had to be voted on. The party's worried leaders had done their best to produce something which, if it failed to please everyone, at least would not rile anyone very much. They had kept in touch with Harry Truman, whose cautious advice had been to keep the specific points of his so called "civil rights" program out of the platform.

As everyone knew, "civil rights" meant, largley, "Negro rights." The platform makers, headed by Pennsylvania' Senator Francis Myers, had hit upon what they thought was the perfect compromise. They parroted the 1944 platform affirmed the right of racial minorities "to live . . . to work . . . to vote." As for federal guarantee of those rights, they called upon Congress "to exert its full authority to the limit of its constitutional powers."

It was a magnificent weasel. The Northern bloc, which believed that Congress' power to legislate "human rights" is limitless, could accept it -- if it wanted to. So could Southern politicians who firmly believe that certain Negro rights are matters which the Constitution leaves to the states.

But the platform makers had overlooked the determination of the Northerners, whose volatile Americans for Democratic Action had drafted a minority report. A.D.A.'s spokesman was Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr., 37, mayor of Minneapolis, who has a fast and facile tongue, political courage, and is opposing Joe Ball for Senator in November. The A.D.A. amendment commended Harry Truman for "his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights," and in somewhat obscure words urged Congress, in effect, to repeal the poll tax, set up FEPC, make lynching a federal offense, and end segregation in the armed services.

"Out of the Shadow." In the unrelenting heat the next day the delegates gathered. They settled soggily into their chairs while once again the interminable speeches rolled out of the loudspeakers. Senator Myers droned out the compromise platform.

The instant he had finished, Southern leaders were on their feet. Texas' ex-Governor Dan Moody offered the South's minority report defining the sovereignty of the states. Two other Southerners, Mississippi's Walter Sillers and Cecil Sims of Tennessee, followed with similar amendments. Cried Sillers: "Give us the right to govern our own fundamental affairs!" Then ex- Congressman Andrew J. Biemiller, of Wisconsin, a onetime Socialist who helped manage Norman Thomas' campaign in 1932, a colleague of Humphrey on the platform committee, presented the Northern minority report on civil rights.

The debate was on. The drawling voices of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama laid the anxieties and defiance of the South before the convention of their party. The vernaculars of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Minnesota shouted the North's challenge.

"I say the time has come to walk out of the shadow of states' rights and into the sunlight of human rights," yelled Hubert Humphrey Jr.

Pants & Stomach. Yellow skullcaps with propellers on top began appearing on the heads of New York and Pennsylvania delegates. A Powers model, carrying a Truman-for-President sign, edged on to the floor in front of the speakers' stand, where she was ogled and photographed. But the delegates listened to the speeches. The hall had taken on a look of purpose.

Texas' Congressman Sam Rayburn, who had taken over from Barkley as permanent chairman, called for a roll-call vote on Governor Moody's states' rights motion. It was smashed by an overwhelming 925 to 309. The two other Southern amendments were shouted down.

The North was not through yet. The Humphrey-Biemiller civil rights amendment was put to a roll call. The big Northern and Western states held solid and the report carried by 69 votes. The South had been kicked in the pants, turned around and kicked in the stomach. The Humphrey and Biemiller crowd roared in triumph.

Frantically but vainly, Alabama tried to get the floor to make a statement. The session quickly recessed. But the showdown could not be postponed long. That night, when the delegates convened again, Alabama's Chairman Handy Ellis won recognition at last. The eleven electors of the sovereign state of Alabama, he shouted, had been chosen "never to cast their vote for a Republican, never to cast their vote for Harry Truman, and never to cast their electoral vote for any candidate with a civil rights program such as adopted by this convention . . . We cannot participate further in this convention."

Thirteen members of the Alabama delegation, led by Handy Ellis, walked out. Mississippi followed, waving the battle flag of the Confederacy. They all plodded, stony-faced, through the crowd, tripped over Truman signs stacked in the aisles, walked out the doors and into a pelting rainstorm. As they emerged, a thunderclap split the air.

The Sunshine. The rest of the convention dragged ut until 2:30 a.m. Alabama's Senator Lister Hill, a party regular, herded a handful of alternates into his state's empty seats. Mississippi had gone for good. The rest of the South remained to fight a futile fight, to rally around Georgia's protest candidate for President, Senator Richard Russell.

But the Russell drive was no more than a gesture. Harry Truman was nominated on the first ballot. The vote: Truman 947 1/2; Russell 263; Paul V. McNutt 1/2. By loud acclamation, faithful Alben Barkley was nominated for the vice-presidency.

The storm receded -- a bit. The only clouds were the glowering Southern delegates, who sat in sullen wrath through the loud and sweaty demonstrations. The sun came out when Harry Truman, smiling broadly, appeared to accept the nomination and make a fighting speech -- and the squall moved on to Birmingham.

Up from Despair

As he stepped into a White House limousine with Mrs. Truman and daughter Margaret, Harry Truman was a cool and confident man. He boarded his special train for Philadelphia, changed to a white linen suit and two-toned shoes, then opened a black leather folder and went over his speech.

It was not a written speech; it was 18 pages of notes. Wavy-haired Clark Clifford, his White House adviser, and Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, who wrote many of Franklin Roosevelt's speeches, had given him a detailed outline, full of short, punchy sentences.

The biggest punch was in his sentence calling for a special session of Congress. That was the President's own idea and it was a well-kept secret. Less than half a dozen party bigwigs knew of his decision. Harry Truman was determined to surprise the delegates and show them that they had nominated a man with fight.

"I'm Not Mad at Them." It was 9:51, and raining, when the President's party reached Convention Hall. Inside the auditorium, bands, whistles, horns and sirens were rousing the delegates into the Truman demonstration, set off by Governor Phil Donnelly's nominating speech. The demonstration lasted 39 minutes, thus surpassing by seven minutes the longest dinning for any Republican candidate three weeks before.

But Harry Truman saw none of it. He had been shunted off to a stiflingly hot, concrete-floored room at the rear of the hall, where he held court for visitors. Jimmy Roosevelt and Chicago's ex-Mayor Ed Kelly dropped by, as did New York's Mayor Bill O'Dwyer. Only one top-drawer Southerner showed up: Alabama's Senator John Sparkman. But Harry Truman was not sore at anybody. To a friend, he said: "They may be mad at me, but I'm not mad at them. I believe in Christ."

It was almost 2 a.m. when, accompanied by Alben Barkley, he made his entrance into the hall. The delegates stood and cheered. Harry Truman laughed with the crowd as a sudden swarm of pigeons flew around him, then adjusted the microphones upward. The photographers howled; the raised microphones obscured their view of Harry. "I am sorry that (they) are in your way," said the President, "but they have to be where they are because I've got to be able to see what I'm doing -- as I always am able to see what I am doing."

"The Most Ungrateful People." Then, well knowing that the convention had been sitting for more than seven hours in the waning hope of hearing something to cheer about, he cried: "Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it, don't you forget that." The delegates rose to a man; it was the first time they had heard anybody say "win" as if he meant it.

The President' voice was strong, his tone assertive. He was a new, militant Harry Truman. "Never in the world were the farmers . . . as prosperous (as now) . . . and if they don't do their duty by the Democratic Party they're the most ungrateful people in the world . . . And I'll say to labor just what I've said to the farmers."

He waded into the 80th Congress and the Republican platform. "They promised to do in that platform a lot of things I've been asking them to do and that they've refused to do when they had the power. The Republican platform cries about cruelly high prices. I have been trying to get them to do something about high prices ever since they met the first time . . . The Republican platform urges extending and increasing social security benefits. Think of that -- and yet when they had the opportunity, they took 750,000 people off our social security rolls. I wonder if they think they can fool the people with such poppycock as that."

As cries of "Pour it on 'em, Harry!" rose. Truman sprang his surprise:

"On the twenty-sixth day of July, which out in Missouri they call Turnip Day, I'm going to call that Congress back and I'm going to ask them to pass laws halting rising prices and to meet the housing crisis which they say they're for; an increase in the minimum wage, which I doubt very much they're for . . . an adequate and decent law for displaced persons in place of the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic law which this 80th Congress passed." (Harry Truman slightly revised an old Missouri adage: "On the 25th of July, sow your turnips wet or dry." when correspondents asked the President, a onetime farmer, about his own turnip planting, he waved an arm wide as if he were sowing and said: "A half pound of seed will sow a couple of acres of turnips.")

The Battle Lines of 1932. After the bedlam of applause, he continued: "What that worst 80th Congress does in its special session will be the test . . . The American people . . . will decide on the record . . . The battle lines for 1948 are the same as they were back in 1932 . . . and I paraphrase the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt as he issued the challenge in accepting his (1932) nomination: This is more than a political call to arms. Give me your help. Not to win votes alone, but to . . . keep America secure and safe for its own people."

At 2:25 a.m. Harry Truman stepped back from the rostrum for his final two minutes of cheers. There was no doubt that he had lifted the delegates out of their doldrums. He had roused admiration for his political courage. Said one delegate: "You can't stay cold about a man who sticks his chin out and fights."

The Loyal Catcher

After the 30-minute ovation for Keynoter Alben Barkley on opening night, there was no longer any question about the nominee for Vice President. Rugged old Alben Barkley was beloved by many, trusted by most, disliked by none.

Harry Truman, who had preferred Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, made no further effort to buck the convention' wishes. Called by National Chairman Howard McGrath, Truman said: "I love him like a brother . . . If the convention wants Alben, of course he is acceptable."

Alben Barkley had not always felt that close to Harry Truman. In the last three years, as Truma's Senate leader, he was often caught flatfooted by Administration proposals of which he had had no previous notice. On one such occasion he angrily told a White House aide: "This is like playing catcher in a night ball game, I not only am not getting the signals, but someone actually turns out the lights when the ball is tossed."

Loyalty is the first page in ALben Barkley's book. In his 23 years in Congress, he dutifully voted as a party regular, was elected majority leader in 1937. No man was more popular with his colleagues. His good humor was legendary, his wit the Senate's best.

After his nomination, Alben Barkley talked informally about his service in the Senate with Harry Truman. Said he: "We're teammates now, and after the election we'll still be a team, in there pitching with the catcher understanding the signs of the pitcher, whether it will be a slow drop or a chin cutter."

The "Turnip Day" Session

Was there really a pressing national emergency? Harry Truman said there was. But who was talking -- the President or the politician? Harry Truman's call for a special session of Congress was made at a political convention; it would be judged largely on its political motives and for its political effect. Harry Truman, who, like all Presidents, occupies a dual position as head of the Government and leader of a political party, had used his powers as President to further his party's fortunes.

"This Petulant Ajax." The maneuver was almost unprecedented. Not since 1856 had a President called back Congress in an election year. (When Franklin Pierce ordered Congress back to pass an Army appropriation bill.) It was a daring stroke of political chicanery. For the moment, at least, Harry Truman had destroyed the notion that the Republican Party would win almost by default. Like an aggressive general, he had seized the offensive at a time and place of his own choosing. If anyone had thought that the President would fight a hopeless delaying action against the Dewey panders, it was now plain as a tank track that Harry Truman meant to go down fighting.

The cries from the opposition testified to the effectiveness of the maneuver. "This petulant Ajax from the Ozarks," warned New Hampshire's Senator Styles Bridges, would be answered by the "maddest Congress you ever saw," Southern Democrats were even hotter. Cried Georgia's Senator Walter George: "The South is not only over a barrel. It is pilloried. We are in the stocks."

The real Republican leaders were more cautious. The day after the President's call. Candidate Tom Dewey refused comment. He had already praised the record of the 80th Congress and declared that a special session would be "a frightful imposition." But the wires from Albany burned with telephone messages to House majority Leader Charles Halleck in Resselaer, Ind.; to Speaker Joe Martin at his summer home in Sagamore, Mass.; to other top Republican strategists. When Joe Martin finally spoke up, it was to warm: "There will be plenty of action. Like the boys at Bunker Hill, we'll wait to see the whites of their eyes."

From the 20-Yard Line. Harry Truman had taken a tremendous political gamble. One risk was that the special session might backfire on the Democrats: the Republicans might straightway haul up the President's civil rights program and let the Southern Democrats filibuster it -- and the session -- to death. Another was that Republican plans for more investigations of the Democratic Administration.

Said California's Jimmy Roosevelt: "It's like a football game, and deciding to pass on the 20-yard line. If you connect . . . you're a great quarterback. If the opposition intercepts . . . the quarterback is a bum."

Quarterback Truman could -- and would -- take credit for whatever Congress accomplished, would try hard to blame the Republicans for anything Congress failed to do.

It was aggressive partisan politics, but was it good for the nation? There was grave danger that the whole session would bog down in futile political wrangling. Said Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg: "No good can come to the country from a special session of Congress which obviously stems solely from political motives." The greatest danger was that the world would misconstrue a purely domestic fight as evidence of fundamental disagreement over U.S. policies abroad.

Harry Truman had certainly stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. From being a fading and futile minority President he had suddenly appeared in a new and more popular guise as an effective rabble-rouser. It remained to be seen whether the U.S. would agree with him that he was really a good boy.

Emma & the Birds

The event that might linger longest in the minds of the delegates, spectators, and television watchers of the Democratic Convention was neither Harry Truman's fighting speech nor the Southern schism. It was the pigeons.

President Truman and Senator Barkley had just come into the hall when Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller bustled up to the podium. the sister of Pennsylvania's ex-Senator Joseph Guffey, and a perennial committeewoman. Mrs. Miller calls herself the Old Grey Mare.

Plump, powdered and behatted, she briskly interrupted Chairman Sam Rayburn's introduction of Barkley, took over the microphone. One behalf of the Allied Florists of Philadelphia, she announced, she wanted to present President Truman with a large Liberty Bell made of flowers. Then, from beneath the bell came a shower of white pigeons (placed there by the florists' pressagent, who had billed them as "doves of peace").

With a flutter of wings, the pigeons swept up & out. The dignitaries on the platform cringed and shrank away like troops before a strafing attack. Torpid delegates broke into a roar of delight. One bird landed on the rostrum, where Chairman Sam Rayburn scooped it up and flung it roofward again. Two landed on a platform fan, stayed there with the breeze ruffling their tail feathers.

If the President had not won his audience right away, the pigeons might have given him real competition. As he spoke, pigeons teetered on the balconies, on folds in the draperies, on overhead lights, occasionally launched on a quick flight to a more pigeonly position. Long after the conventioneers had gone home and workers began to clean up for Henry Wallace's Third Party this week, pigeons still perched in the deserted hall.

THE SOUTH Tumult in Dixie

Three days after their walkout at Philadelphia, the rebellious Southerners met in Birmingham's red brick municipal auditorium. There they snake-danced under a portrait of Robert E. Lee, flourished Confederate battle flags, and shouted their defiance of Harry Truman and the rest of the Democratic Party.

But the meeting had more lung power than political strength. The delegates, except for those from Mississippi and Alabama, were political out and has-beens. Most bigwig Southern politicos pointedly stayed away. Even Arkansas' Governor Ben Laney, who had withdrawn as the rebels' favorite son at Philadelphia, remained aloof in his downtown hotel room, contented himself with offering advice.

"This Infamous Program." In the convention hall, Southern oratory boomed out like cannon fire. In the front row, Oklahoma's doddering ex-Governor "Alfalfa Bill" Murray beamed his approval, proudly recalled that "I'm the man who introduced Jim Crow in Oklahoma." Racebaiting Gerald L.K. Smith turned up as a spectator under the pseudonym of S. Goodyear. A group of Mississippi students set up a chant: "To hell with Truman."

With shouts of triumph, the delegates endorsed a "Declaration of Principles." It condemned "this infamous and iniquitous program (of) equal access to all places of public accommodation for persons of all races, colors, creeds and national origin." Then they nominated South Carolina's Governor J. Strom Thurmond for President and Mississippi's Governor Fielding Wright for Vice President.

Not a Bolt. Just what they hoped to accomplish -- or how they would go about it -- no one seemed to know. So far, only Alabama and Mississippi electors were pledged against Harry Truman. Other states might be persuaded to instruct their electors for the Thurmond-Wright ticket. But most office-holding Democrats would think twice before risking their federal and state patronage by aligning themselves with the irregulars. Said Arkansas' Laney pointedly: "Whatever is done must be done through and by the official Democrat organization in each respective state."

Even the rebels themselves were careful to leave the door ajar. Candidate Wright explained, with careful ambiguity: "This is not a bolt. This is not a fourth party. I say to you that we are the true Democrats of the Southland and these United States." To be doubly sure that there was a way of scrambling back, the rebels agreed to convene again next October to see how they were doing.