Year 1948

__________ 

“…a kind of mindlessness that was special to the period…” 

David Halberstam speaking of the anti-communist rhetoric of the era.

__________

 

“HARRY TRUMAN was a success in the White House partly because he was openly, joyously and unabashedly Harry Truman; he was what he was, he gloried in attacks on his inadequacies, they being in general the inadequacies of most normal men, and he made his limitations his assets…”  (Halberstam, forgot to note page)

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Most of my students had never heard of President Truman. It always worked to show them the famous picture above, and ask them why this photo from the 1948 presidential election was famous. (If I had a kid who seemed to know, I wouldn’t call on him or her – or now, “they” – until we had a number of “wrong” answers. I liked to use Truman’s story of persevering in 1948, as an example for my classes. 

I was a do-nothing dope in school, myself, and only learned the import of perseverance later in life. For example: at Parris Island.

 

* 

February: A Communist coup, as Goldman writes, “sucks Czechoslovakia under The Iron Curtain, recalling to the least-informed Americans memories of Munich, 1938.” Russia appears ready to take control of Finland. Italian elections are coming in April and newspapers in the United States agree that the Communists have at least a 50-50 chance to win. 

 

“Fear of what? Most people don’t know exactly.” 

President Truman appeared before his press conferences making little pretense of chipperness. His faith in ultimate world peace, the President admitted, was being shaken. Reports went out that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was meeting in Key West with heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to iron out their roles in the event of fighting. Two Republican members of the house, Charles Kersten of Wisconsin and Richard Nixon of California, expressed an attitude rapidly spreading in Congress. They presented a resolution giving “solemn warning to the conspiracy in the Politburo that any further step of aggression, internal or external, will be actively resisted by every means at our disposal.”

 

Throughout the country war fears ran rampant. In New England, “wait until the Russians hit” and “when we fight Stalin” were becoming clichés. In Atlanta, friends were greeting each other with: “Well, boy, break out that old uniform.” A Seattle newspaper summarized: “Generally, people here have come to feel that war is definitely on the way.”

 

A Chicago reporter caught the national mood in its fuller nuances. “Cold fear is gripping people hereabouts. They don’t talk much about it. But it’s just as real and chilling as the current 11-degree weather. Fear of what? Most people don’t know exactly. It’s not fear of Russia alone. For most think we could rub Joe’s nose in the dirt. It’s not fear of Communism in this country. Few think there are enough Commies here to put it over. It’s not fear of the atom bomb. For most think we still possess a monopoly. But it does seem to be a reluctant conviction that these three relentless forces are prowling the earth and that somehow they are bound to mean trouble for us. Not many months ago, these forces were something to be thought about only in off moments—like when you turned in some commentator by mistake….But all winter, confidence in peace has been oozing away. With the Czech coup , it practically vanished.” (1/78-79)

 

* 

“That was the most beautiful music I have ever heard.” 

Baseball season: The New York Times had a good story about Maybelle Blair, who came out as a lesbian, at age 95, in 2022.

In 1948, Blair was playing softball in Redondo Beach, California, when a scout for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League saw her play. He wanted to sign her; but her mother resisted. When she found out Maybelle would be making $55 per week she put her on the train to Chicago. 

In her “early 90s,” the Times noted, Blair once visited a sporting goods store and asked to try on a pair of baseball cleats. Once the salesman realized she was serious, he brought her a pair. 

“He put them on my feet. I got up and marched around, and I heard that clicketyclack in my head and I was never so happy,” Blair said.

 

After taking the cleats for a walk in the store, Blair took them off, put them in their box and told the salesman that she wouldn’t be taking them.

 

“That was a big thrill of my life, just to put cleats on and march again,” she said.

 

For Blair, the sound of cleats brought back memories of suiting up as a Peoria Redwing and walking onto the field, her favorite baseball ritual.

 

“I was so proud of myself because it dawned on me: I got to play the game I loved and cherished,” she said. “I’d put on my spikes and march down the aisle and walk onto the field, clicketyclack, clicketyclack. That was the most beautiful music I have ever heard.”

 

Blair was one of more than 600 women to join the baseball league, created in 1943 in response to World War II. As young men were drafted, fears spread that the war would be the demise of professional baseball and its ballparks. So women played instead.

 

Blair first began to become aware of her sexuality in fifth grade, and her first love came when she was a senior in high school. “I’ll never forget her,” she said. But she kept her relationships private and never married.

 

“I was so worried about my family because in those days nobody knew anything about people being gay or what have you. It was so nerve-racking,” she said.

 

She found herself happiest on the field. Blair, who grew up in Texas and California, said she was “born a baseball fan.”

Image

 

“If I hadn’t, my father would have gotten rid of me,” she said with a laugh. “Playing baseball was the only entertainment we had besides breaking horses.”

 

* 

The acronym “WASP” for white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants first appears in the New Amsterdam News. WASPs were once rightly described as “America’s original ruling class.”

 

* 

“Carry as little as possible. But choose that little with care.” 

April 4: Earl Shaffer, a WWII veteran, sets out to become the first person to walk the Appalachian Trail in one continuous hike. When his tent proves too cumbersome, he ditches it and sleeps in a poncho for the next 124 days. One pair of Russell Moccasin Company boots got him all the way through. He carried a little notebook to record impressions. “The fact that he was carrying those extra five or six ounces showed how important it was to him,” says Jane Rogers of the National Museum of American History. 

Today about 1,000 thru-hike the trail each year; 3,000,000 walk portions. (His entire journal is online.) Having served four years in the Pacific, he said he set out to “walk the war out of my system.” He passed the battlefield at Antietam, met other veterans out hiking and talked to a farmer whose son “was psycho from [the] army.” Twice, he mentions Walter, a childhood friend, in his journal. Walter had dreamed of walking the trail with him someday, but he was killed at Iwo Jima. 

Shaffer became the oldest person, at 79, to hike the entire trail in 1998. 

That record was broken in 2017, when Daniel “Greybeard” Sanders completed the thru-hike at age 82.

A recent hiker on the trail.

 

I had a good number of students who enjoyed reading Bill Bryson’s book, A Walk in the Woods, about his own hike. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: You can find a copy of a reading list of several hundred books I used in my class. I retired in 2008, but add a few books every year.

*

 

Summer: Lt. James W. Becton Jr., an African American officer serving in the U.S. Army reserves, listens as his base commander reads President Truman’s executive order desegregating the military. 

Becton would eventually rise to the rank of lieutenant general, but explained how he felt at that time: 

“‘As long as I am the commander here, there will be no change,’” he recalled the base commander saying. “I didn’t believe what I heard,” he added in an interview with The Washington Post in 2018. “This was the commander in chief saying this is what it’s going to be. But here was a commander saying nothing would change.”

 

Despite the discouragement, General Becton left college and returned to active duty. “I really had enjoyed being in the military,” he later said.

 

* 

June 24: The Berlin Air Life begins. The New York Times highlights the contributions of Lt. Gail S. Halvorsen, the original “Candy Bomber” of the operation. 

Lt. Gail S. Halvorsen, an Air Force transport pilot, was on the grounds of West Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield on a mid-July day in 1948, taking part in a historic confrontation of the early Cold War years, when he spotted some 30 German children in ragged clothing outside a fence.

 

He reached into his back pocket, extracted a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint and handed out the last two sticks of gum in the pack.

 

“The look in their eyes, I could see their appreciation for something so small,” he recalled long afterward. “I wanted to do something more, so I told them to come back later.”

 

Halverson promised to drop more candy the next day, when he flew in from his base near Frankfurt. The children asked how they would know which plane he was flying. “I told them I’ll wiggle the wings.” 

In the months to come, an act of kindness by this American airman — the boys and girls of West Berlin would come to call him Uncle Wiggly Wings — grew into a storied good-will operation within a Great Powers drama.

 

Lieutenant Halvorsen and his two crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop a total of 23 tons of candies, chocolate and chewing gum wrapped in tiny parachutes from their planes while preparing to touch down at Tempelhof airfield with vast quantities of other supplies in an effort to break a Soviet land blockade of Berlin’s Allied-occupied western sectors.

 

The Times notes that the airlift represented not only “a defiance of Soviet power by the United States, Britain and France,” but “also symbolized reconciliation between the German people and the Allies in the wake of World War II.” Only three years before, Allied warplanes and left German cities in ruins. 

The airlift began after the Soviet Union cut off the Allied powers’ land access to West Berlin, situated deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany, in June 1948. The people of West Berlin were faced with near starvation and an impending winter without fuel.

 

The airlift, which continued for 15 months, claimed the lives of 31 American airmen and 39 British fliers in accidents, but it thwarted the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s attempts to drive the West from the city. By the time it ended in September 1949 (the Soviet blockade had been lifted the previous May), Allied pilots had flown more than 277,000 missions, sometimes buzzed by Soviet fighters, to supply the city’s western sectors with 2.3 million tons of food, flour, coal, medicine and construction equipment.

 

Lieutenant Halvorsen, a native of Utah, flew 126 Berlin airlift missions, joined by his co-pilot, Capt. John Pickering, and his navigator, Sgt. Herschel Elkins.

 

In September 1948, the Air Force sent Lieutenant Halvorsen back to the United States to publicize his efforts, and he appeared on the CBS-TV program “We the People.” American candy manufacturers began donating sweets, and schoolchildren volunteered to wrap them in simulated parachutes, made from handkerchiefs and twine, for shipment to Allied-occupied West Germany.

 

Lieutenant Halvorsen received many letters from German children during the airlift.

 

A 9-year-old named Peter Zimmerman sent him a homemade parachute and a map providing directions to his home for a candy drop. Lieutenant Halvorsen searched for the house on his next flight but couldn’t find it. … Peter sent another note reading: “No chocolate yet. … You’re a pilot. … I gave you a map. … How did you guys win the war anyway?”

 

Lieutenant Halvorsen sent Peter a chocolate bar in the mail.

 

“Gail Halvorsen enchanted the children of Berlin,” recalled Ursula Yunger, who had been one of those children and later settled in the United States. “It wasn’t the candy,” she told The Tucson Citizen in 2004. “It was his profound gesture, showing us that somebody cared.”

 

Halvorsen earned a private pilot’s license in 1941, joined the Army Air Force after briefly attending college, and earned his wings in 1944. He hoped to see combat, “but he was assigned to ferry bombers and transport planes across the South Atlantic for the European and North African campaigns.”

 

* 

July 10: With Truman’s approval ratings tanking, some panicked Democrats consider drafting Eisenhower to run for the presidency. He sends back this reply: “No matter under what terms, conditions, or premises a proposal might be couched, I would refuse to accept the nomination.”

 

* 

July 11: A group of whites and blacks visited Druid Hill Park, in Baltimore, “to stage an inter-racial tennis combat, and were collared and jugged by the cops,” says H.L. Mencken. He later condemns the arrest, as well as the policy behind it: 

A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.

 

Certainly it is astounding to find so much of the spirit of the Georgia Cracker surviving in the Maryland Free State, and under official auspices. The public parks are supported by the taxpayer, including the colored taxpayer, for the health and pleasure of the whole people. Why should cops be sent into them to separate those people against their will into separate herds? Why should the law set up distinctions and discriminations which the persons directly affected themselves reject? If the park tennis courts were free to all comers no white person would be compelled to take on a colored opponent if he did not care to… No one could be invaded in his privacy. Any white player could say yes or no to a colored challenger, and any colored player could say yes or no to a white. But when both say yes, why on earth should anyone else object?

 

It is high time that all such relics of Ku Kluxry be wiped out in Maryland. The position of the colored people since the political revolution of 1895, has been gradually improving in the State, and it has already reached a point surpassed by few other states. But there is still plenty of room for further advance…The Park Board rule is irrational and nefarious. It should be got rid of forthwith.

 

Of equal, and maybe even worse, irrationality is the rule regarding golf-playing on the public links, whereby colored players can play on certain links only on certain days, and white players only on certain other days. (49/227-230) 

 

* 

“The status of a mongrel, inferior race.” 

July 17: At a convention of “states’ rights” Democrats, former Alabama Gov. Frank M. Dixon blasts President Truman. Speaking for the white folk of the South, Dixon warns that Truman’s effort to advance civil rights for black people will “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race.” 

Attendees then nominate South Carolina’s Gov. Strom Thurmond to run under a Dixiecrat Party label in the race to become the next President of the United States. The party’s platform pledges to protect “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.”

 

* 

July 26: Mencken also has an opinion regarding Henry Wallace, the former vice president: “Soak a radio clown for ten days and ten nights in the rectified juices of all the cow-state Messiahs ever heard of and you have him to the life.”

Same day: President Truman announces in an Executive Order that it shall be “the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.” 

Sen. Thurmond explodes. “There’s not enough troops in the Army,” he warns, “to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” In fact, interracial marriage would be banned in several states for another nineteen years. 

Racial purity was said to be at stake. 

Ironically, it turned out decades later that segregation and racial purity had already ended in Strom Thurmond’s pants. When he was 23, in 1925, he fathered a child by Carrie Butler, his family’s black maid. 

Butler was 15 at the time.

 

* 

September: The campaign for president is in its final stages. Goldman explains: 

[Thomas] Dewey campaigned six weeks; Truman, eight. Dewey covered 16,000 miles; Truman, 22,000. Dewey made 170 speeches; Truman, 271. Up and down the country the President went, clambering out of the confusion of his campaign train to talk to any crowd that gathered at 7 a.m. or 11 p.m. “Give ‘em Hell, Harry,” somebody would yell and Harry Truman, the Missouri twang shrill, both hands pumping up and down, would pour it on in the roughest English spoken by a presidential campaigner since frontier days. So Dewey was proud of the Republican Party? Those fellows are just a bunch of old mossbacks …gluttons of privilege…all set to do a hatchet job on the New Deal.” So Dewey was above mentioning Truman’s name? “That’s all a lot of hooey. And if that rhymes with anything, is not my fault.” So the real issue in the campaign was unity? Dewey “is talking mealy-mouthed political speeches.…I warn you...if you let the Republicans get control of the government, you will be making America an economic colony of Wall Street.” (1/84-85)

 

People talked about Truman, fighting it out. “Mighty game little scrapper,” they said. But it was expected he’d lose. 

Elmo Roper had long since stopped taking public-opinion polls; two months before election day science declared the election over. Leading Democratic politicians, students of another science, were publicly offering their Washington homes for sale. Bookies quoted odds they would have refused on Joe Louis at his prime – fifteen-, twenty-, even thirty-to-one. (1/86)

 

* 

November 2-3: Goldman has a great description of that election night: 

     Until 9:00 or so Truman was leading in the popular and in the electoral votes. This was as expected, the radio commentators explained; wait until the rural returns came in. By ten o’clock a good many of the farm areas were reporting. The figures were not particularly Republican, while Truman went on rolling up majorities in the cities. The voices of the commentators were as authoritative as ever; wait until there were enough rural returns to show the inevitable pattern. The Chicago Tribune, no journal for shilly-shallying, was out on the streets with its extra:

 

DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN

 

     Some people stayed up. Ten-thirty, eleven, eleven-thirty – chairs hunched closer to the radio, conversation was shushed , somebody would dart off to telephone and wake up a friend. The Dixiecrats were carrying only three or four states in the South and Henry Wallace was showing no real strength except in California and New York. The Truman majorities in the cities remained substantial and the farm areas were reporting slim Dewey victories or Democratic sweeps. H.V. Kaltenborn of NBC, the voice that had reported Munich, 1938 to America, the voice that had been news incarnate to a large part of a generation, kept saying, crackling and definitive, wait until the full rural returns come in. But the litany was breaking. On the ABC network George Gallup was a shattered man. He could only sigh and tell his audience: “I just don’t know what happened.”

 

     Later and later the lights burned in living rooms. It was clear that Truman was holding most of the South and a sizable bloc of Midwestern and Western states. … By dawn the issue was California, New York, or Ohio; the electoral votes of any one of these states would push the Democrat over. New York, with Wallace taking a half million votes from Truman, went Republican. California and Ohio swung crazily back and forth, with majorities of fifteen hundred this way, twenty-five hundred the other, in states that had well over two million voters apiece.

 

     At breakfast time the Ohio results became definite. After a long twenty minutes, Harry Truman came out of his Kansas City hotel suite. The strut of the bantam cock was gone; the eyes were misty. The President and President-elect of the United States walked slowly into the lobby, arm in arm with his brother Vivian, and reporters overheard him whisper tremulously: “I just hope – I hope so much I am worthy of the honor.”

 

Experts were stunned (one is reminded of the feeling we had in 2016). Voter turnout had been heavy. The country had been ready to remove Truman. “But then a vast swing had set in – a swing which came so late thousands said they had walked into the polling places intending to vote Republican and had ended up casting a Democratic ballot.” (1/88) 

 “I kept reading about that Dewey fellow,” said Charles Crenshaw of New Lebanon, Ohio, “and the more I read the more he reminded me of one of those slick ads trying to get money out of my pocket. Now Harry Truman, running around and yipping and falling all over his feet – I had the feeling he could understand the kind of fixes I get into.” (1/89)