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 JudgeSamuel 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 (see below), 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's 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 in their platform. At the same time I shall ask them to act on ... aid to education, which they say they're for; a national health program, civil rights legislation, 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 antiSemitic, anti-Catholic law which this 80th Congress passed."

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 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."

* 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."

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