No Surrender

Dropping into the White House for a visit, New York Star Publisher Bartley Crum asked: "By the way, Mr. President, what exactly made you decide to run?" Glancing around the room, Harry Truman replied with a grin: "Where would I ever find another house like this?" This tidbit was reported by a gossip columnist last week. But by last week it was apparent that it would take more than wisecracks to keep Candidate Truman from househunting next winter.

Political prophets like Pollster Elmo Roper were publicly advising the President to throw in the sponge (see above). Eleanor Roosevelt practically conceded a Republican sweep; she included in one of her daily columns a friendly warning for President-apparent Tom Dewey on the problem of getting along with Congress. Heading back from a swing through the West, Columnist Marquis Childs reported the Pacific Coast in the bag for the Republicans, gave the Democrats a fighting chance in only five of eleven western states.

Even the most ardent Democrats clucked despondently over the latest presidential bobble. At his press conference, the President was asked if he knew of any domestic crisis at the moment. Without batting an eye, the man who had demanded an emergency recall of Congress only seven weeks ago, on the grounds of a serious domestic crisis, replied that he had not been told of any.

But Harry Truman was going to fight and keep on fighting, come hell or high water. He repeated, for the nth time, that the congressional investigations of Communism were just a political red herring. And as for Tom Dewey's promise to clean the Reds out of Washington--Harry Truman said he thought it was Dewey's intention to clean out Democrats, not Communists.

As the campaign opened in earnest this week, Harry Truman left no doubts that he was going to campaign as the champion of labor. Six days before Labor Day, he fired off a message calling for repeal of the Taft-Hartley law, extension of social security and health insurance, an increased minimum wage (from 40-c- to 75-c-). Then he climbed aboard his newly refurbished railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, to carry his message to a joint A.F.L. and C.I.O. rally in Detroit, to four other Michigan cities, and Toledo.

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