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(This is the third post in a series on the history and politics of the Veepstakes)
Harry Truman is regarded by contemporary historians as one of the nation’s best presidents. And yet it was essentially an accident of history that he even became vice president, never mind president. So let’s look at the politics that thrust the man from Independence, Missouri, onto Franklin Roosevelt’s ticket in 1944 and then into the history books.
FDR prepares a fourth run for the presidency with a new running mate
By 1944, Franklin Roosevelt was already in his 12th year as president, longer than anyone in U.S. history. But the 22nd Amendment limiting presidents to two terms hadn’t yet been passed and, with the nation still in the midst of World War II, there was little doubt that FDR would run for a fourth term.
Roosevelt’s vice president at the time was Henry Wallace, who’d been elected in 1940 (John Nance Garner was vice president during FDR’s first two terms). Wallace wasn’t universally popular among Democrats, however, and he had particular liabilities with conservative Southerners who didn’t appreciate his liberal ideology, his promotion of racial equality, or his eccentric personality. So party leaders persuaded FDR to change running mates before the 1944 election.
Roosevelt, who was visibly aging in office, liked Wallace but agreed to replace him on the presidential ticket. This decision would ultimately be as important to the 1944 election and to history as was the actual presidential campaign.
After considering a few other individuals, Democratic leaders settled on Senator Harry Truman of Missouri as a compromise candidate to replace the liberal Wallace. Truman wasn’t a national figure but he’d made a name for himself as chairman of the Truman Committee to investigate waste in wartime defense spending. Most importantly, he was well-liked and was a moderate who was broadly acceptable to different factions of the party, both New Dealers and conservative Southerners.
There was, however, a glitch in the plan to elevate Truman. Namely, that Truman didn’t want the job. The man who grew up on a Missouri farm and who’d once owned a haberdashery (men’s clothing store) in Kansas City enjoyed being a Senator, knew that his wife hated the spotlight, and, as he told one reporter, “the plain fact is, I don’t want to be president.”1
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Truman joins FDR’s ticket
At that summer’s party convention in Chicago, Robert Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called Roosevelt while sitting with Truman.
“Have you got that fellow lined up yet?” the president asked.
“No. He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with,” replied Hannegan, as he held out the receiver for Truman to hear.
“Well, you tell the Senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility,” barked Roosevelt.
Truman was flabbergasted and finally agreed to have his name put in nomination. “But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?” he asked, unaware that Roosevelt and Hannegan had planned this call as a ploy to coax Truman onto the ticket.2
This still wasn’t the end of the matter, as Wallace didn’t plan to give up his job without a fight. He wanted to remain vice president and was quite popular with the party’s liberal base. Wallace gave a stirring nominating speech at the convention for FDR, setting off a pro-Wallace demonstration, during which “New Dealers cheered” and “conservatives squirmed,” reported Time magazine.”3
After Roosevelt was nominated, another Wallace demonstration broke out. Thousands of his supporters packed the galleries and chanted “We Want Wallace!” The organist played “Iowa, Iowa, That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” in honor of the vice president’s home state. Party leaders panicked, so the Mayor of Chicago declared the crowded hall a fire hazard and Democrats adjourned the convention for the night and stopped the demonstration.
The next day, Wallace won the first ballot over Truman by 429-319, but was short of a majority as several states strategically voted for favorite son candidates. On the second ballot, at the instruction of party bosses, these states turned to Truman. Because of how he was nominated, Truman was derided as “the Missouri Compromise.”4
FDR Dies, Truman becomes president
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Roosevelt and Truman were inaugurated January 20, 1945. Less than three months later, on April 12, FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage while at his presidential retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Truman later remembered that day as the time “the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen upon on me.”5 He was on Capitol Hill when he got a message to come to the White House “as quickly and quietly” as possible.6 Once there, he was ushered into a room with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She walked up and put her arm on Truman’s shoulder. “Harry, the president is dead,” she said.
“It was the only time in my life,” recalled Truman, “that I ever felt like I’d had a real shock. I had hurried to the White House to see the president and when I arrived I found I was the president.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?” asked a stunned Truman.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” Mrs. Roosevelt responded. “For you are the one in trouble now.”
If Wallace had remained vice president
How consequential was the decision to choose Truman over Wallace in 1944?
Obviously, there’s no way to know how any particular individual would have handled the world situation in 1945 as compared to Roosevelt. What we do know is that, in just his first few months in office, Truman had to deal with the surrender of Nazi Germany, the decision to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, and the first moves by the Soviet Union toward domination of Eastern Europe. And in the next few years a flurry of momentous events landed on the president’s desk, including the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the creation of the United Nations, the founding of Israel, and the desegregation of the U.S. military.
Truman’s relative success in dealing with these challenges is why he receives high marks from historians for his presidency. If Wallace had remained on FDR’s ticket, however, and become president in 1945 instead of Truman, history would certainly have turned out differently, for better or for worse.
Wallace was more liberal than Truman (he actually ran against the president four years later, in 1948, as the candidate of the Progressive Party) and the two men particularly disagreed on how to approach the Soviet Union. Whereas Wallace was more sympathetic to Soviet geopolitical needs and thought the U.S. should engage diplomatically with the Russians, Truman implemented a policy of containing the Soviets. It was the Truman Doctrine of Soviet containment in Europe, in fact, that became the basis for U.S. foreign policy for the duration of the Cold War. It’s an example of how a political decision to add Truman to the 1944 ticket had ramifications that reverberated through American politics for decades into the future.
This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
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Robert H. Ferrell, Choosing Truman: The Democratic Convention of 1944 (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 52.
David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 314.
David M. Jordan, FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011), 168-169.
McCullough, Truman, 320.
A. J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 3.
For descriptions of when Truman learned about Roosevelt’s death, see McCullough, Truman, 341-342, and Baime, The Accidental President, 24-26.