POTUS: The glory of responsibility
Following the presidential election of 1948, President Harry Truman took the train back to Washington, D.C., from his home in Independence, Mo. En route he stopped in St. Louis, where someone handed him a copy of the Chicago Tribune with its notoriously incorrect headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Truman was delighted to hold the paper aloft for photographers to snap the most iconic image in the history of U.S. elections – inasmuch as he was the winner in the contest against Republican Thomas E. Dewey in that year’s duel for the White House.
Truman had pulled off the upset of the century. The country was not just flabbergasted but delirious as well, judging by the reception that awaited the president in Washington. According to Truman biographer David McCullough, the president was welcomed back to the capital by a crowd of 750,000 – two-thirds the size of the city in 1948.
“He stepped to a microphone on the North Portico [of the White House],” McCullough writes. “The whole stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, all of LaFayette Square, everywhere as far as he could see, there were people, waving, cheering, calling out to him.”
Truman had won a great victory in the midst of a grave crisis. The Soviets blocked access to West Berlin in the summer of 1948, chocking off supplies to the city, including food, all of which prompted the Berlin Airlift.
Aides speculated that the Soviet blockade might actually help Truman politically since the American people tend to rally to a president’s side in difficult times.
“In nothing he said or did,” McCullough notes, “is there a sign of his playing the situation for ‘political advantage.’ Rather, the grave responsibilities he bore as President at this juncture seem to have weighed more heavily on him than at any time since assuming office. He felt the campaign and its distractions, the drain it put on his time and strength, could not be coming at a worse time …”
Truman did his job, and the political fruits fell into his lap.
Ulysses S. Grant was a lame duck Republican president in 1876, the year American politics nearly came undone.
That year’s election pitted the Democratic governor of New York, Samuel Tilden, against Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican and the governor of Ohio.
The election campaign was fraught with remembrances of the Civil War concluded 12 years earlier when General Grant accepted the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse of Confederate forces under the command of Robert E. Lee.
Not until July 4, 1876, did the tensions underlining the election and the war’s aftermath burst into the open. A “fracas” in Hamburg, Ga., escalated into a conflict that left five Black men dead and scores wounded, at the hands of a white mob.
Responding to Georgia Gov. Daniel Chamberlain, Grant said, “I will give every aid for which I can find law or Constitutional argument.”
Rumors then surfaced of the formation of white South Carolinian “rifle clubs” intent on discouraging Black participation in the election for president, according to Grant biographer Jean Edward Smith.
President Grant eventually issued a proclamation stating that South Carolina was “in a state of insurrection.” He ordered troops to the state capital of Columbia. The presence of the troops had a calming effect on all sides, Smith writes.
Meanwhile, the contest for president roared to a conclusion; it looked certain that Tilden had won. Trouble over the vote count soon reared its ugly head in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana.
The president, responding to the developing situation, noted, “Either party can afford to be disappointed by the results. The country cannot afford to be tainted …”
With Congress divided between the parties amidst a stymied Electoral College vote, Grant spoke at the White House with his old friend, Congressman Abram S. Hewitt, national chairman of the Tilden campaign. Over coffee and cigars, the two men brokered a bipartisan commission to judge the accuracy of voting in the three states.
The upshot was a disputed victory for Hayes, 185-184 in the Electoral College. Throughout, Smith asserts, Grant was a calming influence on a rattled nation.
Grant later noted, “I would not have raised my finger to put Hayes in, if in doing so I did Tilden the slightest injustice.
“All I wanted was for the legal power to declare a president, to keep the machine running, to allay the passions of the canvass, and to allow the country peace.”
Grant departed the White House a happy man.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.