The American Presidential Election of 1948
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
- The Ultimate American Presidential Election Book: Every Presidential Election in American History (1788-2020) is now available! amzn.to/3aYiqwI
Mr. Beat's band: electricneedler...
Mr. Beat on Twitter: / beatmastermatt
Donate to Mr.Beat for prizes: / iammrbeat
The 41st episode in a very long series about the American presidential elections from 1788 to the present. In 1948, the Democratic Party splinters into three factions, and everyone predicts Truman stands no chance. Finally, Dewey defeats Truman.
Feeling extra dorky? Then visit here:
www.countingthe...
The 41st Presidential election in American history took place on November 2, 1948. After Franklin Roosevelt died, Harry Truman took over, and soon after Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied forces. Now, all eyes were on the Pacific theater of the war.
Truman took action and decided to drop the first and only atomic bombs ever dropped on another country. He did it to end the war quickly and try to save the lives of millions of both Americans and Japanese who would have kept on fighting otherwise. While today people still debate whether or not the action was justified, it’s hard to deny how bold the move was by Truman. And it worked. Japan finally surrendered shortly after Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was over, and this time Truman made it a point to not make the same mistakes that were made after World War One.
Truman had a very low approval rating- it seemed not nearly as many Americans liked him like they did FDR. Not only that, several people in his own political party were turning against him. They tried to get Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II hero and former Chief of Staff of the United States Army, to be the nominee instead of Truman. But they failed, as Eisenhower refused to run. Eventually the Democrats went ahead and went with Truman as their nominee, with Alben Barkley, the Senate Minority Leader, as his running mate.
Though Truman tried to moderate his civil rights positions, some Democrats were like “nuh-uh” and walked out of the Democratic Convention. They started a new political party, called the States’ Rights Democratic Party. Members of this party became known as Dixiecrats. The Dixiecrats wanted to keep the policy of racial segregation in the South allow states to keep their infamous Jim Crow laws. They nominated Strom Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina and the guy who led the walkout of the Democratic convention, for President, and Fielding Wright, the Governor of Mississippi, as his running mate. Fielding Wright? More like Fielding Wrong. Haha Sorry, bad joke.
Anyway, it wasn’t just the Dixiecrats who left the Democratic Party. Some Democrats argued that Truman’s civil rights reforms didn’t do enough for blacks. They wanted more. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, who, remember, would have been President if it weren’t for Truman taking his place in the 1944 election, disagreed with Truman on many issues. In fact, Truman had fired Wallace from his position as the Secretary of Commerce after Wallace talked trash about Truman’s foreign policy. Wallace opposed the Truman Doctrine and wanted to get rid of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which he thought violated civil liberties. Wallace also called for more regulation against giant corporations and an expanded welfare state. Naturally, opponents called him a secret Communist.
Wallace and his supporters also left the Democratic Party to form a third Progressive Party, called the, um, Progressive Party. Can’t we get more creative with names? Again, this was not the same Progressive Party as Teddy Roosevelt or Robert La Follette...it was a new one. This Progressive Party officially nominated Wallace as their nominee, with Glen Taylor, a senator from Idaho, as his running mate. Taylor had earned a reputation as being that one weird politician in DC. A guy known as the “singing cowboy” because he would sing songs and ride his horse up the steps of the Capitol, not at the same time, mind you.
So Wallace and Taylor were definitely unique. When they campaigned, they made a point of speaking to racially integrated audiences, even in the South, and because of that, Southerners sometimes threw food like eggs and tomatoes at them.
Oh crap, I spent so much time talking about Democrats and former Democrats that I almost forgot about the Republicans. Well, they tried for Dwight Eisenhower, too, but after Eisenhower declined, many familiar names stood out for the nomination. Thomas Dewey, Robert Taft, Arthur Vandenburg, and Harold Stassen, who were all in the running in 1944, and some who didn’t run in 1944, notably Earl Warren, the governor of California. The Republicans decided to play it safe and go once again with Thomas Dewey, he was still governor of New York. They nominated Warren as his running mate.
_The Ultimate American Presidential Election Book: Every Presidential Election in American History (1788-2020)_ is now available! amzn.to/3aYiqwI
Is it safe to assume you're writing your video for 2020?
As a follow up it would be nice to do a series on the change in Congress during each election cycle. Perhaps only from 1900 to present
Remember pearl harbor!
Truman's face holding up the "Dewey Defeats Truman" newspaper is the original trollface
John Porteous not the Trib's finest hour.
John Porteous trump need to talk a photo with the Newsweek Hillary thing
I know it's highly unlikely, but imagine the meltdown if Trump (or Pence) somehow manages to invalidate enough mail-in ballots to get the second term.
@@TapOnX then trump should hold up a computer monitor that says that Biden wins...
In all seriousness, that would be a bad look for the US and as someone who voted trump, I think it’d be best if he just conceded.
@@joshuapittman4663 all the Trumpsters will call you RINO
I was seven and my parents voted for Dewey. I didn’t want him because all of my classmates were saying if he became President we would have to go to school on Saturdays.
I heard that Dewey lost because women didn't like his mustache.
Going to school on Saturdays? And I thought Stalin was bad.
@@psilvakimo "“Good gracious! He looks like the little man on the wedding cake."---overheard by Alice Roosevelt Longworth at the Republican convention. She repeated it everywhere during the campaign and often gets credit for saying it first.
Wally McAllister well then 1948 was the smallest upset in american history then
Lol I love the way kids have a political saying even if they don’t realize it or their reasoning isn’t the strongest 😂 I remember when I was 10 years old and in 5th grade during the 2012 election, a lot of us kids didn’t want Mitt Romany to be president because we didn’t feel like he was as energetic as Barack Obama 😂 which had nothing to do with politics whatsoever
It always amazes me that Strom Thourmond stayed around in the Senate until he was 100 years old in 2003
Term limits!!!!!
And people complain about how old Biden is in office. That’s some serious double standards
Very interesting i how it happens again
Thank you for making me go down this rabbit hole
@@filledwithvariousknowledge2747two wrong doesn't make one right. Biden is still visibly senile.
You knew Eisenhower was gonna get elected when both parties tried to get him to run
I recently watched an interview between the channel vloging through history and Susan Eisenhower, she said the the biggest challenge for her granddad wasn't winning the election, it was getting the republican nomination
6:38 if the internet had been around back then, this picture of Truman with the newspaper would have been one of the biggest memes of the year!
It was circulated widely just the same.
If Dewey was more aggressive in his style, he could’ve actually won. He was an effective governor and was a good man in all, but was more worried on winning then discussing the issues
I mean aren't we all like that when something is at stake prioritize the front not the back
I think Dewey took the wrong lesson away from the 1944 election. He probably assumed that going too aggressive against FDR was what hurt him, so he figured taking a lowkey campaign would translate to higher poll numbers as everyone would probably remain angry at Truman.
If he took the strategy of 1944 and applied it to 1948, I'm not sure if he would have won, but he probably would have gotten a higher percentage of the popular vote.
@@rich355 If he got a slight increase, he would've won by the electoral vote, as many states were won by Truman with less than one percent.
@@rich355 To be fair, he wanted to change the campaign methods by criticizing Truman, but his advisors and his wife opposed to that idea.
Henry Wallace was the OG Bernie Sanders
lol.
*Eugene V Debs has entered the chat*
@@stephenquinn3447 Bernie is a huuuge Debs fan too
@@stephenquinn3447 James Weaver has entered the chat
@@akorn9943 *Theodore Roosevelt Has Entered The Chat*
Reading about Truman, he is one of the best and most honest presidents. He didn't accept special pensions from the government after he left office and he actually became broke. He was the poorest president. He was hated at the time but historians agree he was actually really forward thinking for the time and strated the anti segregation days of the democrats.
Smittinator If he didn’t nuke japan, Japan would’ve done chemical attacks on California, which was planned by Japan
He also ordered to kill nearly quarter of a million civilians by Atomic bomb. No amount of praise will be enough for the redemption of his soul.
Pen Muni it was either that or invade Japan, which would have a death toll of around 1 million Americans
Dan Stark Couldn’t have said it better myself.
@@danstark5071 That doesn't make it right. There is a difference between the deaths of civilians and the deaths of soldiers (although to be fair, is there really when the soldiers were forcibly conscripted?). The innocent Japanese civilians who were liquidated by the bombs weren't complicit in the actions of their government, and they neither agreed nor deserved to have their lives sacrificed for potential peace, or even to save a number of lives down the road who they had nothing to do with.
The trolley problem is actually a difficult problem, although some other people will still try their hardest to convince otherwise. But my view is that sheer numbers don't overrule right and wrong. Consent, rights and responsibilities are much more significant in making moral decisions, even if ignoring them yields a more "good" outcome overall. I think more people should recognise a distinction between "good or bad" and "right or wrong".
Lol the greatest upset in American history but then you realize it was made before November 8th 2016
I would actually say this was bigger. I think about a fifth of the polls expected a Trump win or a close race at the very least. So a Trump victory wasn't THAT unexpected if you were paying attention. However, nobody expected a Truman win for even a second. That beats 2016
@Hardwork1994 ! Also2016 Election was probably the first election in awhile where Urbanities preferred one candidate and Rural Folks preferred another. So.... Clinton did receive more popular votes...it was concentrated in cities/urban places and not in swing states.
@@morgankingsley4992
I dunno about that. NYT had it 95% Clinton at the start of the night and even if Trump won EVERY swing state he was still going to lose. Amazingly PA, MI, AND WI were marked as "lean democratic" on sites like RCP. plus there was so much more data in 2016 and I can't remember the last time polls were so wrong. So it seemed far more unlikely for pundits to get it wrong in 2016 than in 1948
@@JohnGoetzGaming The pundits got the 2016 election wrong because they did not understand basic statistical analysis. When the polls show Candidate A with 48% of the vote and Candidate B with 46%, with the remainder undecided, and the standard error (or margin of error) is 4%, what that means is that there is a 95% likelihood of Candidate A's total being between 44% and 52%, and Candidate B between 42% and 50%. Note the overlap?
That is pretty much what happened between Clinton and Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Yet the pundits claimed Clinton had the lead. It was no lead. It was a tie. And the final vote was well within the standard error, though Trump had a slight edge of less than 1% in each state.
@@MFPhoto1
She led by a lot more than 2% in those states. They weren't even marked as swing States. They were marked as leaning democratic. And there was talk of Texas, SC, Georgia, NC, FL, AZ and several others going for her. People thought this would be the death of the Republicans
- The Chicago Tribune was going to give Truman a plaque of their faulty headline for the 25th anniversary of the election, but Truman died a year before that.
- Dewey was the last major candidate to have facial hair.
- Truman ended up being the poorest president after he left office, struggling for money, enough so that and act was passed to pay former presidents.
hey bfdi guy
@@asheep7797 Hi
Well that's intresting
Poorer than Grant?
Hi mister meester... tweester@@MeesterTweester
Even though Wallace has some weird social quirks, he’s often overlooked by many lifelong Democrats, was basically Bernie before Bernie was Bernie. Man wanted to socialize healthcare and provide insurance to all Americans in the 1940’s, bold.
The same thing could be said about Glen Taylor. He was very similar to Wallace policy-wise, and he was almost expelled from the Idaho Democratic Party for running with Wallace and the Progressive Party.
I'm pretty sure Wallace is one of Bernie's heroes as well as Eugene Debs.
Just so you’re aware. Strom Thurmond was still in the senate in 2003. He died in office at 100
A very underrated election in American History. The Cold War, Civil Rights, communism, and the post-war economy all rolled into one election. Plus the surprise winner as the kicker.
The more I research about Henry Wallace the more I noticed that my views correspond with Wallace. He's an interesting man, but I'll be the first to say that he was a bit of a weirdo.
He was definitely a weirdo, and I definitely also love many of the views he had.
Henry Wallace himself later retracted many of his foreign policy views. He said he had been too trusting of Stalin and the Soviets.
Either Dewey or Wallace for me
Meh, the Truman doctrine was the correct choice. In fact I am convinced that if Truman got to be a president earlier, and the US just let the Soviet Union fall during the war instead of propping them up and giving them Eastern Europe to destroy, plunder and economically ruin, we wouldn't have had the Cold war.
FDR's friendliness with Stalin is the main reason I don't consider him anywhere near the best presidents in US history despite the New Deal being pretty good.
Truman was the beginning of the end of are Country
This wasn't really an upset. The poll saying Dewey was ahead was skewed heavily to the Republican burbs.
Truman had support from working class because he came from there.
Well, the polls were still pretty young back then. Also, experts actually _warned_ the pollsters that their tactic of favoring certain places and demographics will screw them over in this election, but the latter ignored it. The pollsters also ended up becoming overconfident, calling the election for Dewey long before Election Day. Many of the supporters that pushed Truman to victory really made their choice to support him around the last fortnight before Election Day, in no small part thanks to the president's aggressive late whistle-stop train campaign tour.
It wasn't just a few polls that had people thinking Truman was toast. It was common sense. The Democrat party was fractured and people figured Dewey was a lock to win New York because he was a very popular governor. (New York was the most important state to win at the time.)
@@warron24 Dewey ended up winning NY because, unlike 1944 and 1940, the state's then-influential Liberal Party declined to give Truman its ballot line.
As well, carrying the State with the most EC votes has mattered less, it seems (1948, 1968, 1976, 2000, 2004, 2016; the winner failed to carry the biggest prize in the aforementioned elections).
From my understanding, the issue was they conducted the poll by telephone. In 1948, telephones were common, but far from universal, and by and large wealthier Americans had them and poorer Americans didn't, and the poorer Americans tended to support Truman vs. wealthier Americans supporting Dewey.
Thankfully Truman could empathize with regular working class & middle class people (like myself & my family)...
I remember my grandmother telling me that a lot of people voted against Dewey because of his mustache. True!
I believe her
Nixon supposedly lost a lot of support due to appearing on TV with "five o'clock shadow," while JFK did not.
"Politics is show business for ugly people." Well, not quite. It may be as much a beauty as talent contest.
A psychologist at the University of Birmingham claims to be able to predict who will most elections just by showing the candidates' pictures to people who have not heard of them: even children in another country.
@@faithlesshound5621 Nixon also did not want to wear makeup. He thought it was unmanly.
@@MFPhoto1 That makes sense if you remember the "pink scare." Nixon had worked with Sen. McCarthy, who "outed" homosexuals as well as communists. Eisenhower had been persuaded to ban the latter from federal employment. So Nixon would have been hypersensitive to being called effeminate.
@@jetstream6389 He does look like Brian Donlevy. www.imdb.com/name/nm0002046/?ref_=tt_rv_t4
6:36 kinda weird to see that at the time New York was super red republican, while Texas was democratic blue
New York didn't always go Republican though, the native son Dewey was very popular there though as he was the sitting Governor. The Democratic Party had a stranglehold on the South because Republicans were blamed for the severe economic depression in the South during the post-Civil War Reconstruction when Republicans were in power. Black voters were also blamed for it because they voted the Republicans into power. Hence keeping black people and other Republicans from voting or holding office in the South became very popular because people didn't want to return to the hardships of Reconstruction. An older guy I know told me his grandmother's stories of living through both Southern Reconstruction here in Alabama and as well as the Great Depression and she said the hard times of Reconstruction were worse. Even more than being bitter against the Party of Lincoln over the Civil War fear kept the average white Southerner, most of whom had no historical connection to slavery, voting Democrat was the fear of a return to the hard times of Reconstruction if blacks or other Republicans ever held power in the South again, and the Democrats used this fear to their advantage. The further you get into the 20th Century the more people with living memory of Reconstruction start dying off and the South becomes slowly less racist and slowly more willing to vote Republican.
Republican party was relatively progressive until 1960s
@@zainmudassir2964 The keyword being relative. They were still more conservative than today's GOP in many ways, it's just that since the 1960s the Democratic Party has changed more rapidly than the Republicans. Also, we are hyper-polarized today. Back then there were liberal and conservative wings in both parties with a lot of people in the center and elected officials in both parties often reflected the culture of their region.
New York did also used to be a swing state back then
@@buncha3arrows195 How long was it a swing state?
It's genuinely so wonderful that you make these videos and put in so much work!
Thank you so much. I love making them :)
In 1948 election Texas was the most solid Democratic state in entire USA
OK was even more so, but TX was right up there then.
At that time Texas was the state that the Democrats had to win in order to win the presidency. Between 1952 and 1992, the only Democrat to win Texas but lose the election was Hubert Humphrey. The 3 most Republican leaning states were Oregon Vermont and California.
Strom Thurmond has the lowest popular vote percent out of any candidate who won at least one state. I think he is the only one to do so while not hitting at least 5 percent
He is probably one of the longest running political ppl in history. He was SC's governor and later Senator until he died in 2003 at 100 years old
Heath N Alf Landon was 100 too
The states that he carried were not hotbeds of universal suffrage.
Yet he managed to get 39 Electoral College votes, while Wallace had none for a similar number of popular votes. That shows the advantage of localised over national support.
Also, in those pre-civil rights days, he won in black-majority states where very few blacks were allowed to vote. Much like South Africa at that time.
The lasting legacy of Thurmond's campaign was the stars and cross version of the Confederate Flag, which his Dixiecrat party disinterred for his campaign.
@@haroldlawson8771 Yeah, but Thurmond was still in office as a senator at the age of 100, Landon wasn't.
I adore Truman. I live in Puerto Rico, and my friend introduced me to a book called “Harry Truman and Puerto Rico: the failed decolonisation project” and you really see his fiery passion for self determination especially after freeing the Philippines, he wanted to do the same here, but the governor wanted a neutral spot where they could still be Puerto Ricans but also enjoy the best from USA as a protectorate
So impressive that a presidential candidate from 1948 (!) served as US Senator in the 21st century.
*candidates used to be so badass, they don't like someone they just leave the party and make their own!! Such fighters, i wish it was still like that*
the useless channel hit the folks
I mean, there's Bernie, who was never a part of a party until he was basically forced to join the Democrats in 2016.
I wonder if the reason why Truman sought for desegregation was because the US had the spotlight aimed at them after WW2. Suddenly they were the superpower that all of the western world looked to because of the cold war. And as they did, they critisized the US for having segregation.
It makes sense that Truman would want to change that, even if he himself was a racist. Because he obviously needed to convince the world that the US were the good guys and the Soviets were the bad guys. But as long as the US had Japanese internment camps and segregation, that was difficult. They seemed like just another bad guy. So that had to change.
There seems to be a basis for that (BTW, the internment camps in the American interior were US INTERNMENT CAMPS - just as the concentration camps in the central and eastern Europe were Nazi concentration camps!).
I think I remember hearing that FDR wanted to start desegregation but never had the chance.
Great coverage of Henry Wallace's campaign. He's too often a forgotten figure.
Man I wish Wallace was president at one point. His platform was incredible
America would be a far Greater country
Henry Wallace knew what FDR wanted to do....
It is entirely possible that there wouldn't have even been a cold war if he had won. And that doesn't even include the grand platform of human rights he would've pushed.
@@philipcone357 that's why they stopped him. They are still doing it today.
I do too, but at the time Truman was the best choice.
Truman is underrated in my opinion. It's a shame the Fair Deal never got passed and that he was unpopular in his time.
All the countries Truman helped rebuild turned out to have better health care than we did. We could sure use Henry Wallace today!
(Trump holds up newspaper): Clinton defeats Trump
@@ah_libra I think that's what she I refearing to
It’s ironic that you said that this was the greatest upset in election history and you released two months before they new greatest upset according to most people. 😂👍🏻
If you actually google it clinton defeats trump newspaper images alot of clinton defeats trump will come up
I'm not a trump supporter, but I watch some of the SNL skits at the time and laugh at how cocky they got. My faviorite line is, "Now the Canidates. Mr. Trump and--can we say it?" "Probably" "PRESIDENT CLINTON"
@@evanmusial6155
Another unelected Republican president. Why is that?
"the biggest upset in american election history"
*2016*
'hold my huffpost polster prediction chart'
Huffpost pundits not understanding basic statistical analysis doesn't mean it was a huge upset. Anyone looking at the data honestly knew it was going to be a close election.
cuz some of the polls were garbage lol. I would say Truman had worse chances
Thanks for posting. November 13, 1948. The day that my paternal grandmother turned 62. And this was her first birthday as a first time grandmother as my aunt (father's sister) and her husband had welcomed their first child (daughter) into the world the previous July.
Would this now be the second biggest election upset in American history?
Yes
MegaVergan
Mr. Beat: And here are the results. Clinton won!
Children: Yay!!!
Mr. Beat: Just kidding
LOL HOW AWESOME THAT WOULD HAVE SOUNDED
No
No, Trump was given a 27% chance of winning the presidency on election day. That's an upset, but not that big.
I was thinking either way with 2016.
I'm also a music aficionado, and it sounds like you're using songs popular in the year of the election as background music on all these election videos.
Dewey had the smoothest voice of any presidential candidate. He sounds like an old fashioned radio host.
Strom Thurmond was SC's Governor and later Senator until 2003! He was 100 years old when he stepped down.
Stepped down by dying
@@Diamond-OSCandMarblestuff He stepped down as Senator in January 2003 and died later that summer in June 2003
@@nick56677 oh
Did you know that Thurmond lived to the age of 100
Henry Wallace. Best Wallace
That title goes to George.
@@declannewton2556 Racist
@@DeezNuts-sx9jd
George Wallace should have been made president
Declan Newton-Maharaj He was a segregationist, confederate supporter, and a terrible person. No he shouldn’t have been
What about David Wallace. He owns Dundee Mifflin.
You're wrong about Henry Wallace - he was not simply called a communist, he was a great admirer of the communists. He objected to a hard line against the Soviet Union, at a time when Stalin was murdering millions.
It looks like we just had a repeat of this election.
McIntosh1581 Yep. Except the parties were swapped around.
McIntosh1581 yup
I was thinking to myself in 2016 "If Hillary screws up she's going to join Dewey" but did not think that it'll actually happen until then.
Hillary and Dewey are pissed off losers
Probably, although the main difference is in this one Truman won in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Trump only won the vote that mattered, the electoral college
I was 3 weeks away from my 8th birthday and I remember this so well. My family were progressives and we didn't campaign for Truman but for Henry Wallace who had been Roosevelt's VP the first time he ran. He was aced out the Dem. convention. Claude Pepper was about to put his name in for nomination for VP when whomever was in charge closed the meeting. Peppa was in his 90's and it took him too long to get to the podium so Wallace was not nominated. It is interesting to think about how the world would be different had Wallace been the one to take over after Roosevelt died in office. No atomic bomb would have been dropped on Japan. Wallace was a great VP and many of Roosevelt's ideas came from him, Eleanor and Roosevelt's personal secretary, Francis (forget her last name). We walked precincts, attended rallies did fund raisers, but history does what history does. VOTE!
And ever since the Democratic Partys has been fucking us in the ass. The backstabbing of Wallace was the beginning of the end.
Now they rust rig elections
Great video, I love these, although your is President Tier list is painful.
Thomas Dewey the original Hillary Clinton
Frank Meason that’s henry clay sir
He was liked.
What about Al Gore in the 2000 elections?
They both represented New York
now he’s joe biden
Dwight Eisenhower - WWII Hero General Dude
Excellent summary
I'm just loving these videos buddy, can't get enough of them.
While Truman was admittedly racist in his youth, and possibly in his personal feelings throughout his life, his writings seem to show that he took the role of president seriously. After seeing the way Black soldiers were being treated after WWII, and feeling he was president of all of the people, he felt that supporting Civil Rights was a necessity. It hurt him politically, as I am sure you will mention (I am typing this paused at 2:32). It is interesting to me the thought that he actually took his job so seriously that he was able to look past his biases. I don't know if that was just him trying to sound good, but I don't even think he would have tried to sound good when he was a younger man.
Truman was indeed conflicted in racial matters beyond his youth; though he desegregated the armed forces and supported a strong (for its time) civil rights agenda for his party and country, he would react negatively to the ciivil rights movements of the '50s and '60s.
Dude was born in the deep south as you go where segregation was as common in culture
Why did I misread this at first as The Presidential *Erection* of 1948? What kind of stuff is Harry Truman looking up on the computer?
Truman took on both the segregationists on the right in his party, and the Communist appeasers on the left in his party. By doing so he virtually assured defeat for himself, except that the voters had the last word. He showed a backbone, something severely lacking in most elected official today.
Missippi voting for Thurmond was the strongest state of any victory since WW2 and the highest ever state win for a third party, with him getting 87.2 percent of the vote there. The closest is Goldwater in 1948, with the same state but "only" 87.1 percent
1964 oops
I mean, they kind of cheated by having Strom falsely listed as the democratic nominee.
@@burningphoenix6679 I do think that with how much hatred the south had for civil rights, especially deep ones, thurmond would have won Mississippi, Alabama, and south Carolina even as a third party candidate. But with a much lower run, like 60 or something
I would've voted for Wallace
Brandon Martinez same
I would Dewey
I think that's the point. Wallace's platform is really a platform for the 21st century, America simply wasn't ready for him
Same, Wallace was great
I would Dewey.
This is the last election where New York voted for the Republican and Texas voted for the Democrat.
sounds like the 2016 election.
+Bryan Braga Somewhat!
Granted Gary Johnson was no Storm Thurmond lol. I don't know if anyone will ever be quite like Storm.
On a random note Gary Johnson does remind me of the singing cowboy
The fact that Strom Thurmond was able to run for president as a grown ass man, and then continue to get elected to the senate for decades until 2003 is why term limits should exist, or at least be presented.
Why does the picture of Strom Thurmond you chose make him look like gigachad lmao😂
Truman wasn’t considered racist enough by the Dixiecrats.
Lesson: Never declare victory in advance. Cuz then you will jinx it and loose!
See Newsmax’s Hillary magazine in November 2016 and also Hillary herself when she was a nominee.
“I will be president. It is written in the stars.”
-Thomas Dewey
Wallace being outed from being FDR's VP in his last administration is one of the great disasters of American history.
The Democratic Party
What do you expect
Wish they taught stuff like this to kids today
Nope, a commie sympathizer
It was because he was a secret communist
No, it was the greatest decision they could have made, so we wouldn't have 2 communist presidents
I wonder how different US/Soviet relations would be if Henry Wallace became president
not that different honestly
It's cute that people think 2016 was a bigger upset than this
Truman: **appears**
Japan: Why do I hear boss music?
Yeah people don’t understand just how bad Japan was in WW2. It was basically Germany of the Pacific.
If Truman dropped the bomb on Germany, no one would’ve been mad honestly but Germany was already defeated by the time the bomb dropped
There are always at least two sides to the story :P
“Greatest upset” 16’ might of topped that
Truman was a better president than FDR
NOT
@@mikelynch7271 Truman basically had many of the same policies as FDR, he just wasn’t naive to the communist threat and didn’t put people in internment camps.
So yeah. I’d say he was better than FDR
Not gonna lie; I'd be tempted to vote for a politician called "The Singing Cowboy" who rode a horse to work.
In my opinion, the GOP was always going to lose the '48 Election no matter what. Because they couldn't accept that times had changed. Like FDR or not, he was the most successful President in the 20th Century. His New Deal changed the American relation with the government, especially Social Security. And so running against that was certainly not going to work no matter if it was a moderate like Dewey, or a conservative like Taft, it had become a third rail issue that nobody touches. And also, they ran the same candidate who lost in the last election, which has almost never worked in most elections. Just ask Adlai Stevenson how that worked out for him. And Truman tying himself to FDR was a great strategy, as it pretty much ensured his victory, as surprising as it seemed.
A good point. Also the fact that FDR saved the country from The great depression and the country still hadn't recovered from that, maybe Thomas dewey's lazy and boring campaign was making them understand that there could be another Great depression if they elected him as President, especially when Harry truman said the same thing in his campaign ¨The communists are rooting for a GOP victory because they know it would bring on another Great depression¨.
Map at 7:21 broke my brain because of the colors I was so confused 😂
In 1948, I would have been fine with Truman, Wallace, or Dewey
In 2016, I like none of the candidates.
actually its 3 atom bomb
During world war II, Tokyo was intended as the 3rd target for a nuclear weapon if the Japanese still refused to surrender. They did surrender after Nagasaki was bombed so the 3rd bomb was not used. That ended the war in the Pacific.
Just read this chapter in the McCullough book!
I like Dewey, but I would wonder how Civil Rights would go without Warren on the court.
You actually had me so confused when you said Dewey won...
On the national/macro level, 1948 win by Truman was the bigger upset than the 2016 win by Drumpf. On the state level (namely Great Lakes region) they seem to be about the same.
Cope
1:52 Stalin is furry, confirmed
I know this channel isn’t about alt. History. Be interesting to see how the later stages of WWII would have gone say Thomas Dewey won in 1944.
Not well
The nukes DID NOT end the WWII. The USSR invading Manchuria did. The nukes were used simply as a way to demonstrate to the Soviets not to go too far. Truman hated Communists above even Japanese people (he called them slopes and Japs). Please stop repeating cold-war propaganda.
Did Stalin have a navy that could invade Japan? With no navy and a small air force why would Japan surrender to the soviets?
@@k.w.powell6393 In the context of the war, Japan was only able to acquire the resources to wage war through their possessions in Manchuria at the end..All other supply lines were broken. The Japanese War Cabinet is known to have been ready to handle a navel assault and amphibious landing of the mainland, but ONLY if able to resupply raw resources through their possessions in what is now China.
Without that direct access to Oil, Rubber, and other essential war material, their fate was sealed. They greatly preferred to surrender to Americans (as did the Germans), so the narrative was put forward as described in the video.
This is factually wrong.
Dewey lost because he thought the polls are on his side and did not bother campaigning in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa he would had 288 Electoral Votes, Truman 204 Electoral Votes, and Thurmond still at 39 Electoral Votes.
This is why we should put aside any polling until the Election Day.
Both the democrats AND republicans wanted Dwight Eisenhower? That's crazy!!!
39 electoral votes but only of 2.4% popular vote, yesh.
It was due to him crow laws preventing all voters but rich white land owners in the south, who went heavily Democratic. The South represented 24 percent if the population in 1948 (which can be figured out when you learn that the south would have contained 165 of 682 electoral votes in 1948 if the apportionment act of 29 was never made) but the laws made the south only get 10.5 percent of the popular vote, only about 40 percent of the real population
Morgan Kingsley Wrong it was because he was on the ballot and Truman wasn’t in every state he won as he official democrat
I was explaining the 2.4 percent, as that is not actually vindictive of the south population percent. I know he used democratic machinery to win the states he did.
The “Singing Cowboy” is such a cool nickname! Wallace was the man!
You know, call me crazy, but I don't think this is the greatest upset election in American history anymore.
Trump in 2016 had a better chances than Truman was predicted
2:53 Truman was nominated
3:21 Strom Thurmond was nominated
4:41 Wallace was nominated
5:42 Dewey was nominated
6:18 results
6:28 Truman won
I would recommend adding Wallace back in. Yes, he won no states, but he got the same votes as Thurmond, and was percieved as a equal threat to Thurmond in throwing the election to the house. He certainly threw New York to Dewey, and nearly did the same for California and Ohio. If he had gotten about 2.6 or 2.7 percent of the vote, so about an extra 150K votes, which isn't that unfeasible, then he would have denied Truman a majority. However, with Thurmond, unless if he took the mantle of the democrat in even MORE states (which would have only realistically possibly happened in Georgia and Arkansas) and won them, he was not going to be having a much bigger impact on the race, though to be fair I think Thurmond would have won South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi even as a third party and the democratic nomination only TRULY tipped Louisiana. So yeah, I would argue that despite winning no states, Wallace had a relatively equal impact to Thurmond.
Who else think that Strom looks like Putin
The progressive media and historians so loved this victory, but are not so eager to really explain how Truman pulled off the upset. In the final weeks of the campaign, the Dems went into rural areas and scared all the farm voters that the Republicans would take away their farm subsidies and pointed to the fact that Dewey was a "city slicker" from New York. The big switch of the farm votes (that normally vote Republican) in Ohio, Iowa, Illinois and California decided the election. Of course there was no reason to continue the farm subsidies (which paid farmers not to plant in order to support farm prices) after WW2, as most of Europe and Asia was starving, and Americans were and are the most efficient farm producers in the world.
So your telling me that literally every election the farmers got scared in to voting democrat which was every election the Democratic Party was in to 1956 probely. But I do think you are right about calling them calling him a city slicker.
@@wizardstumpt4467 I am not saying all farmers or even most farmers, just enough were worried to tip the scale. Dewey still got a majority of the northern farm vote, but not by the expected majority to win those states. In America, farmers big or small are basically independent businessmen (and women), and the GOP is their natural home, just look up the voting history of all the "farm states" of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas ... During the depression, farmers got used to getting government checks for doing nothing, in 1948 many were still hooked on the welfare (as too many poor folks are today). Once farmers realized the return of world market demand for food after WW2, they returned home and never looked back.
K.W. Powell that’s fair
Strom Thurmond: I never understood a word he said. He spoke a kind of Appalachian english that had long since gone extinct.
First election I was alive in!
@@ThatOneGuy7999 also the first election where Trump and Clinton were alive in
The greatest series ever. I got my BA degree in history in May 2016 in Baltimore Maryland at Goucher College
Thomas Dewey was the most British American presidential candidate of the 20th century
The music you have in the background sounds more 1920 than 1948
yes, because this version of Twelfth Street Rag, despite being from 1948, was a cover of a nearly 40 year old ragtime piece and was intentionally done in a Dixieland throwback style
The Republicans had a "dream ticket" on paper. But the chemistry between the two men was almost toxic. Dewey ran a stupid campaign, speaking in platitudes and not upsetting anyone. Earl Warren, who was a Masonic brother of Truman, nevertheless made a perfectly acceptable speech criticizing the "misguided" policies of the "well-meaning" Truman. Dewey read about it and called Warren to order him not to do it again! Warren's son told a Warren biographer that his dad's face turned red, and he almost shouted back, "Well goddamn it, Tom, you gotta say SOMETHING some of the time!"
you're awesome
:D Well thank you. You are, too.
watching this back now "the greatest election upset in American history" feels a little outdated..
6:22 did not age well 💀
Mr. Beat- Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Sax player in the background- "Check out these sick riffs"
Harry Truman was hilarious
If all those people in the 40s and 50s could see that all the civil rights they gave to blacks not only aren't going to be given any credit for by most of today's identity politics blacks but gotten them even more blame, I wonder if they would have still supported them.
This will be very similar to what happened to Trump.
Storm Thurmond was also a WW2 vet, later a SC senator who won as a write in, he’s now the third longest running senator from Robert Byrd, living to be 100