@@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.
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.
@@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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
@@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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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
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. 😂👍🏻
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
@@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
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.
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¨.
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
@@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
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
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
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.
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.
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
Republican = red and Democrat = blue wasn't actually standardized until 2000. In other countries red is the liberal color and blue is the conservative color, too.
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.
The split in the Democratic party actually helped Truman. The racist went with Thurmond and the socialist went with Wallace, removing the extreme elements in the Democratic party. Dewey also thought that he would win automatically because of the split, so he ran a lackluster campaign. The two 3rd party candidates didn't take enough votes from Truman to really hurt him.
The Life Analyst nope he was progressive leftist KKK DemoKKKrat who was just like his mentor Fdr and Woodrow Wilson both progressive hard left left DemoKKKrats who won the south and were funded by far left progressive KKK southern DemoKKKrats. Look at the map. And look at Harry Truman’s DemoKKKratic history.
The Life Analyst Yeah he was also a DemoKKKrat. Truman won some and Thurmond some. It was two leftist progressive DemoKKKrats competing for the KKK leftist south. What’s your point?
The Life Analyst if Thurmond was conservative why did he support fdr the far left progressive DemoKKKrat in 1932? Calvin Coolidge was the most conservative president ever and passed anti lynching laws. Look it up. Thurmond became a conservative Republican like the south and voted to make Mlk day a holiday while he was Republican and rejected his and the south’s far left DemoKKKratic past.
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.
