#presidential election
November 3, 1948 - Newspaper mistakenly declares “Dewey Defeats Truman”
“On November 3, 1948, the Chicago Tribune jumps the gun and mistakenly declares New York Governor Thomas Dewey the winner of his presidential race with incumbent Harry S. Truman in a front-page headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Many of America’s major newspapers had predicted a Dewey victory early on in the campaign. A New York Times article editorialized that “if Truman is nominated, he will be forced to wage the loneliest campaign in recent history.” Perhaps not surprisingly then, Truman chose not to use the press as a vehicle for getting his message across. Instead, in July 1948, he embarked on an ambitious 22,000-mile “whistle stop” railroad and automobile campaign tour.
At every destination, Truman asked crowds to help him keep his job as president. His eventual success in the election of 1948 has been largely attributed to this direct interaction with the public and his appeal to the common voters as the political “underdog.” At the end of one of his campaign speeches, voices in the crowd could be heard yelling “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” It didn’t take long for the phrase to catch on and become Truman’s unofficial campaign slogan.
In a now famous photograph snapped in the early morning hours after the election, a beaming and bemused Truman is shown holding aloft the Chicago Tribune issue that had wrongly predicted his political downfall. Truman defeated Dewey by 114 electoral votes.”
This week in History:
October 31, 1926 - Harry Houdini dies
November 1, 1800 - John Adams moves into White House
November 2, 1947 - Howard Hughes’s “Spruce Goose” flies
November 3, 1903 - Panama declares independence from Columbia
November 4, 1922 - Entrance to King Tut’s tomb discovered
November 5, 1940 - FDR re-elected for third term
November 6, 1860 - Abraham Lincoln elected president
These two newspapers (the original “Dewey Defeats Truman” and the retraction printing the next day) can be found in the online collectionofKentucky Historical Society.
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TheUnited States presidential election of 2000 was the 54th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 7, 2000. The contest was mainly between Republican candidate George W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore.
The final outcome was one of the closest presidential elections in the nation’s history. The result of the election hinged on Florida, where the margin of victory triggered a mandatory recount. Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Bush v. Gore, announced on December 12, 2000, ended the recounts, effectively awarding Florida’s votes to Bush and granting him the victory.
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An anti-Andrew Jackson pamphlet from the 1828 presidential campaign. These “Coffin Handbills” were widely distributed by his opponents, and attacked Jackson for, among other things, executing militiamen and massacring Native Americans. After describing how Jackson personally stabbed a man to death, the handbill asks,
Gentle reader, it is for you to say, whether this man, who carries a sword cane, and is willing to run through the body of any one who may presume to stand in his way, is a fit person to be our President - to be the ruler of a peace loving People!!! [x]
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