The Last Campaign
by Zachary Karabell
Knopf
Bush versus Gore isn't much of a contest. The teams are pretty evenly matched, the personalities are tamped-down and under control, and the voters are faced with a choice that makes vanilla versus vanilla with sprinkles look earth-shakingly meaningful.
But to hear author Zachary Karabell tell it, we'd have to go back to 1948 to get a really full platter of presidential options. His new book, "The Last Campaign," plunges straight into the bowels of the 1948 presidential election, which pitted the folksy (and sometimes demagogic) Harry S Truman against the smooth-as-butter Republican nominee, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey.
By and large, the American public's current understanding of 1948's campaign can be distilled to a single image: Harry Truman grinning like crazy as he holds up a copy of the Chicago Tribune, which had erroneously declared Dewey the winner.
But there's a lot of backstory to this picture, and it's a story that Karabell tells with great diligence and zest.
Most importantly, "The Last Campaign" details the last time an outspoken presidential candidate like Truman would defy popular expectations and triumph over a glossy, TV-friendly media machine like Dewey. This potentially uplifting tale has its dark side, though; far from being a simple whistle-stop charmer, Truman was an often-brutal campaigner whose savage rhetorical attacks on Dewey and the Republican Party set the stage for a Republican post-election backlash. The leader of this political vendetta was Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) the chief demagogue of one of the most bloody political witch-hunts in U.S. history.
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"Once the crowd had settled, Wallace tried to explain what had gone on the weeks before …" More ›.
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— Paul McLeary (pjmcleary@yahoo.com)
Two dynamic third-party forces also enriched the race: Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Wallace, who would be permanently tarred as a Communist sympathizer before the election's conclusion, represented the Progressive Party while the charismatic South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond stumped across the South for the Dixiecrats, a breakaway faction of the Democratic Party.
Of course, at this point in time, applying the word "dynamic" to Strom Thurmond (R-SC) seems like a punchline, set-up or cruelly sarcastic remark. But America's oldest, crankiest and most demented Senator was at one point a major force in American politics, leading the Dixiecrats in open revolt against Harry Truman and his public calls for civil rights. Thurmond was the spear-bearer for "States' Rights," the rallying cry for good 'ol boys across the South who wanted to see things stay just as they were before the war. The Civil War, that is.
On the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, Karabell's account of Henry Wallace is both sad and riveting. A former vice president and a passionate idealist, Wallace started his campaign with high spirits and a realistic chance of making a serious impact on the outcome of the national election. But his refusal to distance himself from Communism and a disastrous campaign tour through the hostile Deep South marked Wallace (who was by all accounts a truly good man) for failure and shame. Karabell's descriptions of the violence and mockery that accompanied Wallace on his campaign through the South are heart-rending.
In an era before the fight for civil rights exploded, Wallace's courage was noteworthy, to say the least. He refused to eat in any segregated restaurants, had black singer Paul Robeson tour with him and spoke boldly for racial equality. As a result, he was pelted with eggs and garbage, mocked, and physically threatened.
Karabell does a terrific job with a broad, complicated topic that could have easily swallowed up his book. His crisp, engaging text manages cogently tells the stories of 1948 in ways that are relevant to today's political junkies, historians and fans of civil rights. By and large, "The Last Campaign" manages to be engaging, instructive and persausive in its arguments about the evolution of American politics.
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
