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How “Give ’Em Hell Harry” Won the Day
When even the Democrats thought Truman was a lost cause.
On November 3, 2020, against all odds, Joe Biden, last year’s quaint old anachronistic hopeful who had been slogging along at the far end of a long, long line of dazzling Democratic presidential candidates, won the election that might well become our country’s greatest game-changer. Even now there are some who still can’t believe it happened. And that includes Democrats.
So I’m here to remind my fellow Democrats about that time Harry Truman won an election nobody thought possible. He was the underdog right up until that moment when he wasn’t. (Don’t remind me that Donald Trump did the same thing in 2016. I mean, just don’t. Harry won his particular battle without Fox News, Talk Radio, The National Enquirer, the Religious Right, or the Russians.)
For most of the 1948 campaign season, the only person who believed Harry Truman could win an actual election was Harry himself. The politicians, the punditry, if not the entire country, thought poor Harry — who was not now and never would be FDR — was laughably unelectable. Not a chance in hell.
William Manchester recounts in his superb book, “The Glory and the Dream, a Narrative History of America, 1932–1972”, in a chapter called “A little touch of Harry in the night”…
