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Fighting a Slump. As his train clanked westward, the single word "POTUS"—railroad code for President of the U.S.—flashed from dispatcher to dispatcher clearing the tracks. A pilot train rolled ten minutes ahead of him as a safety precaution and special guards were posted at crossings.
Truman was trying to do what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had failed to do—to plead for his policies over the head of Congress to the people, fighting the traditional off-year slump for the party in power. Harry Truman, too, had lost ground. The burst of post-election affection and admiration had subsided, and his popularity, according to polls, had sagged badly.
But Harry Truman was supremely confident of the political effectiveness of the character he had so successfully created in his 1948 whistle-stop campaign. So, apparently, were the Democratic politicians, who hustled aboard at every stop to shake the presidential hand. It was a sharp contrast to 1946, when a harassed Harry Truman was under orders of Democratic leaders to stay out of sight. Some still remembered a 1946 stop at Jefferson City, Mo., the capital of his home state, when Truman grinned at a crowd, clamped his hand over his mouth, and wagged his head dolefully.
Caps & Spurs. Nobody—not even Truman—bothered to take seriously the ''non-political" side of last week's trip, if there was one. The President, who had begun by defending the trip as "a report to the nation" which was "my privilege and my duty," soon was saying slyly: "This is a non-political trip but I may come back later and be a little more interested in politics"—sticking his tongue under his lower lip and grinning as the crowd laughed.
There was no disputing it; Harry Truman did well. Like mythical Antaeus, he seemed to draw strength from fresh contact with the earth. He had an enormous talent for identifying himself with people at each stop. At Galesburg, Illl., he remarked that a great-aunt of Mrs. Truman's came from there, and recalled his first "sashay" into politics, when as a little boy he wore a white campaign cap to school. "Well, some big Republican boys took my cap away from me and tore it up," said Truman, "and the Republican boys have been trying to do that to me ever since." Such familiar little yarns sounded wonderfully casual, but they were not as casual as they seemed: the President had been fitted out with a thick loose-leaf notebook full of homey facts about every place he was to visit; he read it over before he reached each town, usually worked in some happy local reference.
Grand Island, Neb. was typical. The file had supplied the information that he had been presented with a pair of spurs there in 1948. Truman remarked: "I told you I was going to make good use of them, and I did. I used them on the 80th Congress."
At the end, Truman turned around with the air of a man with a surprise, peered back into his special car. Then he came back to the microphone, looking pleased as all get-out. "Here's Mrs. Truman," he said. The crowd cheered. Then he peered back in again. "Margaret's coming too," he announced happily. More cheers.