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Demanded one impressed newsman: "Could Taft have done that? Stassen? Dewey? No. Eisenhower? Maybe. A New York crowd would laugh—but these people thought it was wonderful."
Along the Snake. As the presidential train rolled across the black-loam Iowa fields laced with corn stubble and patched with rain-fed lakes, it became clear that Harry Truman was concentrating much of his fire on the Republicans' 1950 slogan: "Liberty against socialism." Time after time he cited instances in the past when "calamity howlers" had hung a "socialist" label on programs that were now farmer gospel—rural electrification, soil conservation, public power, flood control.
Through the wide, empty Nebraska prairies, up into the gulch-seamed Wyoming plateaus where the snow still lay in the ditches, on up the old Oregon Trail along the Snake River canyon, Harry Truman unfurled his pattern for an expanding economy in a free world. Sure, he wanted to balance the budget and cut taxes, he said, "just as soon as we safely can. But I will not join in slashing Government expenses at the cost of our national security or national progress." His programs were not really expenditures; they were investments in the future. Cried Truman: "Don't let anyone tell you that the Government should retire to the sidelines while the national economy goes back to the days of boom & bust. The power of Government exists for the people to use. It would be folly for the people to be afraid to use their collective strength through the Government."
In the best of all Democratic worlds he had something for everybody. For the businessman, he had his new program of Government loan insurance and other aids to small business. For the farmer and the consumer there was the Brannan Plan. In Nebraska, where he had once faced 8,000 empty seats in an Omaha auditorium, 30,000 people stood through a pouring rain in a public square at Lincoln. Though his own congressional leaders had refused any part of it and most organized agriculture opposed it, Politician Truman still seemed convinced that the Brannan formula would catch on.
Following Man. Everywhere there were the high-school bands, swarms of schoolchildren. In little towns where a President had never been seen, crowds were often bigger than the population. A large man with a speckled mustache appeared among them, listening intently. Reporters quickly spotted him. He was Vic Johnston, a hireling of the G.O.P. National Committee, sent to keep tabs on Truman. Johnston had chartered a private plane, was waiting on the platform at every major stop, issuing depreciatory statements. Truman was amused, genially invited him aboard. Johnston sheepishly declined.
Truman glowed with optimism. There was not going to be a war, the deficit would take care of itself, there were no problems that he could not solve. He made his opponents sound like common scolds. Only on the subject of the cold war was he soberly restrained. It "will be with us for a long, long time. There is no quick way, no easy way, to end it."