He never looked better. Tanned and grinning, Harry Truman let his eyes twinkle over two acres of fund-bearing Democrats, a crop to rejoice the heart of a onetime Missouri farm boy, who by loyal association with the Democratic Party had attained the most powerful office in the world.
The party had proclaimed itself as the champion of the common man, the little fellow, the ill-fed. Five times the nation had responded by giving the Democrats the presidency. Now they faced a sixth test, which promised to be the sternest of all. Girding for the battle, 6,000 Democratic leaders assembled in Washington and paid half a million dollars t01) consume pink grapefruit, celery & olives, filet mignon, baked potatoes, string beans, domestic Burgundy and ice cream molded in the form of a donkey, 2) honor Jefferson and Jackson, and 3) hear what their leader, Harry Truman, the improbably successful man with the common touch, had to say about the party's future.
Formula for '52. It was bright, he said. He told them the party could win the sixth election—and if they would believe this from any man they would believe it from Harry Truman, who had stumped the experts by fighting his way out of a corner in 1948. In one of the best-written and best-delivered political speeches he ever made, Truman laid down the formula for victory in 1952.
The formula was a tried if not a true one. Just as a generation of Republicans through the 1870s, '80s and '90s "waved the bloody shirt" and ran for office against Jefferson Davis, so a generation of Democrats through the 1930s and '40s have waved the Great Depression and run for office against Warren Harding, Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover. The Democrats' story was that they killed the dragon in 1932 (although it was so long adying that some economic pathologists say it really expired of arteriosclerosis and Pearl Harbor). The Democrats had been paid four times over for their feat, and the Amalgamated Dragonkillers (C.I.O.) could ask no more.
But Truman could and he earnestly urged the Democrats to stick to their story. Again, he told the Democratic version of the 1920s when the Republicans "spent all their time trying to help the rich get richer." There are still Republicans today who think the same way, he said. "This is the dinosaur school of Republican strategy. They want to take us back to prehistoric times . . . [But this] would only get the dinosaur vote—and there aren't many dinosaurs left."
Well-Worked Vein. Republicans, said Truman, "will try to make people believe that everything the Government has done for the country is socialism . . . Here you are, with your new car, and your home, and better opportunities for the kids, and a television set—just surrounded by socialism!"
As to foreign policy, some Republicans want "to pull out of Korea, and to abandon Europe and to let the United Nations go to smash." Other Republicans want to begin dropping atomic bombs. The Democrats, on the other hand, are against Communism and in favor of peace.