On November 3, 1948, Dewey defeated Truman.
Last edited Fri Nov 3, 2023, 07:09 AM - Edit history (1)
Thu Nov 5, 2020: On November 3, 1948, Dewey Defeated Truman.
Claim by Chicago Tribune that Thomas Dewey had defeated Harry Truman was today 1948:
Beschloss says the incident happened on November 4. The election was on November 2. The headline was printed on November 3. The picture was taken on November 5. Pick a day you like.
Dewey Defeats Truman - Wikipedia
President Truman holding the infamous issue of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
"
Dewey Defeats Truman" was an incorrect banner headline on the front page of the
Chicago Daily Tribune (later
Chicago Tribune) on November 3, 1948, the day after incumbent United States president Harry S. Truman, won an upset victory over Republican challenger and New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, in the 1948 presidential election. It was famously held up by Truman at a public appearance following his successful election, smiling triumphantly at the error.
Background
The erroneous headline of the
Chicago Daily Tribune became ill-famed after a jubilant Truman was photographed holding a copy of the paper during a stop at St. Louis Union Station while returning by train from his home in Independence, Missouri, to Washington, D.C. The
Tribune, which had once referred to Democratic candidate Truman as a "nincompoop", was a famously Republican-leaning paper. In a retrospective article some 60 years later about the newspaper's most famous and embarrassing headline, the
Tribune wrote that Truman "had as low an opinion of the
Tribune as it did of him".
For about a year prior to the 1948 election, the printers who operated the linotype machines at the
Chicago Tribune and other Chicago papers had been on strike, in protest of the TaftHartley Act. Around the same time, the
Tribune had switched to a method by which copy for the paper was composed on typewriters, photographed, and then engraved onto the printing plates. This process required the paper to go to press several hours earlier than usual.
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Aftermath
Two days later, when Truman was passing through St. Louis on the way to Washington, he stepped to the rear platform of his train car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and was handed a copy of the Tribune early edition.
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