The Tribune's early edition crowns Dewey; the returns say otherwise
Nearly every poll and pundit in the fall of 1948 said Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman by a landslide. On the night of the election, the Chicago Daily Tribune, with its composing room on strike and a press deadline set hours early, went to press before most states had reported. The front page of the early edition carried a banner headline reading "Dewey Defeats Truman," written by Washington correspondent Arthur Sears Henning. By morning Truman had won, and later editions replaced the headline.
The Tribune's blunder became the best-known mistake in American political journalism, proof of how far confident forecasts can drift from the count. The early deadline traced back to a labor fight over the Taft-Hartley Act. The copy now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
QHow good was the Tribune's man at calling presidential winners before 1948?
Arthur Sears Henning had a record that made the Tribune's confidence understandable. A veteran Washington correspondent and political analyst, he had correctly predicted the winner in four of the five presidential contests since 1928. That reputation, combined with polls that were almost unanimous for Dewey, meant the call did not look reckless from inside the Tribune's building. It looked like routine work. His one earlier miss aside, the second, was printed in large type on the front page and sold in the street.
QWhat had the Tribune said about Truman before the election?
The paper had referred to Truman as a "nincompoop," which fit its long history as a Republican-leaning publication under Robert R. McCormick. The feeling was mutual. In a retrospective article, the Tribune itself wrote that Truman "had as low an opinion of the Tribune as it did of him." That contempt is part of why the St. Louis photograph landed so hard: the president was not holding up a stranger's error, but the mistake of a paper that had called him a "nincompoop". He seems to have enjoyed it, and the Tribune had little room to object.
QDid the Tribune ever try to give Truman a keepsake of the headline?
It did, though not for a long time. Tribune publishers later planned to present Truman with a plaque bearing a replica of the erroneous banner headline, timed for the 25th anniversary of the 1948 election. It was meant as a rueful gift, the paper acknowledging its most famous mistake to the man who had made it famous. Truman died before the plaque could be given to him. The headline outlived both the grudge and the man who had held it up in St. Louis.
