Vintage Chicago Tribune: 5 things that led to ‘Dewey Defeats Truman,’ the newspaper’s most famous headline

The Chicago Tribune covered its first presidential election in 1848.

The race a century later, however, would result in the newspaper’s most famous headline: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”

The Tribune was on deadline the night of Nov. 2, 1948. In the absence of election results, the newspaper assumed that New York governor Thomas E. Dewey (Republican) would sink incumbent Harry S. Truman (Democrat). He didn’t. And the blunder appeared atop a single edition of the Tribune 75 years ago.

The headline isn’t the only problem with the page — it’s a typographical mess. Lines and type are askew. It’s a mishmash of type styles. And in the second paragraph of the lead story, five lines of type ran upside down.

Several news organizations made the same miscalculation, but no other’s was displayed gleefully by Truman for what’s become an iconic photograph.

In retrospect, the gaffe did not seriously damage the newspaper and there’s even a certain charm about it. Even legendary White Sox owner Bill Veeck cited it when his team was forced by Major League Baseball to forfeit a game after Disco Demolition Night in 1979.

“This was a regrettable incident, but not sufficient grounds for forfeit,” Veeck told reporters. “But we won’t go out of business because of it. It seems to me a Chicago paper ran a headline sayin’ Dewey defeated Truman some years ago. Did they go out of business?”

No.

“We shouldn’t necessarily celebrate the mistake, but we should own our history,” Gerould Kern told the Tribune last week.

Kern, who was hired by the Tribune on Christmas Eve in 1990, became senior vice president and editor in July 2008. It was a tumultuous time to lead the newsroom. He navigated the paper through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and then ownership by Chicago billionaire Sam Zell, and faced new challenges under Tribune Publishing, the spun-off newspaper company that emerged in 2014, cutting costs and newsroom staff while accelerating the transition to a digital-first operation.

He looked to the Tribune’s past for inspiration getting through tough times and settled on the 1948 election.

“That night, that edition haunted the Tribune for decades. Every election night, there was a bit of a ghost of ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ in the newsroom,” Kern said. “Truman became a hero to me and had some personal meaning — don’t let people count you out. Don’t let people count the Chicago Tribune out.”

Kern, who retired in 2016, bought two copies of the notorious Nov. 3, 1948, edition from collectors and displayed one in his office next to another notable front page from 2008. He liked the juxtaposition.

“That year provided a bookend for ‘Dewey Defeats Truman.’ Virtually on the 60th anniversary, a senator from Chicago — Barack Obama — was elected president of the United States,” Kern said. “You may remember Tribune was there at the birth of the Republican Party. It was (Abraham) Lincoln’s newspaper and helped him get elected. The 2008 election was the first time in the history of the newspaper that it had endorsed a Democrat for president. It was the beginning of a new era.”

The “Dewey” papers are highly collectible. Framed originals in good condition are available online for $1,000-$5,000. But replicas can be bought as a jigsaw puzzle, coaster, T-shirt or even reprinted on a sheet of tissue paper the length of your finger.

Just because cautious coverage has followed in subsequent elections more than 27,000 days since, including reporting of the disputed 2000 vote and the 2016 election of Donald Trump, people will never forget the Tribune’s single headline.

There were at least five avoidable factors that set the stage for the newspaper’s infamous error.

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1. An ongoing strike prevented late returns from making the paper.

Three days before Thanksgiving and a month after its contract expired in 1947, the Chicago Typographical Union voted to strike 2,330 ballots to 61. At the Tribune, these workers were responsible for typing up stories and placing them on pages.

The next morning’s Tribune carried the news on the front page. Readers were told daily editions would continue, but look different due to a “new and improved typewriter” — the varitype — that would be used for the work.

The new technology streamlined the job of composing newspaper pages, however, it was also time-consuming. In practical terms, recalled Tribune executive Harold Grumhaus, “it took a good two hours to get a story into the paper.”

With a daunting task ahead, Tribune threw every available employee at it. “A ragtag force of stenographers, secretaries and typists drafted from throughout Tribune Tower worked 10 or 12-hour shifts at their typers,” wrote Richard Norton Smith in “The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick 1880-1955.″

There was one major drawback — the paper would go to press early each night. “Very late news” would be “the greatest difficulty” during the strike, which would last 22 months.

2. The Tribune disliked Truman — and vice versa.

The Tribune differed from its publishing peers because it did not simply support the Republican Party; it believed, with great cause, that it was the Republican Party. The paper would not endorse a Democrat for almost anything until 1972. This powerful and loud editorial voice originated with publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine during the paper’s 100th anniversary in 1947 and was hailed for making the Tribune “indispensable” while violating the commonly accepted requirement of objectivity on front pages.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated for a fourth term in 1945, for example, the Tribune referred to vice president Truman as “an unsuccessful small town haberdasher.” The mudslinging accelerated after Truman was sworn in as the country’s 32nd president three months later and into the 1948 election campaign.

When Truman called the newspaper “the worst in the United States,” the Tribune responded with a rare front-page editorial titled “How We Earned His Hate” that patted itself on the back. “Thanks in no small measure to THE TRIBUNE, the people of this nation know Mr. Truman for the nincompoop he is.”

In the closing days of the campaign, Truman took his fight on to McCormick’s home turf. 25,000 screaming partisans filled Chicago Stadium on the night of Oct. 25, 1948, to hear the president hint darkly that a Republican victory would usher in a totalitarian state. The crowd lustily booed McCormick as the unnamed — but obvious — target of Truman’s scorn.

The paper found a variety of other ways to support Dewey in print.

It ran a full-page color portrait of him and even praised his mustache. Dewey, however, made no effort to defend his reluctant ally. On a campaign visit to Chicago that same month, McCormick confided to Alf Landon that Dewey acted “as though he was not in his right mind. The governor and senator met him at the station, and he put them in the fourth and fifth cars in the procession behind some New York state policemen. At the meeting, he came on the stage just as he was introduced and left immediately afterwards without speaking to anybody.”

Notwithstanding these reservations, on Oct. 31, 1948, the Tribune editorialized that voters should “Mark It Straight Republican.”

3. Polling gaffes created faulty predictions.

Dewey was widely expected to win. Truman was considered a long shot by just about everyone, except Truman himself.

Emil Roper, an innovator of public opinion polling, said in September 1948 that Dewey was leading Truman by an “almost unbeatable margin of 44% to 31%.”

Polls conducted by George Gallup and Archibald Crossley (who stopped polling in mid-October) underestimated Truman’s percentage of the popular vote by about five points.

Few disputed the results — unless they had a bias.

“Your polls this year do not tell a complete story nor give an accurate interpretation of your own findings,” Democratic national chairman J. Howard McGrath said publicly about Gallup.

4. Complacency.

The Tribune’s veteran Washington bureau chief Arthur Sears Henning and managing editor J. Loy (Pat) Moloney ignored warnings from Republicans that Dewey’s election was far from a certainty, retired Washington bureau chief Walter Trohan said in 2003.

“The Dewey and Warren victory in the Presidential election tomorrow probably will be a landslide,” Henning wrote in the Nov. 1, 1948, edition of the Tribune.

It was a rare misstep by Henning, who had covered politics in Washington since 1909, been chief of the bureau since 1914 and was wrong just once before in the previous 20 years. He handled a major scoop — details of the Treaty of Versailles, which would end World War I — and was friendly with nine presidents. In short, his track record was impeccable.

Truman’s victory over Dewey in Illinois was decided by less than one percentage point.

An editorial the following Friday headlined “How we outsmarted ourselves” explained to readers: “We muffed that one, beyond all possibility of doubt.”

5. With deadline looming, Tribune staffers called it.

The Tribune’s editors faced a decision and a deadline. They could either go with something noncommittal or with the conventional wisdom. They chose the latter, which seemed like a safe bet.

Returns had been slow coming — many East Coast tallies were not yet in — but the sparse totals that were available favored Dewey.

Still, Henning stuck with his prediction that Dewey would win. Moloney approved the infamous headline.

Sometime that night, after between 100,000 or 150,000 copies of the now famous papers hit the streets and after more vote totals were reported, the headline was changed to “DEMOCRATS MAKE SWEEP OF STATE OFFICES,” “EARLY DEWEY LEAD NARROW” and “DEWEY HOLDS NARROW LEAD” before settling on “PRESIDENCY STILL IN DOUBT” for the last edition. The Tribune would churn through 11 editions and numerous banner headlines that night.

Staffers were sent out in trucks and station wagons to retrieve the version that began to look frighteningly unsound. As many papers as possible were captured, and, like ordinary returns, the upper right corner of the front page, called the ear, was clipped off to mark them as not for sale. The papers were then trashed. A few people, not realizing their potential value, thought to save the flawed copies.

The next day, the Tribune acknowledged the gaffe and seemed to blame pollsters, saying that it would “avoid the crystal ball” in the future.

But it wasn’t alone in assuming Dewey would win. Life magazine carried a big photo of Dewey with the caption “The next President of the United States.” A German newspaper also proclaimed Dewey the winner.

The main reason people still recall the Tribune’s mistake is because it generated a compelling visual, captured by news photographer Frank Cancellare. It was taken in St. Louis, a stop on Truman’s train trip from Missouri to Washington, D.C.

The next year, McCormick named Trohan to replace Henning.

Henning died in 1966 and Moloney died in 1976. The Tribune’s obituaries for both men praised their highly respected careers, but failed to mentioned the role they played in the election night fiasco of 1948.

Though the Tribune continued to bash Truman throughout his presidency, relations softened in the early 1970s.

Knowing how much Truman enjoyed the botched headline, Tribune leadership had the page emblazoned on a bronze plaque during the newspaper’s 125th anniversary with the intent on presenting it to him. Unfortunately, Truman would not live to see it; he died on Dec. 26, 1972. The commemorative item was donated to his presidential library instead.

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