U.S. At War: Campaign West of the Pecos

In the throbbing, hustling atmosphere of Eastern campaign headquarters, the Vice Presidential candidates had scarcely been able to make themselves heard. Last week all that lay behind them. Both were out on the road, armed with their trusty old campaign weapons, the hearty handshake and the corny joke. If nobody in New York or Washington seemed to know where they had gone, they cared not. Harry Truman and John Bricker were back among The People.

John Bricker, who had not seen Tom Dewey for ten weeks, crossed the Cascade Mountains on a 94-speech, 9,250-mile tour, and headed south. He soothed Tacoma, Wash. Republicans who had been miffed because Dewey had bypassed their town. After Bricker spoke, the county chairman, 260-lb. Dr. Hinton D. Jonez, beamed: “The patient’s wounds have been sewed and the sheets pulled up. The Republicans of this county are resting easily.” Bricker gobbled a Delicious Yakima apple, steered a Puget Sound ferry, pitched the opening ball in Wenatchee for a major-league barnstormers’ game (see cut), admired the scenery continuously, shook hands with one & all, and made homely, reassuring grammatical errors.

In Oregon he had his special train pulled over the Southern Pacific’s backwoods Siskiyou line, on which no national candidate had traveled for 20 years. This enabled him to pan for votes in untouched gravel at Grants Pass, Medford and Roseburg. In Oregon, too, he made the voters slap their legs with a charge against the Democratic Administration—that the New Deal had spent $2.97 per rat (you can buy a chicken for $2.97) in a Louisiana rat extermination campaign. In San Francisco, Bricker and party overcrowded an elevator, were stalled in it for ten minutes, finally crawled out.

Harry Truman arrived in New Orleans and started campaigning before a roomful of servicemen’s wives, each of whom had a baby in her arms. Confronted with a practical politician’s dilemma—to kiss or not to kiss—he escaped neatly by explaining that he had a cold. Back in his hotel room he added another reason, “I might have dropped one.” The nominee’s bronchial tubes enriched the conversation further during his stay. When Andrew Jackson Higgins, famed boatbuilder, asked after his health, Truman said, “I’ve just got the heaves, Andrew. Have a chair.”

When a newsman asked him if he played cards, Truman endeavored to please old ladies and poker fiends alike. “Card games,” the candidate mused. “The only game I know anything about is that game—let me see—I don’t know what the name is, but you put one card face down on the table, and four face up, and you bet.” Then Truman, too, headed for California.