How a Farm Crowd in Iowa Saved Truman’s White House Run

On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1948, Harry Truman was trailing in the polls and widely expected to lose. Then his campaign made an unexpected stop in Dexter, Iowa, for a national plowing match. The small-town crowd showed up in force, and so did the press. Truman’s speech that day was fiery, direct, and aimed squarely at the concerns of rural Americans. What followed helped shift the narrative and the momentum of one of the tightest presidential races in history.

Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate) 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories, and up next
a story about when our thirty third president made an
all important visit to a small town in Iowa. He's
our own Monty Montgomery with a story.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Dexter, Iowa is a small town with a lot of heart,
and even though its population has never exceeded a thousand people,
there's a lot of history there. The Barrow Gang had
a famous shootout there. They hosted an amusement park at
one point, and it was also once a presidential campaign stop,
the presidential campaign stop for that election cycle. Here's Rod

(00:52):
Stanley with more on that.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
September nineteen forty eight, President Truman came to Dexter Isola
for the National Plowing Match. And then it was a
big deal. The National Plowing Match was a big, big deal.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
But what exactly is a plowing match? Roughly put, it's
a competition to see who's the best farmer.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
They judged him on I mean they judged them on
different things. They brought their tractors and their plows, and
there were judges that judged how well you plowed the field,
how straight it was, how open it was, and they
had some other like conservation like making a pond. They
made a pond on my uncle's farm. They blew up
they using dynamite and they blew up land. They made

(01:40):
a waterway to drain water off and stuff. This was
a statewide thing, so it was a national thing too.
So there you had lots of people coming in from
like there's a there was an airport south of Dexter,
southwest of Dexter, and that day like one hundred and
twenty airplanes landed and brought bringing people in. They estimated

(02:01):
the crowd between seventy five and one hundred thousand.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
But how did President Truman even get involved in this
whole thing. It boils down to the drive of a
radio personality, Truman's opponent, and like a lot of things
in politics, whole numbers.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
The guy he was running against was a fellow by
the name of Thomas Dewey from New York, and Thomas
Dewey was so far ahead in the polls. Her plan Beck,
famous who farm personality, was in charge of organizing this
whole thing. And her Plan Beck called or went and
talked to Thomas Dewey and ask him, do you want

(02:39):
to be the headliner out here in Dexter and talk
to these people, and Dewey said, in so many words,
I'm pretty doing pretty well in the polls. I don't
think I need to come out to Iowa and to
talk to these people. So her plan Beck then called
up and scheduled a meeting with Truman. And normally they're

(03:05):
on a limited time basis they when they talked to
the President so on, but they made an appointment they
talked to Truman and actually went over the time limit
because Truman liked talking. I mean, Truman was a he
was one of those guys that liked to talk to
and he was a former farmer too, I mean as
far as he was a farming occupation before he got
into politics. And he said, well, boys, he said, I

(03:28):
would really like to come out and to do that.
But he says, I don't think the Secret Service will
allow me to do what I want to do, and
that's to go out and mingle and talk to people
and so on. And so when her plan back left
that meeting, he thought, well, guysh I don't think I
don't think Truman's going to come either, And so it
kind of sat that way until like three weeks before

(03:50):
the event, and the White House calls her plan back
up and says, Truman's coming through a whole big ranch
because they had to make sure that, you know, the
security had to be better, and there's a lot of
things they had to do to prepare for the president.

(04:11):
Truman started over in eastern Iowa, in Davenport on the
Rock Island railroad line, the one that runs through Dexter
and goes across the state, and he gave a speech
there early in the morning. Then he gave a speech
at Oxford, Iowa, I believe, and then a speech in Grenelle,
and a speech in des Moines.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
Never in the world were the farmers of any republic
or any kingdom or any other country as prosperous as
the farmers of the United States.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
N If they.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Don't do their duty by the Democratic Party, they're the
most ungrateful people in the world.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
And those were just preliminaries. And he actually, I believe,
picked up his wife Bess and his daughter Margaret in
des Moines and they rode the train out to Dexter.
The band Dexter Band was there to meet Truman. I believe.
They played the Missouri Waltz for him when they When
he arrived at the Deepo in Dexter. They had brought
his cadillac, his Robin Egg blue Cadillac out according to

(05:09):
my uncle Dean Styles, about three days before, and everybody
was wondering what the heck was that was going on
bringing that blue Cadillac out here. And eventually they figured
it out that it was the president and he was
going to be stopping and going out to the plowing match.
But he he was concerned, still concerned about the Secret
Service blocking his style, but he came anyway. The people

(05:33):
said that we're sitting with Truman. When Truman saw the crowd,
but Truman saw how big the crowd was, he said
his he had a smile from ear to ear. He
was just loving it. He was saying, this is this
is going to give me an opportunity to really to
get my camp. I'm so far behind it can't hurt that.
It's going to give me a chance to hammer home
my points. The majority of these farmers that attendant were

(05:57):
of the Republican persuasion. But he got thirteen ovations that day,
and he really hammered on the Republicans to do to
do nothings. He called them to do nothing. Congress It
was his first major campaign speech of the nineteen forty
eight election. He used this type of campaign, the whistle stop,

(06:21):
using the train traveling around, stop and talk in small
towns to people to actually turn the tide. It's interesting
when Thomas Dewey found out one hundred people one hundred
thousand people showed up and dexter Iowa, he got a
little nervous and he actually got the Republicans in Iowa

(06:42):
to have a campaign thing for him in Des Moines
and they actually got like fifteen thousand people to hear
Thomas Dewey give a speech, which which was a pretty
good crowd, but nothing like Truman. But anyway, when Truman
was here, he ate lunch. We have stuff in the museum.
The tablecloth actually that that was on the table that

(07:03):
he ate off of. But anyway, he ate lunch out there.
We had fried chicken dinner, mashed potatoes and corn and
relish tray and all apple pie or they had different
kinds of pie. And then he went out on a
He went out on a wagon to look at some
of the projects, the conservation projects that they were doing
that day. It wasn't only a plowing contest, but there

(07:25):
was some like they were making a pond, and they
were making waterways, and they were doing some other stuff,
a conservation things that out there on that in that
area as well. But anyway, that he went out and
he was on the back of a hay wagon, and
of course the Secret Service was with him, and they
were they were cruising along, and the Secret Service looked around.
Truman wasn't on the wagon anymore, and he had jumped

(07:46):
off the wagon and he was heading down to where
they were making this pond. And we called it Walker's
Pond back when I was growing out. It was on
Howard Walker's property. It was Piper property back and then.
But anyway, so those people that we're on the bulldozers
had actually been told by the Secret Service earlier that
if Truman came down there, to turn off the bulldozers

(08:08):
and you know, just sit on the bulldozers and so
if the President comes over and wants to ask you
questions and that kind of thing, and so that's what
they did. They saw, they saw this guy coming down,
they figured it was Truman or some of them recognized him,
and so they turned their bulldozers off and Truman got
down there, which is chatting with him like you know,
like you normally chat with people. And he said, well,

(08:29):
why did you turn off your bulldozers?

Speaker 1 (08:31):
Four?

Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah, I mean, you guys got work to do. And
he said, well, we were told by the Secret Service.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
To do that.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
And Truman said, well, he says, the next time they
ask you to do that, you tell those sobs that
you aren't going to do that, and you just keep
right on working. You know, he got everybody got a
big laugh out of that. And of course the Secret
Service gets down there and puts him back on the
wagon and away they go. But that was Truman, and
but he did get to talk to some of the
people out there. But like I said, this was a

(08:59):
huge boost his his It turned the tide as far
as his his election, and he was really the only
one in the articles I read, he was the only one.
Even his wife had given up. He was so far
behind that he's gonna lose. And she said, we even
need to start packing things up to get back to
Missouri and and live in Independence where our house there.
And Truman's eyes, he doesn't want to give up yet.

(09:19):
And he uh election came in November and he was
listening to it and he was holding his own and
in it, and and Dewey wasn't blowing him away. And
he goes to bed thinking that probably the next morning
that you know, that maybe I won't be president. But
he he was kind of had a quiet confidence. He
thought he thought he was going to win. And the

(09:40):
next morning the results are are ruling in and Truman's winning,
and he's gonna he's gonna end up winning the election.
And it was a huge, huge upset. I mean, there
was no way that he was supposed to win. But
they say that win all started right here in the
one horse town of Dexter, Iowa, and in September forty eight.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
And a great job is always on the production and
the storytelling by Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to
Rod Stanley of the Dexter Museum in Dexter, Iowa. Dexter
is a one light town and the small museum is
right off the main street running through it. If you're
in the neighborhood, I'll drop by and take a visit.
We love visiting these really small small towns and telling

(10:24):
stories about them. And the National Plowing Match of nineteen
forty eight helps propel Truman to victory, the story of
Dexter and Harry Truman's campaign victory. Here on our American Stories.