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from Wikipedia,
Truman was elected vice president in the 1944 presidential election and became president upon Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Only then was he told about the ongoing Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. Truman authorized the first and only use of nuclear weapons in war against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman's administration engaged in an internationalist foreign policy by working closely with Britain. Truman staunchly denounced isolationism. He energized the New Deal coalition during the 1948 presidential election, despite a divided Democratic Party, and won a surprise victory against Republican Party nominee Thomas E. Dewey that secured his own presidential term.
Truman presided over the onset of the Cold War in 1947. He oversaw the Berlin Airlift and Marshall Plan in 1948.
President Harry Truman campaigning for re-election at LA’s Gilmore Stadium on Sept. 23, 1948.
In this set, you’ll see a number of famous faces like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, as well as Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan (back when he was still pro-union), but there are also a number of faces that look extremely familiar that I can’t quite place, so if you recognize someone shout them out in the comments. I particularly want to know about the black female journalists in Slide 4 (neither looks to be Alice Allison Dunnigan, who was traveling with Truman’s campaign at the time as the first black journalist to do so).
In Slides 2-12, we’re seeing Truman’s arrival at Union Station at that day, coming in at 5pm from Oakland after spending a couple days campaigning in Salt Lake City, Reno, and San Francisco. Love the glimpse of the gasometers in Slide 6 and the 7-Up sign in Slides 10-11. In Slide 9, Truman is holding up a new book called “California Jubilee” by Ed Ainsworth, celebrating the state’s centennial anniversary.
After that, we head to Gilmore Stadium, located at Beverly & Farifax, where Television City stands today. The audience was estimated to be about 16,000, so using the crowd-size inflation metric established by a certain current candidate, that’s like 100,000 people. In addition to Bogart, Bacall, and Reagan here, we also have big band musician Manny Harmon in slides 17-19, and in Slide 30, I love seeing that sea of desk lights set up for the press corps covering the event.
Keep in mind that California was a swing state at this time, and that Truman was not expected to win this election. But, he put in the work bringing his message to the American people, making every rally count because he knew that every vote mattered. In the end, he managed to win the state by less than half a point, and won re-election by less than 25,000 votes.
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Photos by Peter Stackpole for LIFE Magazine
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