Book description
Although the presidential election of 1944 placed FDR in the White
House for an unprecedented fourth term, historical memory of the
election itself has been overshadowed by the war, Roosevelt's health
and his death the following April, Truman's ascendancy, and the
decision to drop the atomic bomb. Today most people assume that FDR's
reelection was assured. Yet, as David M. Jordan's engrossing account
reveals, neither the outcome of the campaign nor even the choice of
candidates was assured. Just a week before Election Day, pollster
George Gallup thought a small shift in votes in a few key states would
award the election to Thomas E. Dewey. Though the Democrats urged
voters not to "change horses in midstream," the Republicans
countered that the war would be won "quicker with Dewey and
Bricker." With its insider tales and accounts of party politics,
and campaigning for votes in the shadow of war and an uncertain
future, FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944 makes for a fascinating
chapter in American political history.
"David Jordan has produced a lucid, highly engrossing account
of a fateful but little chronicled episode in American presidential
politics. His narrative of the 1944 election campaign-written with
savvy and encyclopedic range and featuring a large cast of
personalities rendered in deft cameos-deserves a place alongside
Theodore White's histories of how high and low character, fierce
ambition, and dumb luck play their part in the nation's choice of its
chief executive." -Richard Kluger, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
David M. Jordan is author of Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice in
the Senate; Winfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier's Life (IUP, 1988);
"Happiness Is Not My Companion": The Life of General G. K.
Warren (IUP, 2001); and Occasional Glory: A History of the
Philadelphia Phillies.
