How many of you play chess or at least watched The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix?

Do you wonder if chess actually played an important role in the Cold War or do you think it’s just suggestive of the American-Russian rivalry?

Well, if you’re sick of being mired in bad news and want a little entertainment, here are two fairly recent movies and a Netflix series that can provide some insight.

The Coldest Game

The first movie, The Coldest Game, is available on Netflix. It’s a Polish Production set in Poland, but the dialogue is primarily in English. I think it’s the weakest of the offerings even though it includes lots of original footage of events surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The story revolves around an alcoholic math genius who is abducted by US officials and convinced to play in a US-Soviet chess match in 1962.

Bill Pullman does a great job in his role as Professor Manksy, and some of you may find it really enjoyable. Audiences seem to be split.

The blog decider.com says:

This is Thirteen Days crossed with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy crossed with Searching for Bobby Fischer crossed with, um, Barfly. Or Arthur. Take your pick.

Need help deciding?

Here’s a trailer that makes it look more coherent than it is.

Pawn Sacrifice

I really enjoyed this next movie, Pawn Sacrifice, a film by Edward Zwick about Fischer’s chess match against the Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky. You can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube.

The Fischer-Spassky match was played in Iceland in the summer of 1972 with the title of world champion at stake.

A New York Times review by Neil Genzlinger in 2015 argues that the film is only partly about Bobby Fischer.

It is equally about us — Americans or any other nationality inclined to put too much importance on chess matches, soccer matches, space races, whatever. It’s about how we manufacture celebrities on scant pretext and then destroy them, or allow them to destroy themselves while we watch.

Like The Coldest Game, the film includes original footage, illustrating that the match was treated not just as a sports event but as a symbolic showdown between the ideologies represented by the US and the Soviet Union.

Watch the trailer here.

The Queen’s Gambit

And then there’s The Queen’s Gambit – a Netflix miniseries with a 4.9 star rating out of 23,611 reviews on ‘google’.

Set during the Cold War era, orphaned chess prodigy Beth Harmon struggles with addiction in her quest to become the greatest chess player in the world.

In its review, The New Yorker Magazine calls it “the most satisfying show on television.”

I don’t play chess, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of the actual chess scenes. But I am awfully competitive, so I got too hyped up to binge watch.

The Cold War isn’t quite as overpowering here as in the other two films, but I think it gives you more of the actual atmosphere of the era.

Here’s the trailer.

All three are highly recommended for anyone who wants to turn off cable TV. How much bad news can you watch?

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Photograph by Matt on Flickr.

Still looking for Christmas presents? Maybe you can get some toy ideas for girls from the Cold War!

According to American Cold War ideology, homemakers in the United States were a bulwark against communism, fortifying the family social unit that was basic to a democratic society. In contrast, in the Soviet Union, communism drove women out of the home and put them to work, forcing children into state-run daycare centers and assaulting the family.

In response, postwar American society emphasized the importance of the “traditional” family structure which had a male wage-earner and a female housewife and mother. This placed the domesticated woman at the center of American values and viewed her domesticity as a weapon against any subversive communist influences. According to US Census data, in 1950, 23.8% of American married women had jobs outside the home; the figure climbed to 30.5% by 1960, and 39.6% by 1969.

An article in Life Magazine in 1953 tied working women to the consumer society, saying she worked “to increase her buying power as a consumer, for herself and particularly for her family.”

The bottom line was that, for most women, life was home centered. Women cared for their homes and for the emotional and nutritional needs of their families. They nursed, cooked, cleaned, decorated, and shopped. Girls and their toys mimicked the activities of their mothers.

Women’s housekeeping tasks were faithfully reproduced by their daughters who played with their own child-sized sweepers, vacuums, and pots and pans, Some of these were made by the same companies who manufactured the working appliances their moms used. Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company sold versions for real use and also the “Little Queen Carpet Sweeper” for girls, a good way to instill brand name loyalty at an early age.

Vintage Little Queen Carpet Sweeper on Etsy

The Kenner “Easy Bake” and Deluxe Topper Corporation’s “Suzy Homemaker” toy ovens were also popular. They used a light bulb as a heat source that could bake real, but tiny, cakes. Packaged cake mixes from Betty Crocker were sold especially for this use. The Easy Bake slogan promised little girls that they could make “Food as Good as Mom’s.”

“SH-collection BradRoss” by Bradross63 (talk) (Uploads) – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikipedia

Lessons in gender roles were seamlessly linked to lessons in the growing consumer economy. In the early 1950s, Americans began to spend more of their disposable income on food, not because of a rise in food prices, but because of marketing of new kinds of convenience foods. Toys reinforced the message that most food could be found packaged and processed.

Betty Crocker play cake mix from the 1950s.

The most important girl’s toy to come out of the Cold War era was the “Barbie” doll, introduced by Mattel in 1959. Barbie was sold as a fashion doll and ads promised:

Girls of all ages will thrill to the fascination of her miniature wardrobe of fine-fabric fashions . . . . Feminine magic! A veritable fashion show, and every girl can be the star!

Barbie didn’t cost very much when she was first introduced — only about $3 — but her clothes and accessory add-ons earned Mattel very healthy profits.

Barbie provided a contrast to then popular board games because some of the board games actually allowed for the possibility that women might be more than just a fashion object. She might, in fact, work outside the home, but only within a very narrow spectrum of possibilities.

The Selchow and Righter Company made a board game called What Shall I Be in two versions, one for boys and one for girls. Interestingly, there was no overlap between the careers offered to each. Girls choices in the 1966 version included the “helping” professions, like teacher or nurse, with some very glamorous options like stewardess, ballerina, actress, and model. In the 1968 version, boys could try out becoming doctors, engineers, astronauts, scientists, athletes, and statesmen. Neither of the options touched on the majority of real women’s jobs, the “pink collar ghetto” of secretaries, clerks, and waitresses.

Selchow and Righter Board Game for Girls

Selchow and Righter Board Game for Boys

It’s interesting to note that, according to a recent article in The Atlantic, the marketing of toys is more gendered today than it was 50 years ago when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm. But that’s another story.

Cover photograph by James Vaughan (Flickr).

Right before Thanksgiving in 1959 the United States was hit with a different kind of Red Scare. Primed for panic and paranoia by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red baiting taunts, Americans reacted anxiously when told that the cranberries they expected to serve with their Thanksgiving turkeys might be contaminated by a chemical weed killer known to cause cancer in animals.

What made things worse was the fact that the danger was so close to home, lurking in plain sight on supermarket shelves and in family kitchens! No red berry was safe.

Americans were told that every kind of cranberry product could be affected whether sauce or relish, spiced or sugared, chunky or jelled, room temperature or chilled, homemade or store bought.

The announcement was made by Arthur S. Flemming, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, at one of his regular weekly press conferences. He said:

The Food and Drug Administration [FDA] today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959 because of their possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole, which causes cancer in the thyroid of rats when it is contained in their diet, until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from the uncontaminated.

Talk about a berry bomb.

For Cranberry Bog Owners, the date of Secretary Flemming’s announcement, November 9, 1959, became a “Red Monday,” dumping the industry’s biggest annual sales period into the trash heap and threatening to destroy the industry’s existence.

The cranberry industry was under attack at its busiest time of the year. At the Ocean Spray Cranberry Company in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. its president George C.P. Olsson said:

the Secretary’s announcement was ill-informed and ill-advised . . . his intentions are a cranberry witch-hunt.

A San Francisco Chronicle headline blared “A Nation Without Cranberry Sauce.”

The cranberry industry shouldn’t have been surprised, however. They had been warned.

Three years earlier the chemical in question had been approved by the Agricultural Department for the purpose of killing invasive plants that threatened to choke off the cranberry plants. This approval, though, was based on the condition that the chemical be used only after the harvesting of berries, before any fruit began to develop. Otherwise, it might find its way into the edible berries.

These instructions were strictly outlined by the government and widely and specifically disseminated in warning and educational newsletters and reports by Ocean Spray and other industry leaders to Bog Owners.

Ocean Spray had warned its collective of bog owners in a letter dated September 18, 1959. The letter stated that no berries that had been treated with the weed killer after that date would be accepted. It even required bog owners to agree to certify their berries, punishable as perjury if violated. However, when the FDA began testing cranberries for the traces of the weed killer a month later, they found it in berries shipped from Washington and Oregon.

According to Flemming, nobody knew the degree to which the national crops were potentially contaminated. Also, nobody could instruct the public on how to buy “safe” cranberries. Consequently, food chains cancelled all orders of cranberries. Cans of cranberry jelly and jars of cranberry relish were returned to the warehouse, and hundreds of millions of cranberries were seized, quarantined, and destroyed.

Fleming instructed housewives thusly:

If unsure where the cranberries came from, to be on the safe side, she doesn’t buy.

The states also reacted:

Nevada declared it illegal for any supermarket grocery store and corner mom and pop shop within its borders to carry any cranberry products.

Random dragnets were conducted by a network of Ohio, New York, California, and Michigan health board food officials.

The Governor of Oregon immediately ordered that not even one can of cranberry jelly remain on the commissary shelves of all state prisons, fearful that incarcerated men might riot on Thanksgiving if served the poisonous relish.

Individuals and the hospitality industry also panicked:

An irate father in Chicago phoned his daughter’s school board president when he found out that the school had served a spoonful of the tainted stuff in each school lunch.

A hysterical woman in Mobile, Alabama, called an ambulance after washing cranberries to make her family’s chutney recipe.

A Boston beatnik poet scribbled cranberry notations on a coffee shop blackboard and got his picture in Life Magazine.

Iowa church ladies were warned from the pulpit to wear rubber gloves and face masks if they had to touch the berries.

Restaurants crossed “cranberry sauce” off their menus, and hotels assured the public that they would not serve the berries.

Politicians pontificated through word and action:

Republican Vice President Nixon ate four heaping helpings of cranberry sauce  in front of newsmen while campaigning in Wisconsin.

Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy drank a tall glass of cranberry juice and then asked for a second one. Importantly — as I’m sure you remember — he was from Massachusetts — Land of the Cranberry.

Legislators jumped into the fray:

Dr. Boyd Shaffer, a member of American Cyanamid’s Test Team, was called to testify before Congress. He said:

“Why, it would be impossible to expose humans to aminotriazole in amounts that would be toxic, and besides there was no proof that it caused cancer in people.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Shaffer had credibility issues since Cyanamid was the chemical company that invented the weed killer. But he went on to describe the weed in detail. It was called “panic grass” he said.

Meanwhile, a one hit wonder Cranberry Blues made the pop music charts.

As the Cranberry Crisis lengthened, Ocean Spray asked the administration to declare s state of emergency in the five leading cranberry states: Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. And reporters began coming up with headlines connecting Cranberry, Communism, and Cancer as “red zones.”

On November 19, a plan was implemented for the immediate testing of fresh cranberries. But it was too late to save the season from a 20% decrease in cranberry sales.

Secretary Flemming finally made a concession, posing for a photo op with his wife passing him a tray of cranberry sauce.

As for the White House, the press office had assured reporters that the President and Mrs. Eisenhower would be eating some of the nationally “approved” cranberry sauce at the White House Thanksgiving dinner table.

Everyone believed it until a dinner guest emerged from the meal and let it slip that the First Lady had insisted that applesauce, not cranberry sauce, be served.

In the end, the US government offered subsidies for the unsold cranberries which were tested and found to have no pesticide residue. In fact, after the holidays the government announced that 99% of the nation’s cranberry crop had not at all been contaminated.

In an omen of things to come, the San Francisco Chronicle detailed in its article titled “A Nation Without Cranberry Sauce!:”

“One housewife whom we know says she dumped her prepared cranberry jellies into the garbage can, then sat down and smoked a cigarette in relief at having just been saved from cancer.”

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Featured Photograph: Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism

Kitchen Photograph: Ethan on Flickr

Ocean Spray Photograph: Brent Danley on Flickr

Are you as sick of Zoom as I am? If so, you might want to pick out a good read, grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, and decompress.

Here are 10 recently released books to choose from. All the books can be purchased on Amazon, and many — if not all — will be available at your local library. The books are listed in no particular order, and all have 4.4 stars or above (out of 5).

(Please note: the links will take you to Amazon and if you purchase there, Cold War Studies will receive a small donation at no extra charge to you.)

The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War (by Catherine Grace Katz) tells the story of the three intelligent and glamorous young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference in February 1945, and of the conference’s fateful reverberations in the waning days of World War II.  According to Amazon

The Daughters of Yalta is a remarkable story of fathers and daughters whose relationships were tested and strengthened by the history they witnessed and the future they crafted together.

Some of you may have read Ben Macintyre’s highly acclaimed work from 2019, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.  Well, he’s out with a new one titled Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy.  Highly rated on Amazon, the book tells the story of Agent Sonya, a decorated intelligence agent and colonel in Russia’s Red Army, who’s living undercover as a housewife in a small English village. All that her neighbors know about her is that she makes great scones; they don’t realize she’s funneling atomic secrets from Britain and the U.S. to the Soviet Union. 

Here are two more good reads for those of you who are interested in espionage.

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War–a Tragedy in Three Acts  is on my bedside table now. Authored by Scott Anderson, the author of the best seller “Lawrence in Arabia,” the book is set in the early Cold War years, an era when Washington’s fear and skepticism about the agency resembles our climate today.

The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, written by Chris Whipple,  offers a detailed portrait of the agency and its work. Often, their biggest adversary is the federal bureaucracy. “We can overthrow foreign governments,” one official told Whipple, “but we have a more difficult time dealing with our own.” 

Not interested in espionage?  If you’re interested in technology, you might want to try Jill Lepore’s new book titled If Then: How the Simulatics Corporation Invented the Future. (It’s free with Kindle Unlimited.) In their review, the New York Times says:

Starting in 1959, a team of social scientists began work on the ‘People Machine’, trying to learn how to predict human behavior and decisions. Over time, the team did work for the Kennedy presidential campaign, the Department of Defense and The New York Times. In many ways, it was a precursor to big tech and its relentless hunger for user data: Lepore calls the company ‘Cold War America’s Cambridge Analytica’.

The period immediately after World War II was a time when millions of people were left homeless and stranded. The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War by David Nasaw tells their story. Nasaw offers a broad look at how political indecision left the fate of these people in limbo for years. According to The New York Times, lingering prejudices, especially unfounded links between Jews and Communism, meant that many Nazi collaborators were resettled before Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Can’t get enough of books about JFK? Here’s a new one titled JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.  Is there anything new to learn about JFK?  Apparently Fredrik Logevall, the author seems to think so.  A Pulitzer Prize winning historian and Harvard professor, Logevall’s book is the first of a projected two-volume project.  This volume traces President John F. Kennedy’s formative years, from his childhood through his decision to run for president.

Speaking of the American Century, Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow The World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy is also on my bedside table. So far I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the evolution of isolationism and internationalism over the course of American history. According to Wertheim, elites in the United States conceived a new role for the nation as the world’s armed superpower even before the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France, the architects of the nation’s new foreign policy came to believe that the United States ought to achieve primacy in international affairs.

Lastly, the book I’m actually most looking forward to reading, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by the husband and wife team of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Acclaimed by both liberals and conservatives, the book has a full five stars on Amazon after 211 reviews. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist and speech writer for Ronald Reagan states:

No one has ever captured James Baker’s historical importance and essential nature as well as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have in this superlatively reported history. This is a history not only of a man but of late twentieth century politics in America .  .   .

As a bonus you might want to listen to The New York Times Book Review‘s podcast on The Quiet Americans and The Man Who Ran Washington.  You can find it here.

Happy Reading!!

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Photograph by Carl on Flickr

The video below is the second in a two part series that takes you quickly through the last 50 or so years of Cuba’s political and economic history.

Here are the salient points:

By 1990, when the Russians were gone, things were really tough. It was becoming very clear that the Cuban people could not sustain life at such a minimal level indefinitely.

Castro and his advisers came up with a new strategy.

Agriculture was one of three areas of focus.

Acquisition of scarce hard currency through tourism and biotechnology was also central.

The key was to develop things that would produce a high rate of return.

Cuba’s economic decision-makers wanted to allow capitalist investment and enterprise to operate within Cuba itself.

They counted on the appeal of Cuba’s beautiful beaches.

They also believed that historic attractions like Old Havana could be used to promote the tourist sector.

Prostitution has increased and inequality between those working in the dollar economy and others has become a reality.

Multiplier effects include sales of tobacco and rum.

In mid 1990, the first joint venture hotel opened in Varadero beach with profits to be split 50-50.

The hotel, built with foreign capital, had construction costs of $30 million.

The growth of the tourist industry has been accompanied by large investments in construction to enlarge hotel facilities.

By 2011 there were well over 2 million tourists, many more than before the Revolution.

Joint venture capital includes major investors from Spain, Germany, Austria, and Finland among others.

Cuba’s military is highly involved in the tourist sector.

There has been substantial construction of tourist facilities within Havana itself, which retains its position as the main tourist attraction within the country.

Old Havana, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is particularly attractive to tourists.

Old Havana, the colonial core, is known for its lovely old buildings.

Finance was centered in Old Havana in an area known as ‘little Wall Street.’ This was a symbol of North Americanization.

Most activities was centered around the various plazas.

In Havana, rather than displacing residents of the old core, the area is being redeveloped with a concern for the integration of social services and living quarters.

While commercial activities are in place on the first floor of many buildings, renovated housing is available on the upper levels.

Due to a shortage of classrooms, elementary school classes are held in the public space of recently reconstructed museums.

Joint ventures and foreign real estate investment insure that resources are available to redevelop historical commercial structures.

UNESCO continues to assist with the renovation of convents, cathedrals, and other designated buildings.

Despite strenuous US objections, tourism alone is ensuring Cuba a fair amount of success in its efforts to be reintegrated into the regional economy of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Jamaica, Mexico, and other Latin American nations are involved in substantial joint ventures related to tourism.

Other Cuban trade efforts are also meeting with regional success.

The relaxation of US sanctions would provide a definite boost to the Cuban tourism industry.

Raul says: “We have to eliminate forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working.”

He goes on to say: “Without an increase in efficiency and productivity, it is impossible to sustain definitively the enormous social expenditures of our socialist system.”

Right now Cuba’s economy is stagnant.

The real value of wages in Cuba remains at around 40% of the 1989 level.

Cuenta-Propistas — the self-employed — have become the designated saviors of the Cuban economy.

Raul diplays remarkable faith in micro-enterprise and the “Gospel of Productivity.”

The key question: Can the micro (and cooperative)-enterprise sector absorb 500,000-1,200,000 apparently redundant workers?

The Fidelista model is discredited.

We will have to wait and see what happens.

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Video by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

(Please don’t use the contact info at the end of the video. You can always reach me at lisa@coldwarstudies.com)

I wrote this post for Cold War Magazine in 2016 when, for the first time in 88 years, an American president was visiting the island of Cuba. Now, Cuban Americans are in the news again because of their voting power in the upcoming 2020 presidential election, so I thought this would be a good time to reprint the article. The focus is on what’s been happening in Cuba since the 1959 revolution.

The video below will give you the insight you need to understand Cuba’s sociocultural, political, and economic conditions.

It is the first of two parts that will take you quickly through the last 50 or so years of Cuba’s political and economic history. (I’ll post Part Two next week.)

Here are the highlights:

Fidel Castro – popularly named “Savior of the Fatherland” and “Maximum Leader” – reached Havana on January 8, 1959.

President Batista fled Cuba very early in the morning on January 1, 1959.

Opposition to Batista first emerged in 1955. By December 1958 most Cubans despised his government.

Even the Eisenhower Administration wanted Batista out of office.

At the time of the Revolution, Havana was home to the privileged, hardworking, and marginalized.

A great deal of American investment was in the Vedado section of Havana where the Hotel Nacional was located.

In the 1950s, Havana was the center of commercialized vice, much of it underwritten by US organized crime.

The city was famous for its glitzy atmosphere.

At first everything was fine between Castro and the American government. But soon bad blood ensued.

When Cuba nationalized US petroleum properties, Eisenhower eliminated Cuba from the US sugar quota.

As the 1960s progressed, Castro was preoccupied with developing a model of socialist self-government that was uniquely Cuban.

Castro wanted to “ruralize the city” and “urbanize the countryside.”

Resources poured into rural areas for electrification and the construction of new towns.

Roads and buildings in Havana suffered from a lack of upkeep and maintenance.

In 1972, Cuba joined COMECON, the economic arm of the Soviet bloc, and in 1975 Cuba began implementing Soviet economic and planning principles.

Soviet models of economic and social planning facilitated Havana’s social, cultural, and political integration with the Soviet bloc.

1986 marked the beginning of a new period called the Period of Rectification. By this time, Cubans were disillusioned with the Soviets.

Cubans were pressuring their government to return to the core Revolutionary project with its significant gains in the status of women and blacks.

Unfortunately for Cuba, glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union put an end to any hoped for reforms.

In 1990, with the end of the Cold War, Cuba entered a challenging period known as The Special Period (of War) in Time of Peace.

Cuba had an oil driven economy and 98% of the island’s petroleum came from the Soviet bloc.

Aside from oil, 66% of Cuba’s food, 86% of all raw material, and 80% of machinery and spare parts came from Soviet dominated trading partners.

Factory closures became common, food scarcity was widespread, and the already inadequate technology base began eroding.

Exports were also affected since 66% of Cuba’s sugar, 73% of the island’s nickel, and 98% of the country’s citrus fruits had been exported to the Soviet bloc.

Cuba’s abandonment by the USSR was further complicated by a tightening of US sanctions.

Things were very tough. Learn more in Part II.

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Video by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

(Please don’t use the contact info at the end of the video. You can always reach me at lisa@coldwarstudies.com)

Would you rather read a comic book or a 500 page biography?

In 1948, President Truman’s campaign answered that question with a 16 page comic book published by the Democratic National Committee.

By this time, President Truman was used to the snickering of political cartoonists. They’d made fun of his stance on many controversial issues: the desegregation of the armed forces; his decision to drop the atomic bomb;  and the Republican takeover of Congress (called the Do Nothing Congress by Truman). Now that he was in the middle of the 1948 presidential campaign, political and editorial cartoons were everywhere.

Actually Truman sort of liked them. We know this because, after he left office, he became an avid collector. And, while in office — as we have seen — he used them to his advantage. 

Benjamin Franklin: Join, or Die?

Political and editorial cartoons have long been part of propaganda campaigns.  They trace their origins in the US to Benjamin Franklin and his cartoon Join, or Die (1754). The cartoon depicts the disunity of the Thirteen Colonies during the French and Indian War. It became even more famous later on when it was used to encourage the former colonies to unite during the American Revolution. 

Political cartoons were in and out of favor during the early 19th century, but in the 1880s, the media became popular again.

The 1948 Democratic National Convention

Some say the 1948 presidential campaign of Harry Truman is one of the greatest political campaigns in the modern era. No one gave him a chance of beating the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York. The Southern Democrats, called Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, and the Progressives, led by Henry Wallace, had both splintered from the Democratic party. In fact, Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights speech at the convention provoked a walk out.

Nevertheless, the convention re-nominated Truman and adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals.

Thirty-five southern delegates walked out of the convention. The move was on to remove Truman’s name from the ballot in the southern United States. The problem of course: Truman’s support for a stronger civil rights platform than they found acceptable.

The Democratic party lost faith, and refused to spend their usual large sums of money on the election. Truman’s prospects for victory were dim.

The 1948 Presidential Election

On election day, Truman went to bed at 6:30. He woke up about midnight just in time to hear NBC announce:

While the President is a million votes ahead of the popular vote, when the country vote comes in Mr. Truman will be defeated by an overwhelming majority.

Truman concluded:

. . . to the sorrow of myself, and to those who were listening with me, it looked very much as if the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives because, of course, it was not possible for me to get a majority of the electoral votes. I went back to bed, and went to sleep.

About 4 AM Truman woke up again.  This time he heard the NBC announcer proclaim:

While the President has a lead of two million votes, it is certainly necessary that this election shall go into the House of Representative. He hasn’t an opportunity of being elected by a majority of the electoral votes of the Nation!

Truman called the Secret Service in and said:

We’d better go back to Kansas City, it looks as if I’m elected!

The Media Had It Wrong

As it turns out, Truman was right. He carried 24,105,812 popular votes to Dewey’s 21,970,065. This translated into his winning 28 states and 303 electoral votes. Dewey ended up with 189 electoral votes from 16 states.

Not surprisingly, the cartoonists had been having a field day.

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Sources:

Harry S. Truman Library and Museum

Truman Comic Book: The Story of Harry S. Truman
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/story-harry-s-truman?documentid=NA&pagenumber=1

Truman Cartoons in the Library of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/cartoon-drawings/?fa=subject:truman,+harry+s.

Join, or Die (1754)
By Benjamin Franklin – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress;Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3g05315. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10604794

It’s hard to believe that we still have one more primary to go before the 2020 Democratic Convention the week of August 17. 

The Connecticut primary, originally scheduled for April 28, will now be held on August 11. Although 60 delegates are at stake, the contest is anticlimactic. The Connecticut vote will not be a game changer since one candidate — Joe Biden — has already wrapped up the Democratic nomination.

Actually, the disorder so far this year has been relatively minor when compared to that of the 1968 election season. Importantly, this was the last year that it was possible for a candidate to run for the American presidency without participating in a single primary.

In a previous post titled Election 2020: Is American Democracy in Danger, I discussed some findings from the 2018 book titled How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Both authors are professors of  government at Harvard University. You might want to take a look at the 10 takeaways in that post for a little more insight.

Gatekeeping and Populist Outsiders

As it turns out, US primary elections once served a “gatekeeping” function, filtering out politicians who rejected in words or actions “the democratic rules of the game.” Very often these rules are discounted by populist outsiders who want to gain power by claiming that they represent the voice of the people. They tell people that the existing system is not really democratic, that it’s been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite — meaning the establishment. Then they promise to “drain the swamp” and return power to the people. 

In Latin America between 1990 and 2012, five presidents were populist outsiders: Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Lucio Gutierrez, and Rafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic institutions, and the world is still living with how that turned out.

According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, the responsibility for filtering out individuals with authoritarian leanings rests with political parties and party leaders. In other words, these are democracy’s gatekeepers, those tasked with keeping authoritarians off party ballots at election time.

For most of America’s past, these party gatekeepers kept so-called unconventional candidates off the ballot. But a turning point came in 1968. 

A Turning Point

1968 was a turbulent year in the United States. You can read more about it in our post on Protest and Resistance: The Lead Up to the 1968 Election. 

In short, in the months leading up to the presidential elections that year President Lyndon Johnson had escalated the war in Vietnam, and the conflict was spiraling out of control. 

April 1968 saw the assassination of America’s revered civil rights leader, Martin Luther King.  

A second tragedy occurred in June, when Bobby Kennedy was shot just hours after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. He was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. PDT on June 6, about 26 hours after he had been shot.

Democrats Are Divided

Kennedy’s passing left the Democrats divided. Some supported Johnson’s foreign policy while others were in favor of Kennedy’s antiwar position. The traditional party organization stepped in to resolve the conflict, but unity was hard to come by.

Party insiders threw their weight behind the current vice president, Hubert Humphrey. But he was unpopular because of his association with Johnson, and because he hadn’t run in a single primary. Still, with the backing of “party leaders, union bosses, and other insiders,” he won his party’s nomination on the first ballot. Chaos ensued.

Protests and Party Insiders

On August 28, protesters marched on the convention. 

“Confrontations exploded on the convention floor,” and “uniformed police officers dragged several delegates from the auditorium.”

 In the end, Humphrey’s candidacy marked the end of the “party-insider” selection system. In the wake of the Chicago convention, there was far reaching reform that affected both political parties.

After Humphrey’s defeat in the 1968 election, the Democratic Party created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to rethink the nomination system.

That commission came up with a system revolving around binding presidential primaries. Beginning in 1972, most delegates to both the Democratic and Republican conventions would be elected in state-level primaries and caucuses.

Delegates would be preselected by the candidates themselves to ensure their loyalty. There would be no more party leaders upsetting the apple cart by making backroom deals. The traditional party gatekeepers could now be circumvented.

The Democrats changed this a little bit in the early 1980s when they stipulated that a share of their national delegates would be comprised of elected officials who would be appointed by state parties rather than elected in primaries. These superdelegates were to represent between 15 and 20 percent of national delegates, serving to counterbalance primary voters who might settle on candidates that governors, big city mayors, senators and congressional representatives disapproved of.

The GOP, on the other hand, saw no need for superdelegates, opting to maintain a more democratic nomination system.

Outsider Candidates

By placing presidential nominations in the hands of voters, the gatekeeping function of the party elite was weakened, potentially opening the door to outsider candidates. 

• In the 23 years between 1945 and 1968, under the old system, only one outsider — Dwight Eisenhower — publicly sought the nomination of either party. 
• In contrast, during the first two decades of the new primary system, 1972-1992, eight outsiders ran, five Democrats and three Republicans. 
• Between 1996 and 2016, eighteen outsiders competed. Thirteen of these were Republicans. 

Until 2016, celebrity outsiders had always fallen short. 

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic Party nomination in 1984 and 1988, while Southern Baptist leader Pat Robertson (1988), television commentator Pat Buchanan (1992, 1996, 2000), and Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes (1996) ran for the Republican nomination. But they all lost.

Even after the 1968 changes, it proved difficult to circumvent the party establishment.

The Invisible Primary

Capturing a majority of delegates required winning primaries all over the county, which, in turn, required money, favorable media coverage, and, crucially, people working on the ground in all states. Any candidate seeking to complete the grueling obstacle course of U.S. primaries needed allies among donors, newspaper editors, interest groups, and state-level politicians . . . 

Arthur T. Hadley wrote about this in his 1976 book, The Invisible Primary. He claimed that this phase

which occurred before the primary season even began was ‘where the winning candidate is actually selected.’ Members of the party establishment — elected officials, activists, allied interest groups — were, thereby, not necessarily locked out of the game. Without them . . . it was nearly impossible to win either party’s nomination.

Nearly impossible, maybe, but not entirely.

Enter Donald Trump.

The post 1968 primary system had left Republican leaders without an absolute way to stop Trump’s rise. After 1968, they no longer held all the keys to their party’s presidential nomination.

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Much of the information is this post is sourced from Chapter 2 of the 2018 book titled How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. It’s well worth a read.

Photo by kalihikahuna74 (OkinawaKhan808).  RIchard “Tricky D#%k” Nixon (Republican), Hubert Humphrey (Democrat), & George Wallace (Courage)