"
Dewey Defeats Truman" was an erroneous banner headline on the front page of the earliest edition of the
Chicago Daily Tribune on November 3, 1948, the day after incumbent U.S. president
Harry S. Truman won an
upset victory over his opponent, Governor
Thomas E. Dewey of
New York, in the
1948 presidential election. The
Chicago Daily Tribune, which had once referred to
Democratic candidate Truman as a "nincompoop", was a famously
Republican-leaning paper. For about a year before the 1948 election, the printers who operated the linotype machines at the
Tribune and other Chicago papers had been on strike in protest of the
Taft–Hartley Act. Around the same time, the
Tribune had switched to a method by which copy was composed on typewriters, photographed, then engraved onto printing plates. This required the paper to go to press several hours earlier than had been usual. On November 4, as Truman passed through
St. Louis Union Station in Missouri on the way to
Washington, he stepped onto the rear platform of his train car, the
Ferdinand Magellan, and was handed a copy of the erroneous
Tribune edition of November 3. Happy to exult in the paper's error, he held it up for the photographers gathered at the station, as seen in this press photograph. Truman reportedly smiled and said, "That ain't the way I heard it!"
Photograph credit: Byron H. Rollins
