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Franklin D. Mitchell, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election. By Zachary Karabell. (New York: Knopf, 2000. vi, 308 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-375-40086-9.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1142–1143, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700518
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The presidential election of 1948 has not suffered from a lack of attention, as recently published books by Gary Donaldson, Harold I. Gullan, and Zachary Karabell, whose work is under review here, all attest.
Karabell has written an evenhanded, well rounded account of the choices afforded voters in 1948 by the New Deal–civil rig hts– Cold War candidacy of Harry S. Truman; Thomas E. Dewey's centrist domestic agenda and acceptance of the administration's conduct of foreign affairs; Henry A. Wallace's rejection of President Truman's Cold War policy and his leftist advocacy of economic and social reforms; and the States' Rights campaign of J. Strom Thurmond and southern Dixiecrats dedicated to stopping the federal government's intrusion into the region's race relations. “For the last time in this [the twentieth] century,” Karabell writes, “an entire spectrum of ideologies was represented in the presidential election. … It was a true campaign and the last campaign.”
