Dewey Defeats Truman Chicago Daily Tribune Newspaper.

TRUMAN, Harry S.

Item Number: 29088

Signed Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Signed by Harry S. Truman. It was an incorrect banner headline on the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune on November 3, 1948, the day after incumbent United States President, Harry S. Truman, won an upset victory over Republican challenger and Governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, in the 1948 presidential election. It was famously held up by Truman at a public appearance following his successful election, smiling triumphantly at the error. The erroneous headline of the Chicago Daily Tribune (now just the Chicago Tribune) became notorious after a jubilant Truman was photographed holding a copy of the paper during a stop at St. Louis Union Station while returning by train from his home in Independence, Missouri, to Washington, D.C.The Tribune, which had once referred to Truman as a “nincompoop”, was a famously Republican-leaning paper. In a retrospective article over half a century later about the newspaper’s most famous and embarrassing headline, the Tribune wrote that Truman “had as low an opinion of the Tribune as it did of him.

On election night, the earlier press deadline required the first post-election issue of the Tribune to go to press before even the East Coast states had reported many results from the polling places. The paper relied on its veteran Washington correspondent and political analyst Arthur Sears Henning, who had predicted the winner in four out of five presidential contests in the past 20 years. Conventional wisdom, supported by polls, was almost unanimous that a Dewey presidency was "inevitable", and that the New York governor would win the election handily. The first edition of the Tribune therefore went to press with the banner headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN". The incident might have been forgotten, except that when Truman was passing through St. Louis on the way to Washington two days later, he stepped to the rear platform of his train and was handed a copy of the Tribune early edition. Happy to exult in the paper's error, he held it up for the photographers gathered at the station, and the famous picture (in several versions) was taken.