The 1948 presidential campaign is like a great opera. The themes, characters and scenes are so compelling that they resonate again and again: the scrappy accidental president Harry S. Truman struggling to win election in his own right; the Republican challenger, Thomas E. Dewey, prim and complaisant; the rumpled Henry Wallace and his cryptocommunist enablers; and the race-baiting Strom Thurmond with his Confederate-flag-waving Dixiecrat insurgents.
Remarkably, many of the issues stoking this year’s febrile presidential campaign were already in play seven decades ago when radio and newspapers ruled the media and candidates courted voters from the rear platforms of railcars. There was even talk that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election.
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