On November 2, 1948, Republican Arthur B. Langlie (1900-1966) returns to the governor's office by defeating Democrat Monrad C. Wallgren (1891-1961), who had ousted Langlie four years earlier. Langlie's victory is a bright spot for Republicans in what is largely a Democratic year. Democrats win the other partisan statewide races and regain control of the state House of Representatives. Nationally, President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) carries Washington on his way to defeating Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey (1902-1971) in one of the more surprising U.S. presidential elections, which virtually every pollster and political observer has predicted Dewey will win easily. Democrats also retake both houses of Congress, with Washington contributing one House seat to the switch, as Democratic former U.S. Senator Hugh B. Mitchell (1907-1996) defeats incumbent Republican U.S. Representative Homer R. Jones (1893-1970). State voters pass initiative measures increasing social security payments, providing bonuses to war veterans, and allowing the sale of liquor by the glass, and approve several constitutional amendments, including one allowing counties to adopt Home Rule charters.
Truman Defeats Dewey
Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1881-1945) in April 1945. Truman had been vice president for less than three months, and his route to the office that made him Roosevelt's successor was perhaps as politically surprising as his subsequent election victory. Unlike most vice presidents, he was not chosen by the presidential candidate he ran with, but in a convention battle. Roosevelt, the only U.S. president elected more than twice, had already had two other vice presidents. In 1940, when he made the unprecedented decision to run for a third term, his first vice president, John Nance Garner (1868-1967), opposed him, and Roosevelt replaced him on the ticket with his secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965). A champion of the party's left wing, Wallace was popular with organized labor and progressives, but not with more conservative Democrats, including big-city political bosses and many southern Democrats angered by his support for racial integration. At the 1944 Democratic convention, where Roosevelt was nominated for the fourth time, chairman Robert Hannegan and other party leaders made it clear they would not support Wallace's re-nomination.
Instead, they promoted Truman, a U.S. senator from Missouri, Hannegan's home state. Truman had gained a national reputation as chair of a Senate committee, commonly referred to as the Truman Committee, investigating corruption and poor quality in federal defense contracting during the buildup to World War II, reportedly saving the government billions of dollars. Roosevelt chose to stay out of the vice-presidential battle, leaving it to convention delegates to decide. According to press reports, he had "given the nod to three potential running mates" -- Wallace, Truman, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) of Yakima ("Wallace Cuts into ..."). Truman won the vice-presidential nomination on the second convention ballot, and the Roosevelt-Truman ticket easily defeated New York Governor Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, and his running mate, Ohio Governor John Bricker, in the 1944 general election.
The new vice president was soon president, after Roosevelt succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. As president, Truman led the United States through the final months of World War II, including making the decision to use atomic bombs against Japan, and into the post-war years. Domestically, Truman continued Roosevelt's New Deal policies, including support for labor unions. However, the electorate was seemingly tiring of New Deal reforms and Democratic control of Congress, and the 1946 off-year election saw a huge swing to the Republicans, who won control of both houses of Congress and many state legislatures, including Washington's.
As the 1948 election got underway, few observers other than Truman himself thought the incumbent had much chance. Even many Democrats believed he would lose. Some, including Washington's Hugh Mitchell, who had lost his Senate seat in the Republican sweep two years earlier, called on Truman to step aside and urged the party instead to nominate General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), who had led the Allied troops to victory. Eisenhower didn't respond to the Democratic overtures, instead running successfully as a Republican four years later. Other Democrats proposed Justice Douglas, but he also declined, and subsequently declined Truman's invitation to be his running mate. The center of the Democratic Party eventually united behind Truman, but sizable portions of both the left and right wings ended up supporting third-party candidates, seemingly further reducing Truman's chances. Many liberals backed Henry Wallace when the former vice president who Truman had supplanted ran as the Progressive Party candidate. Conservative Southern Democrats, infuriated that the party platform supported desegregating the military, formed the States' Rights Party (often known as the "Dixiecrats"), which chose South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) as its candidate.
The expected beneficiary of Democratic disunity and Truman's apparent unpopularity was Republican nominee Thomas Dewey. Although he'd lost to Roosevelt four years earlier, the New York governor had done better than any of FDR's other opponents, and throughout the 1948 campaign right up to election day on November 2, the polls consistently showed Dewey winning handily. Even when Truman led in early election-day returns, pollsters confidently predicted Dewey would prevail. The editors of the Chicago Tribune, which had to be printed earlier than usual due to a printers' strike, relied on the pollsters and headlined the first edition of their November 3 issue "Dewey Defeats Truman." He did not -- the actual returns continued to favor Truman, and he ended up winning easily, with 49 percent of the vote to Dewey's 45 percent. Thurmond and Wallace each garnered 2.4 percent of the popular vote and Thurmond, with his support concentrated in a few southern states, won the electoral votes of four, but Truman had a comfortable electoral-vote majority of 303 to 189 for Dewey and 39 for Thurmond. The Tribune's error made for an iconic historic image when press photographers snapped photos of a grinning Truman waving the erroneous banner headline from his train car as he greeted supporters along the route of his triumphant return to Washington, D.C. The president undoubtedly relished the moment -- he famously despised the staunchly Republican Tribune, along with the equally Republican Spokesman-Review of Spokane.
Presidential Coattails
Truman's unexpected popularity not only won him the presidency, it also boosted his fellow Democrats, helping the party win enough seats to regain control of both houses of Congress, which it had lost two years earlier. The president's coattails extended to Washington state, where he won by a larger margin -- 53 percent to Dewey's 43 percent -- than he did nationally. Wallace won 3.5 percent of the state's votes; Thurmond's Dixiecrat party did not make the Washington ballot.
The state contributed one House seat to the Democratic takeover of Congress. Hugh Mitchell -- who had feared Truman would be a drag on the ticket -- defeated incumbent Homer Jones in the First District, although by a smaller margin than Truman carried the state. Incumbents won Washington's five other house seats -- Democrat (and future U.S. Senator) Henry M. Jackson (1912-1983) in the Second District and Republicans Russell V. Mack (1891-1960) in the Third District, Hal Holmes (1902-1977) in the Fourth, Walt Horan (1898-1966) in the Fifth, and Thor C. Tollefson (1901-1982) in the Sixth. Truman's popularity in the state helped other Democratic candidates, as the party prevailed in all but one contested statewide race and "gained an astounding 39 seats" (Brazier, 143) to flip control of the state House of Representatives. But Truman's coattails proved insufficient to help his good friend Governor Mon Wallgren. The two men had been close since Wallgren's 1940 election to the U.S. Senate, where he served on the Truman Committee investigating defense spending. When they were both senators, Truman visited Wallgren in his hometown of Everett several times, and he continued to visit the state as president, when Wallgren was governor. In the summer of 1948 they campaigned together across Washington. Despite the presidential support, Wallgren lost his rematch with Arthur Langlie.
Regaining the Governor's Office
The 1948 election was not the first in which Langlie successfully bucked a Democratic tide. In 1940, the popular Seattle mayor ran for governor as a Republican and narrowly defeated former Senator Clarence C. Dill (1884-1978) in an election otherwise dominated by Roosevelt and the Democrats. Running for re-election four years later, Langlie was unable to overcome another Democratic landslide. Democrats recruited then-Senator Wallgren to run against the Republican governor. Langlie, who devoted a lot of the 1944 campaign to supporting Dewey's unsuccessful challenge to Roosevelt and relatively little time to his own re-election effort, lost with 48 percent of the vote to Wallgren's 52 percent.
Langlie maintained a leadership role in the Republican Party and in 1948 headed its statewide ticket again in a rematch against Wallgren. Although Truman and other Democrats proved more resilient than expected, Wallgren was hampered by his underwhelming performance as governor. Langlie attacked the incumbent for his extravagant lifestyle -- Wallgren drove state-owned Cadillacs, enjoyed two bars in the governors' mansion, and had the use of a state yacht. But voters were likely more influenced by Wallgren's failings as an administrator, particularly his problems dealing with the car-ferry system on which many Western Washington communities depended. Then privately owned, the ferry system temporarily shut down in 1948 after the state denied a 30 percent fare increase. Wallgren promised to create a state-run ferry system but failed to do so. Langlie asserted that he could, pointing to his success as mayor in modernizing Seattle's transportation system. (Langlie would make good on that campaign promise, as the Washington State Ferry system was established under his leadership.)
Langlie won 51 percent of the vote to retake the governor's mansion, from which he had the liquor bars removed as soon as he moved back in. Wallgren took 47 percent and Progressive Russell Fluent had 2 percent. Langlie's victory made him the first (and as of 2023 still the only) Washington governor to regain that office after losing it.
That was the only statewide race Republicans won. Incumbent Pearl Wanamaker (1899-1984) was unopposed in the nonpartisan race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, winning the third of four terms she would serve. Democrats won all the other statewide offices, mostly by wide margins. Two races, however, were extremely close. Lieutenant Governor Vic Meyers (1898-1991) won his fifth term by less than 6,500 votes out of more than 830,000 cast, winning 49 percent to Republican Harry Hamblen's 48 percent and Progressive Thomas Rabbitt's 2 percent. The race for Commissioner of Public Lands was even closer. Incumbent Otto Case, who had been elected in 1944 as a Democrat but sought re-election as a Republican, lost to Democrat Jack Taylor, who had served as lands commissioner before Case (but did not seek re-election in 1944) by just 1,492 votes, with 48.76 percent of the vote to Taylor's 48.95 percent; Progressive Lyle Mercer took 2 percent.
Legislature and Ballot Measures
Democrats won big in the contest for the state House of Representatives, gaining 39 seats in the 99-member chamber, which went from a 71-28 Republican majority to 67-32 in favor of the Democrats. In contrast, Republicans increased their majority in the state Senate, winning four additional seats.
One high-profile Republican state Senate candidate lost badly, however. Albert F. Canwell (1907-2002) of Spokane, elected to the state House of Representatives in 1946, had gained notoriety as chair of the Legislative Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington State, generally known as the Canwell Committee, whose formation he had advocated to investigate alleged Communist infiltration. Committee hearings in early 1948 targeted labor leaders, including the Washington Pension Union and its president, William Pennock, and longshore union leader Harry Bridges (1901-1990). Later that year the Canwell Committee targeted University of Washington faculty members, accusing many, often on shaky grounds, of Communist ties. Three professors were ultimately fired, ending their teaching careers. The committee was highly controversial, even during that Red Scare era, but Canwell considered the hearings a success and made the committee the centerpiece of his campaign for a senate seat. Voters evidently disagreed. Democratic former state Representative Donald B. Miller barely campaigned but won 55 percent of the vote to Canwell's 45 percent. Two other members of the Canwell Committee also lost their races.
One of the Canwell Committee's targets, the Washington Pension Union, scored its own election success when voters approved a ballot measure it sponsored, Initiative 172, which increased social security payments in the state. The Pension Union had lobbied the 1947 legislature to increase the minimum monthly pension from $50 to $60, but instead the Republican-controlled legislature eliminated the existing $50 minimum. In response, the union and its supporters successfully convinced voters to enact the $60 minimum, and appropriate $6.5 million to fund pensions, by approving Initiative 172.
Two other initiatives also passed. Initiative 169 provided bonus payments to veterans and Initiative 171 authorized the sale of liquor by the drink in restaurants, hotels, clubs, ships, trains, and airplanes. A contrary measure, Initiative 13, which would have prohibited the retail sale of beer and wine by anyone other than the state, was overwhelmingly defeated.
Voters approved several state constitutional amendments proposed by the legislature. Amendment 20 authorized the legislature to set salaries for elected state officers and Amendment 22 repealed a provision limiting county officials to two successive terms in office. Amendment 21, advocated by good-government reformers including the Municipal League as a means to modernize King County's Territorial-era government, authorized counties to adopt Home Rule charters establishing new governmental structures. Following the amendment's passage, King County in 1950 elected a committee to draft a Home Rule charter, but the resulting charter was rejected in 1952; a second effort succeeded in 1968.
In Seattle, voters overwhelmingly approved a local referendum to continue observing daylight saving time in the city during spring and summer. The vote was one of many in the long and contentious struggle over whether the state should follow the practice of moving clocks ahead one hour to gain an extra hour of daylight in the evenings, a practice vehemently opposed by many rural residents. Four years later, an initiative banning the practice across the state passed with 60 percent of the vote; not until 1960 did state voters approve daylight saving time.
