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This Day in History
Feb 9
World War II
Daylight saving time instituted, 1942
On this day, Congress pushes ahead standard time for the United States by one hour in each time zone, imposing daylight saving time--called at the time…
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1944 Election
By the beginning of 1944, in the middle of World War II, it was clear that President Franklin D. Roosevelt planned to run for a fourth term, and this shaped the coming campaign.
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1940 Election
In 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term by a margin of nearly 5 million.
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1964 Election
The Democrats nominated Lyndon B. Johnson who had succeeded to the presidency upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
President Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded President Roosevelt after his death in 1945, stood for reelection on the Democratic ticket with Alben Barkley of Kentucky as his running mate. When the Democratic convention adopted a strong civil rights plank, southern delegates walked out and formed the States' Rights party. The Dixiecrats, as they were called, nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president and Fielding Wright for vice president. A new left-leaning Progressive party nominated former vice president Henry A. Wallace of Iowa for president with Glen Taylor, a senator from Idaho, as his running mate. The Republican slate consisted of two prominent governors: Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Earl Warren of California.
Although polls and conventional wisdom predicted a Dewey victory, Truman campaigned vigorously as the underdog, making a famous whistle-stop tour of the country aboard a special train. Results were uncertain to the last minute. A well-known photograph shows Truman the day after the election smiling broadly and holding aloft a newspaper with the headline dewey wins! The paper was wrong: Truman had received 24,105,812 popular votes, or 49.5 percent of the total; Dewey, 21,970,065, or 45.1 percent. Thurmond and Wallace each received about 1.2 million votes. The Democratic victory in the electoral college was more substantial: Truman beat Dewey 303 to 189; Thurmond received 39 votes, and Wallace none.
The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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