After order was restored, a roll call vote gave Truman a majority of delegates to be the nominee; Barkley was nominated the vice-presidential candidate by acclamation.

Strom Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina, who had led a walkout of a large group of delegates from Mississippi and Alabama at the 1948 convention, also ran against Truman as a Dixiecrat, campaigning for states' rights.

[26] According to Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, Truman even agreed to run as the vice-presidential nominee of Eisenhower, if he so desired, but all efforts to persuade him failed.

[28] Clifford edited and presented the forty-three page confidential memo to Truman,[29][28] which stated: "The Democratic Party is an unhappy alliance of Southern conservatives, Western progressives, and Big City labor.

[30] The Rowe–Clifford memo advised Truman to project himself as a strong liberal and focus his campaign primarily on urban blacks, labor, and farmers – who made up the core of the New Deal coalition.

[35] Despite his performance in the primaries, Gallup Poll indicated no matter how Truman might campaign, he would lose in November to any of four possible Republican nominees: Dewey, Arthur Vandenberg, Harold Stassen, or Douglas MacArthur.

[51] Douglas was also the alternative candidate for most of the Eisenhower supporters, but he declined, claiming a lack of political experience; he also wanted to remain in the Supreme Court.

[60] After his speech, some delegates broke into a spontaneous demonstration and marched around the hall singing "My Old Kentucky Home" carrying banners inscribed with "Barkley for Vice-President".

Before his arrival, the Southern delegates were agitated when the convention adopted Truman's civil rights plan, which supported equal opportunity in employment and in the military.

[64][65] Although Truman did not intend to alienate the South,[66] many Southern delegates from Mississippi were sent with binding instructions to leave the convention if it did not endorse the states' rights plank.

[71] Shortly after order was restored, Charles J. Bloch, a delegate from Georgia, shouted: "The South is no longer going to be the whipping boy of the Democratic Party," and called for the nomination of Senator Richard Russell as an alternative to Truman.

[77] Truman began his speech, electrifying the delegates by directly attacking the Republican platform, and praising Barkley – who was considered the most popular man in the hall.

[82] He said that he would call Congress back into session on July 26th, Turnip Day,[a] to pass legislation ensuring civil rights and social security and establishing a national healthcare program.

"[82] American author and historian David Pietrusza later wrote that Truman's speech transformed a "hopelessly bedraggled campaign" into an "instantly energized effort capable of ultimate victory in November".

William Loren Batt, a member of Combined Munitions Assignments Board, headed a new campaign research unit formed to focus on local issues and trends in the cities where Truman was expected to give speeches.

[95] A day before the special session of Congress, the Progressive Party formally nominated Wallace as their presidential nominee, with Glen H. Taylor, a senator from Idaho, as his running mate.

[96] Truman's close friend Oscar Ewing advised him to take his civil rights plan to its next logical step by desegregating the military by executive order rather than passing it through Congress.

[98] The following day, in the special session of Congress, he called for action on civil rights, economy, farm support, education, and housing development.

[99][100] Republican legislators strongly opposed these measures, but the Dewey campaign partially supported Truman's civil rights plan, trying to separate themselves from the conservative record of Congress.

[108] At the outset of the fall campaign, Truman's advisers urged him to focus on critical states decided by narrow margins in 1944, and make his major addresses in the twenty-three largest metropolitan areas.

[119] Thousands attended his speeches, but author Zachary Karabell wrote that the crowd could hardly be called excited; they had no intensity or sense of the importance of the moment.

[121] Author Donald R. McCoy observed that: "[Truman's] voice was flat and nasal, his prepared texts were often stilted, and his gestures were limited to chopping hand motions, which were not always appropriate to what he was saying.

[124] Robert Donovan, a correspondent at the New York Herald Tribune, later characterized Truman's campaign as "sharp speeches fairly criticizing Republican policy and defending New Deal liberalism".

[133] While addressing a crowd at Springfield, Illinois, the next day, he claimed Democrats to be "practical folks", and said that Republicans are afraid to tell the people their stand on specific issues.

The large, mostly spontaneous gatherings at Truman's whistle-stop events were an important sign of a change in the campaign's momentum, but this shift mostly went unnoticed by polling agencies.

[144] In early October, when Newsweek in an election survey asked fifty major political writers their prediction, all of them chose Dewey to win.

[153] He decided to send Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson on a diplomatic mission to Moscow attempting to negotiate an end to the Cold War with Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.

[140] The president of Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, also endorsed him, saying he was "more than a little impatient with those promises the Republicans made before they got control of Congress a couple of years ago".

[174] Sometime near midnight, Truman woke up, switched on the radio, and heard the National Broadcasting Company commentator H. V. Kaltenborn saying: "Although the president is ahead by 1,200,000 votes, he is undoubtedly beaten.

[2] Author and Truman's biographer David McCullough later wrote: Like some other photographs of other presidents – of Theodore Roosevelt in a white linen suit at the controls of a steam shovel in Panama, or Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, or Franklin Roosevelt, chin up, singing an old hymn beside Winston Churchill on board the Prince of Wales in the dark summer of 1941 – this of Harry Truman in 1948 would convey the spirit of both the man and the moment as almost nothing else would.