Riding the Rails: Richard Rovere and the 1948 Presidential Campaign

In 1936, during his senior year at Bard College, Richard Halworth Rovere, a supporter then of Earl Browder, leader of the Communist Party of the USA, had the opportunity to witness a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ended his campaign with an appearance at the Nelson House in Poughkeepsie, New York. Twelve years later, now a staff writer with The New Yorker, Rovere traveled across the country with Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, on his whistle stop campaign against Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey.

Prior to joining Truman on what he called a “fast-moving road carnival,” Rovere, who also traveled for a time on Dewey’s campaign train, had taken a break from The New Yorker to write a series of articles for Harper’s magazine on the leading presidential contenders for 1948, including “the beleaguered” Truman, as well as Republican senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose “party affiliation, if any, was unknown, though both Democrats and Republicans were busy courting him,” recalled Rovere.

Rovere’s editor at The New Yorker, William Shawn, had grudgingly agreed that upon his return to the magazine he could spend time on the presidential campaign trains and report on life aboard them. “The magazine had never done anything of the sort before, and, although I had written quite a bit about national politics, neither had I,” Rovere recalled in his autobiography, Final Reports. In September he climbed aboard the Truman train at Washington, DC’s Union Station, staying on it as it made its way to Los Angeles, where he picked up the Dewey train, disembarking in Missoula, Montana, and taking the Olympian Hiawatha Milwaukee line for his home in Dutchess County, New York. “This turned out to be the last cross-country railroad tour of presidential candidates,” he noted. Calling his experience “a supreme adventure,” Rovere produced two articles for The New Yorker about what he observed under the title “Letter From a Campaign Train,” a precursor to the “Letter from Washington” department he would go on to write for the magazine from December 1948 until his death on November 23, 1979.

Today, more than seventy years after the 1948 election, Rovere’s pieces offer a tantalizing snapshot of old-fashioned presidential politics, and insight into how each candidate approached the American voter in a campaign that produced one of the most shocking outcomes in the country’s political history. It was a time when the railroads were still “proud and competitive,” Rovere recalled, showing off the best of their equipment and service personnel on the campaign trains. And while, from a politician’s viewpoint, little was lost when the candidates switched to travel by airplane and getting their message across via television, from “a writer’s point of view,” observed Rovere, “much was lost.”

Rovere remembered there being about fifty reporters during his time on the Truman train, while approximately eighty traveled with Dewey. “Between stops, on the long hauls over the plains, the prairies, and the mountains, we had ample time to converse with the politicians and ample time to write,” he said. Rovere had a compartment to himself  (Car 1, Compartment 1), and kept the upper berth down for sleeping and the occasional nap. “Hotels are more comfortable and offer better facilities for bathing and the like, but this seemed to me a civilized, and certainly a leisurely, way of getting on with the business at hand,” he said.

The two campaigns were polar opposites—with Truman’s effort “an old-fashioned and rather sloppy operation, with schedules often fouled up and plans often mislaid,” Rovere remembered. Life could be rugged traveling with the president. He wrote:

"If you wanted anything laundered, you did it yourself, in a Pullman basin. When you detrained anywhere for an overnight stay, it was every man for himself. You carried your duffel [bag] and scrabbled for your food. If a man was such a slave to duty that he felt obliged to hear what the President said in his back-platform address, he had to climb down off the train, run to the rear end, mingle with the crowd, and listen. Often, this was a hazardous undertaking, for the President was given to speaking late at night to crowds precariously assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew the contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment."

None of those inconveniences troubled the reporters on Dewey's train. On overnight stops the Dewey organization a reporter's luggage would magically vanish from his berth, Rovere noted, and could be found waiting for him in the hotel room he had been assigned. "Good Republican caterers have hot coffee and thick roast-beef sandwiches waiting in the press rooms at every stopover," he remembered. "Laundries are alerted a thousand miles ahead to be ready to turn out heavy loads in a few hours." Also, reporters had no need to attempt the dangerous task of actually leaving the train to hear Dewey's speeches, as most of the train had been wired for sound and the candidate's words were carried for all to hear over the public-address system.

The Republican train (“like those in Mussolini’s Italy,” Rovere slyly said) ran on schedule, but he found its efficiency monotonous. Although he tried to be nonpolitical in his dispatches, Rovere enjoyed life aboard the president’s train “more than life on his rival’s.” (Life in the Truman train was like life in the back rooms at a local Democratic district headquarters, Rovere noted, while life on with Dewey was like life in a Greenwich, Connecticut, country club.) The reporter enjoyed the Truman train’s conviviality—something missing when he traveled with Dewey. Truman’s train had a twenty-four-hour poker game (seven-card stud) going on in the staff car, with the president sitting in from time to time, while the favorite card game on Dewey’s train was bridge. The drink of choice for the Truman train, when Rovere was on it, was the Kentucky bourbon highball, “before, during, and after meals.” Martinis and Manhattans were in vogue on Dewey’s train.

Rovere described Dewey's 

train as “slick and snappy,” compared to the “good-natured slovenliness” of the Truman campaign. The GOP candidate’s speeches were “as smooth and glossy as chromium,” but devoid of many policy commitments. Rovere believed Dewey’s remarks (“Your future lies ahead of you”) had been influenced by what could be found every issue in the Reader’s Digest. “They are full of the good cheer, the defiant optimism, the inspirational tone, and the breathtaking simplification that have made that magazine so popular,” he wrote in The New Yorker. For his speeches, the Republican candidate came onstage seemingly out of nowhere, Rovere said, with his arms outstretched to both "embrace the crowd and gather in the applause" from the crowd. "Dewey doesn't seem to walk; he coasts out like a man who has been mounted on casters and give a tremendous shove from behind," wrote Rovere. "However it is done, he rouses the crowd to a peak of excitement and enthusiasm, and he has to wait an agreeably long while for the racket to die down."

Truman’s train would make sometimes make stops at fourteen to fifteen different places, often staying for no more than ten or twelve minutes and occasionally in and out of a town within five or six minutes. “Anywhere between twenty-five and several hundred people would gather behind the President’s car (the armored Ferdinand Magellan, from which Roosevelt had often campaigned), and the President—a trim, perky figure materializing on the back platform through a parted blue-velvet curtain—would make a short speech, working in some allusions to local industries, problems, and personalities,” noted Rovere. From time to time Truman stumbled giving his prepared remarks, talking about “Republican mothbags” when he supposed to be saying “Republican mossbacks.”

As a rule, Rovere believed that Truman played better in small towns than in large ones, and doing better with off-the-cuff remarks rather than prepared speeches. “When he speaks without a script . . . he inflicts considerable damage on the English language, but anything he does on his own is not one-tenth as deplorable as what his ghostwriters do for him,” said Rovere. The journalist discovered that Truman had a remarkable and detailed knowledge of the small towns he visited. “The impression one gets is that he has acquired, in his sixty-four years, a spoonful or two of information about every community west of the Mississippi [River] and about a good many of those east of it,” Rovere said.

The crowds that gathered to greet the president, both in small and large towns, responded to his speeches with respect, but little enthusiasm, according to Rovere’s reports. Nothing the reporter heard Truman say between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles drew “more than a spot of polite applause. Nobody stomps, shouts, or whistles for Truman.” The decibel count for Truman’s remarks were about the same as it would be, Rovere wrote, for “a missionary who has just delivered a mildly encourage report on the inroads being made against heathenism in Northern Rhodesia.”

The most effective part of Truman’s train campaign came when he introduced his daughter, Margaret, to the crowd. “Margaret’s entrance comes closer than anything else to bringing down the house,” Rovere said. With the festivities ended, a railroad official—usually a vice president of the line, who sat at a telephone in the car ahead of the president’s, called the locomotive engineer, fifteen cars, or a quarter of a mile down the track, and told him to get under way. As the train pulled away, the Truman family would wave goodbye to the crowd. Traveling with the president, Rovere, unaware as yet of what would happen on election day 1948, had the feeling that Americans who saw Truman and heard him “at his best would be willing to give him just about anything he wants except the Presidency.”

Rovere ended his report from the Dewey train with comments from a political adviser who had traveled with one of the trains (he did not say which one) questioning if such efforts changed the minds of any voters. “Hell’s bells!” Rovere quoted the adviser. “Everybody knows that we don’t go through all this business to win friends or influence people. We go through it to keep the friends we’ve already got.” The best way to keep a party organization together, the adviser told the reporter, is “to have the big men in the party get out and say nice things to the little men. I don’t care which party it is. . . . If you think party organizations are not a good and necessary thing in a democracy, then you can write all this off as a lot of nonsense. If you think they’re important, then you can’t deny the usefulness of these trips.” Stated, in those terms, Rovere noted, the "question is a weighty one."

The Governor and the Publisher

In addition to showcasing such national political figures as U.S. senators Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, the 1968 Indiana presidential primary shone a spotlight on some fascinating Hoosier politicians, especially Governor Roger Branigin, a Harvard-educated lawyer from Franklin, Indiana, and the owner of the state’s leading newspapers, Eugene C. Pulliam.

An engaging, witty speaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of the state’s history, Branigin had initially agreed to run as a stand-in for President Lyndon Johnson in the primary. With Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination for president, a stunned Branigin nevertheless decided to remain in the race as a favorite-son candidate. He hoped to win some influence for Indiana’s sixty-three delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago, slated to be held in August 1968. Time and time again during the campaign he repeated that national issues were not at stake in Indiana. “What is at stake here,” he told his supporters, “is who is going to represent the state of Indiana in Chicago.”

Branigin enjoyed several advantages over his opponents in the primary. With his tight control over patronage in the state, the governor could count on the expertise of Democratic Party regulars in each of Indiana’s ninety-two counties. To fund his campaign, Branigin could draw upon the funds raised by having several thousand patronage employees “voluntarily” kicking back to the party 2 of their salaries. Democratic officials throughout the state also feared that if Kennedy were nominated for president, his candidacy would hurt local candidates in the November election. With these factors in mind, Democratic Party chairmen in all but one of Indiana’s counties threw their support to the governor.

In addition to the support of elected officials, Branigin enjoyed the unwavering editorial assistance of Pulliam, the powerful owner and publisher of the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News, as well as newspapers in Muncie and Vincennes. Pulliam did all he could in his newspaper to aid Branigin and defeat Kennedy, whom the newspaper labeled as a carpetbagger ready to buy the election with unlimited cash. The newspaper gave the governor’s effort page-one coverage and even peddled him as a possible candidate for vice president. Referring to his time delivering copies of the Star as a young man, Branigin joked: “I used to carry Pulliam, and he has been carrying me ever since."

The governor noted in his daily journal that Pulliam agreed with his position to “hold the line for the Indiana delegation so as to be more effective in Chicago—and press my candidacy as far as prudence and good judgment permits.” The Democratic governor had been amazed that Pulliam, a strong supporter of Republican causes, had promoted his candidacy day after day in his newspaper, “sometimes when there was no news—or reason. You can’t purchase such support.” Although he did not know what the long-term effect might be for the primary contest, Branigin noted Democrats should remember that “Republicans can elect you!”

Born in Ulysses, Kansas, Pulliam had attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, before leaving after his junior year to work in newspapers. He quickly rose in the industry, working for the Kansas City Star and serving as editor of the Atchison Champion before buying a number of newspapers in Indiana, including the Lebanon Reporter, Franklin Evening Star, and the Indianapolis Star. According to his grandson, Pulliam was at heart “an old fashioned editor who went into political battles with both fists swinging.”

During the 1968 Indiana primary, Pulliam used his power as publisher to bolster Branigin’s efforts in Indiana, and hamper the Kennedy campaign at all costs. During John Kennedy’s administration, Pulliam, who also owned newspapers in Phoenix, Arizona, had developed a liking for the president’s wit, but never developed any such warm feelings for Robert Kennedy. In Pulliam’s mind, the younger Kennedy possessed an unattractive personality that sorted people into two distinct categories—those who were with him, and those who were against him. “You could never relax and just be with him, like you could with Jack,” Pulliam said.

Although warned by his assistant publisher, his son, Gene, and the Star’s managing editor, William Dyer, that his efforts against Kennedy might harm the newspaper’s reputation, the publisher refused to pull any punches. Longtime Star city editor Lawrence “Bo” Connor remembered receiving a memo from Pulliam that read: “I think whenever Senator [Eugene] McCarthy comes to Indiana that we should give him as full coverage as possible—but this does not apply to a man named Kennedy.”

The Star treated Kennedy and McCarthy as unwelcome outsiders. Editorial cartoons blasting Kennedy for using his fortune to buy Indiana votes appeared on news pages. One infamous cartoon on the front page of the Star’s April 24 issue under the title “Guests in the House!” had McCarthy and Kennedy wooing a worried woman labeled “Mrs. Indiana” as Branigin looked balefully down at them behind his glasses. In the drawing, McCarthy tickles the woman under the chin while Kennedy’s hand appears to be fondling her breast.

The Star also gave continued coverage to charges from St. Angelo and Branigin that Kennedy was out to buy the election with his family fortune. The newspaper ran on its front page an editorial from the New York Times titled “Is Indiana For Sale?” The editorial noted that the Kennedy campaign estimated they would spend $500,000 in the state, but nobody would be “surprised at an expenditure by them twice or three times as great.” Because Indiana had no effective law requiring reports on campaign expenditures, the Times editorial said no one would ever know the real amount. In reprinting the editorial, however, the Star edited out a mention that the Branigin campaign could draw upon for financial support what the Times called “the ancient and disreputable practice” of levying 2 percent from patronage employee’s paychecks.

By the end of the campaign, Kennedy campaign aides had called on the American Society of Newspaper Editors’s Freedom of Information Committee to investigate the Pulliam newspapers for what he called “outrageous and callous disregard for fairness.” Pulliam fired back at Kennedy, comparing him to a spoiled child. “When he doesn’t get what he wants, he bellyaches about it,” Pulliam said in a statement. “The facts are Kennedy and his entourage received more space in the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News than any other candidate, largely for the reason he brought his whole family, including his mother, to Indianapolis and they made news and we printed the news and the pictures.”

The Kennedy campaign attempted to counter the reach of the Pulliam newspapers by going over their heads and concentrating on television and radio advertising. In general, however, noted press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, there was not much Kennedy could do about what he saw as biased political coverage. One new technique employed by the campaign to circumvent the Indianapolis newspapers came from Jim Dunn, who had worked on Democrat Pat Brown’s gubernatorial contests in California. Dunn set up a recording machine in Kennedy campaign headquarters in Indianapolis with a phone line and notified every radio station in the state that they could call twice a day to obtain a live feed of Kennedy’s speeches to use in their news reports and programs. Dunn went to every Kennedy speech, recorded them, edited them, and also provided commentary on the size of the crowd and the location of the speech. “It was a good device,” Mankiewicz recalled. “We got a lot of good radio publicity that way.”

Kennedy attempted to joke about the rough coverage he received in the Star. During a visit to Indianapolis on May 1, Kennedy made brief remarks to an enormous crowd of approximately three thousand people that pressed around his car as it traveled on Monument Circle. Lacking the proper permit to make a speech, the senator said he did not want to say too much and risk spending the last few days of the campaign reading the Indianapolis Star while incarcerated. 

In a talk at the Christian Theological Seminary later in the day, Kennedy turned serious, noting he had always considered the Manchester Union-Leader, run by arch-conservative New Hampshire publisher William Loeb, as the country’s nastiest newspaper. “I think, really, the Indianapolis Star must run it neck and neck,” he said. “I’ve been here two weeks, and I’ve never seen a worse newspaper. . . . It’s certainly the most distorted, I think, one of the most warped.” He went on to say, in a dig at Pulliam, that it must be a great thing to “have a toy like that.” The Indianapolis Star reporter who covered the event at the seminary failed to include Kennedy’s remarks about the newspaper, noting only that the candidate made digressed from his remarks to indicate “his displeasure with some of the news coverage he encounters in Indiana.”

As the campaign neared its home stretch, Pulliam’s son had convinced his father to give equal space to all campaigns by running news briefs about their efforts along the bottom of the front page. Branigin, however, continued to be the newspaper’s main focus. The front page of the Star on primary election day, May 7, had a large headline above the fold reading: “Branigin Predicts Victory.” Later that fall, in a meeting with Indianapolis executives, Pulliam did admit: “Well, I guess we did go a little too far.”

Ernie Pyle, Robert Sherrod, and the Battle of Okinawa

On April 9, 1945, while covering the American invasion of Okinawa, located only 330 miles from Japan, two war correspondents, one a veteran of the Pacific War and the other a newcomer to the theater, were busy writing stories about the battle in a room aboard the USS Panamint, a McKinley-class command ship that served as the flagship of Rear Admiral Lawrence F. Reifsnider. As the clacking of their typewriter keys slackened, the two men—Time magazine’s Robert L. Sherrod and Scripps-Howard News Service columnist Ernie Pyle, who both had been firsthand observers of fighting during the war, discussed how they had grown tired of the grind of combat and were looking forward to going home.

In fact, Sherrod planned to leave for the United States in a couple of days. “I’m getting too old to stay in combat with these kids,” Pyle told Sherrod, “and I’m going to go home, too, in about a month. I think I’ll stay back around the airfields with the Seabees and engineers in the meantime and write some stories about them.” (Pyle had written a U.S. Navy public relations officer he knew that he had a “spooky feeling that I’ve been spared once more and that it would be asking for it to tempt Fate again.”)

As he prepared to leave the Panamint, Sherrod could not find the ship’s mess treasurer, to whom he owed $2.50 for two days’ meals. Pyle agreed to pay the bill for his colleague, and asked Sherrod to see about forwarding his mail when he made it to the American base on Guam. From there, Sherrod began his long voyage home, traveling to Pearl Harbor, San Francisco, and, finally, New York.

The encounter on the Panamint marked the last time Sherrod saw Pyle alive, as the Time correspondent left Okinawa on April 11. While in Hawaii, Sherrod heard the news of Pyle’s death from Japanese gunfire on April 18 while on a mission with the U.S. Army’s Seventy-Seventh Infantry Division. “I never learned which doughboy of the Seventy-Seventh Division persuaded Ernie to change his mind and go on the Ie Shima invasion off the west coast of Okinawa,” said Sherrod. “But Ernie rarely refused a request from a doughboy, or any other friend.” The death of Pyle, who Sherrod praised as being better than anyone else at registering the feeling of the average man about the war, made national and international headlines, but he was just one of many on Okinawa, American and Japanese, who lost their lives in some of the costliest fighting of the war.

By the time major combat operations for Operation Iceberg ceased near the end of June, more than 12,000 Americans had been killed along with approximately 110,000 of the Japanese military and anywhere from 40,000 to 150,000 civilians. Offshore, the U.S. Navy had thirty-six ships sunk and 368 damaged due to relentless Japanese kamikaze attacks. The landscape on Okinawa’s southern line resembled that of a World War I–era battlefield, with more than 300,000 soldiers and civilians jammed into an area about the distance between Capitol Hill and Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., noted William Manchester, who served as a sergeant with the Marine Corps and fought on the island. “You could smell the front long before you saw it; it was one vast cesspool,” recalled Manchester. “The two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke, were locked together in unimaginable agony.” Eugene B. Sledge of Company K, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, remembered that he and his buddies fought in an “environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.” Sherrod could only reflect on what he had heard during a pre-invasion intelligence briefing, when an officer said U.S. soldiers and marines should “expect resistance to be most fanatical.” It was.

Sherrod’s coverage of the last battle in the Pacific war began with a sober final intelligence briefing on the Panamint, after which “nobody could have felt overconfident.” After hearing from invasion planners that the Okinawa landings were expected to be “horrendous—worse than Iwo,” according to Sherrod, Pyle said to him, “‘What I need now is a great big drink.’ We did have a drink. Many of them.” Ulithi’s jovial commander, Commodore Oliver Owen “Scrappy” Kessing, had arranged a farewell party at the officers’ club (the Black Widow) on Asor Island for the correspondents and high-ranking officers from the navy and First and Sixth Marine Divisions. The party included a band and, “miraculously,” women—about seventy nurses from the six hospital ships in the anchorage, plus two women radio operators from a Norwegian ship. “Everybody got drunk . . . as people always do the last night ashore,” Sherrod recalled.

The next morning, as the approximately forty reporters and photographers left Asor for their assigned ships, Kessing had an African American band on the dock playing its own “boogie-woogie” version of sad farewell music. Also on hand to see them off was a Seabee lieutenant whose detachment had built most of the base and a special guest, Coast Guard Commander Jack Dempsey, the former boxing champion. Someone in the crowd on the dock shouted out a warning to Pyle—famous for his columns focusing on the average GIs in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France—to be sure to keep his head down on Okinawa. “Listen, you bastards,” Pyle joked to his colleagues, “I’ll take a drink over every one of your graves.” Then, he turned to Dempsey, who, Sherrod noted, weighed about twice as much as the rail-thin reporter, put up his fists in mock belligerence, and asked the former boxer, “Want to fight?” It all made for a pleasant trip for Sherrod who, along with Jay Eyerman, a photographer from Life magazine, had been assigned to the Coast Guard transport USS Cambria, home also to the headquarters of the Sixth Marine Division. “This is the smoothest working staff I’ve ever seen,” Commodore Herbert Knowles said of the marines on the Cambria. “They know what they want; they know how to load a ship. They don’t have to ask the general every time a decision has to be made.”

The Sixth Marines needed able commanders if they were to survive what awaited them on Okinawa, an island sixty miles long and three to ten miles wide and well within range of bases from which Japanese kamikaze planes could reach the more than 1,300 U.S. ships involved in the invasion. Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the Tenth Army, devised a plan in which two marine divisions (the Sixth and First) and two army divisions (the Seventh and Ninety-Sixth) would land on west-central beaches near the village of Hagushi. The island’s topography, especially its mountainous regions on its southern end near the ancient castle town of Shuri, made it ideal for Japanese forces of the Thirty-Second Army under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima to construct fortifications in caves and bunkers that could rain destruction upon the advancing enemy. 

The Japanese planned on letting the Americans land unopposed, then isolate them ashore to be annihilated in a “decisive battle” once the fleet had been destroyed by kamikaze attacks from both the sea and air. After the fighting ended, U.S. troops discovered that in just one sector of the enemy’s defenses they had faced sixteen grenade launchers, eighty-three light machine guns, forty-one heavy machine guns, seven 47-mm antitank guns, six field guns, two mortars, and two 70-mm howitzers. The Japanese soldiers on Okinawa took as their motto: “One plane for one warship, one boat for one ship, one man for ten of the enemy or one tank.” Okinawa itself stood as a formidable obstacle to a successful invasion, noted Sherrod. “The island abounded in flies, mosquitoes, mites, rats, and poisonous snakes,” he said.

While awaiting the invasion on his transport, Sherrod spent several hours listening to propaganda broadcasts from Radio Tokyo, a station he had first come across while at sea with the U.S. Third Fleet before the invasion of Iwo Jima. Radio Tokyo’s broadcasts were made in English every hour on the hour, usually in the afternoon, and featured commentaries on Japanese achievements in science and newscasts slanted toward home consumption, as well as providing “aging popular music” and messages from American and British prisoners of war made under pressure. “Anyone listening exclusively to Radiotokyo could only conclude that Japan is winning the war,” said Sherrod. “Radiotoyko permits no admissions of death or of retreat such as even [Nazi propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels must sometimes make.” 

Even before the U.S. fleet reached Okinawa, Radio Tokyo claimed that its forces had sunk an American battleship, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and a minesweeper. The broadcasters for the “Zero Hour” program Sherrod listened to on the Cambria interspersed their wild reports of success with banter and music. Before playing a song titled “Going Home,” one of the broadcasters introduced the tune as a “little juke-box music for the boys and make it hot, because the boys are going to catch hell soon, and they might as well get used to the heat.” The Japanese broadcasters failed in their attempt to strike fear into the hearts of their audience. Sherod noted that the few sailors who sat around the communication room on the transport listening to Radio Tokyo “acted as bored as men who had seen a Grade B movie three times.”

Sherrod could never have anticipated what awaited the marines and soldiers when they landed on Okinawa on April 1, Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day. It proved to be quite an April Fool’s prank by the Japanese. Early on, it looked like the reception on the beaches would be hot, as kamikazes were active seven hours before the start of the invasion. “Many times before daylight the sky around us was pierced by anti-aircraft tracer bullets, but no enemy planes got within shooting distance of the Cambria,” said Sherrod. The suicide planes did cause some damage to the transport USS Hinsdale and two Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) carrying troops of the Second Marine Division making a diversionary demonstration south of Okinawa. The U.S. troops who landed ashore on L-Day (Love-Day in the voice signal alphabet), however, “stepped ashore with slightly more opposition than they would have had in maneuvers off the coast of California. To say merely that they were bewildered is to gild the lily of understatement,” Sherrod observed.

Missing from the landing beaches on the west coast from north of Kadena southward halfway to Naha was the usual deadly rain of withering machine-gun fire, nine-inch rockets, and 320-mm mortars. Within three hours, the First Marine Division had taken Yontan Airfield against only a few shots from isolated snipers at a cost of two killed and nine wounded. At 10:00 a.m. Sherrod wrote in his notebook: “This is hard to believe.” The news was the same for the soldiers, with the Seventh Division stepping from their amtracs onto a seawall “as easily as if they had been on a pleasant fishing trip,” noted the correspondent. The soldiers moved on to capture Katena Airfield after disposing of a solitary machine-gun position. 

On Okinawa, Sherrod discovered half-heartedly constructed pillboxes, most of which seemed to have been abandoned long ago. “Only a few [mortar] bursts were fired at the landing amtracs, and none of them caused any casualties,” he said. A relieved Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner radioed a message to Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii that read: “I may be crazy but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war, at least in this sector.” The more realistic Nimitz responded: “Delete all after ‘crazy.”

Sherrod, too, expected stiffer opposition to come, realizing that the Japanese had “given up their beaches above Naha and moved farther south.” What nobody could foresee on the invasion’s first day, or in the two weeks that followed, was that the enemy “would have the strength to fight as fiercely as they finally did—else why had they let us ashore so easily?” he asked. A marine officer proved to be prophetic when he said to Sherrod: “This is the finest Easter present we could have received. But we’ll get a bellyful of fighting before this thing is over.”

The Reporter and the Mine Disaster

The bodies began coming up from deep within the bowels of the earth days after the first explosion at the Centralia coal mine on March 25, 1947. Members of the Illinois prairie community of Centralia began hearing about how an explosive charge meant to dislodge coal had ignited the unstable coal dust permeating the air more than five hundred feet below ground at the mine south of town in Wamac.

The wives of the miners whose fate was not yet known gathered at the washhouse—the place where during the work week their husbands changed out of their grimy, coal-streaked clothes at the end of their shifts. Avoiding the rescue teams wearing their oxygen tanks and “other awkward paraphernalia of disaster,” the women gravitated toward sitting beneath their loved ones’ clothing, settling in for the long wait to learn about their men’s fate.

Ambulances from Centralia and nearby towns idled their engines in the cold night air, in an attempt by the men inside to keep warm as they waited to be called upon to transport the deceased to the local Greyhound bus station, which officials had converted into a temporary morgue. As a shiny limousine drove away from the mine, taking with it one of the 111 men killed in the disaster, a friend of the deceased, standing with others in the crowd, remarked, “I bet it’s the only time he ever rode in a Cadillac.”

A year after the disaster, Harper’s magazine, in its March 1948,  reserved twenty-eight pages for a lengthy examination of the Centralia mine blast. The story, written by freelance writer John Bartlow Martin and titled “The Blast in Centralia No. 5: A Mine Disaster No One Stopped,” praised by the Harper’s editors as a “top-notch reporting job, to be compared . . . with John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’” shocked the nation. Illustrated with twenty-four drawings by social-realist artist Ben Shahn, the story, the longest ever printed in Harper’s in its approximately hundred-year history, told about the helpless miners and their struggle to save their lives, only to come face to face with an uncaring government bureaucracy, lackadaisical union officials, and greedy mine owners more concerned about profits than their workers’ lives.

Later reprinted in condensed form in Reader’s Digest, a magazine with the largest paid circulation in the world, the article, written by Martin in spite of threats of violence against him made by mining officials, played a major role in bringing about the downfall of Illinois’s Republican governor Dwight H. Green and electing Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson. The federal government also stepped in and enacted a stricter safety code for mines. Martin, however, offered his readers scant hope that a similar disaster might not befall another mining community in the future. He remembered the somber words of a young miner he met sipping a beer at a saloon in a neighboring town. Martin reported the scene as follows:

‘I got a wife and one kid. It takes a lot of money to raise kids. Where else could I make thirteen-o-five a day? The railroads pay eight, nine dollars. And that’s all there is around here.’ At a table in a corner a couple of old miners are arguing quietly, and behind the bar the lady bartender is listening sympathetically to a lady customer whose husband is always crabbing about what she cooks. The young miner says, ‘Sometimes I’d like to leave for good. But where’d I go? I don’t know anything else. I don’t know what hell you would call it. Well, it is life, in a way too. I just wish my life away, when I go below I just wish it was tomorrow. Wish my life away. And I guess the others are the same way, too.’ 

Only dimly aware of the disaster at first, Martin began his work on the Centralia explosion following a suggestion from a Reader’s Digest editor he had previously worked with, Paul Palmer, who promised him a large fee ($2,500) and offered to pay his expenses (the Digest often planted stories in other magazines with small budgets, making their own arrangements with writers and then reprinting the article). Martin then broached the idea to an editor at Harper’s, who agreed to read the article when it was finished. “I set forth . . . thinking, ‘I’ve got a hell of a nerve, starting out single-handed, with nothing but my typewriter, to overthrow the political machine of the governor of Illinois,’” Martin recalled.

To uncover what had happened at the mine Martin, a former newspaper reporter, began his research in Saint Louis, Missouri. The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch had done yeoman work in exposing Green’s failure to prevent the tragedy in spite of numerous warnings that dangerous conditions existed at the mine, including a large accumulation of volatile coal dust. For its efforts, the newspaper won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for public service. “The Post-Dispatch editors gave me access to their files,” Martin said. “They were proud of what they had done and well they should have been; they helped me, for they wanted the story told.”

From Saint Louis, Martin traveled the approximately sixty miles east to Centralia. The town of sixteen thousand looked nothing like Martin had expected it to be. Instead of a “dismal [coal] company town” like ones in West Virginia, Centralia had the look of a typical midwestern farming community—“wide main street lined with low flat-faced stores, sprawling railroad shops and the ungainly black coal-mine tipple on the edge of town.” Martin began his work here by obtaining background information on the town itself, talking to farmers, local businessmen, and housewives. Only then did he begin interviewing those involved in the disaster, beginning with the miners and the miners’ widows, because, as Martin noted, “they were the victims, the aggrieved, and would want the world to know. I did not want the story to turn into a debate among the powerful—Governor Green, and John L. Lewis of the UMWA [United Mine Workers of America], and the coal company. I wanted it to be the miners’ story, the story of helpless ordinary people.”

One of the first miners Martin talked to was William Rowekamp, who as recording secretary of Local 52 of the UMWA had sent a two-page letter to the governor pleading for his help that he typed while sitting at a cluttered oak desk in his living room. While the letter praised Scanlan, calling him the “best inspector that ever came to our mine,” it castigated his superiors at the Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals for their inaction. “In fact, Governor Green,” the letter stated, “this is a plea to you, to please save our lives, to please make the department of mines and minerals enforce the laws at the No. 5 mine of the Centralia Coal Co. . . . before we have an explosion like just happened in Kentucky and West Virginia.” In addition to Rowekamp, the three other men who signed the letter included Jake Schmidt, Local 52 president, and Thomas Bush and Elmer Moss of the union’s mine committee; only Rowekamp survived the massive Centralia underground explosion, described by one expert as being like “a huge shotgun blast down a long corridor.”

Although taciturn by nature, Rowekamp soon began talking freely to Martin, telling him that some miners were worried enough to even tell their wives their fears about their safety. When he finished the interview, Martin asked the miner, as he always did at the end of an interview, if he knew of anyone else he should talk to, and Rowekamp gave him the name of other miners. “For the next few days,” said Martin, “I went from one to another and I took to hanging around the bare upstairs union hall and they became so used to seeing me that they paid little heed, always what a reporter wants.” He soon learned that the miners considered themselves a breed apart, superior to those who worked on farms or factories. “The danger they were always in was part of the fascination,” noted Martin. “They were fierce fighters for their rights. They had a strong sense of being the underdog.” Martin, who grew up during the Great Depression and saw his father lose his successful business, shared their underdog mentality and that mind-set “remained a powerful force in my life and my writing.”

To bring the disaster even more home to his readers, Martin talked to the widow of one of the miners who died in the explosion, Mrs. Joe Bryant, a big, forty-four-year-old woman who had borne eleven children; two had died in infancy. Martin asked her to tell him everything about the day of the explosion, and while she did, several small children played around her legs, pulling on her dress in an effort to distract her. She shared with him a note her husband had scrawled on a page torn from a time book while he was trapped in a tunnel, waiting to die as the breathable air ran out. Bryant had written: “Dear Wife fro Give [forgive] me Please all love you Be shure and don’t sign any Paper see Vic Ostero [a warning against signing away her compensation rights] My Dear wife good By.” 

Funeral expenses had taken most of the compensation the widow had received from the union and other sources, and she could only expect payments of $44 a week for the next five years from the state’s industrial compensation fund and Social Security. When Martin asked her who she blamed for the loss of her husband, she said: “I don’t know nothin’ about the mine, I wouldn’t blame no one, accidents happen, seems like it just has to be.”

Driving away from the Bryant home on a dusty road, Martin turned his car for Springfield, the state capital, where he uncovered the second half of his story—politics and government bureaucracy. Martin got a lucky break. When he visited the offices of the Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals, he expected some foot dragging from its staff, but an employee on duty that day said Martin could go through all the files, as they had already been published during the various investigations into the Centralia explosion. “But it turned out they hadn’t,” Martin noted. “I found a mountain of paper accumulated over five years. Piled up, the evidence was devastating.”

Martin traced, almost hour by hour, the reports issued by Scanlan finding that the mine was dangerously dusty and warning that such conditions could lead to an explosion. Medill, the department’s director, had not seen Scanlan’s first thirteen reports; they were handled by his deputy, who read some, but not all, of the scathing reports. Form letters indicating the department agreed with Scanlan’s findings were mailed to the Centralia mine company’s Chicago office. “Not only did the company not comply with Scanlan’s recommendations, it did not even bother to reply,” said Martin.

When federal mine inspections started in 1942, they found the same violations and made the same recommendations as had Scanlan. “The company ignored them too,” said Martin, who spent days in the department’s office making notes on “scores of federal and state inspection reports, correspondence, transcripts of the six hearings and investigations into the Centralia disaster.” After interviewing Medill, whom he described as “a large jovial man with a loud blustery voice,” at his home in Lake Springfield, Martin returned to the Illinois capital, where he talked to legislators, union officials, lobbyists, and coal operators. He tried, and failed, to interview Governor Green and Lewis.

Martin was now ready to start writing his story, but resisted the temptation to start. He had never forgotten the advice of a writer friend, W. Adolphe Roberts, the author of numerous historical novels, who had told him, “‘We always send our stories in too soon,’ before we’ve made them the best we can.” Also, the story had become so “big and complex, jumbled up in my head, all disorganized and out of order,” said Martin, that he had to take a few days off to fish in Upper Michigan, “trying not to think about Centralia, letting it marinate.” It worked; driving back to his home in suburban Chicago he began to see the story unfold before him. “The principal elements were the town of Centralia, the miners, their union, the mine operators, and state and federal authorities,” he said. “The story’s impact would depend upon two things: bringing the characters alive, and piling up the evidence of the history of the disaster.”

Because he had such an abundance of research for his Centralia article, Martin abandoned his old system of organizing his material on three-inch by five-inch notecards. Instead, he went through his notes and documents, gave each a code number, and then numbered the pages. When he came across an item he wanted to use in the article, he typed it out, triple spaced, and keyed it to code and page numbers. “I then cut up the typing line by line into slips of paper,” said Martin. “I moved the slips around, arranging and rearranging them.”

When he had all the slips arranged to his satisfaction, he pasted them together, resulting in a long scroll that he rolled up, placed on his typing table, and consulted as he began writing, letting the scroll fall to the floor as he worked. When he came to the end of the scroll, he had his rough draft finished. Martin eventually abandoned this system when, years later, one of his scrolls measured more than 150 feet long, “running out of my room and out the front door and across the lawn.” He went back to organizing his research on note cards, this time using some measuring five-inches by eight-inches in size. 

A friend, reading a rough draft of Martin’s story, told him, “If Harper’s publishes this in anything like its present form, it’ll make your reputation.” At 18,500 words in rough-draft form, the article was the longest Martin had ever written. “What made it so long and what made it so powerful was the relentless documentation—I kept piling it up and piling it up and piling it up—showing that for years everybody had known the mine was going to blow up but nobody had stopped it,” Martin recalled.

When Harper’s chief editor Frederick Lewis Allen read the story, he wrote Martin a long letter praising the writer’s work and ended by saying, “The whole office is rocking with cheers.” (Upon its publication Allen tried to have the story nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but discovered the journalism award had no magazine category.) After he had read Martin’s manuscript, artist Shahn had called Russell Lynes, the editor at Harper’s who had asked him to provide drawings for the article, at home to tell him he thought the article was “wonderful.” Lynes added that when “Shahn says ‘wonderful’ it sounds as though he means it. The first syllable takes three times as long as the other two.”

The artist was so inspired by the tragedy that he produced sixty-four drawings, saying once he started he felt compelled to keep on drawing. John D. Voelker, a best-selling author known best today for his novel Anatomy of a Murder, had met and became friends with Martin during his frequent vacations in the Upper Peninsula, where Voelker lived. Voelker called the Centralia story “a glorious piece of plain writing and of social detection and exposure.” He expressed his amazement at how fair Martin could appear to be, and maybe was, in the article, but at the same time how he was able to “expose the wound in all its rawness. You can hit low so fast that even the victim doesn’t know it.”

In his long career as a freelancer, Martin, through his numerous stories for national magazines and many books, took his readers into the worlds of such forgotten people as the victims of a gruesome highway crash in Michigan, the mother of a teenage boy who wondered why her son and two others killed a nurse for no apparent reason, a convict from Jackson Prison talking about the hell of life behind bars, a crusading journalist gunned down in cold blood for daring to expose corruption in his town, a dedicated psychiatrist trying to save damaged lives at an Ohio mental institution, and an illiterate black steelworker bringing to life the real meaning of segregated housing in a northern city.

As the writer of heavy-fact stories, Martin, who died in 1987, said it was his fate to “thrive on other people’s troubles.” Once a person involved in the Hollywood film industry asked him, “Don’t you ever write any happy stories?” Martin told him: “No, I don’t. I don’t think the human lot is a very happy one. Maybe an analyst could figure that out . . . but I do take my work seriously and feel dedicated to it.” There existed in Martin’s mind a gulf between the matter-of-fact newspaperman who saw little difference between covering a football game and hanging, and the serious journalist he aspired to be, one who writes significant articles “about serious subjects and takes them seriously and so becomes himself engaged—engaged in his society, in his times, in the human condition.”

"But I Do Clamor": May Wright Sewall, Teacher and Activist

While preparing for classes one day on the third floor at Indianapolis High School (later to become Shortridge), a teacher who had come to the city with her husband in the 1870s was interrupted by a distinguished visitor: Zeralda Wallace, widow of Governor David Wallace and president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s Indiana chapter. Wallace had come to the school to ask the teacher, May Wright Sewall, to sign a petition in favor of temperance Wallace planned on presenting to the state legislature.

As Sewall prepared to add her name to the document, her eye caught some words indicating that those who signed did not intend to “clamor” for any additional civil or political rights. “But I do clamor,” Sewall exclaimed to Wallace. Throwing the paper on the floor, Sewall stalked out of the room, “vexed in soul that I had been dragged down three flights of stairs to see one more proof of the degree to which honorable women love to humiliate themselves before men for sweet favor’s sake.”

Sewall’s anger at Wallace faded over time, and the two joined forces to found the Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society. The Society came about in large part due to the “open contempt” showed to Wallace by Hoosier legislators when she attempted to present her temperance petition to the Indiana General Assembly. One lawmaker even went so far as to tell Wallace that since women held no political power, her document “might as well have been signed by 10,000 mice.”

To ensure that women’s voices would indeed be heard by those in power, Sewall worked tirelessly on behalf of rights for women in the United States—and around the world—during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She served as an invaluable ally to such national suffrage leaders as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and gave the woman’s movement an international focus through her pioneering involvement with the International Council of Women and the American National Council of Women. By the turn of the twentieth century, Harper’s Bazaar magazine claimed that Sewall had “an ‘eternal feminine’ following of 5,000,000 in eleven countries.”

           

Sewall’s work on behalf of suffrage for women was just one of the many reform and cultural endeavors she became involved in during her life. Described by one Indianapolis acquaintance as “a large woman of sturdy carriage,” Sewall played a significant role in the cultural and social life of the capital city. At first with her second husband, the Harvard-educated Theodore Lovett Sewall and later alone, she operated the influential Classical School for Girls, located on the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and Saint Joseph Streets.The Sewalls’ residence served as a cultural showcase for the city, hosting a variety of nationally known literary and political figures. Every Wednesday in the home’s drawing room approximately one hundred to two hundred people of all types gathered to discuss the issues of the day. “This salon is distinctively the social and literary centre of all Indiana, and, for that matter, many a distinguished traveler from around the world had enjoyed this rare hospitality,” noted Harper’s Bazaar. Another journalist who visited the house’s library marveled over the fact that more “schemes for social progress have been conceived in this room . . . than in any other room on this continent.”

A bold statement, but not surprising considering Sewall enriched the city’s intellectual life through her efforts to form such organizations as the Indianapolis Woman’s Club, the Art Association of Indianapolis (the forerunner of the Indianapolis Museum of Art), the Indianapolis Propylaeum, the Contemporary Club, the Ramabai Circle (a group working to aid women in India), the Alliance Francaise, and the Indiana branch of the Western Association of Collegiate Alumnae.

In addition to all this, and her work at the school, she also found time to edit the woman’s page in the Sunday edition of the Indianapolis Times from 1882 to 1885. No less an authority on life in Indianapolis than Booth Tarkington boldly claimed that in company with Benjamin Harrison and James Whitcomb Riley, Sewall “would necessarily have been chosen (in the event of a contest in such a matter) as one of the ‘three most prominent citizens’ of the place.”

These efforts by Sewall to improve life for people were not merely parochial in nature, but international as well. In addition to lecturing widely across the United States on behalf of woman’s rights, she also strove to win people’s support for another cause: world peace, an effort she called her “absorbing ideal.”

Although sometimes women had to fight to protect their homes and families, Sewall said that “no woman within civilization has ever been found who did not see in war . . . a menace to the whole spirit of the home, a menace to the children born and reared within the home; hence no woman within civilization who does not see war to be her constitutional and inevitably relentless foe.” The only battle to which a woman could give her heart, she continued, “is that war whose object it is to slay war and establish peace.” Following the motto “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind,” Sewall promoted the cause of peace through membership in the American Peace Society and through her work with both the National Council of Women and the International Council of Women, both of which adopted peace programs after intense lobbying by Sewall.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914 and many peace advocates believed their efforts had been for naught, Sewall persevered. To her, the conflict “seemed a proclamation to the women of the world that some action by them which would assert the solidarity of womanhood was imperative.” In 1915 Sewall organized and chaired an International Council of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. To instill pacifism in young people, she called on textbook publishers to eliminate jingoistic language and to replace it with calls for brotherhood. She also implored mothers to remove toys that might “bring into a child’s mind the thought of military pomp and show, of warfare, with its contentions and its glories.”

Sewall died on July 22, 1920, just a short time before the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, was ratified—something she always had faith would happen. Unbound by tradition, Sewall endeavored to do all she could for causes still being fought for today—education, woman’s rights, cultural enrichment, and world peace. The lasting legacies of her many works can still be seen in Indianapolis. 2018 marks the 143rd anniversary of the Indianapolis Woman’s Club, the Propylaeum remains as a place for women to gather and discuss the day’s issues, and the Art Association of Indianapolis has grown into the internationally-respected Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Fellow women’s rights advocate Grace Julian Clarke offered the finest eulogy for Sewall and what she represented to women in Indiana, the United States, and the world when she said: “I never left Mrs. Sewall’s presence without resolving to be more outspoken in good causes, more constant in their service, without a fresh resolve to let trivial concerns go and emphasize only really vital interests.”