Regret the Error

This year’s U.S. Presidential election election marks the 60th anniversary of the “Dewey Defeats Truman” edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Since that headline was first published, it has become perhaps the most famous press error of all time. This is the story of how and why it happened, and what we can learn from it.

On election night in 1948, President Harry Truman took a Turkish bath, had a sandwich and glass of milk for dinner, and went to bed early. Both he and his Republican opponent, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, had said earlier in the day that they didn’t expect to learn the final result until the next morning.

The pollsters and press were of a different opinion. As far they were concerned, Dewey had it in the bag.

On September 9, less than two months before election day, Elmo Roper, the head of public opinion research firm Roper Research Associates, Inc. and a columnist for Fortune magazine, reported that Dewey was at 44.2 percent support, while Truman lagged behind at 31.4 percent. Gallup gave Dewey a five point lead just before the election, and other pollsters had been declaring Dewey’s strength for months.

Jonathan Daniels, the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer and a consultant to the Truman campaign, later recalled the mood in his newsroom on election night.

“We have a custom on The News and Observer when there is a great Democratic victory — this goes back to my father’s time — of printing a red crowing rooster across the front page, and so the night of the election, I asked the managing editor, ‘Have you got that rooster out?’” he told an interviewer for the Truman Library in 1963. “And the boys grinned at me and said, ‘Yeah, we got it out,’ but the whole implication was that they didn’t think they would have need for it.”

The mood was likely the same in the offices of the Chicago Daily Tribune. By late afternoon on election day, editors were preparing the first edition of the paper. They were dealing with some significant problems. The skilled workers who operated the Linotype machines—huge, clacking creations that turned out small bricks of type used to create the printing plates for a daily newspaper—had been on strike at all six Chicago dailies since the previous November. The strike meant that some of the paper’s most skilled workers, and the useful machines they operated, were out of service.

Rather than using the Linotype machines to quickly prepare plates for printing, the paper was pasting together pages of text cobbled together on typewriters. Adding to Tribune’s woes was the fact that returns were coming in slowly, even from the Eastern part of the country. The facts at hand were inconclusive, but deadline approached.

“A call was made to the paper’s Washington correspondent, Arthur Sears Henning, who had been wrong just once in the previous 20 years,” the Tribune reported in a 2006 article. “He stuck by his prediction that it would be Dewey.”

The first edition of the paper, made available by 7:30 p.m. on election night, carried the front page headline “GOVERNOR DEWEY CLAIMS VICTORY.” Copies were trucked out to distributors and hawked on the street. Meanwhile, the staff was busy preparing what would become the infamous second edition. At about 9 p.m. on election night, it began hitting the streets.

“DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” declared the headline.

The paper went on to publish nine subsequent editions that night and into the morning, but few people remember them. Today, sixty years after it was first published, that headline has become the most recognized press error in American history, though by no means the first or last incorrect presidential election headline.

In the 1876 race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden, many papers mistakenly gave the victory to Tilden. In 1916, the San Francisco Examiner put Charles Hughes in the White House instead of Woodrow Wilson. In 2000, many broadcasters and newspapers also made the wrong call.

Though the most notable error, the headline wasn’t the only mistake made by the Tribune’s taxed staff. The paper’s use of typewriters to lay out pages meant that it couldn’t easily update vote totals as they poured in before deadline.

“The front page was done with a typewriter because nobody knew how to run the Linotype machines,” Rick Brown, the former publisher and editor of Collectible Newspapers, the newspaper of the Newspaper Collectors Society of America, told me when I interviewed him for my book. “They typed out the columns one at a time and then glued them down. If they made an error in the vote totals, they’d go back and just ‘X’ out a digit. If it said 762 votes for Dewey but the correct number was 782, they’d go back to where ‘6’ was and keep hitting ‘8’ until it was a lot darker [than the 6].”

This meant some of the vote totals were illegible. On top of that, someone responsible for gluing down the typewritten columns also managed to place five lines of text upside down in a below-the-fold story. Not long after “Dewey Defeats Truman” hit the streets, the paper realized its mistake. It sent out trucks to recall copies from distributors, but the damage was done. Subsequent editions that night made no mention of the paper’s error. In fact, many in the broadcast press continued to promise a Dewey victory through the early morning of November 3.

At midnight, Truman awoke and listened to NBC Radio commentator H.V Kaltenborn report that, “Mr. Truman is still ahead but these are returns from a few cities. When the returns come in from the country the result will show Dewey winning overwhelmingly.”

Truman went back to bed. After being roused later that night by an advisor, the sleepy incumbent told everyone to leave him alone. Then, at around 4 a.m., the Secret Service entered his room and implored him to turn on the radio. Kaltenborn reported Truman was ahead in the popular vote – this time by an even larger margin than before – and once again suggested that Dewey would carry the day.

Truman had heard enough. He began preparing to head back to Washington as the newly re-elected president. (Once back in Washington, Truman got back at the renowned commentator by doing a cutting impersonation of him at the Electoral College dinner in January 1949. Kaltenborn eventually returned the favor by doing “an impersonation of Truman impersonating Kaltenborn,” according to Time magazine.)

At 11:14 a.m. on November 3, Governor Dewey conceded via telegram. Less than two hours later, he faced the press.

“I was just as surprised as you are,” he told the assembled reporters. “And I gather that is shared by everybody in the room, as I read your stories before the election.”

With a Truman victory on the books, the press and pollsters began examining why they had been so wrong. It soon became clear that the polls published close to election day had in fact been taken weeks prior. The data was old. It also failed to properly account for undecided voters.

In a post-election letter to colleagues published in The Loneliest Campaign, James Reston, the eminent New York Times correspondent, said that “in a way our failure was not unlike Mr. Dewey’s: we overestimated the tangibles and underestimated the intangibles . . . just as he was too isolated with other politicians, so we were too isolated with other reporters; and we, too, were far too impressed by the tidy statistics of the polls.”

Time magazine said the press was “morally guilty on several counts. It was guilty of pride: it had assumed that it knew all the important facts—without sufficiently checking them. It was guilty of laziness and wishful thinking: it had failed to do its own doorbell-ringing and bush-beating; it had delegated its journalist’s job to the pollsters.”

The Time article also included the text of a telegram sent by the Washington Post to President Truman:

YOU ARE HEREBY INVITED TO A “CROW BANQUET” TO WHICH THIS NEWSPAPER PROPOSES TO INVITE NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL WRITERS, POLITICAL REPORTERS AND EDITORS, INCLUDING OUR OWN, ALONG WITH POLLSTERS, RADIO COMMENTATORS AND COLUMNISTS . . . MAIN COURSE WILL CONSIST OF BREAST OF TOUGH OLD CROW EN GLACE. (YOU WILL EAT TURKEY.) . . . DRESS FOR GUEST OF HONOR, WHITE TIE. FOR OTHERS —SACK CLOTH . . .

For its part, the Chicago Daily Tribune was not in the mood for self-analysis. The paper addressed its error in a November 4 story, “Never Again, We Hope,” that placed the blame on pollsters and their “alleged science.” It also made a play for the new president’s favor, saying, “We were dim on Dewey from the star start.”

“Having been bitten as badly as the next one, we hope that we have the courage to swear off these sessions with the crystal ball in the future,” read the article. “Divination and inspection of the entrails ought to be left to the vanished priests of ancient Rome. The science is too fallible.”

No mention was made of its struggles with staffing and production, the late vote tallies, its rush to publish, or the call made by its man in Washington.

On the day the Tribune article was published, Truman boarded a train back to Washington. He made a stop in St. Louis and was met by a crowd of more than 10,000 people that “swept aside police lines and swarmed over the tracks in Union Station,” according to the New York Times.

At one point, while addressing the crowd from the back of his train, Truman was handed a day-old copy of a newspaper. He grabbed it with both hands and gleefully held it up, making sure everyone got a look at the headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” The crowd erupted in cheers.

Photographers, most notably Pierce W. “Pete” Hangge of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, snapped away, creating what remains the most iconic image of press error on record.

After the rally, Truman returned to Washington and took his seat in the Oval Office. On the desk in front of him was the famous sign, “The Buck Stops Here.”

It was soon joined by another treasured tchotchke: a “Dewey Defeats Truman” paperweight.

The Lesson

It’s easy to look back at “Dewey Defeats Truman” and focus on just one root cause of error. You could, as the paper did, blame the incorrect polls that conditioned everyone to expect a Dewey victory. But that would ignore the fact that the paper chose to make a call that the vote totals didn’t warrant. As is the case with many errors, it was a combination of factors that contributed to the incorrect headline. I examine the history and significance of “Dewey Defeats Truman” in the Regret the Error book, and here’s a relevant excerpt:

The errors in the “Dewey Defeats Truman” edition of the paper were the result of a series of unique but related failings that converged on one evening in 1948: the strike, the polls, the staff, the technology on hand, the deadline, and in the end, a mistaken assumption by one of the paper’s respected reporters.

. . . The Tribune’s desire to get past its error and not look at root causes beyond the failure of pollsters and their “crystal ball” is still commonplace in today’s press. But even the most basic of errors have a provenance. They happen for a reason, or, frequently, for a variety of them.

The best way to prevent future errors is to understand what caused them in the past. This error is a prefect perfect case study because it includes all of the elements that cause errors on a daily basis: people, process, technology, sources, and the desire to always be first. The latter will be driving all manner of news organizations tomorrow night. They will marshal all of their people, technology and sources with the goal of being the first to call a state, and the election as a whole.

Because any of those elements can fail at any given time, speed, while important, is the enemy. It prevents people from double-checking information and questioning sources. It drives reporters, editors and producers to creep towards speculation.

If there’s one thing that “Dewey Defeats Truman” teaches us about calling elections, it’s that history only remembers who got it wrong.

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