It was a year of upsets. 1948 the Democratic party faced extraordinary challenges: how to forge an alliance between Southern conservatives, Western progressives and big city labor; how to incorporate a civil rights plank; how to quell the rise of a third party. Republicans gathered for their convention, confident the party would capture the White House. Former Republican Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce called the vying Democratic factions “The Bourbons, the Wampum and Boodle Boys, and Stalin’s Mortimer Snerd.” On the left, former vice-President Henry Wallace was running on the Progressive Party ticket. On the right, then Governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond split from the party to form the States Rights Democratic Party, the Dixiecrats. Herbert Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis, gave a seminal speech supporting a civil rights plank at the Democratic Convention. The Mississippi delegation walked out. President Harry Truman, as his aide George Elsey remembers, had to navigate through all the feuding and fighting. What are the political and social lessons to be learned from the election of '48?

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