The 1952 primary season was one of only two where a challenge to an incumbent president of either party was successful, the other being 1968. Prior to this, the last incumbent to try and fail to win his party's nomination was
Chester Arthur in 1884 on the Republican side, and
Andrew Johnson in 1868 on the Democratic side.
The decline and fall of President Truman The expected candidate for the
Democratic nomination was incumbent President
Harry S. Truman. Though running for a third term would thereafter be disallowed under the recently ratified
Twenty-second Amendment, Truman was
grandfathered by a clause that would have specifically exempted him from term limits. However, Truman entered 1952 with his opinion poll popularity plummeting. The bloody and indecisive
Korean War was dragging into its third year, Senator
Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade was stirring public fears of an encroaching "Red Menace", and the disclosure of widespread corruption among federal employees (including some high-level members of Truman's administration) left Truman at a low political ebb. Truman's main opponent was populist
Tennessee Senator
Estes Kefauver, who had chaired a nationally televised investigation of organized crime in 1951 and was known as a crusader against crime and corruption. The Gallup poll of February 15 showed Truman's weakness: nationally Truman was the choice of only 36% of Democrats, compared with 21% for Kefauver. Among independent voters, however, Truman had only 18% while Kefauver led with 36%. In the
New Hampshire primary Kefauver upset Truman, winning 19,800 votes to Truman's 15,927 and capturing all eight delegates. Kefauver graciously said that he did not consider his victory "a repudiation of Administration policies, but a desire...for new ideas and personalities." Stung by this setback, Truman soon announced that he would not seek re-election (however, Truman insisted in his memoirs that he had decided not to run for re-election well before his defeat by Kefauver).
The rise of Estes Kefauver With Truman's withdrawal, Kefauver became the front-runner for the nomination, and he won most of the primaries. Nonetheless, most states still chose their delegates at the Democratic Convention via state conventions, which meant that the party bosses - especially the mayors and governors of large Northern and Midwestern states and cities - were able to choose the Democratic nominee. These bosses (including President Truman) strongly disliked Kefauver; his investigations of organized crime had revealed connections between mafia figures and many of the big-city Democratic political organizations. The party bosses thus viewed Kefauver as a maverick who could not be trusted, and they refused to support him for the nomination. Instead, they began to search for other, more acceptable, candidates, with President Truman leading the effort. However, most of the other candidates had a major weakness. Senator
Richard Russell of
Georgia had much Southern support, and won the
Florida Primary, but his support of
racial segregation and opposition to
civil rights for Southern blacks led Northern delegates to reject him as a racist. Truman favored U.S. diplomat
W. Averell Harriman of New York, but he had never held an elective office and was inexperienced in politics. Truman next turned to his Vice President,
Alben Barkley, but at 74 he was rejected as being too old by labor union leaders.
Stevenson One candidate soon emerged who seemingly had few political weaknesses: Governor
Adlai Stevenson II of
Illinois. The grandson of former Vice President
Adlai E. Stevenson, Stevenson came from a distinguished family in Illinois and was well known as a gifted orator, intellectual, and political moderate. In the spring of 1952 President Truman tried to convince Stevenson to take the presidential nomination, but Stevenson refused, stating that he wanted to run for re-election as Governor of Illinois. Yet Stevenson never completely took himself out of the race, and as the convention approached, many party bosses – as well as normally
apolitical citizens – hoped that he could be "drafted" to run. ==Democratic National Convention==