"Dewey Defeats Truman" was a famously inaccurate banner headline on the front page of the Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...

on November 3, 1948, the day after incumbent United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 President

President of the United States

The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....

 Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States . As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice president and the 34th Vice President of the United States , he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his...

 beat Republican

Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

 challenger and Governor of New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election

United States presidential election, 1948

The United States presidential election of 1948 is considered by most historians as the greatest election upset in American history. Virtually every prediction indicated that incumbent President Harry S. Truman would be defeated by Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman won, overcoming a three-way...

 in an upset victory.

Background

The paper's erroneous headline became notorious after a jubilant Truman was photographed holding a copy of the paper during a stop at St. Louis Union Station

St. Louis Union Station

St. Louis Union Station, a National Historic Landmark, is a passenger train terminal in St. Louis, Missouri. Once the world's largest and busiest train station, it was converted in the early 1980s into a luxury hotel, shopping center, and entertainment complex...

 while returning by train from his home

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site

The Harry S. Truman National Historic Site preserves both the family farm and the longtime home of Harry S. Truman , 33rd President of the United States...

 in Independence, Missouri

Independence, Missouri

Independence is the fourth largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri, and is contained within the counties of Jackson and Clay. It is part of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area...

 to Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 The Chicago Tribune, which had once referred to Truman as a "nincompoop", was a famously conservative paper . In a retrospective article over half a century later about the newspaper's most famous and most embarrassing headline, the Tribune wrote that Truman "had as low an opinion of the Tribune as it did of him."

For about a year prior to the 1948 general election, the printers who operated the linotype machine

Linotype machine

The Linotype typesetting machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over manual typesetting....

s at the Chicago Tribune and other Chicago papers had been on strike, in protest of the Taft–Hartley Act. Around the same time, the Tribune had switched to a method where copy for the paper was composed on typewriters and photographed and then engraved onto the printing plates. This process required the paper to go to press several hours earlier than usual.
'

Election of 1948

On election night, this earlier press deadline required the first post-election issue of the Tribune to go to press before even the East coast states had reported many results from the polling places. The paper relied on its veteran Washington correspondent and political analyst Arthur Sears Henning who had accurately predicted the winner in four out of five presidential contests in the past 20 years. Conventional wisdom, supported by polls, was almost unanimous that a Dewey presidency was "inevitable", and that the New York governor would win the election handily. The first (one-star) edition of the Tribune therefore went to press with the banner headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN".

The story by Tribune correspondent Henning also reported Republican control of the House of Representatives

United States House of Representatives

The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...

 and Senate

United States Senate

The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...

 that would work with President-elect Dewey. Henning wrote that "Dewey and Warren won a sweeping victory in the presidential election yesterday. The early returns showed the Republican ticket leading Truman and Barkley

Alben W. Barkley

Alben William Barkley was an American politician in the Democratic Party who served as the 35th Vice President of the United States , under President Harry S. Truman....

 pretty consistently in the western and southern states" and added that "indications were that the complete returns would disclose that Dewey won the presidency by an overwhelming majority of the electoral vote."

As returns began to indicate a close race later in the evening, Henning continued to stick to his prediction, and thousands of papers continued to roll off the presses with the banner headline predicting a Dewey victory. Even after the paper's lead story was rewritten to emphasize local races and to indicate the narrowness of Dewey's lead in the national race, the same banner headline was left on the front page. Only late in the evening, after press dispatches cast doubt upon the certainty of Dewey's victory did the Tribune change the headline to "DEMOCRATS MAKE SWEEP OF STATE OFFICES" for the later two-star edition. However, some 150,000 copies of the paper had already been published with the erroneous headline before the gaffe was corrected.

As it turned out, Truman won the electoral vote by a 303-189 majority over Dewey and Dixiecrat

Dixiecrat

The States' Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived segregationist political party in the United States in 1948...

 candidate Strom Thurmond

Strom Thurmond

James Strom Thurmond was an American politician who served as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes...

, though a swing of just a few thousand votes in Ohio

Ohio

Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

, Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

, and California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 would have produced a Dewey victory. Instead of a Republican sweep of the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats

Democratic Party (United States)

The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...

 held the Presidency and regained control of both the House and the Senate.

Aftermath

In later years, the publishers of the Tribune were able to laugh about the blunder. As the 25th anniversary of the 1948 election approached, the Tribune had planned to give Truman a plaque containing a replica of the erroneous banner headline. However, Truman died on December 26, 1972, before the gift could be bestowed.

The Tribune was not the only paper to make the mistake. The Journal of Commerce

The Journal of Commerce

The Journal of Commerce is a weekly magazine published in the United States that focuses on trade topics. First published in 1827, the Journal has a circulation of approximately 15,000...

had eight articles in its November 3 edition about what could be expected of President Dewey. The paper's five-column headline read, "Dewey Victory Seen as Mandate to Open New Era of Government-Business Harmony, Public Confidence."