Template:POTD/2025-11-03
"Dewey Defeats Truman" was an erroneous banner headline on the front page of the earliest edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune on November 3, 1948, the day after incumbent U.S. president Harry S. Truman won an upset victory over his opponent, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, in the 1948 presidential election. The Chicago Daily Tribune, which had once referred to Democratic candidate Truman as a "nincompoop", was a famously Republican-leaning paper. For about a year before the 1948 election, the printers who operated the linotype machines at the 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 by which copy was composed on typewriters, photographed, then engraved onto printing plates. This required the paper to go to press several hours earlier than had been usual. On November 4, as Truman passed through St. Louis Union Station in Missouri on the way to Washington, he stepped onto the rear platform of his train car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and was handed a copy of the erroneous Tribune edition of November 3. Happy to exult in the paper's error, he held it up for the photographers gathered at the station, as seen in this press photograph. Truman reportedly smiled and said, "That ain't the way I heard it!"Photograph credit: Byron H. Rollins