How a Farm Crowd in Iowa Saved Truman’s White House Run
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1948, Harry Truman was trailing in the polls and widely expected to lose. Then his campaign made an unexpected stop in Dexter, Iowa, for a national plowing match. The small-town crowd showed up in force, and so did the press. Truman’s speech that day was fiery, direct, and aimed squarely at the concerns of rural Americans. What followed helped shift the narrative and the momentum of one of the tightest presidential races in history.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.4 | And we return to our American stories. |
| 0:17.9 | And up next, a story about when our 33rd president made an all-important visit |
| 0:23.0 | to a small town in Iowa. Here's our own Monty Montgomery with a story. |
| 0:32.8 | Dexter, Iowa is a small town with a lot of heart, and even though its population has never exceeded |
| 0:39.4 | a thousand people, there's a lot of history there. The Barrow gang had a famous shootout there. |
| 0:45.7 | They hosted an amusement park at one point, and it was also once a presidential campaign stop. |
| 0:52.1 | The presidential campaign stop for that election cycle. |
| 0:56.0 | Here's Rod Stanley with more on that. |
| 0:59.0 | September, 1948, President Truman came to Dexter, Iowa for the National Plowing Match. |
| 1:10.0 | And it was a big deal. The National Plowing Match. It was a big deal. |
| 1:12.0 | The national plowing match was a big, big deal. |
| 1:15.3 | But what exactly is a plowing match? |
| 1:18.2 | Roughly put, it's a competition to see who's the best farmer. |
| 1:23.8 | They judged them on, I mean, they judged them on different things. |
| 1:27.2 | They brought their tractors and their plowsows and there were judges that judged how well you plowed |
| 1:31.9 | the field. |
| 1:32.9 | How straight it was, how open it was. |
| 1:35.7 | They had some other like conservation, like making a pond, they made a pond on my uncle's |
| 1:41.2 | farm. |
| 1:42.2 | They blew up, they used in dynamite and they blew up land and they made |
| 1:45.1 | a waterway to drain water off and stuff. |
... |
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