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My History Can Beat Up Your Politics

THE MARSHALL PLAN AND ELECTION 48

My History Can Beat Up Your Politics

Bruce Carlson

News, Politics, History

4.51.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2024

⏱️ 73 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

1948 is the classic comeback political story. And anytime you talk about it, you are talking about the possibility that an incumbent on the ropes come back. That's why MHCBUYP discussed this topic in 2020. But there is another angle to 1948. It's often forgotten that the year featured a sweeping bi-partisan legislative and foreign policy victory and that also factored into the result. We talk with author A.J. Baime about his then new book on the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

0:04.0

It's 1948 in Patterson, New Jersey, and in a small room a man is typing, typing away at his aunt's house.

0:17.6

This is where he can think, remembering vivid images of what happened last year.

0:24.0

Recording them, first in a written journal that he got at the stationery store and then typing them.

0:31.0

The hitchhiking, the things that farmers and truck drivers said, the migrant workers,

0:37.0

the jazz music, the bebop.

0:39.0

I worked out an intricate mathematical thing which determines how assiduously I'm getting my novel

0:43.9

typed and revised a day after day. It's too complicated to explain, but suffice it to

0:49.3

say that yesterday I was batting 246 and after today my batting average rose to 306. The point is I've got to hit like a champion I've got to catch up and stay with Ted Williams

0:59.7

currently hitting 392. Typing away the Chinese food and the painful emotions.

1:08.0

In my fantasy of glee, there is no sea light and no beatness,

1:12.0

just the wind blowing through the kitchen window on an October morning.

1:17.2

He jogs to get himself into shape to get into this typing mood.

1:21.2

When he's done typing, he fixes up his copy and types some more.

1:25.0

Eventually, he decides that he'll create a role of typing paper so that he never has to

1:30.4

stop and type for hours.

1:32.8

It'll become a great American work.

1:35.3

Right now, it's just typing.

1:37.5

We know the political image of 1948 Truman

1:41.0

holding up a paper that says Dewey beats Truman when exactly the opposite it happened.

1:46.0

He had won the presidency for another term. He's holding it up with glee. It's black and white that image and it makes us think that it's old but it's not so far away

1:56.6

And it's not an unmodern time. That's why I bring up Jack Kerouac the writer who's typing at this time, about a hitchhiking trip that he took through the United States the year before.

...

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