tion of the Roosevelt coalition, now became in the
minds of the campaign planners an essential ingredient in a Truman
victory. Through the efforts of Oscar Ewing, head of the Federal
Security Administration and White House adviser on civil rights
matters, and several other politicians, Harry Truman was cast in the
role of minority rights champion.[12-58]

[Footnote 12-56: Interv, Nichols with Ewing; Interv,
Blumenson with Leva.]

[Footnote 12-57: Memo, Clark Clifford for President,
19 Nov 47; ibid., 17 Aug 48, sub: The 1948
Campaign; both in Truman Library. See also Cabell
B. Phillips, _The Truman Presidency_ (New York:
Macmillan, 1966), pp. 198-99, and McCoy and
Ruetten, _Quest and Response_, ch. VI.]

[Footnote 12-58: Interv, Nichols with Ewing.]

Theirs was not a difficult task, for the President's identification
with the civil rights movement had become part of the cause of his
unpopularity in some Democratic circles and a threat to his
renomination. He overcame the attempt to deny him the presidential
nomination in June, and he accepted the strong civil rights platform
that emerged from the convention. The resolution committee of that
convention had proposed a mild civil rights plank in the hope of
preventing the defection of southern delegates, but in a dramatic
floor fight Hubert H. Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis and a
candidate for the U.S. Senate, forced through one of the strongest
civil rights statements in the history of the party. This plank
endorsed Truman's congressional message on civil rights and called (p. 310)
for "Congress to support our President in guaranteeing these basic and
fundamental rights ... the right of equal treatment in the service and
defense of our nation."[12-59]

[Footnote 12-59: Quoted in Memo, Leva for SecDef, 15
Jul 48, D54-1-3, SecDef files.]

Truman admitted to Forrestal that "he had not himself wanted to go as
far as the Democratic platform went on the civil rights issue." The
President had no animus toward those who voted against the platform;
he would have done the same if he had come from their states. But he
was determined to run on the platform, and for him, he later said, a
platform was not a window dressing. His southern colleagues understood
him. When a