 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(May 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
 | |||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
 First place by popular vote First place by convention roll call | |||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
From March 11 to June 3, 1952, voters and members of theDemocratic Party elected delegates to the1952 Democratic National Convention, partly for the purpose of choosing a nominee forpresident in the1952 United States presidential election. Incumbent PresidentHarry S. Truman withdrew his candidacy for re-election after losing theNew Hampshire primary to SenatorEstes Kefauver ofTennessee. Kefauver proceeded to win a majority of the popular vote, but failed to secure a majority of delegates, most of whom were selected through other means.
The1952 Democratic National Convention, held from July 21 to July 26, 1952, inChicago, was forced to go multiballot.[1] The nomination went toAdlai Stevenson II, thegovernor of Illinois, and grandson of the formerVice PresidentAdlai Stevenson I.
The following political leaders were candidates for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination:
These candidates participated in multiple state delegate election contests or were included in multiple major national polls.
| Candidate | Most recent position | Home state | Campaign | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
.jpg) Estes Kefauver | United States Senator fromTennessee (1949–63) U.S. Representative from Tennessee (1939–1949) |  Tennessee |  (Campaign) | |
.jpg) Adlai Stevenson II | Governor ofIllinois (1949–53) |  Illinois | (Campaign) | |
 Richard Russell Jr. | United States Senator fromGeorgia (1933–71) Governor of Georgia (1931–1933) Georgia State Representative (1921–1931) |  Georgia | ||
_Edit.png) | Director of the Mutual Security Agency (1951–1953) United States Secretary of Commerce (1946–48) United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom (1946) United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1943–46) |  New York | ||
 | United States Senator fromOklahoma (1949–63) Governor of Oklahoma (1943–1947) |  Oklahoma | ||
The following candidates ran only in their home state's primary or caucuses for the purpose of controlling its delegate slate at the convention and did not appear to be considered national candidates by the media.
| Poll source | Publication | Alben Barkley | William O. Douglas | James Farley | George Marshall | Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. | James Roosevelt | Harry Truman | Fred Vinson | Others | Undecided/None |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gallup | Nov. 23, 1949 | 12% | 3% | – | – | 22% | – | 44% | 3% | 6%[b] | 14% |
| Gallup | Apr. 9, 1950 | 14% | 4% | 6% | – | 13% | 3% | 45% | 2% | 3%[c] | 9% |
| Gallup[2] | Oct. 14, 1950 | 16% | 4% | 7% | 9% | 12% | 6% | 35% | – | 3%[d] | 8% |
| Poll source | Publication | Alben Barkley | William O. Douglas | Dwight Eisenhower | James Farley | Estes Kefauver | Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. | Harry Truman | Fred Vinson | Others | Undecided/None |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gallup | Apr. 15, 1951 | 9% | 2% | 43% | 3% | 3% | 9% | 18% | 2% | 4%[a] | 7% |
| Gallup[3] | June 17, 1951 | 8% | 3% | 40% | 3% | 4% | 9% | 20% | 2% | 6%[b] | 5% |
| Poll source | Publication | Alben Barkley | Harry Byrd | Paul Douglas | Estes Kefauver | Richard Russell | Adlai Stevenson | Harry Truman | Fred Vinson | Others | Undecided/None |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gallup[4] | Feb. 15, 1952 | 17% | 7% | 8% | 21% | – | – | 36% | 6% | – | 5% |
| Gallup | Apr. 1952 | 8% | – | 5% | 33% | 7% | 2% | 32% | 4% | 4%[a] | 5% |
| 16% | 7% | 43% | 8% | 4% | – | 7% | 5%[b] | 10% | |||
| Gallup[5] | May 8, 1952 | 8% | [c] | [c] | 41% | 9% | 11% | – | [c] | 27%[d] | 4% |
| Gallup[6] | June 7, 1952 | 17% | – | – | 45% | 10% | 10% | – | – | 9%[e] | 9% |
| Gallup[7] | July 14, 1952 | 18% | – | – | 45% | 10% | 12% | – | – | 9%[f] | 6% |
The 1952 primary season was one of only two where a challenge to an incumbent president of either party was successful, the other being 1968. Prior to this, the last incumbent to try and fail to win his party's nomination wasChester Arthur in 1884 on the Republican side, andAndrew Johnson in 1868 on the Democratic side.
The expected candidate for theDemocratic nomination was incumbent PresidentHarry S. Truman. Though running for a third term would thereafter be disallowed under the recently ratifiedTwenty-second Amendment, Truman wasgrandfathered by a clause that would have specifically exempted him from term limits. However, Truman entered 1952 with his opinion poll popularity plummeting. The bloody and indecisiveKorean War was dragging into its third year, SenatorJoseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade was stirring public fears of an encroaching "Red Menace", and the disclosure of widespread corruption among federal employees (including some high-level members of Truman's administration) left Truman at a low political ebb.
Truman's main opponent was populistTennessee SenatorEstes Kefauver, who had chaired a nationally televised investigation of organized crime in 1951 and was known as a crusader against crime and corruption. The Gallup poll of February 15 showed Truman's weakness: nationally Truman was the choice of only 36% of Democrats, compared with 21% for Kefauver. Among independent voters, however, Truman had only 18% while Kefauver led with 36%. In theNew Hampshire primary Kefauver upset Truman, winning 19,800 votes to Truman's 15,927 and capturing all eight delegates. Kefauver graciously said that he did not consider his victory "a repudiation of Administration policies, but a desire...for new ideas and personalities." Stung by this setback, Truman soon announced that he would not seek re-election (however, Truman insisted in his memoirs that he had decided not to run for re-election well before his defeat by Kefauver).
With Truman's withdrawal, Kefauver became the front-runner for the nomination, and he won most of the primaries. Nonetheless, most states still chose their delegates at the Democratic Convention via state conventions, which meant that the party bosses - especially the mayors and governors of large Northern and Midwestern states and cities - were able to choose the Democratic nominee. These bosses (including President Truman) strongly disliked Kefauver; his investigations of organized crime had revealed connections between mafia figures and many of the big-city Democratic political organizations. The party bosses thus viewed Kefauver as a maverick who could not be trusted, and they refused to support him for the nomination. Instead, they began to search for other, more acceptable, candidates, with President Truman leading the effort. However, most of the other candidates had a major weakness. SenatorRichard Russell ofGeorgia had much Southern support, and won theFlorida Primary, but his support ofracial segregation and opposition tocivil rights for Southern blacks led Northern delegates to reject him as a racist. Truman favored U.S. diplomatW. Averell Harriman of New York, but he had never held an elective office and was inexperienced in politics. Truman next turned to his Vice President,Alben Barkley, but at 74 he was rejected as being too old by labor union leaders.
One candidate soon emerged who seemingly had few political weaknesses: GovernorAdlai Stevenson II ofIllinois. The grandson of former Vice PresidentAdlai E. Stevenson, Stevenson came from a distinguished family in Illinois and was well known as a gifted orator, intellectual, and political moderate. In the spring of 1952 President Truman tried to convince Stevenson to take the presidential nomination, but Stevenson refused, stating that he wanted to run for re-election as Governor of Illinois. Yet Stevenson never completely took himself out of the race, and as the convention approached, many party bosses – as well as normallyapolitical citizens – hoped that he could be "drafted" to run.
The1952 Democratic National Convention was held in theInternational Amphitheatre inChicago, the same venue where the Republicans had gathered two weeks earlier. The primary season had been decisively in Kefauver's favor and he had momentum coming in, but President Truman was still angry at "Cow-Fever's" defeat of him in New Hampshire, and the Tennessee Senator was unable to get enough delegate strength to win the nomination outright due to the delegate selection processes in most of the states at the time. The convention itself would prove, in retrospect, the last of its kind.
_color_corrected.jpg)
.jpg)
