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It happened this week, and it happened 60 years ago this month: Tthe Republican nominee for vice-president and the Democratic nominee for president both stumped in Colorado at about the same time.
In September of 1948, the Republican presidential nominee was Thomas Dewey, governor of New York, who had also been the GOP candidate in 1944. His running mate was Earl Warren, governor of California, who later became chief justice of the United States.
Back then, candidates generally traveled on special trains. Salida was a major junction on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in those days, and thus candidates stopped and spoke in what is today flyover country.
Warren spoke here exactly six decades ago, when his eastbound train paused for 20 minutes at 1 p.m. on Sept. 17, 1948. He drew about 5,000 people, which is pretty good for a town that had about 5,000 people. Some issues never change, for Warren felt compelled to begin by assuring Coloradans that his candidacy was not part of a California plot to take Colorado water.
From what I could find of his speech in the local
newspaper, Warren did not deliver a hard-hitting address.
Instead, it was rather vague: The West is an entity. We
want it to be an entity within an entity -- a greater
entity of course
-- whatever that means.
Warren said Dewey would given the United States an
efficient, humane, and forward-looking government. He
won't vacillate. He will strike these immediate problems
like the cost of living, the housing situation, and all of
our other domestic problems. He will hit those problems
head on, and he has the character and ability to do
that.
Warren's campaign train went on to Pueblo, then
south to New Mexico.
Three days later, on Sept. 20, 1948, President Harry
Truman came though on a westbound. He had started the day
in Denver with a noon rally at the state capitol, telling
Coloradans that You can choose to be governed by
Republican puppets of big business -- the same breed that
gave you the worst depression in our history. Or you can
choose to be governed by the servants of the people, who
are pledged to work for the welfare of all the people, the
nominees of the Democratic Party.
Then he boarded the train. At 4:37 p.m., he spoke
briefly from the rear platform in Colorado Springs,
praising the scenery and noting that It's a wonderful
thing that has happened to this part of the world in the
last decade, and I am wondering whether you are going to
let the present propaganda machine fool you into turning
the clock back to 1932 again. I am very sure you won't do
that.
He spoke longer in Democratic Pueblo, starting at 6:07
p.m. He promoted an early version of the Fryingpan-Arkansas
water project, and lambasted the Republican congress.
The first thing that the 80th Congress did,
he
charged, they passed a rich man's tax bill. They began
to line their own pockets.
In Cañon City 90 minutes later, he said the
Republican Congress would like to put the West back
where it was in 1860, as a sort of colony of the East.
His last speech of the day was at 9:46 p.m. in Salida,
where he explained that this was familiar territory because
My family used to take their vacations up here at Buena
Vista and would come down to Salida for various
reasons.
The train paused for four hours, then rolled west. The next day Truman spoke in Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction, then in Utah: Price, Helper, Springvale, American Fork, Salt Lake City and Ogden.
One wonders: Would America be a better place today if presidential candidates, and the national media, still had to address the places they fly over now?
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