Correspondence Between President Harry S. Truman and Ambassador Claude Bowers

6154 November 19, 1949 Dear Mr. Ambassador: I certainly did appreciate your good letter of the fourteenth and I am more than happy that Mr. Miller's visit to Chile was a success. The Republicans seem to have lost all sense of the political situa- - tion. They are still working in 1890 and following the precepts of Herbert Hoover who never did have any concept of the movement forward in favor of the common people. I believe the Democratic Party now has been consolidated into a National Party. As I wrote you before we won the election without the solid South and without the industrial East - that is New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the 1948 election. The issues in 1949 were fairly drawn in New York and we won in spite of two splinter parties in the election. The Republicans made a very poor showing in up-State New York, We carried munici- palities in that part of the State which had not been carried for twenty-five years. The Pennsylvania result was also very much in our favor. The election in Philadelphia went for Democratic candidates by 65,000 votes and the election gave the Democrats control of the City, although the Republicans still have the Mayor. The Democratic nominee for Mayor in Pittsburgh was elected by the largest majority that a Mayor ever had in that City - that was true also in Cleveland, Ohio and our friends maintained their control of the Cincinnati City Council by a five to four margin. They had difficulty in electing Charlie Taft on our ticket because his name was Taft. When that happens in Cincinnati it looks very much as if we might carry the State with a Democratic Senator in 1950. In California we elected a Democrat in a District that has been Republican for twenty-one years. ARCHIVES *NATIONAL SERVICE' RECORDS AND My trip to St. Paul was what you might call a howling success. : coverning There were more people on the streets to greet me than during the campaign - the crowd was estimated by the newspapers at four hundred thousand but our people estimated it at somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred thousand. The hall was full to the rafters and I don't think I ever had a more enthusiastic audience.