'Trib' Names Own 'Dewey Defeats Truman' Hed As A 'Chicago Blunder'

By: Mark Fitzgerald To follow up on a series called "The Seven Wonders of Chicago" that ran last autumn in its Tempo features section, the Chicago Tribune on Thursday kicked off a series called "The Seven Blunders of Chicago."

Its first nominee: The Nov. 3, 1948 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline, "Dewey Defeats Truman."

Why? Well, as Tribune senior correspondent Charles Leroux wrote, it's "one that, if we don't mention it, you will."

Thursday?s article recalls the circumstances that led Tribune editors to make their monumental blunder, and gave history the famous photograph of a grinning re-elected President Harry s. Truman holding up a copy of the paper incorrectly picking New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey as the winner.

Trib editors were facing an earlier than usual deadline that night because of a printers strike, and the election returns were coming in slowly.

?The sparse totals that were available favored Dewey,? Leroux wrote. ?A call was made to the paper's Washington correspondent, Arthur Sears Henning, who had been wrong just once in the previous 20 years. He stuck by his prediction that it would be Dewey.

?The Trib's editors faced a decision and a deadline. They could either go with something non-committal or with the conventional wisdom. They chose the latter in what seemed then a safe bet.?

About 150,000 copies of the paper with the incorrect prediction hit the streets before the headline was changed to "Democrats Make Sweep of State Offices."

Employees were dispatched to collect copies of the earlier edition. ?(L)ike ordinary returns, the upper right corner of the front page, called the ear, was clipped off to mark them as returns not for sale,? Leroux wrote. ?Then the papers were trashed. Not realizing their potential value, few people thought to save the flawed copies.?

A complete copy of the 1948 paper with the headline intact recently sold for $900 on eBay, the Tribune reported.

Just as with the original "Seven Wonders of Chicago" series, the Tribune will nominate a "Blunder" each day for the next six days, inviting readers to make their own suggestions for a final list.