“Dewey Defeats Truman” The Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1948.

Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York had been the overwhelming favorite to unseat the incumbent Harry S. Truman in the 1948 presidential election, with Truman’s popularity in apparent decline and nearly every poll and pundit predicting a Republican victory. At the Chicago Daily Tribune, a Republican-leaning paper then relying on a temporary typewriter-based typesetting method, its effects visible in the front-page body text, that required more time than usual to print, the early deadline collided with the slow-arriving returns. Trusting the forecasts and the judgment of a specially engaged election prognosticator, the Tribune committed its early morning edition to a Dewey victory before a sufficient count had come in. Only after the papers had reached the streets did the later returns make clear that Truman had in fact won reelection. Staff members were dispatched to newsstands and homes across the Chicago area to retrieve the erroneous copies, and shortly afterward a jubilant Truman was famously photographed at St. Louis Union Station holding the paper aloft and grinning at the headline that had prematurely written him out of office, an image that endures as one of the most beloved in American political history. Original, entirely complete examples of this newspaper have grown increasingly scarce, and are seldom found in such fine condition.