WI: Harry Truman killed by a falling piano in the White House?

Stop sniggering in the back there, it nearly happened. :eek:

What happens if Harry S. Truman died in this tragic, albeit cartoonish, fashion on that fateful day in June, 1948? Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the presidency would fall to Joseph William Martin, Jr., a Republican (there was no VP at the time.) How would this affect the impending presidential race? Would Martin be seriously considered for the nomination, or would his accession simply be considered an anamoly? The White House, I imagine, would be on an even more accelerated renovation schedule as compared to OTL.
 
Well if Martin isn't nominated then Dewey is likely to be president ITTL, I doubt Truman's successor could match his OTL campaigning skills. Things might get interesting if President Martin has a go at the nomination and Dewey defeats him.
 
When was the GOP convention? If it had already taken place when the piano dropped on Truman, Dewey is the nominee and Martin can't really do anything about that. If after, I'm still not sure if Martin can become the nominee as Taft was Dewey's main opposition.

If Dewey is the nominee in Timeline, I say he wins as none of the Democratic names that come to mind strike me as feisty as Truman. If Dewey is President, history is roughly similar to ours at first, but butterflies down the road.

If Taft is the nominee, closer race, but I still think the GOP wins as 16 years of Democratic rule is a pretty big hurdle for the Democratic nominee to get over. If Taft wins, butterflies start immediately as New Deal deals with a President who is really hostile to it in the White House and its legacy is threatened.
 
What made the piano fall was Lauren Bacall's weight... :D

OK, seriously, I think by June the Republicans are committed to Dewey, and that Martin will only be seen as an accidental and temporary president. So far as the Democrats are concerned, the liberals will push for someone like William O. Douglas, but I think a more centrist Democrat like Barkley is more likely to win the nomination. I doubt he can win in November, though: All Dewey has to do is get a few more votes than he did in OTL in Illinois, Ohio, and California. http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1948.txt
 
Stop sniggering in the back there, it nearly happened. :eek:

What happens if Harry S. Truman died in this tragic, albeit cartoonish, fashion on that fateful day in June, 1948? Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the presidency would fall to Joseph William Martin, Jr., a Republican (there was no VP at the time.) How would this affect the impending presidential race? Would Martin be seriously considered for the nomination, or would his accession simply be considered an anamoly? The White House, I imagine, would be on an even more accelerated renovation schedule as compared to OTL.


Well Louis Johnson never becomes Secretary of Defense and doesn't gut the military
 
It could also have the effect of Eisenhower never becoming President. According to his memoirs IIRC, one of the reasons Ike ran was the fear that Taft would become President in 1952 and would be isolationist as to NATO/Europe for his taste. I suspect that Dewey would follow the broad outlines of Truman's foreign policy, including an alliance with the Western European states. If Dewey serves two terms, Ike's health in 1956 might prohibit him from running for President.
 
Without Truman, will Hubert Humphrey's Civil Rights plank get through? If it doesn't, then the Dixiecrats won't break away, but Dewey will probably do better with the black vote in the rest of the nation.
 
Stop sniggering in the back there, it nearly happened. :eek:

What happens if Harry S. Truman died in this tragic, albeit cartoonish, fashion on that fateful day in June, 1948? Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the presidency would fall to Joseph William Martin, Jr., a Republican (there was no VP at the time.) How would this affect the impending presidential race? Would Martin be seriously considered for the nomination, or would his accession simply be considered an anamoly? The White House, I imagine, would be on an even more accelerated renovation schedule as compared to OTL.

According to the Wiki article linked, a LEG of the piano broke through, not the whole piano.

You'd need a) the whole piano to fall through, b) the Trumans to be eating dinner at the time (which they weren't as far as I can tell), and c) for the collapse to be total and immediate. Given that the likely course of events is that a leg or such breaks through first and/or the ceiling starts groaning, bending and creaking in ample time for people to get away from falling piano.

So.

Fun scenario, but way unlikely to actually happen, sorry.
 
Stop sniggering in the back there, it nearly happened. :eek:

What happens if Harry S. Truman died in this tragic, albeit cartoonish, fashion on that fateful day in June, 1948? Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the presidency would fall to Joseph William Martin, Jr., a Republican (there was no VP at the time.) How would this affect the impending presidential race? Would Martin be seriously considered for the nomination, or would his accession simply be considered an anamoly? The White House, I imagine, would be on an even more accelerated renovation schedule as compared to OTL.

Korean War either does not happen or goes differently.

1) Kim Il Sung feeling he could get away with invading the South is routinely blamed on Truman/his administration making multiple statements implying that South Korea was outside the US defence perimeter, that the US would take no action to defend it.

Different President, different statements. It would not take much to resolve the misunderstanding and maybe prevent the war.

2) A firm hold on MacArthur's lease if the war happens anyway.

After Inchon MacArthur kept making public statements that were at odds with official policy, as in 'We should invade China now while we are here anyway'. Sending his army north, into North Korea in the direction of the Chinese Border while making these statements arguably triggered Chinese intervention.

A different president might have sacked MacArthur for invading North Korea - which was not a war aim - and repeatedly publicly being a twerp.

Or for repeatedly ignoring the Pres when he told Mac to shut the hell up.

Maybe no Chinese intervention. Then again this was Mao when he was calling Stalin a coward for not deliberately starting a nuclear war with America so...
 
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According to the Wiki article linked, a LEG of the piano broke through, not the whole piano.

You'd need a) the whole piano to fall through, b) the Trumans to be eating dinner at the time (which they weren't as far as I can tell), and c) for the collapse to be total and immediate.

Actually, the Trumans weren't even in the White House at the time: "When Truman returned from his whistle-stop tour on June 18, 1948, news of the falling piano hit him with the force of, more or less, a falling piano. His fury over the incident would burn for years..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=pajfAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA65

Really, Truman should have moved out of the White House right then, given the evidence it needed repairs and was dangerous for him, his wife and his daughter. But he was worried that to acknowledge that the White House was crumbling would hurt him in the election: the GOP would blame it all on him and make the crumbling White House a metaphor for his administration. https://books.google.com/books?id=pajfAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA66
 
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Robert Klara gives the background to the crash in *The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America’s Most Famous Residence, * pp. 63-65. https://books.google.com/books?id=6VdLQkUoCSAC&pg=PA63

"One of the cracked beams on the White House's second floor happened to run beneath Margaret Truman's sitting room, a pretty little retreat with a marble fireplace and walls of robin's egg blue. That June, Margaret had left not one but *two* pianos in that room. The First Daughter, who'd launched a singing career the previous March when she soloed with the Detroit Symphony, practiced on her Steinway religiously. But she was fond of four-hand compositions, too--accompanied by her father or by her friend Annette.

"The assistant usher later would recall the First Daughter's pretty voice, which still was echoing in his head. "Mr. West, do you think we could roll the little spinet piano into my sitting room just for tonight? Annette Wright is coming over to spend the night and we'd like to try a duet."

"*Just* for the night? No. Housemen had trundled the Gulbransen upright in and out of Margaret's room for years now, fitting it snugly alongside the baby grand--and adding perhaps as much as a thousand pounds to the beam's burden below. No apparent harm had come of it--except on one recent night.

"Annette and Margaret had been deep into a classical duet when, sight-reading their sheet music, they came to a movement marked with an "*ff*"--fortissimo. The girls had let it rip, leaning hard into the keyboards and hammering at the ivories with all the might in their young fingers. Suddenly, Margaret had felt vaguely dizzy. It had almost seemed like the floor beneath them was rising and falling in time to the music. It had taken the girls a moment to realize that, in fact, that was exactly what was happening. "The two young ladies and the pianos were, for all intents and purposes, bouncing up and down rhythmically on an impromptu springboard--the split beam beneath them," Purves later explained.

"It had been a warning sign, and a big one at that. Had the warning been heeded, the two pianos would never have been left in Margaret's sitting room that summer. But they had been left there. And now, in June of 1948, the house could stand it no more.

"Exactly what happened next will probably never be known, for the versions varied widely and took on new colors with each telling. This much is certain: Straining under the enormous weight of two pianos, a portion of the sitting room's dry-rotted flooring split, opening a rift big enough to swallow one of the pianos' legs. Down it went--plunging through the parquetry, through the subfloor, and punching through the plaster ceiling. It must have made quite a noise, that falling piano--230 strings opening up in a hellish chorus as the instrument staggered to its knees, then the dead thud of hardwood on hardwood. In the room below, a shower of splinters and plaster dust fell twenty feet to the floor.

"Margaret would later remember that it was the spinet that took the plunge. Nevertheless, for the rest of his life the venerable Theodore E. Steinway loved telling the story of how he took a phone call from the White House not long after this incident. It was a young Margaret Truman on the line, asking for a man who could come over to rescue a piano..."
 
I'm wondering how this would affect American Culture. With the president dying in such a traditionally cartoony way, this could cause backlash in cartoons like the looney toons. This is right before the golden age of Bugs Bunny and could reverberate throughout comedy and cartoons depending on the reaction to his death.
 
I'm wondering how this would affect American Culture. With the president dying in such a traditionally cartoony way, this could cause backlash in cartoons like the looney toons. This is right before the golden age of Bugs Bunny and could reverberate throughout comedy and cartoons depending on the reaction to his death.

I think it would be hushed up. In an old TL I wrote, the British PM fell down the stairs while drunk and broke his neck. The public were told he had passed away in his sleep from sudden heart failure.

I think in this case, rumours would circulate, but the official story would not involve a piano.
 
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