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On the afternoon of election day, November 2, 1948, President Truman slipped away from his home in Independence in a Secret Service car and went to the Elms Hotel. He checked into Room 300. He had a ham and cheese sandwich in his room and went to bed at 9 o'clock. He told the Secret Service to wake him up if anything important happened. Almost everyone expected Thomas Dewey to be elected President that night. But at about 4 a.m., the Secret Service got Truman up and told him that, according to reports on the radio, he was winning. "We've got 'em beat," Truman said. (David McCullough, Truman, drawing from an interview with Secret Service agent Jim Rowley.)
The Elms Hotel is located at 401 Regent Street in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.