Historical Figures Series Thomas Dewey and The Battle for The Republican Party, Part 2: 1944 and the Campaign Against FDR

 

Dewey would admit much later on in his life that his main problem was that he rose too fast in public life and at the wrong time.  In a time of peace, his youth might have helped him get the nomination in 1940 and perhaps become President. Instead, he would lose the nomination to Wendell Willkie.

At the time, it did not seem like this had permanently hampered his political career. In 1942,  he was elected governor of New York in a landslide, winning over his Democratic opponent by nearly 650,000 votes. However, in his acceptance speech, Dewey had to moderate his tone to reflect the times and acknowledge that ‘we all belong to one great opposition party – the party of uncompromising opposition to Hitler, his allies and all the things they stand for.” The crowd chanted Dewey for President and between his victory and being sworn in as governor, he received 20,000 letters many urging him to run for President in 1944.  But it showed the problem most Republicans had in targeting the White House: how could run a campaign against the Democratic President and not say you were against the American effort in the war? It did not help that two of the major members of FDR cabinet were themselves Republicans – Henry Stimson was Secretary of War and Frank Knox, who had been the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1936, was the Secretary of the Navy.

He was not helped by the fact that Willkie was still a favorite for the nomination in 1944, had raised his international profile immensely in the years since, and seemed determined to thwart Dewey at every turn. Willkie had been a nuisance to Dewey during his run for Governor, trying to make sure other Republicans contenders could run against him. Dewey did not openly declare his candidacy, because he had pledged not to leave the governorship until his term was over in 1946.

The problem for Willkie was that he was increasingly becoming too much of an internationalist – and moving to the left – for the old Guard. As 1943 ended, Dewey decided that he would run for the Presidency.

In Wisconsin, which would be the major battleground, Dewey would trounce Willkie in the presidential primary. General Douglas MacArthur, a hero because of his victories in the Philippines, was sought out by many Republicans to run, but he declined.  Robert Taft, who had been Dewey’s major opponent in 1944, announced he would not be a candidate in the middle of the year. The only true opposition to Dewey came from the Midwestern isolationists, reluctant to have another member of the E  astern Establishment run the ticket. John Bricker, the Governor of Ohio, was their favored candidate. He could not even get his campaign started.

Dewey who had been basically quiet for much of the first half of 1944, began to talk about international affairs. He talked of the post-war world, said that the nation had to learn lessons from the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, discussed global alliances with Britain and The Soviet Union, and discussed the ideas of ‘an organization of nations’.

In June of 1944, there was another major factor in the Presidential campaign that the White House, the Democratic Party and everyone in Washington new. FDR was dying. A discussion with his doctor had said he might, under good conditions, live another year. His advisors all knew it. The problem was that for twelve years the Democratic Party was Franklin Roosevelt. There were no successors groomed or even permitted.

There was an obvious contrast between the two: Roosevelt was a patrician, warm and open. Dewey was a pretender, cold and efficient. Roosevelt flattered and talked to press, Dewey had no confidants in journalists, and while he had close friends, he was not warm with them. Roosevelt was inspiring, Dewey was snappish.

It did not help that, while the party was nominating Dewey, they did not truly love him or his policies. They far preferred Bricker, who was photogenic, a skilled administrator, a good conservative – and intellectually vacant. Even his closest ally in the party, Bob Taft, knew he was less able than Dewey.

The Chicago convention was one of the dullest in history. Dewey received all but one vote on the first ballot (a lone delegate voted for MacArthur) and Bricker was nominated as Vice President. The convention halls were bare to maintain wartime sobriety, the hall was oven hot and Taft almost fell asleep reading the 5000 word platform. When Dewey was nominated, a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ began. It lasted seven minutes. When Dewey arrived to accept the nomination for President, he bowed stiffly.

There was some excitement when Dewey gave his acceptance speech, as he pointed out that the New Deal had left a costly legacy and ten million people unemployed. He said he would keep the New Deal around but run it better, argued that the administration was filled with tired old men and was superannuated. He had managed to launch his party out of a coma.

The problem was not Thomas Dewey. It was that three weeks before he was nominated, the Allies had invaded Normandy. Victory over Hitler seemed a near certain thing. So now Dewey had to accomplish a miracle: convince America to reject a commander-in-chief in the final months of a war.

After FDR was renominated by acclimation in Chicago, the major decision had been who to pick as his running mate. Henry Wallace had been a hard pill for many Democrats to swallow in 1940 but they had gone along with it. Now that it seemed certain that FDR would not survive his term, the likelihood of him becoming President terrified the Democrats.

Over the next several months they would debate choices to supplant Wallace as Vice President. FDR provided no assistance in this matter, favoring some candidates, giving words of approval to others, and mostly seeming indifferent to the entire process. When Harry Truman, senator from Missouri, ended up being pressed by the bosses at the convention, he balking and only pressure from FDR (who seemed indifferent even then) allowed him to be nominated. Even then, it took two ballots and a significant amount of pressure by the bosses to ensure his nomination.

While that was being discussed, FDR said in a discussion with party chairman Robert Hannegan in regard to this “clear everything with Sidney.” Inadvertently, he launched one of the major issues of the campaign to come, one that Dewey would seize on.

Sidney Hillman was Lithuanian-born Jew who had over many years become a major figure in the American Labor movement. When he was younger, he had been a member of the Socialist Party in New York and as head of the CIO had been an outspoken supporter of the Russian people. Hillman was the head of the very first political action committee and had pledged $1.5 million to defeat Republicans. Because of Hillman’s association with Communist causes, columnists would make public that FDR was allied with the Communist cause. “Clear Everything With Sidney’ was one of the biggest campaign slogans of the 1944 campaign. It set the stage for what would be an ugly campaign: one that FDR himself called “The meanest campaign of his life.”

FDR who hadn’t disliked Landon and genuinely respected Wendell Willkie, hated Tom Dewey. Both Roosevelt and Dewey made overtures to Willkie during the fall campaign – Roosevelt was discussing with him a ‘realignment of the parties in a post-war world’. Willkie, who if anything like Dewey less than FDR did, spent much of the campaign ignoring him.

FDR spent much of the summer not campaigning at all, so Dewey dominated the early months. The problem was he was talking over the heads of most of his audiences as he stressed talking about facts rather than trying to seem like a human being. He spoke campaigns that were full of facts, statistics and information. They were also dull and tedious. It didn’t help matters that Dewey spent most of the campaign taking the high road.

In the fall, Dewey turned nasty, accusing Roosevelt of mishandling the army, the economics of the office. He began to raise accusations as to whether or not the government had been telling the truth to the public about what had happened at Pearl Harbor, based on information that had become available from Japanese codes. Only after a visit from one of George Marshall’s staff did he let go of it as a campaign issue. He increasingly made Communism a major factor of the campaign.

Of course, there was an issue that Dewey did want to use that would have been very legitimate. FDR’s failing health. Throughout the campaign he kept hinting at it, particularly after hearing a campaign stop where FDR had been unable to stand and had needed his son’s help to get up. Dewey thought that the public was owed this as an obligation and his campaign believed that their might be something to it.  Dewey eventually decided not to, afraid it would backfire.

Was that the right decision? Even nearly eighty years later I am unable to say. On the one hand, FDR and the Democratic party knowingly engaged in a fraud of the American electorate when they put forth as their standard bearer a man they were fully aware was almost not certainly going to survive his term. Indeed, at the initial meeting of Truman and FDR, a man on the secret service thought that Roosevelt was not going to make it to the election, that Henry Wallace would become President after all. Truman himself knew looking at him that he was going to be President soon ‘and it scared the hell out of him’.  FDR’s decision not only to consider his Vice President seriously, but not consider the after effects of what might happen is one of the most negligent decision a President has ever made, and even given the wartime atmosphere, his decision to barely keep anyone, much less Truman, up to date on what was going on during the final months, is a dereliction of duty. We are fortunate as a nation that Truman proved to be up to the job.

Dewey had the right to make this knowledge public to the American voter, but he did have to consider that there was a war going on and the global ramifications it would have if this knowledge became public. The fact that it was coming from the man running to replace him almost certain would have hurt him politically as many people did not like him outright and his campaign was already increasingly vicious.

The election was the closest of FDR’s four runs for the White House in terms of the popular vote. FDR managed to get slightly more than 25 million votes while Dewey got more than 22 million. It was another electoral landslide, however: FDR took 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99. In David McCollough’s biography of Harry Truman, he says that with the shifting of 300,000 votes from the Democrats to the Republicans, Dewey would have become President. I have been through the math repeatedly since reading that and believe it to be hyperbole, I can not see how that works. The Democrats gained 22 seats in the house, adding to their majority but would lose 1 in the Senate. Many of the major gains were in the Midwest, where Homer Capehart and William Jenner would win seats in Indiana, Bennett Clark, the other Missouri Senator would lose his seat in the Republican election. Other Republicans would have the same luck. Rapid isolationist Gerald Nye lost his seat in North Dakota. Other elected Senators who would be significant in later years would be Glen Taylor of Idaho, William Fulbright in Arkansas and Wayne Morse of Oregon (who was elected as a Republican.

That night, after his victory FDR told an aid about Dewey: “I still think he is a son of a bitch.” Indeed, the nastiness of this campaign would reflect on Dewey going forward. As a result when he ran his campaign in 1948, he would take a different approach.

In the next article, I will deal with Dewey’s rise to prominence as a Presidential candidate in 1948 and his battle for the Republican nomination.