When FDR passed
away on April 12, 1945 Tom Dewey wired condolences to Eleanor Roosevelt and
offered sympathy to the new President, Harry S. Truman. Truman came into office
with an 87 percent approval rating, and many Republicans were impressed by this
modest, straightforward man from Missouri. Initially Dewey was as well. “While
it may be bad news for the Republican party, it will be wonderful for the
country and that is what we all interested in.”
The national
harmony did not last long. When the Soviets broke many of the pledges that they
had made at Yalta, the Cold War began By
the time 1945 ended, the international situation across Europe was beginning to
unravel. Worse, the domestic boom that had been prominent since the start of
the conflict collapsed when the war ended.
The peace between labor and the White House was over. Inflation
skyrocketed and shortages in peacetime exceeded the deprivations that had
unfolded during the war.
By the spring
of 1946, Truman’s approval ratings had collapsed. ‘To Err is Truman’ became a
popular saying. And the GOP, which had hoped that their fortunes might improve
with FDR finally gone, could see a return to power ahead of them. The
Republican campaign slogan for the 1946 Midterms was simple: “Had Enough?” They
didn’t need to say anything more.
In 1946, the
Republicans returned to power in both Houses of Congress for the first time since
1930. In the house they gained a whopping 55 seats and took twelve in the Senate,
only one of two occasions in a mid-term election that ten or more Senate seats
would switch. Republicans gained seats in such vital states as Ohio,
Pennsylvania, New York and Wisconsin and would take a seat in Kentucky. Several
of the Senators elected would be major forces in the years to come William
Jenner of Indiana, William Knowland of California, Henry Cabot Lodge of
Massachusetts, John Bricker of Ohio and a freshman senator from Wisconsin named
Joseph McCarthy. Richard Nixon was elected to Congress in California. Among the
paltry Democrats gains were two seats in New England. In Maine, Edmund Muskie
was elected and a war hero named John F. Kennedy was elected in Massachusetts.
Leadership
underwent a massive shift. Joseph Martin took over the Speakership from Sam
Rayburn who had held it since in 1933.
Alben Barkley became minority leader to Wallace White of Maine, but he
was little more than a stalking horse for Ohio’s Robert Taft.
The Democrats
were certain that Harry Truman was deadweight. Republicans were salivating for
the nomination for President, knowing that the fall campaign would be a
formality for the White House. When Dewey swept to reelection in November of
1946, he had become a front-runner but unlike 1944, he was going to have to
fight for it.
Within the Senate,
there were two major contenders: Taft and Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg.
Taft was qualified to be President by pedigree but in personality and affect
was duller than Dewey. Even in the aftermath of the war he was fundamentally
still an isolationist, opposing both the UN Charter and the Marshall Plan. It
did not help that the major piece of legislation that bore his name – the Taft
Hartley act - doomed whatever appeal to
labor he had. Vandenberg had moved from being a staunch isolationist to being a
larger supporter of foreign policy, being fundamentally in favor of
internationalism on the Foreign Relations Committee. Some wanted Douglas MacArthur, the hero of Manilla
and the leader of post-war Japan, to run for President and he wanted to be
President – but believed it would be dereliction of duty to leave his post. But
the man who was fundamentally considered the biggest threat to the GOP
nomination was a thirty-nine year old former governor of Minnesota named Harold
Stassen.
Stassen would
eventually become a figure of mockery among politicians in his lifetime, but
that is unfair because for much of the 1940s many had reason to believe he
would be the future of the GOP. He had risen like a rocket in politics: he had
been elected to District attorney at 23, won reelection four years later and in
1938 had become the youngest governor history in a landslide victory. He won reelection twice,
but in 1942 he resigned to enter the service. Serving under Admiral Halsey in
1943, he won the Legion of Merit. On leave from the Navy in 1945, he was named
by FDR as one of the delegates to the San Francisco conference that established
the UN.
He preached a
new form of Republicanism in 1947, internationalist abroad, a hybrid of liberalism and conservatism at home. He proposed
massive public housing, a decrease in tax rates, was wobbly on Taft-Hartley and
was willing to grant some authority to the UN. The conservatives loathed him,
but by August of 1947, he was running second to Dewey in the polls for the GOP
nomination.
To try and find
a candidate, most of attention would be at party conventions. By this point,
there were now only five political primaries – New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nebraska,
Ohio and Oregon. Dewey wanted to ignore the process which at that time meant
little guarantee of the nomination if you won but could doom your chances if
you lost. Dewey had seen that work both for and against him. In 1940, he had
won 6 of the seven contested primaries but had lost the nomination to Willkie.
In 1944, Willkie had lost the Wisconsin primary to him and his chances as
front-runner had evaporated. And in the
political primary, a candidate like Harold Stassen – who had no Republican
organization, but a galvanizing message, unlimited energy and ambition and enormous
public support – was a huge threat.
Stassen
refused to play by the rules. He would confer with Taft at an October 1947
conference that seemed like he might be allying with Dewey, He then tore that to
shreds in January of 1948, saying he would challenge Taft in his home state of
Ohio.
Dewey was the
sole campaigner in New Hampshire, still not considered the bellwether for
political fortune it would be years later.
Dewey would win six of the eight delegates at stake, but narrowly: a switch
of a few hundred votes would have given Stassen the victory. Stassen fought on.
In Wisconsin,
a draft for MacArthur went into effect something that brought fear into the
hearts of Dewey and Stassen. When stateside, MacArthur lived in Wisconsin. His
grandfather had briefly been governor. Stassen, whose hopes on the nomination
depended on an upset victory, campaigned heavily. Dewey only appeared once.
Dewey knew his chances were remote, but still hoped to cadge a couple of
delegates. He didn’t even get one. Stassen took nineteen to MacArthur’s eight.
Dewey was
doing his job by gathering delegates, picking up ninety from his New York state
delegation. The problem was Stassen had all the press.
In Nebraska
Taft hoped to gain momentum in a non-binding ‘beauty contest’ and put basically
every Republican who had shown interest in the nomination on the ballot. It backfired:
Stassen took 43% of the vote to Dewey’s 35%. Stassen was gaining momentum in
some perfunctory primaries: in write-in ones in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Stassen
ran ahead of Dewey. Even in Ohio, where Stassen lost, it was not a huge defeat.
Dewey was now
in a desperate position. Only if he could win the Oregon primary against Stassen
did his candidacy have any chance of surviving. Dewey would campaign vigorously
in Oregon, but his political fortunes would be reversed on an issue that seemed
insignificant compared to the general campaign: outlawing the Communist party.
This was an issue that Stassen himself have raised, for reasons that have never
been clear. As a result, the first ever primary
debate was scheduled for May 17th.
Heard by
between 40 and eighty million people on every major radio station across the
country, Stassen would blunder from beginning to end, mostly because on every
aspect of the issue, Stassen was completely misinformed. He also read his
remarks while Dewey spoke extemporaneously. Dewey’s position of the decline in
the American Communist party was a strong one.
Dewey walloped
Stassen in Oregon, capturing all twelve delegates at stake. The problem was, in
the eyes of many commentators, all that this had demonstrated was that there
was no national demand for any declared candidate, Stassen, Taft or Dewey
himself. By this point Dewey had
acquired more than 300 delegates, but few people thought he had a realistic
chance. It was going to come down to the convention.
The Republican
National Convention was historic because it was the first convention ever
televised. In order to take advantage of the still new medium, the Republicans
and Democrats would hold their conventions in Philadelphia. (At the time, most
owners of sets were on the East coast.) Here Stassen and Vandenberg mounted
campaigns, Taft was trying to build his, and some were hoping for a dark horse
such as the governor of California, Earl Warren.
From the start
of the convention, the speakers all piled on Harry Truman. Perhaps the most memorable
was Connecticut Congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce, who skewered the Roosevelt
decade and famous said that Truman was “Frankly, a gone goose.”
Dewey was
organized and in control of everything. The problem was the conservative wing
of the party loathed him. If they had been able to unify among a common
candidate, they could have unseated him. The problem was no one was willing to
yield particularly the two major opponents: Taft and Stassen.
In a late
night meeting, Taft suggested Stassen throw his support to him. Stassen argued
that they should support Vandenberg.
Taft said his Ohio delegates preferred his colleague John Bricker. They
broke up at 2:00 am, having accomplished nothing. “Neither Stassen nor Taft
hated Dewey enough to withdraw” Taft’s biographer said, “and neither man
thought they could get his delegates to follow if they did.
On June 25,
the nominations began. Dewey led with 434 delegates to Taft’s 224, while Stassen
was third with 157.on the first ballot. On the second ballot, Dewey would gain
83 votes and Taft would gain 50. Stassen lost 8. Before the third ballot Dewey’s
delegation called for a recess. Stassen did everything in his power to stop the
Dewey juggernaut – except back Robert Taft. Meanwhile Warren, who had held the
California delegation for the last two ballots, released his delegates. This would
start the train forward; Taft would concede and release his delegates. Dewey
was nominated by acclimation on the third ballot..
Dewey’s
acceptance speech was vacuous and bland, compared to the one he’d given four
years earlier.. He invoked the word ‘unity’ or united nine times in his speech,
though it was difficult to know what he was for or against. He mentioned nothing involving Communism, the
domestic or foreign issues of the time, civil rights or even the New Deal. To this day no one knows why his speech was
so bland or empty. Was he overconfident or did he believe that if he was too specific
he would be defeated?
What did not
help was how he looked on TV. As he concluded his speech, he waved to the auditorium
– never reaching for his wife who had come on stage to accept the nomination
with him.
Dewey then had
to choose a vice president. The conservative branch advocated for Bricker again
or Indiana senator Charlie Halleck. The choice eventually boiled down to Stassen
or Warren. The problem was Warren did not want it.
He made that
very clear when Dewey offered him the job. He considered it a ceremonial job,
told him that his salary as Vice President was less money than he made as
governor, and the Vice President had no official residence. Most of all Warren
just disliked Thomas Dewey and had for over a decade. He had been offered the
vice-presidency in 1944 but had refused it. When he had released his delegates,
he pointedly did not endorse Dewey.
Warren
eventually took the job for purely political reasons. He wanted the Presidency,
and if he were to refuse the vice-presidential nomination twice, he would never
be seriously considered for anything again. When a reporter asked one of his
aides what made him change his mind, the aide said bluntly: “They put a gun to
his head.” Even then, he was indifferent to it. When he called his thirteen-year
old son to explain, his son asked: “Is that good?” Warren said that he thought
so. He genuinely did not know.
The fact was
Warren’s nomination was good for the ticket and the party’s chances; it seemed
to lock down California’s 25 electoral votes, it had no tangible connection to
the current Congress and relative speaking, it was a youthful campaign: Dewey
was not yet 46 and Warren at 57 was still seven years younger than the sitting
President. There was every reason to have any doubt when papers like the LA Times
called Dewey the next President.
In the next
article, I will go into detail why Truman’s chances actually seemed worse than
they were even before the Republican campaign, why Dewey ran the campaign he
did and why Truman managed to defeat him.
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