Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  “Colonel, why don’t you go in and get us a drink? A real one, not the cordials. When you come out, you can tell me how you courted Mrs. Sinclair.”

  “If you’re interested in that, you might as well come inside.”

  “No,” said Peter. “I like it out here. I might play the Reginaphone.”

  “All right, suit yourself. I’ll bring out some whiskey and some ice.”

  Horace went inside, leaving Peter alone with the Reginaphone, which he cranked, and the buckram box, which he opened.

  JACK HAD NEVER BEEN TO THE CITY CLUB, BUT LATE FRIDAY night, when he arrived to pick Anne up from the sugar-factory grounds, Carol Feller insisted he join a group that would be there celebrating the readiness of everything for Dewey’s arrival.

  They drove up Main, where the 6600-lumen incandescents brought to life the bunting and the candidate’s black-and-white face, endlessly repeated, pole after pole. The Hotel Owosso was full, music from a swing band sailing through its open doors.

  Upstairs at the City Club, along with Peter Cox, Harris Terry and Councilman Royers, Harold Feller waited for his wife. He was in an expansive mood—life was much better than it had been in August—and delighted to see Carol arrive with a group, even if the club had grown short of chairs and waiters. “I’ll do the honors,” he said, taking the newcomers’ drink orders as soon as he found them something to sit on.

  When he made it back with the tray, Harris Terry was taking the last sip of his second highball and asking where the young people were. “Not that you three aren’t young,” he said to Anne and Jack and Peter, “but I meant Margaret and her swain.”

  “Billy,” said Harold Feller, “is probably selling the last roll of crepe paper at three times the price.” He felt so right with the world he could even accept the idea of Billy Grimes as a son-in-law, should Margaret somehow make it through four years in Ann Arbor as contented with her lot as she now appeared to be.

  “There is no further need for crepe paper,” Carol informed her husband and Harris Terry and Ed Royers. “Everything is completely finished. Ready for Freddie.”

  “How’s it looking?” asked Terry.

  “Like a dream,” said Anne. “It’s such a wholesome sight; it’s only the extent of it that seems opulent, as if Marie Antoinette were in charge of the prom.”

  “Let ’em eat crepe,” said Peter.

  “Well, this will fuel Al’s megalomania,” mused Ed Royers, laughing.

  “Has anybody figured out what they’re going to do with the traffic?” asked Jack. It was the most neutral, sportsmanlike question he could think of.

  “They’ll start blocking off the streets at three tomorrow afternoon,” answered Royers.

  “Imagine what January twentieth in Washington is going to be like,” said Terry. “The Argus says they’ve already got Truman’s farewell parties planned. A lot of the Cabinet are renegotiating their leases so they won’t be stuck paying rent.”

  “Harry may have a few cards left to play,” said Anne. Everyone knew about her postconvention enthusiasm for the President (what Peter called the New Zeal), and they indulged it like someone’s unaccountable fondness for a mangy dog. Even Jack could still be surprised by the ardor of it.

  “You mean cards like the Vinson mission?” asked Peter.

  “Now, Peter,” cautioned Harold, “that’s been canceled.”

  “But for it to have been thought of!” The President’s idea of sending the Chief Justice on a trip to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin—a scheme vetoed by General Marshall—had dealt Truman an embarrassment he could scarcely afford.

  “Yeah,” said Peter, entering his relentless mode, “that’s really giving the Russians hell.”

  “Too bad he isn’t as tough as Dewey,” said Jack. “He could invite Stalin over here and have him shot at sunrise.”

  “Oh,” said Peter, “the engineer. Jeez, Jack, he’s just trying to regulate the railroads. You’re all for the regulation of every interstate thing under the sun, aren’t you?”

  “Enough,” said Anne. “That particular train has pulled out. ‘With a little jerk,’ as someone wrote.”

  “I think we ought to make the incident a booth along the Dewey Walk,” said Peter. “Give our Democratic visitors a chance to work themselves up.”

  “Or maybe,” said Jack, “you could make it into a game for the Republicans. Shoot the engineer and win a kewpie doll.”

  “I like the way you think!” said Peter, raising his glass. “Tell me, Annie, what are you going to play out there next spring? And have you thought about growing gracefully into the older character parts as the years go by? Maybe even Mama Dewey herself along about 1990? You’ll be, what, sixty-five?”

  “Anne, you and I both need a snack,” said Carol. “We skipped dinner, if you remember.” The two women headed off to see if the kitchen was open. Before they were out of earshot Anne heard Jack suggesting that the next time Peter looked at a map for a legislative seat, he think about picking Rat’s Ass, Alabama. She missed the reply, but Carol caught it. “Peter says he can’t run there, because Rat’s Ass is part of the Democratic plantation. You know, the solid South. Don’t worry, Anne, they’ll cool down. By the way, has Peter been drinking?”

  “Not enough. Nothing takes the edge off him.”

  “Well, Harold will keep him in line.” They joined a group in search of sandwiches.

  “Why won’t he quit?” asked Anne.

  “Because he hasn’t won.”

  “But he’s lost. And is that all he wants? To win?”

  “No,” said Carol. “He may be a politician, but he wants you.” The two women looked back toward the circle of chairs they’d just left. The noise was growing.

  “I have to confess I hate seeing some of the changes occurring here,” said Carol, diverting Anne’s gaze to other parts of the room. “Everything is already getting spruced up and unrecognizable. A year from now all the ashtrays and glasses will probably look like souvenirs from Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, except they’ll have pictures of Tom and Frances Dewey on them.”

  “Maybe they will for a while,” said Anne. “But not by 1990. I mean, surely everybody will be over it by then.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Have you ever been to Marion, Ohio? You’d think Caesar were buried there instead of Harding.”

  Anne seemed to drift away from the conversation. It was as if she were off in another place, hearing and answering Carol by radio, half her mind working along some track that ran parallel to the words. 1990. Between now and then the country would plow itself up ten times. These elections weren’t a matter of democracy; they were a self-induced reinvention, history’s protest that, even with the occasional war, it would bore itself to death without a new era every four years. How could the country get ten lives while she, living here, would get only one?

  “Wouldn’t I somehow be older than sixty-five in 1990? It feels as if I should.”

  “It feels to me as if I’ve every right not to be dead by then, but I will be.”

  While Carol took possession of two sandwiches, Anne saw a picture of the next fifty years passing, one in which the town remained the same and everything around it—this abstract, galactic swirl—spun and crackled and continually reconfigured itself, a terrible, inviting vortex. She would be asking Jack to shield her sight from the lightning while, the whole time, she peered through the cracks between his fingers.

  “Chicken salad all right?” asked Carol. “They’re out of everything else.”

  “Yes,” said Anne, trying to turn off her mind’s eye. The two women started back toward the circle of chairs holding their husband and fiancé. The younger men’s voices, which had subsided for a minute, were regaining volume. Shouts of “Taft-Hartley” and “Pendergast machine” and “ignoramus” were pitched and batted back, while Harold Feller and Harris Terry tried, like umpires, to be heard.

  “We know what this is really about!” Jack shouted.

  Judging from everyone’s
sudden silence, including Harold’s and Harris Terry’s, Anne realized that everyone did know what it was really about, a situation so mortifying she had to shut her eyes. Behind their lids she once more saw Owosso, forever denied a second tornado, as the still point in the swirling universe, and she understood that only one thing, something inevitable, and imminent, and necessary, could halt the swirling. To her immense relief it was exactly what happened next, when Jack, without getting up from his chair, leaned over and knocked Peter’s block off.

  TEN

  October 23

  THE SEVEN BRASS BANDS AND THE FLOODLIGHTS AND HOWEVER many thousand people were shouting on the sidewalks seemed ready to crack the nighttime sky, to puncture it like an eggshell. They were living in a Dewey world now. There weren’t even real movies anymore: the Capitol’s marquee proclaimed THE DEWEY STORY! MARCH OF TIME STARTS TOMORROW! CONTINUOUS SHOWINGS! It had been decided somewhere that the nine-minute newsreel, starring Himself, would be released to Owosso early; the rest of the country would get it after victory footage from election night was added.

  Residents had been urged to eat dinner at home and save space for visitors in the big chow lines set up at the high school, the Lutheran church and who knew where else. Jack had made himself two hamburgers after Anne left for Jackson, Michigan, at four o’clock with the reception committee. She’d boarded the Victory Special there about three hours ago, arriving with it in Owosso on the dot, at 9:10. Fifteen minutes earlier, the parade had stepped off with a roar toward Willman Field, where the candidate would be waiting. As soon as the last float passed by, Jack would get down there, to the place he and Anne had arranged for her to spot him, a reversal of what they’d done in Flint.

  Down at Willman, when they brought Dewey out, Jack planned to turn his back on him, at least for a second. He wouldn’t give him the bird or make a thumbs-down; just this quiet, rude gesture. No one would notice, and he’d do it only to please himself. As it was, his status as a gentleman seemed unshakeable. Last night, while Peter’s shiner sprang to life as neat as Dewey’s mustache, he’d expected to be thrown out of the City Club like some common brawler. But an immediate consensus formed that Peter had been the instigator, provoking Jack “beyond endurance,” as Mr. Terry put it. Councilman Royers had even clapped him on the back. In a daze, as if he’d taken the punch instead of thrown it, he could hear Harold Feller saying, “Peter, eject yourself.” Which is what Peter did, while Royers scared up a last round of drinks and joked about “Jersey Jack” and, like the Fellers and Mr. Terry, refused to hear any apology out of him.

  The only one who seemed unhappy was himself. He was glad to have slugged the guy, but it was John L. Lewis’s eyebrows all over again. In front of Anne he’d done something “common,” as his eighth-grade English teacher liked to put it; or, to use a phrase Anne sometimes applied to Truman bashers who got on her nerves in the newspaper, he’d “reverted to type.” But nobody else saw it that way. By the time they left the club, the incident was growing into a nice little legend. Back on Williams Street Anne couldn’t stop talking, telling him what a pain in the neck Peter had made himself all week. She’d rattled on as if she were afraid to subside. It was the first time she’d stayed over since the Saturday before, and there had been no little-boy warm-up to the lovemaking; she’d wanted things right away and then again in the morning, before she jumped out of bed and walked all around the house, up and down the stairs, fast, slicing the air with her arms the way Louise always did with that bony nervous energy. She talked about the color each room could be, how they could knock a hole in the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and how up in the attic, with a little remodeling, there’d be space for another bedroom, a place for “Junior’s little brother.” She kept it up, laughing all the time, though not the way his mother would have; more like someone after a little too much gas at the dentist’s. He put it down to her being both exhausted and all jazzed up now that the big day was finally here.

  He wished he could share the excitement. As it was, he felt crankier than his father had been at the end. Irked by the noise, he was just standing here, not cracking a smile, annoyed by the debate going on behind him about whether the crowd was ten thousand or fifteen thousand. Whatever it was, the Republican editors would jack it up; he knew that much from his day in Detroit. He’d actually clipped today’s Argus editorial to give to Walt Carroll, who lived in Flint and couldn’t imagine what Jack had had to put up with ever since moving back to Owosso last spring. “He is approaching the climax of his public career,” the Campbell brothers’ paper had said of its candidate. “On November 2 the people of this nation make him their chief executive.” Not even will make him. But the real crap came, as Anne had pointed out, two paragraphs later: “He had to make his own place in life through ability and the sheer force of sticking to the job at hand. There are many American people who forget the opportunities for self-expression and advancement in this nation. They are too prone to call it quits when the going gets rough and let the government or someone else carry them along. Tom Dewey never did that …”

  Dewey’s life had been a parade from the beginning! As the bobsled rode past and the crowd cheered for the boys on top of float number 2, including Phil Welch, Dewey’s fourteen-year-old second cousin, Jack tried concentrating his gaze on the undercarriage of the flatbed truck, to see if he could guess its make from that alone. But he couldn’t stop remembering the way the wind raced through that shotgun house down by the depot while he and Lorraine shivered with flu. And now here came heroic young Dewey milking cows on the Putnam farm and then selling magazines outside the Owosso Times Building, where he probably made more money than the full-grown Gene Riley did before the union came in and made his job worth having.

  ACROSS THE STREET BILLY HAD KEPT AN EYE OUT FOR MARGARET, who responded to his two-handed wave with a smile and a wink, never missing a note as the sixty-eight-piece Owosso High School band, marching between floats one and two, blared out “The Victors.” He revered her composure; a Grenadier guard outside Buckingham Palace couldn’t do better. And now that they’d had their prearranged greeting, he could get back to supervising his sales force. He was six kids’ boss tonight. The old Columbia was turning out to be a godsend, the only conceivable means of shuttling between here and Willman, but come Monday morning he should at last have enough money for a decent used car. No, nothing as flashy as Peter Cox’s new Ford, but also no antique like Arnie Herrick’s Chevrolet, which he guessed was slowly dying of suffocation in Mrs. Herrick’s garage. He’d be paying cash, too, before his father got any ideas about how the wads he’d accumulated up in his room and at the State Savings Bank might better go toward next year’s tuition bills.

  He knew he was getting sucked toward MSC or Central Michigan, and it only made sense if he was going to hold on to Margaret. It was a matter of keeping one’s machinery up to date, resisting depreciation, which is what his Owosso High diploma was bound to suffer in her eyes if he didn’t make some big score over the next four years. He didn’t have the grades for Ann Arbor, where she’d certainly get in and go, but even a Central Michigan degree might keep him looking solvent to her.

  Jesus, though: if there were this many people on Main Street every Saturday night, he could be rich before 1950 rolled around.

  WITHOUT A FLUTE AT HER LIPS, MARGARET WOULD HAVE failed to notice how damp it was tonight. The noise and light were deceptive; the ease with which she was keeping her whistle wet told the real story of how much moisture the air held. Her girlfriends had brought some spiked cider to the parade’s assembly point, and when everything was over they were going to ride out of town and finish it off. She’d go home by herself, since Billy would be selling his stuff until one in the morning and she didn’t want to have to fight to keep her eyes open at church tomorrow. Everyone said there’d be a better view of Governor Dewey from the back pew of Christ Episcopal than the front row of the stadium.

  She wondered if they’d have fireworks after he spoke t
onight. That might get her more in the mood—not that she wasn’t in it, but she kept thinking that somehow November 2 itself would have to be more exciting than tonight, which for all its size and sound struck her as missing something, maybe a salute with a cannon, or just one plane overhead, skywriting a message.

  “RILEY! RILEY!” OVER THE DIN, FROM ACROSS THE STREET, Jack made out the voice of Carl Rutkowski. Carl’s ruined arm had to rely on Louise to do its waving, but his voice was every bit as strong as when Jack had heard it singing “Which Side Are You On?” in ’37. Not one to mind her manners or the rules, Louise had now darted into the street, between float number eight and the Durand High School band, which was coming right at her. She made it across and started tugging him to join her and Carl.

  “You’re gonna get us trampled,” Jack protested.

  “Okay, we’ll wait till after the next float. Where’s Anne?”

  “Down at the field. With the reception committee. And probably wearing a Truman button.”

  “From what I hear,” said Louise, “she could get away with it. Tell me why I should like this girl so much,” she added, giving Jack’s rear a squeeze.

  “Jeez, Louise.”

  “To coin a phrase. For Christ’s sake, Jack, there’s a half dozen tubas between us and Carl, and he can hardly see past the curb as it is. What did you do about dinner? We had ours at the Elks’ temple, and dessert at the Lutheran church. They overstocked both places, and they should’ve known better. People don’t want to sit down and eat before something like this. They only want what they can wolf down on the sidewalk or in the stands.”

  “I hope Dewey’s operation gets stuck with the bills.”

  “I hope somebody has the sense to get the stuff to the Salvation Army before it rots. If you’re as miserable as you look, why don’t you stop watching this and drive a truckload of leftovers to Flint?”