Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul

by A. J. Baime

  Dewey was just forty-four years old. Relatively short in stature at five foot eight (he was known to occasionally stand on a dictionary while orating), he had a short stub-like nose, side-parted brown hair, and a mustache so fastidiously kept, it looked like each hair had received his personal attention. Since his childhood days selling newspapers in rural Michigan, accomplishment was Tom Dewey’s sustenance, and the evening of the midterms was thus far the greatest night of his professional life. After his opponent conceded, Dewey took his baritone voice to the airwaves in a short radiocast from microphones set up in the mansion. His address sounded less like a victory message than a presidential State of the Union.

  “What has happened today,” Dewey said, “means much more than an ordinary election. It was not a mere matter of choosing between one man and another. In this election our people were making a choice between different kinds of government, involving two different political philosophies . . . A troubled world looks to us, not only for material help, but for spiritual inspiration, for a renewed devotion to the ideals of genuine liberty.”

  Over the next days, congratulatory mail swamped the Dewey family, who skipped the Army–Notre Dame football game at West Point in order to write thank-you notes. The Deweys had never experienced such adulation. The governor read in the newspapers that he was now a front-runner for the Republican ticket in 1948, and how Albany was to be “the Mecca” for Republican powerbrokers once again, as it had been during the halcyon days when Dewey’s hero Theodore Roosevelt lived there. Dewey was “riding the very crest of the 1946 Republican wave,” noted the Christian Science Monitor. “Today, the prospects of 1948 look like very much more than an illusion. They look like a positive hope.”

  On December 18, weeks after the election, Dewey met privately at 138 Eagle Street with Republican leaders, while reporters fingered cigarettes in the nearby pressroom, hoping for a major national story. Would he run in ’48? When Dewey emerged from his meeting, the reporters swarmed.

  “Governor,” yelled one, “are you ready to announce your candidacy for President?”

  “Certainly not,” Dewey said coldly.

  “Certainly not ready?”

  “Certainly not, period.”

  When New York’s new legislative session began, the governor did what he did best: He rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Along with his offices in Albany, he kept a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel at 45 East Forty-Fifth Street in New York City, and he spent most of his weekends at his working dairy farm in rural Pawling, New York. In Albany, he worked with the state’s administration. In the city, he rubbed elbows with the Wall Street crowd and Republican Party officials who represented voters in the world’s largest metropolis.

  Dewey’s youthful stamina impressed everyone but his wife, who often found herself lonesome in her upstairs suite in the Albany mansion and at the dinner table, where she dined with her two boys and an empty chair where her husband was supposed to be. Late nights for Dewey were the norm. Lunch was the same every day, eaten at his desk: a chicken sandwich, an apple, milk. Dewey was all business. He smoked but never more than a pack a day. He drank but never more than two highballs in a sitting. Meanwhile, he drove his staff hard. “This didn’t make him popular with those people he had to deal with,” recorded Republican National Committee chief Herbert Brownell Jr. “But it did make him effective.”

  The governor’s desire for efficiency was as extreme as his phobia for germs. He knew how hard the job could be: “A good many people have the idea that politics is a sordid business, to be left to those who cannot make a living by anything else. Others have the idea that it is a simple business, in which anyone can become qualified as a sage overnight or with a brief space of speech-making or handshaking. The fact is that politics is the science of government. So far it has defeated all the best minds in the history of the world. At least I have not yet heard of the perfect government.”

  The country’s surge toward the Republican Party was a long time in coming—the war had sustained Democratic rule beyond what it might have been in more normal times. In 1946 Republicans had been out of power in Washington for fourteen years. The entire political careers of national figures had come and gone during that time. The Democrats’ hold on the White House through FDR and now Truman, plus the Democrats’ majority in both houses of Congress, had demoralized the party of Lincoln. In terms of the presidency, it was the longest winning streak for a single party in a generation.

  “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed,” remembered Congressman Joe Martin of Massachusetts, who became Speaker of the House following the 1946 election. “Many of the experiments of the New Deal seemed to us certain to undermine and destroy this society . . . Roosevelt’s philosophy [notably high federal spending on social programs] weakened our ideals of self-reliance, and we are poorer for it . . . I am sorry to say, it has encouraged too many people to depend on the government instead of themselves.”

  Now finally the Republicans were beginning to take control again, taking back both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Republicans unseated Democratic governors in Idaho, Ohio, and Massachusetts. “The greatest advantage I had in 1946,” recalled Richard Nixon, who won his first House seat that year in California’s Twelfth Congressional District, “was that the national trend that year was Republican.” “Anyone seeking to unseat an incumbent needed only to point out all the things that had gone wrong and all the troubles of the war period and its aftermath,” added Democrat Jerry Voorhis, who lost to Nixon that year. “Many of these things were intimate experiences in the everyday lives of the people.”

  Five weeks after the 1946 election, the nation’s most respected pollster, George Gallup, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The public’s reaction to last month’s election is to sign over 1948 to the Republicans. People who think the Democrats will win the 1948 presidential election are almost as scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth.”

  The question became: Who would be the Republican nominee? When Gallup released his first post-1946-election numbers, Dewey was the choice of 52 percent of Republican voters nationwide, far ahead of any competitor. Second was former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen—thirty-five points behind.

  “The always efficient Gov. Thomas E. Dewey is quietly gaining ground,” noted the syndicated political columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop. “His successes are sending powerful chills of apprehension down the spines of his rivals.”

  * * *

  Thomas Dewey had become a Republican even before he left his mother’s womb, according to his father. He was born on March 24, 1902, in an apartment above the general store in the town of Owosso, Michigan. The town was proud of its three hotels, its tire factory, and its three miles of paved roads. Dewey’s father, George, owned the local newspaper, and he was so dedicated to Republican politics that he listed the following announcement in his newspaper upon the birth of his only child: “A ten-pound Republican voter was born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. George M. Dewey. George says the young man arrived in time for registration for the April election.” GOP ideology was woven so thickly into the fabric of this family, Thomas Dewey would later say that “it was one of those things we took for granted, as it was assumed that all good people were Republicans.”

  Young Tom was a natural leader. He was selling newspapers by age eleven, and by thirteen he had his own magazine-sales business. Rarely a family dinner would pass without talk of politics. Dewey’s early memories romanticized the successes of Theodore Roosevelt. Dewey’s father subscribed to the progressive Republicanism that Teddy Roosevelt championed—“Negro” rights, progressive tax reform, conservation of natural resources, internationalist foreign policy. George Dewey even nicknamed his son Ted, as those were Thomas E. Dewey’s initials.

  The powerful Republican Henry Stimson, who was then US attorney general for the Southern District of New York, defined the era’s Republican liberalism in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt duri
ng this time: “To me it seems vitally important that the Republican party, which contains, generally speaking, the richer and more intelligent citizens of the country, should take the lead in reform.” Though the Deweys were not rich, they agreed.

  Dewey attended the University of Michigan, and he came of age during the Roaring Twenties, an era when post–World War I Republicanism dominated Washington. Warren G. Harding, then Calvin Coolidge, then Herbert Hoover—for twelve years a Republican ran the country.

  During these years, the GOP evolved. Leaders redefined Republican values as a reaction to the horrors of World War I—a war that some prominent Republicans believed the United States should never have participated in. As if with a scalpel, liberalism was removed from the GOP’s ideology. In the place of internationalism was isolationism; in the place of progressive change was “normalcy”; in the place of federal spending on social programs was small government that largely left taxation and spending to the states. The Republicans had renounced Theodore Roosevelt’s liberalism, but the Deweys never did.

  After graduating from college, Dewey moved to New York and became chairman of the New York Young Republican Club. He studied law at Columbia University, but his real love, surprisingly, was music. He took voice lessons, and on March 24, 1923, his twenty-first birthday, he gave his first recital in hopes of embarking on a singing career. Whether it was a case of laryngitis or stage fright on the performer’s part, the concert was a disaster. Dewey gave up on that dream and immersed himself in the law, taking a job with the firm McNamara and Seymour.

  When Wall Street crashed in 1929, ushering in the Depression, Dewey was living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his wife, Frances, and in 1931, at an event for the Young Republican Club, he was introduced to Herbert Brownell Jr., an ambitious fellow attorney with the firm Lord Day & Lord. Originally from Nebraska, Brownell was a brilliant Yale man who, like Dewey, had been a Republican seemingly from birth. He wanted to run for the New York state legislature, and although Dewey had no experience, he agreed to manage Brownell’s campaign.

  Dewey delivered his first speeches from the back of trucks on Manhattan street corners. He distributed vinyl records of Brownell speeches—“a novel idea in those days,” Dewey later remembered. He and Brownell were eager young rookies in a teeming metropolis where Republicans had always been outnumbered by Democrats. Brownell nevertheless won a seat in the New York State Assembly in 1932, notwithstanding a national surge away from the party of Hoover, as FDR won the White House for the first time. Dewey would remember Brownell’s campaign as “chaos,” but Brownell came to his own conclusions. If Brownell’s campaign proved one thing, it was that Tom Dewey was going places. “He gave you the impression of having a goal, and getting there fast,” Brownell recalled, “and if you were kind of a drag on it, or didn’t quite follow what he was saying . . . he sort of didn’t bother with you anymore.”

  Around the same time Dewey was first experimenting in the New York political scene, he was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate corruption in the city. Two years later, he was made an assistant US attorney, and at just thirty-one years old, he was the youngest ever to take on the job in Manhattan’s Southern District. At the time Dewey was sworn in, the Jewish gangster Waxey Gordon’s sensational trial was already in progress, and Dewey was thrown into the heat of courtroom battle. Self-conscious about his height, he made up for it with swagger.

  “Gentlemen,” he told the courtroom his first week as a trial prosecutor, “there will be a lot of dead men mentioned during this case.”

  Dewey was instrumental in putting Gordon behind bars for ten years, on charges of income tax evasion. The case put Dewey on the map as a rising star in the Southern District.

  * * *

  The prosecutor’s office suited Dewey. By the time he was thirty-five, he was running for attorney general of the state of New York, and he was already getting national publicity. Prohibition-era New York was the perfect petri dish for a prosecutor to grow into a national figure, if he had legal brilliance and fearless drive. This was the New York of Lucky Luciano, of Meyer Lansky, of Murder Inc. Even when Prohibition came to an end in 1933, there were plenty of criminal gangs to go after.

  In 1935, during the depths of the Depression, anyone lacking a moral compass would do anything for a buck. “The mobs had a tremendous hold on the legitimate business life of the community,” Dewey later recalled. “As a matter of fact you could feel it. It was almost as if you could touch it.” Dewey opened a special-prosecutor’s office on the fourteenth floor of the Woolworth Building on lower Broadway, a block from City Hall. He recruited seventy-five police officers to go undercover in New York’s underbelly. “They did not look like cops,” Dewey recorded. “They had small feet, alert minds, and tough, wiry frames . . . They were of many national extractions and spoke the languages of the countries of their fathers. This, then, was to be known as the grand jury squad.”

  Dewey installed an untappable phone in his office, and put twenty stenographers to work in one large room under constant supervision. Witnesses and turncoats were made to give testimony in rooms with blinds drawn. All scrap paper was burned in the building furnace. With a staff of twenty deputy assistant attorneys, ten investigators, ten accountants, two grand jury reporters, and four messengers under him, the special prosecutor began cracking some of the most shocking criminal cases the city of New York had ever seen. Dewey’s men once raided two hundred brothels in a single day. But it was the case of Lucky Luciano—Manhattan’s top mob boss—that made Dewey a national hero. Dewey’s office indicted Luciano on April 3, 1936, and the ensuing case produced the most lurid newspaper headlines of the era.

  “Gangsters Split Girls’ Tongues.”

  “Girl Says Squealer’s Feet Were Burned with Cigars.”

  “Torture Is Laid to Vice Bosses.”

  Using the testimony of call girls and their madams, Dewey won Luciano a thirty-to-fifty-year prison term.

  Next on Dewey’s docket: “Tootsie” Herbert, labeled “the meanest poultry racketeer of all time.” Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, “the terror of New York City’s garment industry.” Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who went to his death in the electric chair. “No man deserved it more,” Dewey concluded. The special prosecutor got credit for putting all these figures behind bars.

  Dewey’s top prize was James J. Hines—the fedora-sporting, jowly-faced boss of New York’s Tammany Hall. The trial against Hines drew tremendous attention. It was not just Hines on the stand, but Tammany Hall itself, the notoriously corrupt organization that had controlled Democratic power in New York City for generations. Dewey proved in a courtroom that Hines had illegal connections with the city’s most high-profile gangsters, and Hines was convicted of thirteen counts of racketeering. It was the biggest blow to Tammany Hall since the trial of Boss Tweed in 1873. The morning after the trial ended, Dewey invited photographers into his office so they could snap pictures of him reading the morning paper, which ran a banner headline on the front page: “Hines Guilty.”

  At just thirty-seven, Thomas Dewey was a household name. He had achieved seventy-two convictions out of seventy-three prosecutions. People joked that Dewey could successfully prosecute God. The attorney’s nickname, “Gangbuster,” was used for a popular radio series. Hollywood pumped out movies inspired by Dewey’s trials—Marked Woman in 1937, starring Humphrey Bogart as a Dewey-esque crime fighter, and Racket Busters in 1938, also starring Bogart.

  Dewey ran for governor in New York in 1938 and lost by a slim margin to the Democrat Herbert Lehman. But the young prosecutor’s campaign drew enough attention that it launched him into the rarified group of elite national Republicans.

  “You made a glorious run and you demonstrated that you possess a deep measure of popular affection and confidence,” Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan—one of the most revered Republicans in the nation—wrote Dewey on November 11, 1938. “So far as the Republican party is concerned, you have irresistibly bec
ome one of its chief figures and one of its ranking leaders . . . We need the precise influence and viewpoint which you typify. The more active and more aggressive you are in our party councils, the happier many of us will be.”

  Franklin Roosevelt was ending his second term at the end of the 1930s, and the Republicans were desperate for a new man who could counter the Democrat’s success. On December 1, 1939, in the newly opened “Dewey for President” headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, crowds pushed in to catch a glimpse of the young legal mastermind.

  “I have confidence in the Republican party,” Dewey said in the opening speech of his first presidential campaign. “It always has stood for good government and stable business. Today’s responsibility is to reawaken hope and courage in a nation which has been driven almost to despair by incompetent government and unstable business.”

  In his delivery, Dewey lacked spark, that unnameable charisma that FDR exuded, but the youthful Republican made up for it with cold precision and endless ambition. So fresh-faced and boyish was he that FDR’s secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, quipped that Dewey had “thrown his diaper into the ring.”

  * * *

  “You are getting as much publicity as Hitler,” a friend wrote Dewey during the 1940 presidential campaign. Dewey failed to win the nomination; the dark horse Wendell Willkie swooped in and won over the party faithful. However, Dewey won enough respect within the Republican ranks, it was said that it was not a matter of if he would be president, but when.

  In 1942 Dewey won the governorship of New York—his first political executive office. He was the first Republican to win New York’s top political office since 1920. The state was larger and more populated than many countries, and its political landscape was full of pitfalls. New York City was home to the most diverse population of any city on earth, with vast numbers of Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles. The city voted largely Democrat. Upstate lay broad swaths of rural forests and farms populated by conservative whites who feared footing the bill for the big city. Meanwhile the nation was at war—a tricky time for an inexperienced politician to take over. Dewey moved into 138 Eagle Street and employed the brand of Republican liberalism that he had grown up with, the progressive politics of Theodore Roosevelt.