by A. J. Baime
At the same time, the candidate was experiencing a groundswell of support. Fan mail was pouring in; Dewey’s team counted eleven thousand letters addressed directly to the candidate in the two weeks following the Republican National Convention. “What exciting times you are having!” wrote Winston Churchill, who sent Dewey a copy of his new book, The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his memoirs. Federal legislators hoping to curry favor in the new administration wrote the governor obsequious letters promising loyalty. But the real surge was coming from everyday Americans, eager to be part of Dewey’s historic ascendancy.
The Metalart Corporation of Milwaukee sent Dewey a “Dewey broom” as a campaign prop suggestion (“Help sweep the nation clean with the new GOP victory broom”). The D. A. Pachter Company of Chicago offered to make a Dewey presidential coin (“We believe that it will offer tremendous excitement”). Small-time songwriters from all over the country sent the candidate campaign songs they had written: “Dewey Will Do It: Marching On to Victory,” by Tom R. Hazard of Cine-Mart Music Publishers; “The Grand Old Party,” by Perry Alexander and Woody Frisino of Dubonnet Music Publishing. There was “Tom Dewey for President” from the Eighth South Republican Club of West Forty-Eighth Street in New York City:
Here’s a name which brings fame to the glory of All America and her cause
For Thomas Dewey is truly the symbol of great government and its laws.
As Dewey’s vacation neared its end, he gathered his team at his farm to plan what they hoped to be the smartest, most data-rich presidential campaign that had ever been run. The team consisted mostly of the figures who had orchestrated Dewey’s 1944 campaign: Herbert Brownell, Long Island Republican operative J. Russell Sprague, New York Republican state committee boss Edwin Jaeckle, and Elliott Bell, a former New York Times financial reporter and current New York State superintendent of banking, who had served as an economic adviser to the governor on numerous occasions.
In August, Dewey headed back to Albany, and on the eleventh, the Republican National Committee’s chairman, Pennsylvania congressman Hugh Scott, arrived at the governor’s mansion to report on a twenty-eight-state tour of the nation Scott had just completed. Scott had interviewed Republican officials and precinct bosses from all over and all had agreed, he reported, that Dewey should run the kind of tough-as-nails attack-dog campaign that he had run against Roosevelt four years earlier. He should gun for Truman the way he gunned for mob bosses like Lucky Luciano back in the day.
“Well,” Dewey said, “this will come as news to you, then. That’s not what we are going to do.”
The way Dewey saw it, he had this election won; all he had to do was refrain from making mistakes or painting himself as reactionary. Dewey’s closest advisers were recommending he run a careful campaign, and not rock the boat. They were of the opinion that the more commitments Dewey made as a candidate, the more his hands would be tied as president.
As committee chairman, Scott was alarmed. The party faithful, he said, expected Dewey to give the kind of ruthless attack speeches they believed had been most effective in 1944. Scott singled out Dewey’s speech in Oklahoma City, in which the governor had gone after FDR in one of the most vitriolic addresses anyone could remember. Calling the president a blatant demagogue, Dewey had accused FDR of distortions of truth “which not even Goebbels would have attempted.” This was a shocker—to compare the American president to Hitler’s propaganda chief, in the midst of a murderous war. Four years had passed since that speech and Americans could still be heard talking about it.
“That’s the worst speech I ever made,” Dewey told Scott. “I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow”—meaning Truman.
Soon after Dewey’s meeting with Scott, the conservative broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr. brought up the same speech with the candidate.
“This campaign will be different from 1944,” Dewey said.
“That Oklahoma City speech—”
“Exactly,” Dewey said, interrupting Lewis. “It was all wrong. I was attacking the dignity of the office I was seeking.”
“I didn’t think so. I thought it was great. I thought you were attacking the dignity of the man who was seeking the office.”
Dewey did not want to hear it. He had run an attack campaign for governor in 1938 and had lost. He had run an attack campaign for president in 1944 and had lost. His two campaigns for governor in 1942 and 1946 were different; Dewey had put forth an image of composed leadership and a focus on the job at hand. In those two campaigns, he had won. That was the kind of campaign he wanted to run in 1948, and his wife, Frances, strongly supported him on the matter. Polling data had confirmed the shrewdness of this strategy, revealing that, when Robert Taft and other Republican figures from the Eightieth Congress attacked Truman, the president only benefited. The public sympathized with him.
On the sixteenth and seventeenth of August, Dewey welcomed his campaign staff and VP candidate Earl Warren to the Albany mansion for two days of meetings to map out the strategy. Reporters were invited into jam-packed press conferences, throwing questions at the governor while Warren looked on quietly.
“Can you tell us when you start [the campaign]?” asked Earl Behrens of the San Francisco Chronicle.
“No definite date,” Dewey said.
“How much of the Communist program at home and abroad will be brought up?” asked another reporter.
“I will tell you better on November 2nd,” said Dewey.
* * *
The GOP candidate was no longer acting like a man running for president, but one who already was president.
In July Dewey held a press conference about the Berlin Blockade—how war could result from “the slightest mismanagement” of the crisis—and revealed that he was conducting daily phone conversations with his foreign affairs adviser John Foster Dulles, who was preparing to head to Paris to participate in United Nations negotiations on Palestine, Berlin, and more. It was as if Dewey was already running his own State Department. He had Senator Arthur Vandenberg, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, give testimony on camera as to the New York governor’s “thoroughly competent grasp of all our major foreign problems.”
There was a focus on public appearances to make Dewey look presidential. In August he headed up a group of honorary pallbearers at the funeral of New York Yankees star Babe Ruth, before a crowd of seventy-five thousand standing in the rain outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. At the Albany governor’s mansion, he invited motion-picture cameras to capture him in the mahogany-paneled Executive Chamber, speaking to his advisers. The footage could easily be mistaken for a man already in the Oval Office.
And always, there was the driving message of Dewey’s success managing the Empire State, a state bigger than many countries, with a far more disparate populace than existed anywhere else on earth. State-built convalescent centers for wounded veterans, state-subsidized housing for more than sixty thousand people, a scholarly department set up at Cornell University to study labor-management relations in an effort to find solutions to labor strikes before they occurred—all of this was part of the Dewey legacy, a legacy his publicity managers were conveying to Americans via all manner of communications.
Behind the scenes his staff was busy setting up the itinerary for his cross-country campaign tour and delving into statistical algorithms in hopes of finding every advantage they could over Harry Truman. Dewey’s campaign had identified that a total of seven voting districts in the 1946 midterm elections had swayed by the tiniest margin of 50 to 50.9 percent between Republican and Democrat, allowing them to funnel resources into those districts (two of them were in Truman’s home state of Missouri). They knew that ten additional districts had been swayed by the slightly larger margin of 51 to 51.9 percent (there were also two in Missouri).
Dewey asked Brownell to begin courting celebrity figures from theater, literature, and the arts, the biggest names who could appear with Dewey when he arrived in Los Angeles to speak a
t the Hollywood Bowl in mid-September. “Why shouldn’t we have some people, smart organizers, devote their full time to doing this and doing it well?” Dewey wrote Brownell on August 23. It was “a whale of an idea,” Dewey noted.
An even bigger one, however, was The Dewey Story. Campaign staff came up with a plan to make Dewey a Hollywood star himself; they hired Louis de Rochemont—writer and producer for the popular newsreel series The March of Time—to produce a short movie on Dewey. The campaign budgeted production costs of $35,000, plus additional money to pay for prints. De Rochemont promised to finish The Dewey Story in time to show it in theaters before feature films during the final two weeks leading up to November 2.
At the same time, executives from the massive Madison Avenue advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn reached out to all five major pollsters to interview them on their methods, as polls tended to get enormous publicity and were highly influential, especially to undecided voters. The Dewey team was creating the first-ever in-house polling unit. Four of these pollsters responded to questions about their process, and transcripts of these conversations were sent to Herbert Brownell at Dewey headquarters in Washington. Among the five major pollsters, only George Gallup refused to do the interview, but he did offer this statement: “Why does the Republican Committee want to spend any money? The results are a foregone conclusion.”
* * *
Truman was set to begin his campaigning in Detroit over Labor Day weekend, with a speech that would court organized labor. Dewey’s staff decided to wait and kick off the GOP campaign two weeks later. Instead of rebutting Truman himself in Detroit, Dewey was going to send a representative, and he chose Harold Stassen of Minnesota. When the phone call came in to Stassen from the Dewey campaign, Stassen was surprised.
“Why doesn’t Dewey answer Truman?” he asked.
“The Governor doesn’t want to start his campaign for another two weeks,” a Dewey aide answered.
Later Stassen’s aide Vic Johnston took a call from Dewey himself. Johnston reiterated the Stassen camp’s surprise at the request to have Stassen make the rebuttal to Truman in Detroit. Wasn’t there animosity between the Stassen and Dewey camps, following their clash in the primaries and at the national convention in Philadelphia?
“I’m the man who beat you in Wisconsin,” Johnston said, as he had managed Stassen’s Wisconsin primary campaign.
“That’s exactly why I want you,” Dewey answered.
18
“As for Me, I Intend to Fight!”
ON JULY 31, STROM THURMOND headed up the first official election-season States’ Rights Democratic Party rally, at a watermelon festival in Cherryville, North Carolina. Some five thousand people turned out on an uncomfortably humid day. Tucked deep into a rural backwater, Cherryville was home to cotton mills, farms, and old-school southern sentiment, a climate in which Thurmond’s message would hit home.
If the civil rights program of the president is enforced, Thurmond rallied his crowd, “the results in civil strife may be horrible beyond imagination. Lawlessness will be rampant. Chaos will prevail. Our streets will be unsafe. And there will be the greatest breakdown of law enforcement in the history of the nation. Let us tell them that in the South the intermingling of the races in our homes, in our schools and in our theaters is impractical and impossible . . . I did not risk my life on the beaches of Normandy to come back to this country, and sit idly by, while a bunch of hack politicians whittles away your heritage and mine. As for me, I intend to fight!”
Thurmond was determined to position his campaign as the last stand against a constitutional crisis. Federal encroachment on states’ ability to make their own laws would cause “a virtual revolution in the Southern States,” he said in Cherryville. As Thurmond put it in a letter to Governor Dewey: “The South’s fight is not being waged on the theory of white supremacy but on State sovereignty,” an issue of “vital importance not only to the South but to the entire Nation.” Still, it was the threat to segregation that drew a voracious response from Thurmond’s listeners.
Many were asking: Who was this man, Strom Thurmond, who was so suddenly making a name for himself on the national scene? Americans came to recognize Thurmond, with his broad, toothy smile and his shiny bald head, from media coverage of the southern governor. Readers of newspapers and magazines learned that he was newly married to a former Miss South Carolina—Jean Crouch, who at twenty-two was roughly half his age. To prove his athletic prowess, he had posed standing on his head for a Life magazine photographer on his wedding day, less than a year earlier.
He became known in the inner sanctum of American intelligence too; the special agent in charge of the Savannah, Georgia, FBI office, E. D. Mason, described the governor’s personality in detail in a 1948 memo to the FBI chief in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover. “Governor Thurmond is a thoroughly honest, reliable man,” wrote the special agent. “He cannot be bought financially. He is slightly sluggish mentally . . . The Governor has admitted that he did not aspire to the leadership of the States Rights Party, but that it was virtually thrust upon him . . . His political future in the State of South Carolina seems somewhat assured as evidenced by almost unanimous acclamation of his States Rights Program, which seems to be a result of resentment on the part of South Carolinians to interference by outside interests in what they consider purely local problems.”
The more Americans learned about Thurmond, the more it became clear that the history of segregation in the South could be illuminated through the family saga of this one man.
* * *
Thurmond was born the same year as Thomas Dewey—1902. But he came from a place so far removed from the Michigan where Dewey grew up, it might as well have been a different country. Thurmond hailed from Edgefield, South Carolina, and his political story begins with his father, John Thurmond, who was three years old when the Civil War ended in 1865. The Republican president Abraham Lincoln and his Union army had won; slavery was to be abolished, and newly freed male slaves in the South were to be granted civil rights, including the right to vote. To ensure that these laws were respected in places like South Carolina, Union troops remained during the period of Reconstruction, led federally by a Republican administration.
In the 1870s, a paramilitary group called the Red Shirts, whose members were spread out across the southern United States, and especially in South Carolina and Mississippi, began a campaign to restore white supremacy, to destroy the Reconstruction, and to put the Democratic Party back in power. In Edgefield, a prominent Democrat and Red Shirt leader named Benjamin Tillman became a leader of a white supremacist movement. Like many white politicians in the South, Tillman—who had lost an eye to illness as a teenager—viewed the Republican Party as an instrument of northern oppression. Tillman’s white supremacist views matched those of thousands of white people living in the South at the time, and his voice became their voice. “The struggle in which we were engaged meant more than life or death,” he said of the Red Shirt campaign to reestablish white rule in 1876. “It involved everything we held dear, Anglo-Saxon civilization included.”
Key to the traditions of white supremacy was the suppression of the black vote, and the black vote at the time was overwhelmingly for the Republican Party (the party of Lincoln). The paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party in South Carolina created a “Plan of the Campaign” to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. “Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro,” the plan read in part, “by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine how he may best accomplish it.”
The year the Red Shirt movement crystallized, the nation saw one of its most controversial presidential elections, and one that would have a profound effect on the racial and political identity of both the South and the Thurmond family. The election was so close it became a matter of bitter dispute. The Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio trailed the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York by nineteen elector
al votes, but the results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were unclear. Both sides claimed victory, leading to a crisis in leadership. Congress created an electoral commission to solve the problem, made up of members of the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court. Ultimately, a deal was struck: All of the disputed electoral votes from these three southern states were given to the Republican Hayes, who won the presidency 185–184, and in exchange, Hayes agreed to withdraw the federal troops occupying the South, thus ending the period of Reconstruction.
The so-called Compromise of 1877 had two major consequences: (1) White supremacy returned to the South, and (2) politically, the Democratic Party controlled the South. The South became a single-party system—the so-called Solid South, right up until 1948 and the Dixiecrat revolt. White politicians created laws that made it difficult or impossible for black Americans to vote in many southern states, and the federal government left lawmaking to the lawmakers in these states.
Meanwhile, riding on the coattails of the Compromise of 1877, “Pitchfork” Benjamin Tillman cemented his political power, ultimately becoming governor of South Carolina. His personal lawyer was Strom Thurmond’s father, John Thurmond.
John Thurmond had designs on a political career himself. One day five years before Strom was born, John Thurmond got in an argument over a political appointment, and he shot and killed a man named Willie Harris. A jury acquitted him of murder, determining that he had acted in self-defense, and that the victim was raging drunk at the time. However, the killing derailed Thurmond’s political career. Strom would grow up to achieve the political stardom that was denied his father. “He was my idol,” Strom later said. “I tried to imitate him as much as I could.”
