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
