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 during 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
