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“Dewey’s Hat Is Tossed into Ring”
ON JUNE 12, 1947, GOVERNOR Dewey stepped off a train at the Mineola, Long Island, station. At a fund-raising luncheon at Jones Beach for five hundred Republican county officials, one of Dewey’s closest advisers, J. Russell Sprague, introduced him.
“We are here to pledge our loyalty to him as a friend, as a great Governor, as a leader of our party, and as the next President of the United States.”
The crowd went over the top as Dewey rose to his feet. New Yorkers loved the idea of having a New Yorker back in the White House again.
“That was a charming and overgenerous introduction,” the governor said. “But I would like to assure Mr. Sprague again in public as I have in private that I am happy where I am. I like the company and my friends and I would not lightly give up those opportunities.”
Who believed him? Not many. The next day’s New York Times ran a front-page headline, “Dewey’s Hat Is Tossed into Ring.”
Over the next month, a “Dewey for President” campaign began to crystallize, without any fanfare or even any statement from the man himself. The incipient campaign was like a bullet in a chamber; the question was when to pull the trigger.
The governor’s old friend Herb Brownell set up campaign headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to complement the Washington offices of the Republican National Committee, and Brownell began to recruit a team. There was Sprague, Long Island’s most powerful Republican politico, and the strategist Edwin Jaeckle, former chair of the New York State Republican Committee and still a powerhouse in the state. Along with Brownell, Jaeckle had guided Dewey’s gubernatorial campaigns. He would later describe his work with Dewey in these words: “I was like a trainer with a good horse.”
Brownell started to rebuild the party from the ground up. “Reorganization of the national party machinery was long overdue,” he recorded. He traveled by train from state to state to personally acquaint himself with local party leaders, so they would cooperate, in his words, “in building a new party structure.” He aimed to consolidate power, to weave the various localities into a highly coordinated centralized juggernaut.
Brownell stepped down from his chairmanship of the Republican National Committee to manage Dewey’s campaign. Yet the field of potentially strong candidates was growing crowded. Republicans believed they would take the White House, probably for the next eight years, but securing the nomination looked to be a harder fight than defeating Truman on November 2, 1948. Liberal and conservative factions were rivaling for control of the party. The conservative faction—in step with the Republican ideology of the 1920s and ’30s as personified by Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—wanted to curb governmental intervention in the economy, and abroad. The liberal faction of the party—as personified by Theodore Roosevelt, and now Thomas Dewey—embraced the power of the federal government and progressive domestic policies.
The conservatives were led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft was a Cincinnati lawyer and Washington royalty—the son of the twenty-seventh president, William Howard Taft. The younger Taft had come of age in the White House. He was the product of the best schools in the nation, a Harvard Law man who had cemented himself at the center of the conservative coalition on Capitol Hill. Taft was a fighter and enormously respected. “For many voters, especially independents,” according to Brownell, “ ‘Republican’ and ‘Taft’ were synonymous.”
As a liberal Republican, Dewey supported the Marshall Plan and internationalist foreign policy. Taft threatened to create an “Anti-Marshall Plan Committee,” arguing in a 1947 speech, “The solution of many of the European problems must rest with their own governments . . . Why should we make ourselves responsible for something entirely beyond our control?”
Dewey also supported Truman’s Universal Military Training plan. Taft loathed the idea—too much government.
As governor of New York, Dewey had a proven record of spending on social programs. Those who mocked the idea of a “welfare state” were “very clumsy Republicans,” Dewey said. “There has never been a responsible government which did not have the welfare of its people at heart,” he had said. “Anybody who thinks that an attack on the fundamental idea of security and welfare is appealing to people generally is living in the Middle Ages.” Taft fought for less federal spending at almost every turn, and blamed the current inflation crisis on High Tax Harry’s spending.
The only major policies that both Dewey and Taft consistently supported were civil rights and desegregation, and a homeland for the Jews. In other words, Dewey agreed with Truman on many of the major issues.
Taft launched his campaign early, announcing his run at a press conference on October 24, 1947, in Columbus, Ohio. He was fifty-eight years old. Taft offered a short list of the issues that would be front and center in the 1948 election, and number one on his list echoed the conservative ideology of his father: “The general issue [is] between people who want more federal power and action and the people who want less.” Taft, of course, wanted less.
“There will be violent differences of opinion,” he warned of the months ahead.
By the time he announced his candidacy, his team had already booked nearly 160 hotel rooms in Philadelphia for the Republican National Convention, where the 1948 GOP candidate would be crowned.
Taft and Dewey were the heavyweights, but there were also dark horses in the making, including General Douglas MacArthur, the military commander of occupied Japan. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst spoke for many when he wrote in a letter in 1948, “I think we are going to have war with Russia. I think MacArthur is the only President who could avert war with Russia and, if it could not be averted, I think MacArthur would be the only President who could win.”
The most formidable dark horse, however, was Harold Stassen. At forty, Stassen was even younger than Dewey, and his politics put him in the
