Roughly two weeks later, the Eightieth Congress’s special “Turnip Day” session ended, with almost no new legislation on the books. Congress approved a $65 million loan to create a permanent home for the United Nations, in Manhattan. Two bills reached the president’s desk—one on housing, one on inflation. While Truman called them inadequate, he signed them both, and the fight over the special session’s legacy began. At the conclusion of the session, a reporter asked the president, “Would you say it was a do nothing session, Mr. President?”
“I think that’s a good name for the 80th Congress.”
The name stuck, and Truman would be hammering on the “do-nothing Congress” for the next three months.
Truman later admitted that he knew Congress would get almost nothing accomplished in the special session. “I felt justified in calling the Congress back to Washington to prove to the people whether the Republican platform really meant anything or not,” he wrote in his memoirs. Republicans attacked the administration, saying the special session was a waste of money for American taxpayers. Republican senator Styles Bridges called Truman “a petulant Ajax from the Ozarks.” One columnist, Fred Othman of the Atlanta Constitution, described the session as “the most expensive advertising campaign in the history of the vegetable business,” as Americans were now desirous of turnips as never before.
“They sure are in a stew and mad as wet hens,” Truman wrote Bess in Missouri, regarding the “ ‘Hypercrits’ known as Republicans.” “If I can make them madder, maybe they’ll do the job the old gods used to put on the Greeks and Romans . . . My best to everybody, kiss my baby [Margaret], lots of love to you, Harry.”
17
“What Exciting Times You Are Having!”
THE MONTH OF JULY FOUND Thomas Dewey at Dapplemere, his fifty-two-cow dairy farm outside Pawling, New York. Dewey had owned this farm since 1938 (he’d put $3,000 down on the $30,000 property). He roamed the rolling hills with his two boys, making campfires and cooking eggs over open flames in a cast-iron skillet. “I am having a ‘holiday’ which consists of about two-thirds work at my farm,” Dewey wrote one friend. Meanwhile his press team made the most of his vacation, putting out statements on the candidate’s farming expertise, about the Dewey farm’s “principal innovations in artificial insemination and pen stabling,” on how the bacteria count in the milk at Dewey’s farm was “the lowest of any of the dairy farms in the State.” Dewey needed to keep farmers voting Republican, as they traditionally did.
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
