Ghost of Dewey Hovers Over GOP’s Philadelphia Convention

It was a summer to remember.

The Russians blockaded Berlin and the world dangled on the brink of war as the United States launched a massive airlift of supplies. To escape the tension, Americans listened to the crooning of Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra on newfangled long-playing records. “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” by Alfred C. Kinsey topped the bestseller lists and helped touch off what became a revolution in sexual mores.

The year was 1948, and then as now Republicans were preparing to hold their national convention in Philadelphia to nominate the governor of a big state who they were optimistic would win back the White House after years of Democratic control.

The GOP has not held a convention in Philadelphia since then, and in view of what happened in 1948 it’s not hard to understand why it took the party more than half a century to return.

Republicans emerged from that long-ago gathering united behind New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who proceeded to snatch defeat from the jaws of supposedly certain victory. While Dewey ran a lackluster campaign, embattled President Harry S. Truman barnstormed across the country, “giving ‘em Hell.” That November, Truman scored probably the most dramatic upset in U.S. political history.

“Tom Dewey has haunted the Republican Party since 1948,” said Dewey biographer Richard Norton Smith. And he believes that as the GOP prepares to gather in Philadelphia in three weeks to anoint Texas Gov. George W. Bush as its 2000 presidential nominee, the party must guard against the danger of history repeating itself.

In assessing their bitter ’48 defeat, some Republicans blamed the abrasive partisanship their congressional leadership had adopted in dealing with Truman. Therein lies a possible lesson for Bush, who like Dewey must answer for the actions of a GOP-controlled Congress that tried to oust President Clinton from office through impeachment and has been at loggerheads with his administration on key policy issues.

A negative image for the current Congress could turn out to be the Texan’s Achilles’ heel, said Smith.

Indeed, Bush’s Democratic foe, Vice President Al Gore, plans to focus this week on attacking what he calls a “do-nothing-for-the-people Congress.”

Truman Written Off as ‘a Gone Goose’

The Republicans were not alone in convening in Philadelphia 52 years ago. Democrats met there as well to nominate Truman, the former vice president who had ascended to the presidency when Franklin D. Roosevelt died a few months into his fourth term. Also holding its convention that year in Philadelphia was the leftist Progressive Party, which picked as its nominee another of FDR’s former vice presidents, Henry Wallace.

But the spotlight was on the Republicans because it appeared so clear they were going to win. Few political analysts--Democrat or Republican--disagreed with Clare Booth Luce when she told the GOP convention that Truman was “a gone goose.”

As David McCullough wrote in his acclaimed 1992 biography of Truman, “. . . for all the change and tumult of the times, among the few accepted certainties was that it would be a Republican year.”

Voters had signaled their discontent with Truman in the 1946 congressional elections, overturning Democratic majorities that had long ruled the House and Senate and putting the GOP in charge. Then, too, Wallace’s third-party candidacy seemed likely to rob Truman of much of the liberal support he needed for victory in the fall.

Even Democrats conceded that in the 46-year-old Dewey, the Republicans had a formidable challenger. He had earned a national reputation as a racket-busting prosecutor when he was in his early 30s. In 1942, he won the governorship of New York, and in 1944 he gained the GOP presidential nomination.

With World War II in its last stages, voters were disinclined to replace Roosevelt. But Dewey bounced back quickly from his presidential defeat, winning reelection to the New York governorship in 1946 by the largest margin in the state’s history.

True, Dewey had his flaws. To some, he seemed too eager to get ahead. When he first sought the presidency--in 1940 at the ripe old age of 38--acerbic New Dealer Harold Ickes wisecracked that Dewey had “thrown his diaper in the ring.”

He was, in today’s idiom, vertically challenged, short enough so that he sometimes stood on a dictionary while giving a speech. He sported a thin mustache, which to some gave him a fussy look. Television was making its debut at the nominating conventions in 1948, and at least a few Republicans fretted the cameras might not be kind to Dewey. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the tart-tongued daughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt, had likened Dewey’s appearance to that of “the little man on the wedding cake.”

But such misgivings were swept away by the manner in which Dewey lived up to his reputation for ruthless efficiency by taking command of the convention and rapidly recruiting the additional delegates he needed to assure his nomination. “The CIA were amateurs compared to the Dewey people,” recalled an aide to Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft, Dewey’s main adversary. “They knew where your bank loans were, who you did business with, who you slept with.”

Dewey embellished his convention triumph by persuading California Gov. Earl Warren (later chief justice of the Supreme Court) to be his running mate. That gave the GOP what national chairman Hugh Scott called “a dreamboat ticket,” and darkened the already bleak outlook for the Democrats when they assembled in the same city three weeks later.

Dewey Ignores Underdog’s Bite

The Democratic situation seemed to go from bad to worse when liberals pushed through a strong platform plank on civil rights. Enraged Southern Democrats bolted the party and rallied behind the presidential candidacy of then-Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on the States Rights ticket.

Even attempts at ceremony defied the Democrats. Several dozen pigeons released at the convention as symbolic “doves of peace” frantically flew toward the ceiling, fluttered around the hall and inevitably splattered the delegates.

As a final blow, delegates ignored Truman’s desire for a youthful running mate, instead selecting Kentucky Sen. Alben Barkley, 70, as his vice presidential candidate.

All seemed lost as Truman marched jauntily to the podium at 2 a.m. to accept the nomination. He immediately displayed the fire and fight that would mark the rest of his campaign.

“Sen. Barkley and I are going to win this election and make these Republicans like it,” he said. “And don’t you forget it.”

He then unveiled his masterstroke, announcing that he was calling Congress back into special session to deal with a host of problems. As Truman expected, the session produced no legislative results. But it did provide Truman with a convenient target, the “do-nothing Republican Congress,” which he proceeded to lambaste as he whistle-stopped around the country.

Understandably confident, Dewey decided not to dignify Truman’s attacks by responding to them. Instead, he devoted himself to glittering generalities and pleas for national unity.

On election day, the GOP paid a heavy price for Dewey’s complacency. Not only did Truman hold on to the White House, but the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress.

Dewey, for his part, managed to speak of his own plight with humor. It reminded him, he said, of the mourner who imbibed too heavily at a wake and woke up in a coffin. “If I am alive, what am I doing in this coffin?” the man asked himself. “If I am dead, why did I have to go to the bathroom?”

It was just the sort of human touch which, if displayed during the ’48 campaign, might have offset Truman’s blistering attacks and given Dewey and the GOP the victory they had been so sure was already in the bag.