Truman(52)

‘Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make the Republicans like it—don’t you forget it. We will do that because they are wrong and we are right.’15

The lash was almost as harsh on the shoulders of the somnolent, warring, defeatist delegates as on the despised Republican Party ‘of special privilege’. It was not a visionary general offering his legions new frontiers or a freedom from fear. It was a sergeant-major telling his squad to get off their backsides. It worked rather well. They sat up. They listened. They cheered. For a moment they almost thought they might win.

Truman had one skilful ploy in his speech. The Republicans meeting in the same hall three weeks before, had adopted a liberal candidate and a notably liberal platform, substantially at odds with the record of the 80th Congress. If Truman was going to make a success of his strategy of portraying them as a party of reactionary ogres he had to expose the contradiction and keep that Congress to the fore. So he announced that he was using his presidential powers to summon it back for a special fifteen day session on July 26th. During these fifteen days he invited the Congress to do a good four years’ work: to deal with rising prices, the housing problem, education, civil rights, and to provide for an increased minimum wage, a national health programme and extended social security benefits. He topped off this extravagant ice-cream sundae of satirical propaganda by offering a ready-made disparaging nickname for the special session. July 26th, he said, was called ‘Turnip Day’ in Missouri. A local jingle advised people to ‘sow your turnips wet or dry’ about then, but most of the few who knew it thought it referred to the 25th rather than the 26th.

However both the name and the idea served their purposes. It was a fairly outrageous use of executive powers which produced predictably exaggerated howls of execration from the other side. ‘Never in the history of American politics has a Chief Executive stooped so low,’ pontificated Senator Brooks of Illinois. The ploy was good, rather undignified, partisan propaganda. However, Truman was not running on non-partisan dignity. He left that to Governor Dewey, the young statesman, still well under fifty, again as in 1944 the Republican candidate.

Dewey had to fight harder for the nomination in 1948 than in 1944. It was regarded as a much more worthwhile prize, an almost certain key to the White House. He had two serious rivals. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, son of a president, effective party leader in the Senate, disdainful of the tricks of political packaging but widely respected and even revered, the core and conscience of the Republican Party; and Harold Stassen of Minnesota who had made himself something of a boy wonder as a successful governor in his early thirties, who was as liberal and internationalist as Dewey, over whom he physically towered, and a great deal more genial.

However, Dewey, whatever he lacked in warmth and stature, had a beautifully oiled machine and once he had decisively beaten Stassen in the Oregon primary, both in debate and votes, looked the favourite, although not irresistibly so. He was ahead on the first two ballots and won on a landslide on the third. Earl Warren, Governor of California and future Chief Justice, was unanimously chosen as vice-presidential candidate. The Convention was one of the best organized in American history. There was enough uncertainty to create interest, but not enough bitterness to leave dangerous wounds. Few doubted that it was a prelude to victory.

The ticket, with New York and California, was excellently balanced geographically, much better than the Democratic one with Missouri and Kentucky. But it was not balanced ideologically. Warren was as liberal as Dewey. He was also as bland.7 However there was nowhere else for right-wing Republicans to go. The strain on their loyalties did not begin to approach that needed for a break. The ideological splits and the prospects of the erosion of votes were all within the Democratic Party.

Dewey behaved throughout the campaign with dignity and decency. He also behaved with complacency. He was totally dedicated to being President, but at least equally dedicated to being a good one. He was uninterested in collecting cheap plaudits or scoring demagogic points on the way. This was the good side of his somewhat cold personality. If it was true, as a New York Republican lady was reputed to have said, that it was difficult to decide which was the chillier experience, having Tom Dewey ignore you or shake you by the hand, it was also true that he was intellectually honest and rarely stooped to conquer.8 His most brazen demagogic point during the 1948 campaign was to claim that the Republicans would not have to spend a lot of time and money rooting Communists out of the government because they would not have them in in the first place. This elipsis apart, his pronouncements on how to deal with internal Communism were impeccable (’You can’t shoot ideas with a gun’ ‘We will not jail anybody for what he thinks or believes’), and a model which his successors would have done well to follow. The principal lesson which he drew from his 1944 joust with Roosevelt was that he did better when he behaved as a statesman and worse when, exceptionally, he took the low road, notably in a vituperative Oklahoma City speech.9