Thomas Dewey: The Titanic Little Man Beyond Just “Dewey Defeats Truman”

Thomas Dewey in Bakersfield, CA, 1948. Photo by Frank E. Moore, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

To the extent that America remembers Thomas E. Dewey at all, it’s mostly as a punchline. As I worked my way through Richard Norton Smith’s 1982 biography of the man,¹ friends would ask what I was reading. “Who?” was the inevitable response after I’d told them. “Dewey Defeats Truman,” I’d say, and that they recognized. “The little man on the wedding cake!” one of my colleagues offered, a reference to the (perhaps apocryphal) famous barb about Dewey from Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, herself more inclined to support Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. But Tom Dewey was a titanic figure in his day, and his legendary battles with Taft in particular helped to shape the Republican Party for the duration of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

As I read Avi Woolf’s exceptional recent article on Taft, also a regrettably little-remembered figure whose influence continues to reverberate unseen in his party despite his comparative obscurity among your modern average American, I could not help but reflect on the profound influence that both he and Dewey had on the Republican Party in particular and on American (and world) politics in general. Taft is often described as principled, and Dewey as pragmatic. Dewey was certainly a pragmatist in many ways, but the suggestion that he was unprincipled is wholly without foundation. He was, indeed, a man of deep, abiding principle, and it structured the way he approached his work, both in the law and in public life.

Thomas Dewey cut his teeth as a prosecutor in New York City during the 1930s, holding office during the Republican Party’s leanest period and bringing numerous members of the mafia to heel. His reputation was so sterling that it seemed inevitable that he’d run for governor, and maybe president, and in 1938 at the age of 36, Dewey lost an exceptionally close race for the governorship to Democrat Herbert Lehman. He tried again four years later, successfully winning the first of three terms. Dewey as governor could be ruthless. He wielded executive power with aplomb and relished his role, and he was not above leaning hard on members of his own party to get his way. After flirting with the GOP nomination in 1940, Dewey received the GOP’s highest honor in 1944 when he was saddled with the unenviable task of taking on Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he sought an unprecedented fourth term in the midst of World War II.

Dewey, who was long the leader of the party’s so-called “Eastern Establishment,” and in contrast to some elements within the GOP, believed strongly in an interventionist foreign policy, and he envisioned a world in which America would play a central role in international affairs. He was a strong backer of various international organizations, and his inclination towards liberalism in foreign relations was one of the things that set him apart from the leader of the GOP’s conservative wing, Robert Taft. This did not stop him from criticizing the incumbent administration in the conduct of foreign policy, however, and the same was true with respect to Dewey’s willingness to assail Roosevelt on issues of domestic policy. While Thomas Dewey is largely castigated today, and was then, as one of what were once called the “Me, Too” Republicans (i.e., Republicans who simply said they largely agreed with what the Democrats wanted to do), he was vociferously opposed to much of the New Deal, believing it was wildly corrupt and a horribly inefficient use of public money. Dewey gave a blistering speech undressing Roosevelt and his administration in the final months of the campaign, though he would later come to regret it, feeling he had allowed himself to be dragged into the mud. Roosevelt dispatched Dewey with relative ease (though Dewey did come the closest of any of FDR’s opponents, he only walked away with 99 electoral votes), remarking to an aide as he retired for the evening after the result was in hand, “I still think he [Dewey] is a son of a bitch.”²

Four years later, with Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, floundering, Dewey managed to wrangle the nomination for himself again, though he had a tougher fight this time. He, of course, had to contend with Taft and his steadfast supporters once more. But there were others, like former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, vying for control of the establishment wing. Dewey famously debated Stassen on the radio in May of 1948 on the question of whether the Communist Party of the U.S.A. ought to be outlawed. Stassen argued in the affirmative, with Dewey in the negative. With anti-Communist sentiment high (though not quite so high as it would get in the days of McCarthyism), Dewey’s position was somewhat of a risky one, but he conducted himself exceptionally well and was largely perceived on the basis of public sentiment to have won. “You can’t shoot an idea with a gun,” Dewey argued. He strongly believed that to outlaw Communism in America was not to truly banish it, but simply to move it underground. Better to let it see the light of day that it might be extinguished by the sun’s rays.

When he secured the nomination, Thomas Dewey acknowledged his defeated opponents, particularly Taft, in a call for unity. “You have given here in this hall a moving and dramatic proof of how Americans, who honestly differ, close ranks and move forward for the nation’s wellbeing, shoulder to shoulder.” He went on. “Let me assure you, that beginning next January 20, there will be teamwork in the government of the United States of America,”³ a clear reference to Truman’s inability or unwillingness to work with what the President called a “do-nothing” Republican Congress. Considering the GOP had been returned to a majority in Congress for the first time since the Hoover Administration only two years prior, and given Truman’s unpopularity and the widespread perception that he was not up to the job (“To err is Truman” was a popular saying in those days), one would be forgiven for thinking, as many did, that Dewey would waltz into the White House.

Of course, things didn’t turn out that way. Dewey himself sensed slippage in the final weeks and months of the campaign, worrying that he should go more on the offensive. His instincts were to play defense, believing that he had a lead and that only a mistake on his own part could cost him the election. That partisan speech attacking Roosevelt shortly before the ’44 election, he felt strongly, had been a huge political mistake. Nevertheless, doubt creeped in, especially as Truman turned up the heat on a barnstorming whistlestop tour upon which he secured the nickname “Give ‘em hell Harry.” Still, Dewey’s advisors were largely consistent: don’t get into the mud with Truman, they said nearly to a person. And so he didn’t. And the pollsters stopped polling, feeling the result was largely not in doubt.

Republicans gathered in New York at the Hotel Roosevelt went from elated to anxious to despondent over the course of several hours that night in November of 1948. Tom’s son, Tom, Jr., remembered his parents waking him and his brother John the next morning. “Well, we lost,” the younger Dewey recalls his father saying. “Maybe for all of us as a family, that wasn’t the worst thing that could happen,” the Governor continued.⁴ And if Dewey harbored regret over 1948, he never talked about it.

The election left Taft’s supporters feeling somewhat vindicated despite the political losses sustained by the GOP, which was returned to the minority after only two brief years in charge. Dewey had lost, they largely felt, because he was too accommodationist. He was too liberal, too progressive. Roosevelt had opened the door to socialism, many felt, and Dewey seemed content to march right along.

The notion was preposterous. It is true that Thomas Dewey was a liberal in many ways, but that connoted very different things than it does today. He believed in robust governmental support, but he also believed in efficiency and fiscal discipline. A cornerstone of his arguments against Roosevelt and Truman was that they spent with reckless abandon, not minding where the money was going or even if it was achieving its stated purpose, and that their programs were awash in corruption as a result. Dewey provided many more public services in New York during his time as governor, but he did it while cutting taxes and streamlining government. He wasn’t a socialist or anything close to one. He was a committed capitalist, but he believed that the system of capitalism could not be sustained unless people were actively taken care of. Essentially, Dewey believed that the country had chosen progressivism emphatically and without hesitation. It was what they wanted in those days and they made it abundantly clear in election after election. Dewey believed the only choice was to give it to them, but in a way that spent their money wisely and efficiently and that avoided the repetitiveness induced by a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. “He certainly would’ve approved of Ronald Reagan,” Tom, Jr. said some quarter of a century after his father died of a heart attack in 1971, eight days shy of his 69th birthday. “I don’t think he’d have been happy about what happened to the deficit in the 80’s,” the younger Dewey said, but went on to note that “he [Dewey, Sr.] would be very strongly in the camp of those who favor smaller government and returning whatever governmental functions have to be done to the lowest possible level.”⁵ He’s to be praised as well for his steadfast support of civil rights, an area in which he spearheaded considerable progress during his tenure as governor, helping to usher through an anti-discrimination measure that provided genuine legal recourse for those discriminated against in the workplace. “No man shall be deprived of the chance to earn his bread by reason of the circumstances of his birth,” Dewey said in hailing the legislation.⁶ Yes, Tom Dewey was a pragmatist. But that does not mean he was without principle. He believed intensely in America and in the system of free enterprise, but he had a different way of going about securing these ideals than did some of his more conservative opponents.

Dewey’s days in politics did not end with his loss to Truman. He reluctantly agreed to run for a third term as governor in 1950, which he easily secured, and in 1952 he turned his eyes again to the Republican nomination, but not for himself. His aim this time was to deny the nomination to Taft. Taft himself acknowledged that 1952 was his last shot, but his opponents in the Eastern Establishment, which was still very much led by Dewey, were intent on keeping the nomination away from the conservative Ohioan. The Easterners felt that Taft was sure to lose, believing he was far too conservative for the median voter in America. They turned their eyes to Dwight Eisenhower, a man whose politics were largely unknown, attempting to coax him into running for the Republican nomination. The Democrats dreamed of Eisenhower as well. Truman had apparently offered Ike the nomination in 1948, fearing that he was otherwise headed for defeat. But Eisenhower left politics well enough alone, finally revealing during the Establishment’s courtship of him for the GOP nomination that he considered himself a Republican.

Thomas Dewey fought hard and dealt harshly with New York’s GOP delegation as he maneuvered to secure the presidential nomination for Eisenhower, and once again, he was successful. Taft’s presidential hopes came well and truly to an end, and the General himself would go on to defeat Adlai Stevenson with relative ease, returning Republicans to a majority in Congress (which would also prove short-lived) and securing the White House for the party for the first time since Herbert Hoover. Dewey was delighted. Taft, for his part, came to truly like and admire the new President, but their partnership would be tragically short-lived. Taft was diagnosed with cancer shortly into Eisenhower’s term and would die prematurely in 1953 at the age of 63.

Though the rivalry between Taft and Dewey had been heated, Dewey nevertheless went surreptitiously to the hospital to visit and pay respect to his old rival. The two chatted for half an hour, but whatever was said in that room died with them. Later, Taft would joke to his nurse, “Tom came around to see whether I am really out of the running.”⁷

Dewey had the satisfaction of seeing the Republicans win two more presidential elections (he was even encouraged in 1964 to seek the nomination himself, but he quickly dismissed the idea), though after 1952 they would never again win a majority in Congress in his lifetime. After his time as governor came to an end, he returned to private practice, allegedly twice declining appointments to the Supreme Court (one offer coming from Eisenhower and the other from Richard Nixon). He was just about to return from a golfing trip in Miami when he was found dead in his hotel room, dressed and packed to leave.

It is regrettable that both he and his rival Taft are so unknown to so much of the modern public. Their rivalry helped to define the Republican Party throughout the Cold War, and we hear its echoes in the GOP even today. There is much to admire, and to criticize, about both. But there is also a great deal to learn.

1. Thomas E. Dewey and His Times: The First Full-Scale Biography of the Maker of the Modern Republican Party. New York: Simon and Schuster. Much of the factual information herein was originally researched by Smith. See as well C-SPAN. 28 October 2011. “Thomas E. Dewey, Presidential Contender.” Online at https://www.c-span.org/video/?301275-1/contenders-thomas-e-dewey-1944-1948.
2. Smith 1982
3. YouTube. “1948 Thomas Dewey Republican Convention Acceptance Speech.” Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGONleUwb6A.
4. C-SPAN. 29 July 1996. “Thomas Dewey Reflections.” Online at https://www.c-span.org/video/?74257-1/thomas-dewey-reflections.
5. C-SPAN. 29 July 1996. “Thomas Dewey Reflections.” Online at https://www.c-span.org/video/?74257-1/thomas-dewey-reflections.
6. Smith 1982
7. Smith 1982