Flashback: Dewey-Stassen Debate, 1948

“To outlaw the communist party would be recognized everyplace on earth as a surrender by the great United States, to the methods of totalitarianism. Stripped to its naked essentials, this is nothing but the methods of Hitler and Stalin. It is thought control borrowed from the Japanese war leadership. It's an attempt to beat down ideas with a club.”—New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, May 17, 1948, in the first live electronic media debate, in which he and his opponent, former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen faced off on a single issue: “Should the American Communist Party be banned?”

Fighting off a nasty cold and pressed by work obligations, I blogged less extensively than I would have liked a few weeks ago. One event slipped through the cracks then—the Dewey-Stassen debate just before the Oregon GOP Presidential primary. 

I didn't want to forget it, however. It deserves more attention than it has received this year, both for what it represented in American electoral history and as a possible turning point in the Cold War.

The debate is important for another reason: it featured two rivals whose images not long thereafter became frozen in stereotypes: Dewey, the cold "Man on the Wedding Cake" who lost a race he should have won handily against Harry S. Truman, and Stassen, the shameless, clueless, perennial Presidential sweepstakes loser. 

At the time of their clash, however, these men were viewed as credible candidates, even Presidential timber.

In the masterly historical thriller Hour of the Cat, Peter Quinn depicts Dewey as a kind of proto-Guiliani: bruising and charm-challenged. That characterization is, I’d have to say, inarguable. But in the following episode, at least, he displayed another side to his character that doesn’t get enough recognition.

Formerly a prosecutor who, like Guiliani more recently, parlayed indictments of underworld figures into a political career, Dewey soon contracted the New York Governor's Disease: the sudden itch to raise his sights to the highest office in the land. (I'm indebted for the identification of the disease's symptoms, though not its name, to Peter Quinn.) 

He was considered the odds-on favorite after having won his battle stripes as FDR's last Presidential rival, and had compiled a respected record in Albany.

Called the nation's "boy governor" after winning the Minnesota gubernatorial race in 1939, then re-elected twice, Stasssen joined the Navy in 1943, eventually becoming chief of staff for Admiral William F. Halsey. He served with distinction as part of the American delegation to the first UN Conference at San Francisco, where he not only helped write the UN Charter but was voted the most effective delegate. In the early going of the 1948 Presidential election, he pulled off several upset victories over Dewey, with polls indicating he could beat Harry Truman in a head-to-head contest.

But, with Dewey pulling out all the stops in the run-up to the Oregon primary, the Midwesterner made a crucial error by challenging the New Yorker to a debate. 

Unlike other debates before and since, this one was confined to a single topic of all-too-real importance: the constitutional question of whether Communism should be outlawed. Stassen took the "pro" position; Dewey, the "con."

The debate was broadcast on the KEX-ABC radio station in Portland. No precise count exists on the number of listeners, but with 900 audio stations nationwide carrying the debate, the estimates ranged from 40 to 90 million people. Telephone operators claimed later that long-distance calls dropped by 25% during the broadcast.

Dewey’s opening statement packed the kind of roundhouse punch that might leave its recipient technically standing, but awfully woozy. Listeners couldn't see Stassen's lack of comfort, the way that TV viewers witnessed Richard Nixon sweating in his first debate in 1960 with John F. Kennedy, but his shaky tone gave the game away.

Why did Stassen perform so badly? Admittedly, Dewey was a skillful prosecutor used to making cogent statements to audiences. But I think Stassen might have, in his heart of hearts, found this cause not to his liking.

Remember that Stassen was considered the heir apparent of the Theodore Roosevelt brand of progressivism. During the campaign, he advocated federal funds for housing, limited regulation of labor, international cooperation, and adjustment of federal taxes and spending to prevent boom-or-bust swings in the economy. As leader of the American Baptist Convention, he would join the civil rights March on Washington in August 1963.

In other words, Stassen’s stance in this debate was not really characteristic of most of the rest of his career. You have to wonder if he felt he needed to placate what he viewed as the mainstream in his party at the time. (After all, he must have thought, he’d not only knock out Dewey but even outpoint the conservative wing’s favorite, Senator Robert Taft.)

Perhaps because the contest involved a pair of losers—Dewey, the two-time Presidential loser, and Stassen, the uber-loser of them all (running not only for President—nine times!—but also governor of Minnesota and Pennsylvania)—this event has been mostly ignored.

One publication that, to its credit, did not neglect the event was Esquire Magazine, which, in the 1980s, in a monster retrospective issue that I can no longer locate, included an article on the debate.

Camelot chronicler Arthur Schlesinger also took notice. In an interview with The New York Times in 2000, the venerable historian agreed with columnist Walter Lippmann’s remark that if Dewey had beaten Truman, there’d have been no Joe McCarthy.

“Dewey wasn't a bad fellow,” Schlesinger observed. “He was rather enlightened….Although a Republican, Dewey was not a reactionary. And had he won, the politics of revenge which played a large role in the McCarthy years might have subsided.”

The 19th-century historian George Bancroft, I read somewhere once, voted Democratic on every page. The same might also be said of Schlesinger, whose reputation was made with accounts of the Jackson and FDR Presidencies, even before he became the court historian of the Kennedys.

There’s a certain brand of historian who doesn’t have a nice thing to say about a Republican until he’s dead. Sean Wilentz, a longtime defender of the Clintons, is one such individual, offering, in The Age of Reagan, some surprisingly kind words about how the latter transformed his party and the nation. 

(My own take on The Gipper: He was manifestly right about the intrinsic evil of the Soviet regime, but his part in its downfall has been exaggerated by his partisans, and the economic gains made during his Presidency would not be so fondly recalled now had not successor George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced his jaw-breakingly-large deficit.)

It does make you wonder about why such historians can’t be a bit more objective and nuanced while the objects of their retrospective upgrading are still in office, or, at least, alive to appreciate it. But let’s let that pass and accept the spirit of charity that has belatedly overtaken them.

Let’s consider Schlesinger’s proposition about Dewey for a second. How well does it hold up? And what did Dewey’s triumph over Stassen in Oregon accomplish?

* It gave the upper hand to the internationalist wing of the GOP over the isolationist faction. Both Dewey and Stassen appealed to elements of this same group, particularly in their reactions to the UN and the Marshall Plan. But Dewey’s victory in the debate relegated to the sidelines the Taft isolationist element that would have most favored a ban on Communism. (Taft would try again for President in 1952, only to lose to Ike.) The internationalists would remain ascendant until the Goldwater debacle in 1964, ensuring that the GOP, like the Democrats, would favor united action of the West against Communism.

* It demonstrated that Americans need not be stampeded into running roughshod over civil liberties. Though the Korean War and the Rosenberg arrests for espionage were still two years away, Dewey still had to face a decidedly unfavorable time for taking his position against the ban. The Iron Curtain had fallen over Eastern Europe, and Stalin’s grip on the region would tighten further that year as he attempted to cut off Berlin from the West and engineer a power grab in Czechoslovakia. Film studios were doing everything they could to distance themselves from the “Hollywood Ten” screenwriters and directors who refused to answer questions on Capitol Hill about their Communist associations. In that context, the format, allowing for Dewey to frame a countervailing argument over 20 minutes, represented a whole different world from today’s, which allow slittle better than a string of sound bites. To its credit, the Republican electorate accepted Dewey's reasoning.

* The contention that there would be no McCarthyism, however, is harder to sustain. Lippmann and Schlesinger were implicitly arguing that McCarthy would have found it much more difficult to defy a President from his own party than a Democrat. This was only true to an extent, however, as can be seen in McCarthy’s disastrous decision to investigate the Army—the institution at the heart of President Eisenhower’s career.

Moreover, some of Dewey’s own associates—and presumptive appointees—indicated, in their careers, that the governor would not have acted like a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. 

(Note to ACLU lovers: As journalist Jessica Mitford wrote in A Fine Old Conflict (1977), that organization “instituted its own loyalty purge excluding from membership those suspected of harbouring subversive ideas.”) 

John Foster Dulles’ policy of “brinksmanship” toward the U.S.S.R. continued to fan the Red Scare. Most surprising is Curt Gentry’s argument, in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, that Dewey won behind-the-scenes support from the FBI Director in the race against Truman with the promise of an appointment as Attorney-General.

This Day in Presidential History (Dewey—Oops, Truman—Wins)

November 2, 1948—Harry S. Truman became the most beloved of underdog Presidential contenders by pulling out a win against GOP rival Thomas E. Dewey, in a victory that virtually nobody—certainly not pollsters, and even not members of his own party—thought he'd be able to achieve.

To read accounts of the 30-state “whistle-stop campaign”—including the exhilarating one in David McCullough’s superb Truman—is to come away with a sense of a Rocky-like battler—though, in this case, it might be closer to a Midwestern bantamweight than an Italian Stallion. In fact, the President did face obstacles that seemed insuperable all the way down to the last hours, including:

* A party fractured in three. The Democrats suffered splits not only from the Dixiecrat (States’ Rights) Party, led by Strum Thurmond, but, from the left, the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace, who felt the President was dealing much too harshly with the Soviet Union. (I find it a bit ironic that two years later, Wallace backed Truman’s “police action” in Korea—if the growing Soviet crushing of free governments in Eastern Europe hadn’t been enough to raise his hackles, why would Korea? H. L. Mencken, in his last hurrah covering conventions, captured some of the candidate’s distance from reality when he noted that Wallace had acquired such a “semi-celestial character” that, “if when he is nominated he suddenly sprouts wings and begins flapping about the hall, no one will be surprised.”)

* Lukewarm support from his supposed base. Even among the “Cold War liberals” who were his base, Truman was regarded with much less enthusiasm than the fallen predecessor who overshadowed him, Franklin D. Roosevelt. That tepid support started with FDR’s own family. Three of the President’s sons—including the eldest, James-- spearheaded a boomlet for General Dwight Eisenhower that lasted up to shortly before the convention, when Ike (who, in any event, hadn’t even declared a party preference) in no uncertain terms turned down the offer.).
* A united Republican Party. The GOP won control of Congress in 1946, largely erasing the stigma left by Herbert Hoover of being the party responsible for economic collapse. At the convention, Dewey had disposed of rivals Robert Taft, Harold Stassen and Arthur Vandenberg without undue bloodletting, after three ballots. The GOP had been out of the White House for 16 years, and sensed that its time had at last come.
* A tested opponent. Dewey was a veteran not just of the most recent election cycle, but of the 1944 race—and he and his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, were sure that Truman did not possess the electoral magic of FDR, the opponent in that earlier race.
* An incumbent at bay, at home and abroad. Few Presidents have been faced with so many challenges immediately upon taking office—and so little preparation for handling them. FDR hadn’t even kept his Vice-President informed of the Manhattan Project, believe it or not. Communism was on the march not only in Eastern Europe but also in the Far East, in China. At home, with World War II over, labor unions raised their demands and inflation soared. The Republicans even had a clever slogan for the President’s run of rotten luck: “To err is Truman.”

As Truman rose to deliver his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, party regulars thought they were witnessing a political interment. Instead, it turned out to be a resurrection, as signaled seven sentences into the address, with these words: “Senator [Alben] Barkley [Truman’s running mate] and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it-- don't you forget that!” He sounded as if he actually believed it.

This was an election in which character merged, often imperceptibly, with issues. To be sure, Truman rallied, for probably the last time, the full force of FDR’s New Deal coalition. (Historians have viewed the ’64 Johnson-Goldwater election as a marker in campaign realignment, but the first fissures of that probably go back to the 1952 race, when, in addition to the Northeast, Midwest and West, Eisenhower managed to put the traditional Democratic strongholds of Virginia, Tennessee and Florida in the Republican column.)

Instead of the kind of set “Speech” that candidates have taken to nauseating lengths, as if voters had never heard them say any of it before, Truman and his aides crafted each speech for a local audience. Detroit, for instance, might hear about the rights of labor; the Midwest would hear about farming. (In the age of YouTube, such an approach might not work so well—if you get too specific, something said in one context might not go over elsewhere.)

All of this contrasted with Dewey, a horribly formal, straitlaced figure. His image as what the incurable Washington wag Alice Roosevelt Longworth termed “The Man on the Wedding Cake” crystallized for the electorate, when a sudden lurch on his train led Dewey, with the microphone on, to complain sarcastically about firing the “lunatic” conductor. Instantly, the electorate’s old perceptions of the party as being against the common man were reinforced. (Dewey might have done better if he had let loose publicly with the quip he unleashed on the next Republican New York governor after he stepped down, Nelson Rockefeller: ''I like you, Nelson,'' he once confided, ''but I don't think I can afford you.")

Dewey gave voters little positive to counteract the crass, bossy image he conveyed. His speeches were thin gruel, featuring Reaganesque platitudes about the best lying before America. Still, even with the incident on the train (called, with more than a touch of presumption, the “Victory Special” by the GOP campaign), Dewey still seemed well enough ahead.

What virtually nobody saw coming awas major upset in the making. The predicted results were so out of touch with eventual reality that the two major pollsters of the time, George Gallup and Elmo Roper, faced hard questions (and wholesale cancellations) from clients about how they could be so wrong. The polls led the media to the following embarrassing mistakes:

* “Thomas E. Dewey’s Election as President is a Foregone Conclusion” (The New York Times);
* “The Next President of the United States,” A Life Magazine cover with Dewey’s picture and caption;
* H. V. Kaltenborn, assuring his radio audience that Truman’s early-evening lead would evaporate; and, of course,
* “Dewey Defeats Truman” (from The President’s least favorite paper, the Chicago Tribune).

Look at the famous picture accompanying this blog, in the last-mentioned source. Seldom has a candidate exulted in politics as contact sport so much!