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.