Almost President (20 page)

Smith had hoped the Democrats might turn to him once more in 1932. He even defeated Roosevelt in the Massachusetts primary and arrived at the convention with two hundred pledged delegates. But it was Roosevelt's turn and it was Smith himself who had put FDR on the road to the White House by insisting Roosevelt run for governor of New York in 1928. That Roosevelt, whom Smith considered a lightweight despite their friendship, could succeed where Smith failed, and that this was due at least in part to religious bigotry, embittered Smith, and he became a leading critic of Roosevelt and the New Deal, damaging Smith's own reputation among liberals.

At the annual Washington, D.C., dinner of the Liberty League, before the group of industrialists and financiers who were solidly opposed to Roosevelt and who also were Smith's new friends and business partners, Smith gave an angry speech over nationwide radio, accusing Roosevelt and his New Deal of fomenting class warfare. “There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow,” he said. When Roosevelt won an enormous landslide victory later that year, Smith could only remark, “You can't lick Santa Claus.”

In time, Smith's bitterness ebbed, and when war seemed imminent, he judged it his patriotic duty to support the president and his policies. Roosevelt had always been more baffled than angry by Smith's enmity, and during the war he invited Smith to the White House for a chat that led to reconciliation. In May 1944, Smith's beloved wife, Katie, died, and he followed her in death five months later.
Commonweal
said in Smith's obituary that his defeat in 1928 “was a blow from which he never fully recovered.” But the country recovered from the bigotry infecting that election, and that is the great legacy of Al Smith.

CHAPTER SIX

THOMAS E. DEWEY

1944, 1948

It is our solemn duty . . . to show that government can have both a head and a heart; that it can be both progressive and solvent; that it can serve the people without becoming their master.

Thomas E. Dewey, despite having lost not one, but two presidential elections, can stake a claim to being the most influential Republican of the twentieth century. Dewey, along with his protégés Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, moved the Republican Party away from an agenda of repealing the New Deal to a grudging acceptance of the permanent welfare state. The philosophy of “Modern Republicanism” inspired by Dewey's pragmatic politics continued to define the limits of Republican conservatism into the early twenty-first century, when the “Tea Party,” dedicated to shrinking the federal government, still shied away from even relatively modest reforms of federal entitlements, including not only the New Deal's Social Security program, but also the Great Society's Medicare program.

Yet, to the degree Dewey is remembered today, it is as a supposedly tepid and bumbling campaigner who allowed Harry Truman to defy the odds in 1948 and win re-election in the greatest upset in presidential election history. The shock of that upset is forever enshrined by the infamous
Chicago Tribune
headline
Dewey Defeats Truman
. But as much as any presidential loser in history, Dewey reminds us that a lost election is only the loss of one political battle in a much larger struggle to set the political direction of the nation. Under Dewey's leadership—and both Eisenhower and Nixon owe a considerable debt for their presidencies to Dewey's favors and efforts—the so-called Eastern establishment wing of the Republican Party dominated the GOP for more than three decades and altered the central thinking of even the party's conservative wing. In the more than half century since Dewey outmaneuvered the right wing for control of the Republican Party, only one Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater in 1964, seriously challenged the idea that the welfare state is here to stay, and he suffered the most overwhelming defeat of any Republican candidate since Alf Landon in 1936.

Dewey's image as “the little man on a wedding cake,” an epithet hung on him by a sharp-tongued socialite (which one is in some dispute), is in need of revision. In truth, Dewey was a charismatic crime fighter, as feared by the underworld as “The Untouchable” Eliot Ness. Dewey made his name and his political career as a fearless New York prosecuting attorney whose exploits inspired dozens of Hollywood films, with Dewey portrayed on screen by tough guys like Humphrey Bogart. His fame made him a presidential contender at age thirty-seven—while he was still just a district attorney. In his career, Dewey put behind bars the man advertised as head of Murder Inc., as well as the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, a leading boss of Tammany Hall, and most famously, the racketeer Charles “Lucky” Luciano. So effective was Dewey in his crime busting that the gangster Dutch Schultz was plotting Dewey's assassination when Schultz himself was murdered in a gangland killing.

There were plenty among the right wing of the Republican Party who later wished Schultz had been able to finish the job. Dewey was a heretic to conservatives because he had concluded in the early 1940s, after he had already sought the Republican nomination once, that the GOP should embrace rather than repeal the New Deal and such liberal reforms as Social Security. To do otherwise, Dewey insisted, would be political suicide, for if Republicans yielded to the forces of reaction, they would be doomed to permanent minority status. Rather, Dewey argued, Republicans needed to pursue progressive ends by conservative means. It was fine for the federal government to initiate social reforms, Dewey believed, but those reforms should be implemented at the state or local level and they should be funded in a fiscally responsible manner that did not increase the national debt. Dewey's fine biographer, Richard Norton Smith, called Dewey's philosophy “pay-as-you-go liberalism.”

To true blue conservatives, such as Dewey's arch-nemesis Ohio senator Robert Taft and later Goldwater, Dewey was not offering a conservative alternative to liberalism, only more “me-too-ism.” They questioned why the Grand Old Party should follow the lead of a man who had been defeated not once but twice. But as of this writing, Dewey's warning that the GOP cannot repeal popular social programs without facing electoral disaster has been heeded by Republicans.

While espousing conservative rhetoric may have helped elect Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, each also presided over (and often initiated) expansions of federal spending, federal power, and domestic programs. None dismantled a major New Deal or Great Society program. Echoing Dewey, Eisenhower conceded that the most accurate label for his own two-term presidency was “responsible progressive.” As Nixon prepared to assume the presidency, his attorney general–designate, John Mitchell, told Southern civil rights leaders, “Watch what we do, not what we say.” The 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, said his model president was the Republican progressive Theodore Roosevelt—who had also been Dewey's boyhood political idol.

Even Goldwater had to concede that the election of an avowedly conservative president like Reagan had not led to a dismantling of federal power. During the Reagan presidency, Goldwater complained to conservative journalist William F. Buckley, “We used to say about the Democrats, ‘They spend and spend and elect and elect.' Now the Republicans—‘They borrow and borrow and elect and elect.' So there's basically no difference.”

Goldwater has been the only Republican presidential nominee since 1948 to ignore Dewey's advice and instead offer what Dewey scorned as “a platform of back to Methuselah.” Goldwater fulfilled Dewey's prediction of the fate of such a platform when Lyndon Johnson trounced him in 1964 by winning the largest popular vote percentage in presidential election history. Dewey could only shake his head in wonder at those who insisted on ideological purity and who wanted to purge the party of moderates and liberals. If the Republican Party were only a party of conservatives, Dewey warned, and truly became the party of reaction that yearned to return the nation to “the miscalled ‘good old days' of the nineteenth century . . . you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country.” Democrats would win every election, Dewey said. The United States would end up being ruled by one party, which would be a prelude to totalitarianism and the end of liberty.

Dewey had no desire to see the parties sharply divided along ideological lines and thought a large part of the strength of American democracy was the general similarities between the two parties. Having struck up an unlikely friendship with Hubert Humphrey, whom he called “about the best liberal around,” Dewey argued that when Nixon and Humphrey ran against each other in 1968 there weren't “five degrees” separating them on the political spectrum and that was just “swell” because in America “all the votes are still to be found in the middle of the road.”

“This similarity is highly objectionable to a vociferous few,” Dewey said during a series of lectures he gave at Princeton University in 1950 (which were republished, not coincidentally in 1966, two years after the Goldwater debacle):

They rail at both parties, saying they represent nothing but a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I must say that I have most often heard this view expressed by people who have no experience in government and are either extreme reactionaries or radicals who want a neat little party to carry out their special prejudices, or these people are pseudo-intellectuals, or just plain obstructionists. None of them contributes much to the sober, tough business of modern government.

To Dewey, Americans are all one family who share the same basic values and objectives. The argument between the two parties is over which methods best achieve those objectives. “The disparaging epithets of those who want everything clear-cut and simple cannot erase the stubborn fact that our objectives and interests as Americans are not neatly opposed but are, I hope always will be, mutual.”

Dewey had referred to himself as “a New Deal Republican” and vigorously defended Social Security, unemployment insurance, farm supports, and securities legislation as ideas that cost relatively little “when compared with the gain in human happiness.” In determining a governmental course of action, Dewey had two questions he needed answered: Is it right? Will it work? Dewey did share the general belief of American conservatives that programs work best when they are initiated and operated locally as opposed to centrally in the federal government, and he often proved that to be true while serving as governor of New York for a dozen years.

Dewey was often far ahead of the Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman in tackling such domestic issues as racial discrimination. Anti-discrimination legislation in New York signed into law by Dewey in 1945 ended segregated public transportation, prevented unions from using race as a qualification for entering a trade, and greatly expanded the hiring of minorities in a wide range of professions. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell heralded the law as the most important legislation benefiting African Americans since the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Dewey later pushed and approved similar laws to end discrimination in education and housing.
5

Dewey scoffed at those who said he was enabling the “welfare state.” “Of course they are running a welfare state,” he said. “There has never been a responsible government which did not have the welfare of its people at heart.” The question, Dewey believed, was how to provide for the people's welfare without sacrificing personal freedom. That was where he believed the Republicans held an advantage over the Democrats. Republicans would first consider whether the private sector could address the needs of the people, or whether it would be better handled at the local or state government level, before turning to the federal government. But if the federal government were the right place to address a public need, then Republicans would be more fiscally responsible, more efficient, and less corrupt in the administration of the program.

At least this was Dewey's faith based on his own remarkable record as governor of New York. One of the more impressive achievements of his years as governor was completely revamping New York's mental health care system after discovering the appalling condition of state hospitals. He bitterly noted that the squalid conditions of these facilities were “left to me by those who claimed to be liberals.”

In addressing public welfare, Dewey echoed the words of Henry Stimson, who had served in the presidential Cabinets of Taft, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. “To me it seems vitally important that the Republican Party, which contains, generally speaking, the richer and more intelligent citizens of the country, should take the lead in reform and not drift into a reactionary position,” Stimson said.

Stimson's statement reeks of class-consciousness and a condescending noblesse oblige, but Dewey would not have objected to the basic sentiment; he had been taught from birth that “all good people” were Republicans.

Dewey was born on March 24, 1902, in Owosso, Michigan, the son of the local newspaper editor, who was also a local Republican official and activist. His birth announcement stated: “A ten-pound Republican voter was born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. George M. Dewey.” Dewey's mother later told the story of how young Tom, overhearing a political argument between his father and a neighbor, complained to his parents that he had been falsely told the neighbor was a nice man. “Why, he is, Tom,” his mother replied. “But he's a Democrat!” Tom countered.

Dewey was raised to work hard. At age nine, he was not merely a paperboy; he was the local distributor for the
Detroit News
and managed nine other boys who actually delivered the papers. At age ten, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Republican Party because it would not turn out the conservative incumbent, William Howard Taft, Dewey was an avid Roosevelt supporter, distributing literature door-to-door and even earning the nickname “Ted,” partly because of his devotion to TR and partly because
t
,
e
, and
d
were his initials.

The cool perfectionism that would prevent Dewey from becoming a beloved political figure, rather than just an admired one, was present at an early age. Dewey was, his high school principal said, “by all odds the smartest kid in school,” but so arrogant he had trouble getting along with classmates. Dewey was aware that he was considered obviously straight-arrow. Not only did he never miss a single day of school in twelve years, he was never even tardy. When this came to light in his later political campaigns, Dewey begged his mother to joke that she had purposely scheduled his bout with chicken pox during summer vacation, and in high school, he deliberately earned a few Bs so that he would not receive straight As.