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Thomas E. Dewey... nominated for President...
Thomas E. Dewey... nominated for President...
Item # 582575
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June 29, 1948
THE SPRINGFIELD UNION, Springfield, Massachusetts, June 29, 1948
* Thomas E. Dewey nominated for president
* Pre Dewey defeats Truman issue
* Republican Party
This 18 page newspaper has a nice banner headline on the front page: "DEWEY WOULD END ONE-MAN RULE" with subheads and related photos (see images).
Other news, sports and advertisements of the day throughout. Good condition.
wikipedia notes: He was the Republican candidate in the 1948 presidential election in which, in almost unanimous predictions by pollsters and the press, he was projected as the winner. The Chicago Daily Tribune printed "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" as its post-election headline, issuing a few hundred copies before the returns showed conclusively that the winner was Harry S. Truman, the incumbent.
Indeed, given Truman's sinking popularity and the Democratic Party's three-way split (between Truman, Henry A. Wallace, and Strom Thurmond), Dewey had seemed unstoppable. Republicans figured that all they had to do to win was to avoid making any major mistakes, and as such Dewey did not take any risks. He spoke in platitudes, trying to transcend politics. Speech after speech was filled with empty statements of the obvious, such as the famous quote: "You know that your future is still ahead of you." An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal summed it up:
No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.[18]
Part of the reason Dewey ran such a cautious, vague campaign was because of his experiences as a presidential candidate in 1944. In that election Dewey felt that he had allowed Franklin Roosevelt to draw him into a partisan, verbal "mudslinging" match, and he believed that this had cost him votes. As such, Dewey was convinced in 1948 to appear as non-partisan as possible, and to emphasize the positive aspects of his campaign while ignoring his opponent. This strategy proved to be a major mistake, as it allowed Truman to repeatedly criticize and ridicule Dewey, while Dewey never answered any of Truman's criticisms.[19] Perhaps alone among all of Dewey's advisers, his 1944 campaign chairman, Edwin Jaeckle, admonished him to be aggressive on the campaign trail, advice Dewey rejected.
Dewey was not as conservative as the Republican-controlled 80th Congress, which also proved problematic for him. Truman tied Dewey to the "do-nothing" Congress. Indeed, Dewey had successfully battled Ohio Senator Robert Taft and his conservatives for the nomination at the Republican Convention; Taft had remained an isolationist even through the Second World War. Dewey, however, supported the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, recognition of Israel, and the Berlin airlift.[20]
Dewey was repeatedly urged by the right wing of his party to engage in red-baiting, but he refused. In a debate before the Oregon primary with Harold Stassen, Dewey argued against outlawing the Communist Party of the United States of America, saying "you can't shoot an idea with a gun." He later told Styles Bridges, the Republican national campaign manager, that he was not "going around looking under beds." As a result of his defeat, Dewey became the only Republican to be nominated for President twice and lose both times. He is also the last major-party presidential candidate to wear permanent facial hair, in his case a mustache.
Category: The 20th Century
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