TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/44elect/44elect.009

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                                                                                October 2, 1944

THE CAMPAIGN

The Old Magic



     In The Presidential Room of Washington's Statler Hotel were
gathered the elite of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters,
Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, and the elite of
the city's political society -- assorted czars, administrators
and politicians. They were met together to eat roast chicken,
Virginia ham, peas, potato croquettes, salad, ice cream and
coffee, to drink California sauterne and, more important, to get
an answer to the biggest of the Democrats' political questions:
Has The Old Master still got it?

     The Old Master looked considerably thinner but very fit.
(The President is down to "about 180 lbs." His "best weight"
used to be about 186. Some comment was aroused because he was
wheeled in before an audience, for the first time, and for the
first time made a political address, outside the White House,
while seated.) He ate heartily, drank only half of his glass of
California sauterne, and sat thoughtfully oversmoking through the
banquet. For the benefit of the Teamsters, the band played Don't
Change Horses in the Middle of the Stream, while Franklin
Roosevelt made penciled notes on his manuscript. Then it was time
to go on the air, before the millions of citizens who were also
asking: Has he still got it?

     Familiar Tune.  Up rose white-haired Dan Tobin, for 37 years
the absolute boss of the Teamsters. He stuck out the majestic
Tobin stomach, and ordered the waiters to clear out. Then he sat
down again, and the show was on the air. When, at last, the Tobin
gravel voice had stopped quivering the rosy Tobin jowls, and the
six-minute ovation was over, the President spoke.

     The Old Master still had it. Franklin Roosevelt was at his
best. He was like a veteran virtuoso playing a piece he has loved
for years, who fingers his way through it with a delicate fire, a
perfection of timing and tone, and an assurance that no young
player, no matter how gifted, can equal. The President was
playing what he loves to play -- politics.

     He started smoothly with a reference to the "mess that was
dumped into our laps in 1933," and then got down to cases. His
first attack was on those Republicans, who, he said, "suddenly
discover" every four years, just before Election Day, that they
love labor -- after having attacked labor for three years and six
months.

     "Common Fraud."  He "got quite a laugh," he said, when he
read the liberal labor plank in the 1944 GOPlatform, endorsed by
the very men who "have personally spent years of effort and
energy -- and much money -- in fighting every one of those (New
Deal) laws in the Congress and in the press and in the courts..."
This, he said, was "a fair example of their insincerity and
inconsistency." He described what he called the effort of the
Republican Old Guard to switch labels with the New Deal as "the
most obvious common or garden variety of fraud."

     He paused in the attack just long enough to defend his
Administration's preparations for war. His defense: the
isolationist record of the Republicans in Congress who opposed
Lend-Lease and other preparedness measures. He ridiculed
Republicans who have changed their views, and said, while labor
leaders applauded: "I am too old for that. I cannot talk out of
both sides of my mouth at the same time."

     The President, in all his 33-minute address, by his actor's
timing, by the voice that purrs softly and then strikes hard, by
the frank ham-acting, kept his audience with him every minute
that he was on the offensive.

     Who Loves the Soldiers?  Tom Dewey had charged in
Philadelphia that the Administration is afraid of peace, and had
quoted Major General Hershey's statement, "We can keep people in
the Army about as cheaply as we can create an agency for them
when they are out." This was "fantastic," said Candidate
Roosevelt; he had read it with "amazement." The War Department
had announced a plan for speedy demobilization. "This callous and
brazen falsehood was, of course, a very simple thing . . . an
effort to stimulate fear among American mothers, wives and
sweethearts."

     Which party, he asked, was so afraid of the soldiers vote
that it had tried its best to keep all U.S. servicemen from
voting? The President charged flatly: "Millions of soldiers and
sailors and merchant seamen have been handicapped or prevented
from voting by those politicians and those candidates who think
that they stand to lose by such votes."

     Whose Depression?  Some Republican had made some remark
about a "Roosevelt depression." This, Mr. Roosevelt thought, was
laughable indeed: "I rubbed my eyes when I read it." Eloquently
he recreated the Hoover breadlines, the apple stands, the
"Hoovervilles," thus carrying on the New Deal's attack on Herbert
Hoover into its twelfth successful year. This Republican prating
about depression reminded him forcibly of an old adage which
Republicans should keep in mind: "Never speak of a rope in the
house of a man who's been hanged." In fatherly tones, Mr.
Roosevelt offered the G.O.P. some advice: "If I were a Republican
leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole
dictionary that I would think of using is that word
'depression'. . . ."

     Mr. Roosevelt feigned some reluctance in saying it, but
there seemed to be something a bit "foreign" creeping into the
campaign this year -- a "propaganda technique invented by the
dictators abroad." It was, he feared, a technique out of Mein
Kampf; never tell a small lie, make it a fantastic whopper and
keep repeating it.

     The President kept his tone mainly light and good-humored,
even in some of his most savage digs. But at one point his voice
dropped into solemnity and he said: "These Republican leaders
have not been content with attacks on me, or on my wife, or on my
sons -- no, not content with that -- they now include my little
dog Fala." The audience roared; even the stoniest of Republican
faces around U.S. radios cracked into a smile.

     "Malicious Falsehood."  The President then repudiated the
"old worm-eated chestnut" that he has ever "represented himself
as indispensable." This he described as a "malicious falsehood,"
to which, he added, he was accustomed -- but he still did resent
"libelous statements about my dog."

     In closing, the President stressed that his postwar concern
was to provide jobs, that that, very simply, was the issue. But,
said he, there are three main tasks ahead: 1) winning a speedy
victory; 2) setting up international machinery to keep the peace;
3) reconversion. Once before, almost a generation ago, the nation
had faced the same tasks. They were botched by a Republican
administration. With obvious relish, Candidate Roosevelt rolled
out the letters and spelled the word: "B-o-t-c-h-e-d . . .
botched by a Republican administration."

     The 1944 campaign was on -- and Franklin Roosevelt had got
off to a flying start.

     "Political Bushwhacking."  Press comment was generally
divided along partisan lines. The New York Times, which seems to
prefer Term IV to Tom Dewey, praised the speech; the Republican
New York Herald Tribune derided it. Of the independents, the most
significant comment came from the Washington Post, which is more
often pro-Roosevelt than not. The Post severely criticized the
speech as "a cheap variety of political bushwhacking . . . at a
moment when spiritual leadership of a high order is urgently
needed. . . . It is doubtful whether the President's
indispensability complex has ever been more boldly exhibited."

     The speech, said the Post, "bristled with the arrogance that
inevitably accompanies a feeling of inevitability," and was the
speech of a politician, not that of a statesman.


Countercharge

     Tom Dewey got hit twice last week, once by a flying thermos
jug, when his train crashed in Oregon, and once by Franklin
Roosevelt.

     The Champ had swung -- a full roundhouse blow. And it was
plain to the newsmen on the Dewey Special that the challenger had
been hit hard -- as plain as when a boxer drops his gloves and
his eyes glaze.

     The Dewey radio would not work that night, as the Dewey
party rolled through the flat Arizona desert, eastbound from
California after a full week of campaigning on the coast. But the
reporters' radio, in the lounge car, worked perfectly, almost as
perfectly as the Champ had used it. And soon word of the speech
filtered through to the Dewey car.

     Tom Dewey and his chief speechwriter, scholarly Elliott V.
Bell, decided to sleep on it, but took the precaution to wire New
York for a full text of the F.D.R. speech. Reading it the next
morning in the cold light of day and without benefit of the
superb Roosevelt inflection, Speechwriter Bell thought his chief
could ignore it. But then the telegrams began to pour in from
irate Republicans offering advice on how to answer the President.

     As the stack of telegrams mounted, so did Tom Dewey's anger.
He finally collected himself and handed newsmen a reply, just in
time to catch the Monday morning papers. Said he: "My opponent
indicated that he has no program and has sunk to mere quoting
from Mein Kampf. . . . I shall examine his record with
unvarnished candor." At Belen, N. Mex., Tom Dewey got off, walked
into a glass phone booth in the station, put in a long distance
call to National Chairman Herbert Brownell. While Indian children
and cowboys ogled him through the glass, Tom Dewey ordered a
second radio network (170 more stations on the Blue) for his
speech in answer.

     A kind of earnest frenzy came aboard the Dewey train. Dewey,
Bell & Co. went to work, and wrote four consecutive drafts. Dewey
stayed up until 2 a.m., polishing the phrases; researchers were
up for four more hours, checking facts and dates, even calling
Albany from tiny way stations for more ammunition.

     Next morning, at his Oklahoma City press conference, Tom
Dewey was all business and no banter. He rushed through his usual
conferences with businessmen, farmers and GOPsters, rushed back
for more work on the speech. Two hours before delivery he read it
aloud to himself in his hotel room.

     The speech was a solemn, serious, hardhitting countercharge.
Tom Dewey was not going to crack any jokes at the brilliant level
of Bob Hope, or any other. Cried he: "I shall not join my
opponent in his descent to mud-slinging. . . . I will never
divide America."

     Then in his most aggressive courtroom manner, Tom Dewey went
after the Roosevelt record on preparedness:

     "In 1940 the United States (Army) could put into the field..
no more than 75,000 men. The Army was only '25% ready.' Now, Mr.
Roosevelt, did those statements come from Goebbels? Was that
fraud or falsification? Those are the words of General George C.
Marshall. . . .

     "I quote again: 'Dec. 7, 1941, found the Army Air Forces
equipped with plans but not with planes.' Did that come from
Goebbels? That statement was made by General H.H. Arnold. . . .

     "On the floor of the Senate in May 1943, these words were
uttered: 'After Pearl Harbor we found ourselves woefully
unprepared for war.' Was that Dr. Goebbel? That statement was
made by Harry S. Truman."

     Like a prosecuter confronting a stubborn defendant with his
own damning confession, Tom Dewey had a field day with a hatful
of hapless Administration quotes, including some from Franklin
Roosevelt. He recalled that, in January 1940, he himself had
called for a two-ocean Navy. That statement had been branded by
F.D.R. as "just plain dumb." Cracked Tom Dewey: "Then, as now, we
got ridicule instead of action."

     Tom Dewey could not compete with the Champ when it came to
sustained sarcasm; but he threw one sudden and effective
sarcastic punch, when he announced that Franklin Roosevelt was
indispensable: "He is indispensable to Harry Hopkins, Madame
Perkins, Harold Ickes . . . . the mayor of Jersey City . . . . to
Sidney Hillman . . . and to Earl Browder.

     "Shall we perpetuate one man in office to accommodate this
motley crew? The American people will see that we restore
integrity to the White House so that its spoken word can be
trusted."

     The audience ate it up. This was more like it. From now on
it would be blow for blow.


Crucial Week

     In the second week of his campaign, pushing down the West
Coast, Tom Dewey fought on in cold, logical and precise fashion.
He had a difficult task: to be New Dealish enough to hold the
vote of all those who do not want a reactionary administration
but are weary of New Deal mismanagement; yet to attack powerfully
enough to please those who are just plain mad at Franklin
Roosevelt.

     In Seattle, he laid down a precise barrage against the New
Deal's laborcoddling, against WLB's timidity, red tape and
politicking. (Said onetime WLBster Wayne Lyman Morse, now
Oregon's G.O.P. Senate candidate: "It is the truth. I know . . .
that there was political interference in WLB cases. . . .")

     In Portland, his poise unruffled by the morning's train
crash, he had lashed out against "the danger of one-man
government."

     In San Francisco, he made the clearest statement to date of
his domestic program. Frankly, he "bought" most of the New Deal
social gains. But he made a careful line of separation: "We must
create an economic climate in which business, industry an
agriculture can grow and flourish. . . . Studied hostility toward
our job-producing machinery must cease."

     See the Stars.  Tom Dewey had come into Los Angeles into the
most fabulous and phony, yet effective, political demonstration
of the campaign. All day long the Los Angeles radio commercials
had trumpeted: "Hear Thomas E. Dewey -- and see the stars."

     That night, at least 90,000 Angelenos came to the Coliseum
to hear & see. Republicans Cecil B. de Mille and David O.
Selznick produced the two-hour show, on a script written for
split-second timing. Giant spotlights stabbed into the sky to
form a giant "V"; the platform backdrop was a 40-foot flag. The
Coliseum's playing field, a cool green under the thousands of
baby spots, swarmed with performing Indians and cowboys; Actor
Leo Carrillo rode energetically back & forth on a white horse,
banging his six-shooters into the air. And all the time Radio
Announcer Harry von Zell chattered over the microphone,
introducing an impressive list of movie stars.

     With a great splash of Dewey-like efficiency, the Hollywood
GOPsters had dished out advance copies of 50-word speeches by the
Big Names; then failed to call back the speeches of some who did
not appear. Thus, next morning, the arch-Republican Los Angeles
Times reported:

     "Barbara Stanwyck, who is Mrs. Robert Taylor in private
life, got a cheer when she told the vast audience that at last a
man has stepped forward to lead us out of twelve years of doubt.
. . ."

     But Barbara had not been there.

     Continued the Times:

     "And Lionel Barrymore, who heads a Hollywood committee
backing Dewey and Bricker, was given an impressive reception
when, speaking from a wheel chair, he told the crowd they were
soon to hear the voice of a new, vibrant, forceful and courageous
leader."

     Lionel, too, was somewhere else.

     But hundreds of stars were there, in jewels an furs and
brand-new hats. And, as Announcer von Zell steered them to the
microphone, they spoke their ten-second piece -- Ginger Rogers,
Hedda Hopper, Edward Arnold, Walt Disney, Eddie Bracken, Gene
Tierney, Frances Dee, Joel McCrea, Ruth Hussey, etc., etc.

     Impossible to Describe.   The De Mille script read: "At
7:44 Mr. de Mille cues Governor Dewey's entrance from tunnel
. . ."

     At 7:44, Harry von Zell had Adolphe Menjou at the mike.
Von Zell:  "Tell them about this great sight here tonight."
 Menjou:   "Tell them? How on earth can I?"
But the De Mille cue had given and, suddenly, the wandering blue
kleig lights turned from the flag-draped platform to focus on
the concrete opening whence football teams usually come rushing
out in triumph.

     From this tunnel, while the bands played, the crowd cheered,
cowbells rattled in the upper tiers, the Deweys appeared, in a
cream-colored touring car, flanked by eight motorcycle cops. Said
the script: "After Governor Dewey enters, Von Zell brings many
stars to the microphone to describe the scene during the time the
cars are driving around the track. After one minute of cheering,
dial the mikes down so that the continued cheering becomes a
background for the stars speaking. . . ."

     On the platform, shaking hands with the glittering stars,
even Tom Dewey became so excited by the tumult & shouting that,
in an unusually prankish gesture, he tossed his grey Homburg a
full ten feet into the hands of a waiting bodyguard.

     One-Minute Cheer.  To this crowd, buoyed up by two hours of
hoopla, Tom Dewey chose to talk of expanding social security, of
extending old age insurance to 20,000,000 Americans not now
covered by the Social Security Act, of planning medical insurance
for all. However earnest and sincere the speech may have seemed
to radio listeners, it was not the fire-breather that the 90,000
had hoped to hear.

     The De Mille script read: "8:30, completion of speech. Two
minutes of cheering, led by young Republicans; 8:32, band plays
until 8:45." But the cheering lasted less than a minute, and the
radio program was quickly switched off.

     The Los Angeles meeting had been the second biggest
political rally in U.S. history. (Biggest: Franklin Roosevelt's
1936 acceptance speech at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, heard
by 105,000) What had Tom Dewey gained by it? Enough votes to
overcome Franklin Roosevelt's lead in California? If so, it would
be a major political achievement. But however well the speech was
aimed at the Ham 'n Eggers in Southern California, at the
Coliseum it was a total flop. The newsmen wrote it down as
another demerit for Dewey.

     The Dewey Demerits.  In more than two weeks of junketing,
they had noted other demerits: the Dewey lack of humor, his
unwillingness to pose for trick shots for photographers, his
narrow range of facial expressiosn, his tinge of
Scoutmasterishness (when excited, he uses phrases like "Oh,
Lord," and "good gracious"), his lack of warmth (he rarely
visited newsmen in the lounge car), his super-efficiency (which
sometimes leads him, in normal conversation, to say "period" at
the end of a sentence, as if he were dictating).

     But the newsmen noted his merits, too. His radio voice is
good, and getting better; he had learned much (including such
politically important facts as that a candidate never wears a
topcoat in California, no matter how chill). He was no amateur;
he listened effectively to local complaints. He might not be
convivial and gay, but he had a basic, if somewhat stiff, decency
and kindness. After the train crashed in Oregon, even the most
black-hearted New Deal Newsmen threw their hats in the air as
they watched Tom Dewey walk through the wreckage, inquire of
everyone's injuries, order medical aid instanter.

     Merits and demerits aside, and entirely apart from his
Oklahoma City answer to Franklin Roosevelt's jabs, Tom Dewey
still faces his severest test. With six weeks to go before
election, he has to get down to cases.

     Last week ex-New Dealer Raymond Moley, a sympathetic Dewey
critic, wrote: "He (Dewey) has stated his preference for an
economic life more free of restrictions than that which the New
Deal has provided. But he has not sufficiently dramatized the
conditions that make such a free life attractive to the average
American. Nor has he clearly differentiated the way of life which
he sees from that which has been created under three terms of Mr.
Roosevelt. Somehow, the case against the New Deal has not yet
been made."


POLITICAL NOTES
The Pot Boils

     The campaign moved into high gear. The U.S. people, big &
small, prominent and nameless, began to make up their minds,
choose sides, form organizations, collect funds, hurl epithets.

     --For nine weeks the Chicago Tribune had run colored front-
page cartoons built around a campaign jingle: "BACK TO WORK
QUICKER WITH DEWEY AND BRICKER." But the New Deal-hating Tribune
had puzzled its readers. It had failed to find a four-color
jingle lampooning Franklin Roosevelt. Last week a braying
Democratic jackass appeared on Page One, bearing aloft a banner:
"BACK ON RELIEF WITH THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF."

     --South Carolina's lame duck Senator Cotton Ed Smith
galumphed into Washington, vowed he could wreck Term IV. He
organized a National Agricultural Committee, set out to "deliver
the nation's farm vote" to Tom Dewey in the next five weeks.
Roared metaphor-mixing Cotton Ed: "We have taken a nose dive
into hell! I have great hopes that a miracle will gird up its
loins and try another deal." Next day, the committee folded up.

     --Wealthy, black-haired J. Louis Reynolds, vice president of
Reynolds Metals Co., whose plants have been fabulously expanded
by war contracts, called on U.S. businessmen to rally behind
Franklin Roosevelt. Said he: "Business had its sad experience
with The Great Engineer and now it doesn't want to take any
chance with The Great Prosecutor."

     --Even Moscow took sides. War and the Working Class, which
always states official Communist views, charged that Tom Dewey's
nomination was promoted by "the most reactionary elements" in the
Republican Party. Roared W.W.C.: "Through it (the G.O.P.)
defeatists and appeasers, even Hitlerite agents, are seeking
access to the political arena."

     --Harold Ickes lit into Dewey in characteristic vein. "Four
years ago," he cracked, "I observed that Mr. Dewey had thrown his
diaper into the ring. At Los Angeles on Friday night, when he
upbraided the New Deal for not being New Dealish enough, he threw
the sponge after his diaper. . . ."

     --An Oyster Bay Roosevelt came out for Franklin D. She was
the widow of Teddy's son, Major Kermit Roosevelt (who died last
year while on active duty in Alaska). Said she, offering her
services to the Democratic National Committee: "I'll do anything,
even lick envelopes."

     --Mrs. Crystal Bird Fauset, one-time friend of Eleanor
Roosevelt, one-time member of the Pennsylvania Legislature (its
first and only Negro woman), quit the Democratic National
Committee's offices in Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel, walked two
blocks up Madison Avenue to join the G.O.P. at the Roosevelt
Hotel. Said she: "Bob Hannegan is a dictator -- a man who is
not willing to deal democratically with Negroes."

     --Democrats and Republicans simultaneously discovered that
the other party is sending out campaign literature along with
servicemen's ballots. At Miami, a sailor reported that his ballot
was accompanied by a plea for the re-election of Michigan's
Republican governor Harry F. Kelly. At Guadalcanal, a soldier
opened his ballot, found a letter from Chicago's Democratic Mayor
Edward J. Kelly, urging him to vote for Franklin Roosevelt. The
two Kellys reacted differently. Governor Kelly denied everything;
Mayor Kelly announced that he had sent, not one, but 150,000
letters. "It's legal," he explained happily, "We're on our toes
here."