What I Am Reading: "FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944" by David M. Jordan

This book was acquired from the library on a whim at the same time as the Susan Dunn book on the 1940 election. If possible this is an even more forgotten election, perhaps the most forgotten of all - Roosevelt's successful pursuit of a fourth term in the last days of his life and in the last days of World War 2. The author, David M. Jordan, disputes these two main takeaways in popular memory of the 1944 election: that Roosevelt was always going to win, and that everyone knew that he was going to die. These of course cannot be falsified, but he makes the case through some notes on popular opinion at the time.

The book is occasionally interspersed, mostly around the beginning and end, with notes on the home front of WW2: the music, the baseball, the films; which celebrities are in the service and which aren't. I've gradually become more interested in the culture of the '20s, '30s, and '40s over the past decade or so. When I try to trace this interest, I chart it back to granular readings on the life of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), or my interest on Jazz a la Mode on my local NPR station, or the popular '40s and '50s music of Fallout 3. I think I have to date it even earlier, though, to my heavy consumption of M*A*S*H when I was a kid. Though set in the '50s, Hawkeye and co. make innumerable references to the culture of the couple decades preceding the show's setting (as one would expect), and my initial familiarity probably comes from there. Nowadays my interest in the period has come into sharper focus, as I often find myself moving along with the edge of living history.

Anyway, after Pearl Harbor rendered the isolationism vs. interventionism debates of the 1940 election moot (the isolationists would rebrand themselves as "nationalists" during the war, and opposed post-war internationalism), the U.S. moved to a wartime footing. Despite the resulting influx of Keynesian stimulus, the Republicans won the midterms in 1942; a combination of voter apathy and the geographic displacement of laborers led to low-turnout, with only the animated opposition partisans eager to cast ballots. This result motivated labor to mobilize heavily for the next election, and one of the key figures in this was Sidney Hillman, CIO leader, who formed the "Political Action Committee," later the CIO-PAC, to mobilize the grassroots for the Democratic nominee.

Labor was not the only constituency mobilizing for Roosevelt - FDR also had strong support in the Black community for his policies on race. These policies, as well as the wartime economy's elimination of the need for New Deal spending, caused Southern Democrats to sour on Roosevelt; they were finally able to give some vent to their illiberal tendencies, both in Congress and in the election.

The Republicans looked to these recent wins as they waged a campaign focusing less on the war than on the peace to follow. Polls consistently showed that Roosevelt's support correlated with the continuation of the war; a hypothetical wind-down would lead to a narrow race, and a conclusion of the war would lead (in this early polling, anyway) to a Republican victory.

There were a few main candidates who sought the Republican nomination. The victor was Thomas Dewey; only the Manhattan DA when he sought the nomination in 1940, he had been elected Governor of New York in the intervening time. He was known as an efficient, if cold, administrator, formerly having risen to prominence as a gang-busting prosecutor. The other major Republicans running were John Bricker, conservative governor of Ohio; Harold Stassen, young and internationalist Governor of Minnesota who was off serving as a Lieutenant Colonel in the South Pacific at the time (the theater that produced all of our WW2 Presidents, except Eisenhower); Wendell Willkie, still campaigning as an iconoclastic internationalist; and the megalomaniac Douglas MacArthur, flirting with an ultimately-aborted hard-right vanity campaign from his Australia command.

Roosevelt, meanwhile, was less interested in politics than he was in the pursuit of the war effort, and suffered from failing health (not honestly admitted to by his doctors). There wasn't as much drama in 1940 regarding his candidacy, but the Democrats saw plenty of drama around the Vice Presidential nomination. Other than among the left and labor elements, Vice President Henry Wallace did not have much support, and a coalition of big city bosses and other party bigwigs made their opposition clear to Roosevelt. FDR, whether out of indifference or out of his usual desire to keep his options open until the last minute, encouraged Wallace as well as other potential candidates, while the bosses favored Harry Truman. Truman was a border-stater, non-objectionable to the left, and had a high public profile from his steerage of the Truman Committee, hunting down waste in war contracting. He was nominated on the second ballot that July, but Roosevelt's games caused some hurt feelings for Wallace, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, bureaucrat Jimmy Byrnes, and other contenders who were said to be in favor at one point or another. All eventually campaigned for the ticket, however.

The Republicans, meanwhile, were rid of their Wendell Willkie problem after he campaigned hard in the Wisconsin primary and was defeated. His endorsement and following were highly sought after by nominee Tom Dewey; but Willkie died of a heart attack in October before he could bestow it to either candidate. This was a big loss for internationalism, Willkie was only in his 50s and could have played a prominent role in the post-war order.

That is skipping ahead a bit, though. At their convention, presumed Republican VP nominee Earl Warren decided at the last minute that he wasn't very interested in losing an election, and the Republicans nominated John Bricker instead. His conservative politics and typical politician style were liked by the delegates anyway, and his nomination headed off a serious convention floor fight. He was not regarded as much of a statesman, however, with one descriptor as no more than an "Honest Harding."

The Republicans did not love Dewey, but they thought that he would get them votes in the primary battlegrounds of the big Eastern states. They planned to "Win the War Quicker With Dewey and Bricker." Clare Boothe Luce, about whom I wrote recently, delivered a keynote speech decrying Roosevelt's "dictatorial bumbledom" and lamented the plight of GIs who would either return home to a miserable economy or would die because of Roosevelt's blunders. One magazine writer said that "to hint that the American war dead died because the majority of us voted wrong in the last three elections is a palpable misstatement of fact as well as a staggering breach of taste." (p.116).

I found the roll call from the Republican convention to be interesting. The Republicans were at a comparative high-water mark of legislators and Governors, and Dewey campaigned in close concert with many of these contemporary leaders. As they were mentioned and re-mentioned, I couldn't help but muse that these Republican officeholders amounted to a bunch of fucking nobodies. The Democratic wins in this era, coupled with the back-to-back Dewey nominations and the eventual victory with Eisenhower, deprived an entire generation of Republican politicians the opportunity to run for President or (except for a few, obviously) to serve in a high-profile cabinet role. They were then all swept away in the public consciousness at least by the returning generation of young, ambitious war heroes and a postwar political paradigm.

With policy broadly agreed upon between the two nominees (or at least with a Republican unwilling to attack either the war's conduct or the New Deal), the Republicans focused their campaign on attacks and contrived scandals. Two of these were the alleged order from Roosevelt to "clear everything with Sidney Hillman" regarding the platform and VP selection; though this was really just a normal political check-in with the leader of an important constituency. Nevertheless, the Jewish left-wing labor leader became a major boogeyman on the Republican campaign trail, as did Earl Browder and the Communists. Another "issue" was the comment by one bureaucrat (who had no say in the matter) that it would be as cheap to keep the soldiers in the army after the war as it would be to form an agency to reintegrate them into the economy, “evidence” of a “plan,” or lack thereof, to deal with the post-war. Dewey was particularly fond of taking statements out of context to prove Roosevelt's political meddling, incompetence, or mendacity. He did not disagree with the plan to win the war in Europe before focusing on the Pacific, but still found time to comment on the "inadequate" supply of MacArthur's men. He would have done more to stop Stalin from setting Poland's borders, though what he could have done, with Soviet troops on the ground, remained unstated. Roosevelt did not do enough to prepare for the war; the Republican role in blocking his efforts to do so remained unmentioned.

When Roosevelt finally hit the campaign trail late in the game, he mocked these comparisons. He and his "incompetents" and so on had created all these successful domestic and wartime programs that the Republicans had no intention of doing away with, he mocked. All of Halsey’s battleships had been commissioned on his watch, and (though I don’t think Roosevelt said this directly) the high command that Republicans lauded were all hand-picked. Roosevelt's personal appearances, including a 51-mile trek through NYC in the rain, worked to dispel his image as an old and sick man, whispered loudly by the Republicans.

One of the most interesting topics was the military vote, which conservatives did their best to unofficially oppose. Liberals in Congress wanted a federal bill (the Green-Lucas bill) that would allow soldiers access to a special uniform ballot to vote for their federal offices, but conservatives watered it down to a ballot that only came in to play in the absence of state action. Republicans feared that soldiers would vote for their commander-in-chief, and Southern Democrats feared backdoor Black enfranchisement. Roosevelt outmaneuvered this compromise by polling state governors on if they would amend their laws to validate the federal war ballot (the federal imposition being another objection of state's rights conservatives), and thus shifted political responsibility for the mediocre bill. Roosevelt allowed it to become law (rather than veto it and be overridden, as had happened with a too-small appropriations bill), and pushed for expansion. Governor Bricker himself later, in August, saw a controversy on the subject in his own state. In Ohio, votes by law had to be marked by a black lead pencil. When Bricker refused to call a special session of the legislature to remove this requirement, the Democrats threatened to sue to require the state to send each soldier from the state a black lead pencil. Bricker was forced to back down.

The book lists the many campaign events and the back-and-forth of important speeches; though campaigns were conducted on a much tighter timeframe at that time. In the end, Roosevelt won by a fairly comfortable electoral vote margin, though his smallest popular vote margin (possibly because of very low turnout in the unenthusiastic South). The rest is, of course, history: Roosevelt's health overtook him and he died, Truman became the President responsible for shaping the Cold War international order, and he defeated Dewey again in an upset in 1948.

I have a book at home about the importance of various losing Presidential candidates, and one of them is Dewey. I need to re-read its section to remind myself of Dewey's importance (internationalist and center-left consensus, perhaps), but I do recall that the book makes a lot of hay out of Truman's unfair and demagogic attacks on Dewey. After this book, I have a lot less sympathy for that claim. Dewey did his job as the ambitious, young ("junior partner") Republican, singing the gospel of romanticized capitalism against the "dictatorial" and "fascist" New Deal and Roosevelt, the “indispensable man”, but he does not come off as impressive in so doing. To be sure, it was undoubtedly hard to campaign in the face of Democratic insistence "not to change horses in mid-stream," and I think the abovementioned polling about the potential votes after the war's conclusion were very interesting. The Republicans did perhaps look more to the peace than the Democrats did, at the cusp of the war's conclusion. That being said, Dewey's subsequent repudiation in his effort to take over from Truman as the post-war mover and shaker of America and the world speaks for itself.

It was a bit surreal reading this book from the day before to the day after Election Day 2020. I read of Wendell Willkie's unsuccessful Wisconsin barnstorming (a heartland of isolationism) as friends contemplated that state's all-too-familiar electoral landscape this year; and as votes were counted and electoral totals slowly accumulated today, I read of the prediction vs. the reality for Dewey, who only carried 12 states, many fewer than some had predicted. Roosevelt was an older man who had perhaps lost a step, not unlike Biden. Dewey was, of course, not as bad as Trump, but he was a New Yorker who thought himself the only honest man. Republicans and Southern (yes, okay, Democratic) conservatives did not want all votes to be counted. The country is in a gloomy and uncertain mood at this snapshot in time, with the election un-called as I type this (though I am still bullish on Biden, I think the fundamentals are strong enough to carry the day). History helpfully provides a reminder that, in fact, all elections are shitty, if you get right down to it. We have to go through them regardless.