FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944

By David M. Jordan

“A lucid, highly engrossing account of a fateful but little chronicled episode in American presidential politics . . . featuring a large cast of personalities.” —Richard Kluger, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Simple Justice

Although the presidential election of 1944 placed FDR in the White House for an unprecedented fourth term, historical memory of the election itself has been overshadowed by the war, Roosevelt’s health and his death the following April, Truman’s ascendancy, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Today most people assume that FDR’s reelection was assured. Yet, as David M. Jordan’s engrossing account reveals, neither the outcome of the campaign nor even the choice of candidates was assured.

Just a week before Election Day, pollster George Gallup thought a small shift in votes in a few key states would award the election to Thomas E. Dewey. Though the Democrats urged voters not to “change horses in midstream,” the Republicans countered that the war would be won “quicker with Dewey and Bricker.” With its insider tales and accounts of party politics and campaigning for votes in the shadow of war and an uncertain future, FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944 “deserves a place alongside Theodore White’s histories of how high and low character, fierce ambition, and dumb luck play their part in the nation’s choice of its chief executive” (Richard Kluger).

“Jordan tells the story of the 1944 presidential election, and he tells it very well . . . a clearly written, well-researched narrative.” —Journal of American History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9780253005625

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PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When people think of the 1944 presidential election, they usually think two things: that everybody knew Franklin D. Roosevelt was dying; and that victory was a given for FDR. The thing they usually don't know, or can't quite remember, is who the Republican candidate was. Walter Trohan, the longtime Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, summed it up in his memoirs: The 1944 presidential campaign was a foregone conclusion even though all the politicians knew FDR was a dying man.¹

But Trohan was writing his book thirty-one years after the election took place, and he was simply reflecting the received wisdom of that day. If the reader could go back in time to a moment about a week before the ′44 election and talk with Dr. George Gallup in his office at Princeton, New Jersey, where Gallup received his reports of polling around the country and put the results all together for his newspaper clients, the reader would get a far different picture from Trohan's in 1975. According to Gallup shortly before the election, it looked almost like a toss-up, with the result depending on how several key states, rated 50–50 by the pollsters, broke on Election Day. If they went one way, Roosevelt would win his fourth term; if they edged into the other camp, as Gallup thought they would, Thomas E. Dewey could become president.

As to Roosevelt's health, it can safely be said that Dr. Howard Bruenn, Admiral Ross McIntire, and several physicians with whom they consulted were aware that the President had a very serious heart condition. No one else really knew, and McIntire, Roosevelt's personal physician, kept the rest of the country as much in the dark as possible with his misleading announcements to the press and public. There were whispers, of course; the frustrated Republicans were always circulating rumors about FDR and his family. He was dying of cancer, he was really Jewish, he'd undergone a secret operation, his wife was organizing black maids to rise up against their employers, and so on. Roosevelt's day-long drive through the streets of New York in a downpour on October 21, 1944, effectively put an end to the health whispers for that election.

Of course, the fact that Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, on the eighty-third day of his fourth term, seems to validate the theory that everyone knew he was dying. On the contrary, such history-by-hindsight should be guarded against, because it does not accord with what really took place. Lots of people (mostly Washington insiders) had suspicions, but no one knew, and it appears that very few voters made their decision on the presidency thinking that the incumbent was dying. They thought he looked tired after handling the war effort for three grueling years. The biggest issue in the campaign was who was better suited to bring the war to a conclusion and handle the issues of peace thereafter, and the widely discussed choice was between Dewey and Roosevelt, not between Dewey and Harry Truman, the Democratic vice presidential candidate and putative successor to a dying man.

One of the most interesting aspects of the 1944 election is that, long before they went after each other, each party had a major internal problem. For the Republicans, it was how to get rid of Wendell Willkie, their 1940 standard-bearer, who was regarded as poison by the party bigwigs; for the Democrats, it was disposing of Henry Wallace, the incumbent vice president, who was unwanted by sizable elements of the party. Willkie, of course, was a former Democrat who had made inroads into the GOP representing corporate America's fight against the New Deal; to the astonishment of the party leaders, he had parlayed this notoriety into the capture of the 1940 Republican presidential nomination. Wallace, deeply unpopular with party regulars when Roosevelt forced his vice presidential selection in 1940, had developed a following in the left wing of the party but was loathed by many other Democrats. How the parties solved their separate problems with these two men occupies the first part of this story.

Once the two party tickets were set, the normal routine of a presidential campaign got under way. Except that 1944 was far from normal. The nation was deeply involved in the greatest war in its history, and the war effort was the great shadow that fell over all the activities of the campaign. The Democrats chanted Don't Change Horses in the Middle of the Stream, while a Republican slogan, not as widely used, was Win the War Quicker with Dewey and Bricker. The GOP claimed that it could do better in fighting the war and in providing for the peace to follow; besides, the Republicans said, the Democrats had sold out to the Communists. How these varying efforts played out constitutes the climax of the story.

I have a few personal recollections of the ′44 election, as a 9-year-old boy who was interested in politics. My parents loathed Franklin Roosevelt, so my childhood memories are colored slightly by the fact that everything I heard around the house was slanted in one direction. Still, I read the magazines and newspapers about the campaign (the Philadelphia Inquirer and Bulletin were pretty solidly Republican, and the Record was never allowed in our house) and listened to reports over the radio. It all whetted my interest, and I've been happy to get back to it for this work.

Along the way I have had much help from a lot of people, many of whose names I failed to record. I do want to express my thanks to Jim Cross in Special Collections, Clemson University Library; Sharon Sumpter at the University Archives, Notre Dame Library; Mark Renovitch, Robert Parks, and Karen Anson at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park; Mary Huth and Melissa Mead at the University of Rochester Library; Dan Linke at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscripts Library and Donald Simon at the Firestone Library at Princeton University; Randy Sowell and Dave Clark at the Truman Library in Independence; Jan Grenci at the Library of Congress; Edith Prout at the Jenkintown Library; Bill Harper at the Ohio Historical Society; Sue Stuard; and Michael Hamilburg. Thanks also for editorial assistance to my wife, Jean, my daughter, Diana Jordan Born, and my good friend the late Max Silberman, who had the foresight to be born on January 20, 1945, the day of FDR's fourth inaugural. Any factual errors or questionable conclusions, of course, are mine.

David M. Jordan

PROLOGUE

An Evening at the Statler

The night was clear and cool, a lovely early autumn Saturday evening, as the leaders of the Teamsters Union gathered at the Statler Hotel in Washington for their annual dinner. They looked forward to this gathering each year, but they especially anticipated this one. The President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was coming. He was going to make the main speech, to them and to a nationwide radio audience. Saturday, September 23, 1944, looked like an exciting night.

Roosevelt, in office since March 4, 1933, was the Democratic candidate for an unprecedented fourth term in the White House, nominated to run against the Republican hopeful, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Dewey had been campaigning hard for several weeks, scoring points on a western swing while Roosevelt took care of the many burdens of running a world war (with a trip to Hawaii and Alaska concerning the war in the Pacific mixed in). Democratic Party leaders were becoming a little nervous about the campaign, and they looked forward to FDR's talk with even more anticipation than did the Teamsters in the Statler ballroom.

Indeed, Drew Pearson's nationwide column appearing that day had said that Roosevelt himself was less confident of winning than he was at the same time in 1940. The President admitted privately that Dewey had been hitting pay dirt in the West and that the election was far from being in the bag.¹

In his speech accepting the Democratic convention's nomination, on July 20, 1944, Roosevelt had donned his commander-in-chief's hat and said, I shall not campaign in the usual sense, for the office. In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. Besides, in these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time. I shall, however, feel free to report to the people the facts about matters of concern to them and especially to correct any misrepresentations. Now, though, he acknowledged that his speech would be political—it would have a tinge of politics, FDR playfully told his press conference—in order to correct some of what he felt were misrepresentations.²

Columnist Marquis Childs wrote that Roosevelt's talk was going to have to pull his campaign out of the slough of apathy, indifference and confusion into which it has fallen. While the Republicans had been out on the hustings, attacking Roosevelt's New Deal for administrative incompetence and for its tired old men—a not very hidden reference to the rumors they were busy circulating about the President's worsening health—Democrats indulged in the customary Democratic pastime of fighting each other. Bourbon Democrats from the South complained about outsiders threatening Dixie's time-honored racial practices, while old-line party bosses feared the inroads that labor leaders were making into their fiefdoms, in what Childs called a rivalry for power and position that could hardly be called good-natured. The President's task was a stern one.³

The union leaders started getting together early in the evening, gathering in the bar to renew acquaintances and to discuss the affairs of the day. At the appointed hour, after everyone had moved into the ballroom for dinner, President Roosevelt arrived, accompanied by his ever-present Secret Service escort; his appointments secretary, General Edwin M. Pa Watson; and Steve Early, his press aide. Early's secretary had sent a memo to the Secret Service and to Dave Beck, who was running the dinner for Daniel J. Tobin, the Teamsters' president, that Watson and Early would go into the dining room with the President and then ‘mosey’ from the head table down to their table (which they hope will be nearby).⁴

There were a thousand people at the dinner, seven hundred of them Teamsters leaders and their wives and the rest appointed government officials, representatives of the various agencies like the National War Labor Board, U.S. Maritime Commission, and the Office of Defense Transportation with which the Teamsters did official business. At the head table next to the President were William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor (of which the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, to give the union its full title, was a part), and West Coast shipbuilder HenryJ. Kaiser.

Once the meal was finished, the program for the evening began. The Roosevelt radio time, purchased by the Democratic National Committee, began at 9:30 (Eastern War Time), so at the appropriate moment, union president Dan Tobin introduced his friend the President as a great world leader of courage, experience and real statesmanship attacked by a band of avaricious manipulators of wealth. A noisy four-minute demonstration followed, after which the President began.⁵

He gave his address sitting down. The steel braces that the polio-afflicted President used to hold himself upright had in recent times become more and more painful to him. A week and a half earlier, talking to his cousin Daisy Suckley and his political confidant Harry Hopkins, FDR referred to the upcoming speech and said, I just can't stand up to make that speech, and both of them said there was no reason why he should have to stand up.⁶

Roosevelt beamed down at his audience and began, with a reference to the critics of his age and health and a crisp reminder of Herbert Hoover:

Well, here we are together again—after four years—and what years they have been! You know, I am actually four years older, which is a fact that seems to annoy some people. In fact, in the mathematical field, there are millions of Americans who are more than eleven years older than when we started in to clear up the mess that was dumped in our laps in 1933.⁷

FDR's great New York-patrician speaking voice, the voice that had beguiled, attracted, and infuriated Americans since 1932, was unchanged. He talked about the Republicans who attacked labor for three years and six months and then discover that they really love labor and that they are anxious to protect labor from its old friends. He said he got quite a laugh from the plank in the Republican platform adopted at its July convention claiming that the party accepts the purposes of the National Labor Relations Act, the Wage and Hour Act, the Social Security Act, and all other Federal statutes designed to promote and protect the welfare of American working men and women. He went on:

You know, many of the Republican leaders and Congressmen and candidates, who shouted enthusiastic approval of that plank in that convention hall, would not even recognize these progressive laws if they met them in broad daylight. Indeed, they have personally spent years of effort and energy—and much money—in fighting every one of those laws in Congress, and in the press, and in the courts, ever since this Administration began to advocate them and enact them into legislation. That is a fair example of their insincerity and of their inconsistency.

The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all social progress under the New Deal.

That, he went on, as his audience guffawed, was not imitation as a form of flattery but the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud. He said there were enlightened, liberal elements in the Republican Party, but they were not able to drive the Old Guard Republicans from their entrenched positions.

Can the Old Guard pass itself off as the New Deal? Roosevelt asked. I think not, he answered, with a twinkle in his eye; we have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on his back.⁸

He spoke about Republican opposition to preparedness measures in the years before Pearl Harbor, and he quoted Dewey, without naming him, for his claim that Lend-Lease would bring an end to free government in the United States. He said the Republican leaders promised to make the peace so skillfully that they won't lose a single isolationist vote or a single isolationist campaign contribution.

Roosevelt looked dolefully out at his audience and said, I think there is one thing that you know: I am too old for that. I cannot talk out of both sides of my mouth at the same time. His listeners rocked with laughter.⁹

Talking about the fine job the nation's military leaders were doing, the President chided Dewey, again without mentioning him by name, for his suggestion that Douglas MacArthur's forces in the Pacific were being shortchanged on resources. He scored what he called labor-baiters, who picked on labor for the occasional strikes that had taken place during the war, strikes, he went on, that have been condemned by every responsible national labor leader. Then he added, all but one, who each listener knew was the mineworkers' John L. Lewis, Roosevelt's bitter enemy. He described the massive output of labor and management for the war effort, with a nod to Henry Kaiser for the 19 million tons of cargo ships a year. He pointed out that since Pearl Harbor only one-tenth of one percent of manhours have been lost by strikes. Can you beat that?¹⁰

The President suggested that the opposition in 1944 had imported into the campaign the big lie technique set out in Adolf Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, which called for repeating the big falsehood over and over again. For example, he said, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican depression but a Democratic depression from which this nation was saved in 1933. He paused, then said:

Now, there is an old and somewhat lugubrious adage which says: Never speak of rope in the house of a man who has been hanged. In the same way, if I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I think I would use is that word depression.¹¹

The audience loved it.

He talked about the Republican leaders, still largely in control of the party, who had fought nearly every attempt that this Administration made to warn our people and to arm our Nation. And then he took note of a story that had been recited in the House of Representatives by a longtime isolationist congressman from Minnesota named Harold Knutson.

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons, he began. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala, he said, as smiles started to spread through his audience.

Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself—such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

Roosevelt's audience roared with appreciative laughter. One enthusiastic listener beat a silver bread tray with a soup ladle, while another, two tables away, applauded by smashing glasses with an empty wine bottle, sending showers of glass around him and to the floor.

The President finished up his speech, setting forth his vision of the task ahead, particularly to ensure postwar prosperity and employment. Much has been done, he asserted. Much more is under way. The fruits of victory this time will not be apples sold on street corners. He concluded to a thunderous ovation, with most of his listeners still chuckling about Fala as the Secret Service wheeled the President away.

Dewey would answer, the pundits would have their say, Congress-woman Clare Boothe Luce would deplore the President's use of humor in such serious times, and the editorials would roll out, pro and con. There could be no doubt, after the Teamsters speech, that the 1944 campaign for the Presidency was on in earnest now.

1

A Nation at War

1944 was an election year in the United States. For the first time in eighty years, the country would go through the whole presidential electoral process while in the midst of a war.

In 1864, incumbent president Abraham Lincoln outpolled the Democrats, defeatism, and General George B. McClellan to win election to a second term, but it was no sure thing for old Abe until Sherman's capture of Atlanta early in September 1864.

In 1944, it was the Democrats who were in power, with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt nearing the end of his unprecedented third term. As 1943 came to a close, the American war effort appeared to be going well, but there was still much hard fighting ahead against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and militaristic Japan. Eleven years of a turbulent presidency had generated considerable opposition to Roosevelt and his New Deal, while recent elections and public opinion polls seemed to indicate a nationwide swing toward the conservative Republicans. Leo Crowley, high in the administration and in the Democratic Party, told Harold Ickes, Roosevelt's Interior secretary, he believed the political situation, as it affects the President, to be very gloomy indeed. The 1944 election, the shape of which was very clouded as 1943 drew to a close, was up in the air.¹

Much had happened since Roosevelt shattered the two-term tradition with his victory over Wendell L. Willkie in 1940. The undeclared war in the North Atlantic, American destroyers playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game with German submarines, was ended by the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and the subsequent round of declarations of war.

The mobilization of America, which had slowly been taking place before the start of the war, sped up. On December 29, 1940, Roosevelt had called upon his country to become the great arsenal of democracy.² Industrial conversion to the manufacture of tanks, guns, ships, airplanes, and the multitude of other implements of modern warfare became more pressing, as did the efforts to get much larger numbers of American men (and women) into military uniforms. Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had a scare in September 1941, when the Selective Service Act—the conscription law—was nearly defeated, extended for another year in the House of Representatives by the margin of a single vote. Once the war began, of course, there was no longer any question of opposition to the draft.

Restructuring the government for handling the war effort presented numerous challenges, especially with a slow and lumbering Congress increasingly suspicious of Roosevelt, who often found it necessary to bypass Congress in setting up agencies to deal with pressing needs. FDR's particular administrative peculiarities and his oft-noted disinclination to dismiss functionaries who were not performing well posed further difficulties. The combination of these factors produced a spate of ad hoc agencies, usually created by executive order, to deal in many cases with specific problem areas. Frequently these units were succeeded by new agencies called into being to handle the same or similar problems but to do it better. Things were working, problems were in fact being solved, but bureaucratic confusion was rampant as well.

Republicans and anti-Roosevelt Democrats, who were none too happy to see a great augmentation of the President's powers in wartime, attempted to rouse the citizenry against the growing multitude of administrators, ignoring the fact that the munitions were being produced, synthetic rubber and penicillin and sulfa drugs were being developed, and the American armies and navies around the world, as well as those of our allies, were being supplied. Nevertheless, the American voter could easily be confounded by the profusion of brand-new bureaus, agencies, committees, and commissions and led to believe FDR's opponents who portrayed these as just more New Deal-type bureaucracies.

The National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC) was followed by the Office of Production Management (OPM), which gave way to the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board (SPAB) and later to the War Production Board (WPB). The Smaller War Plants Corporation (SWPC), the Office of Price Administration (OPA), the Office of War Information (OWI), the Office of Defense Transportation (ODT), and the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) each had its own area of operation, sometimes encroaching upon others, sometimes being encroached upon. And there were many other agencies—each with its own set of initials—handling specific needs.

The Office of Price Administration—the OPA—was a particular target of anyone who had any kind of gripe about wartime conditions. Controlling the prices of or even rationing consumer items had an impact on everyone, and OPA Administrator Leon Henderson found himself the constant recipient of the barbs of discontent, justified or not. One historian has said, As the war drew on, nearly every item Americans ate, wore, used or lived in was rationed or otherwise regulated. It was the most concerted attack on wartime inflation and scarcity in the nation's history, and by and large it worked. That is not to say that people were happy with how it worked. In 1944, Henderson's successor, Chester Bowles, declined to take any part in FDR's campaign, fearing the reaction if the OPA chief got involved in politics. He had problems enough without that.³

The administration turned to businessmen, many of them Republicans, who came to be called dollar-a-year men, to make it a bipartisan war effort. The businessmen, some of the great industrialists of the nation, responded splendidly on the whole. The United States became the arsenal for the free world that Roosevelt had envisioned.

As the country developed rapidly into an industrial giant at home, it turned more slowly into a military giant as well. The string of horrors of December 1941 and early 1942—Pearl Harbor, Guam, Bataan, Corregidor, Wake Island, and the vast destruction of shipping off the Atlantic coast by German U-boats—gradually turned into victories at Midway, the Coral Sea, and Guadalcanal. The debacle of an untried U.S. Army at Kasserine Pass was followed by the successful eviction of the German army from Tunisia and Sicily, the invasion of Italy, and the removal of Italy as a belligerent power. Roosevelt agreed with Winston Churchill that overall strategy required defeating Germany first, with Japan to be dealt with later, but the American public did not always favor this strategy.

The Russian army had broken the back of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and won a great tank victory at Kursk, but Kesselring's troopers that the American Fifth and the British Eighth armies fought up the boot of Italy were still battle hardened and tough. The Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, whose bloodied nation knew the full meaning of total war, demanded the opening of a full-fledged second front in the west, but the Western Allies could not conceive of a cross-Channel invasion in 1943, despite Stalin.

On the home front, Americans coped with the war—with shortages of items they were used to having in plentiful supply, with ration books, 35-mile-an-hour speed limits, gasoline rationing, draft boards, Victory gardens, gold-star flags, air-raid wardens, war bonds, with uprootings and displacements and massive changes in ordinary life. Coffee, sugar, shoes, typewriters, whiskey, alarm clocks, and domestic servants became hard to find. Any complaint about conditions—about just about anything—was met with the universal response: Don't you know there's a war on? ⁴

An example of a restriction surprisingly well accepted was gasoline rationing. A serious rubber shortage made it imperative to ration gasoline, thus preserving automobile tires, and nationwide rationing went into effect on December 1, 1942. The initial protests from the citizenry soon disappeared.⁵

Meat rationing, on the other hand, was poorly handled by the OPA, which issued a flood of sometimes-nonsensical regulations—on constantly changing ration point values, on how butchers should cut meats, on what meatpackers could charge. Housewives raised a steady howl of protest. In some parts of the country, horse, rabbit, and muskrat were sold as substitutes for beef and pork, and black marketeering of meat became widespread.

On the home front there was more money around than Americans had seen in some time—the nagging memories of the Depression started to fade—but all too little to spend it on. The magazines—Life, Look, Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post—were full of two-page, brightly-colored ads showing many of the consumer items that would be available soon after the war ended, but these things were not for sale now.

Many people were vaguely aware that there had been some sort of problem on the West Coast with the Japanese who lived there, but it had been taken care of and dropped out of newspaper reports. Few Americans realized that the displacement and internment of Japanese Americans, citizens and non-citizens alike, with no evidence of sabotage or imminent danger, constituted one of the most flagrant mass abuses of civil rights in the nation's history. The Japanese internment became a dark stain on the historical reputations of California Attorney General Earl Warren, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, Henry Stimson, and Franklin Roosevelt. The army was opposed to the evacuation, but the civilian leadership of the War Department, particularly McCloy, pushed hard for it.⁶

Popular culture thrived during World War II. Early in the war Roosevelt wrote what was called the green light letter to baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, advising that big-league baseball should be kept going in wartime, for morale purposes, even though subject to similar restrictions as everyone else.⁷

This green light seemed to apply to other forms of entertainment and culture as well. Clark Gable and James Stewart and Henry Fonda went to war, but Bing Crosby carried on and Gregory Peck, Sonny Tufts, and Van Johnson became bright new stars. Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Bob Feller went into the service, while old-timers like Mel Ott, Eddie Mayo, and Joe Medwick drew fans to the ballparks, and a left-handed pitcher named Hal Newhouser, with a heart murmur that frustrated his efforts to enlist, became the top hurler of wartime baseball—and of a few years afterward.

Early in the war, Americans watched films like Mrs. Miniver, about the heroic English, and Casablanca, about coping with the Vichy French. Soon enough Hollywood began pumping out plenty of movies about the American war. The wartime function of the movies…, pronounced the Hollywood Writers Mobilization for Defense, is to build morale. In 1943, fully one-third of American movies dealt with the war, either directly or indirectly.⁸

So Americans watched such films as Brian Donlevy's Wake Island, Action in the North Atlantic with Humphrey Bogart, and Tyrone Power's Crash Dive. Moviegoers made a hit of Madame Curie, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon (with small roles for Van Johnson and cute little Margaret O'Brien), and Coney Island featuring Betty Grable, who was voted by movie-theatre owners the top star of 1943. They followed Saturday-afternoon serials like Don Winslow of the Navy and Walt Disney sagas like Dumbo, about an elephant whose ears were so big he could use them to fly. Alfred Hitchcock's fans loved the famous director's Saboteur, whose villain got his comeuppance in a spectacular fall from the top of the Statue of Liberty.⁹

Radio, over the three national networks, CBS, NBC, and the Blue, was still the medium of choice for wartime Americans, who sat around their living rooms by the millions to listen to Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Your Hit Parade, One Man's Family, and dozens of daytime soap operas. There were quiz shows, amateur hours, baseball games, even boxing matches, to while away the spare hours of radio listeners, as well as newscasts, both regular and those interrupting programs with fast-breaking news. The names and voices of newsmen became familiar to American listeners—William L. Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, Gabriel Heatter, and Eric Sevareid, among many others.

And, of course, there was music—hours and hours of music. From Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony of the Air, the New York Philharmonic, and Texaco's Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera to the half-hour shows of big bands like those of HarryJames and Fred Waring and the contributions of disc jockeys around the country, music filled the airwaves.

A number of the big bands broke up soon after the coming of the war, but others continued. What was new was the proliferation of single singers. In the thirties there were a few stars like Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, and Rudy Vallee, but most popular singers were connected with the big bands. When Frank Sinatra left Tommy Dorsey's band to go out on his own and quickly became 1943's biggest star, with teenage girls called bobby-soxers swooning at his well-modulated tones, a new paradigm was established. America's wartime pop music ranged from such combat-inspired classics as You Can't Say ‘No’ to a Soldier, Frank Loesser's Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, and They're Either Too Young or Too Old, to the more standard Blues in the Night, Xavier Cugat's Brazil, Mairzy Doats, and Irving Berlin's White Christmas, introduced by Crosby in the 1942 film Holiday Inn.

In April 1943, a new show by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II opened in New York, and the Broadway musical would never be the same again. With its catchy songs and its exuberant choreography set in turn-of-the-century frontier life, Oklahoma was about as far away from midwar America as it could be, but it enchanted people around the country. When Alfred Drake as Curly McLain wrapped his baritone voice around Oh What A Beautiful Mornin'! all America gasped with pleasure.

With all that music playing, it was only natural that there was a great increase in dancing. Especially near army bases, there were many recreational facilities for off-duty soldiers, offered by the USO, local churches, YMCAS, teen canteens, and dance halls. It was considered patriotic for young ladies to provide entertainment in such milieus for lonely GIs, and thousands of them did so, often with all-too-predictable results. The strenuous jitterbug boomed during the war, particularly with youngsters, while older dancers preferred the fox-trot and its varieties.

With gasoline rationing encouraging Americans to stay at home, it was not surprising that book buying increased. Shirer's Berlin Diary was at the top of the best-seller lists when the war began, and it was no surprise that war-oriented books sold well, including See Here, Private Hargrove, a story of a citizen-soldier trying to adapt to the military, William L. White's PT boat saga, They Were Expendable, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, and Wendell Willkie's One World, recounting the author's journey around the world on a presidential mission.

So the people of the United States had much with which to divert themselves from the news coming from overseas and the discomforts of wartime living. Joe Louis and Billy Conn, the kings of the boxing world, were both in the army, but Count Fleet won the Triple Crown of racing in 1943, and he was as fast as any pre-war thoroughbred. Dinah Shore sang I'll Walk Alone, and millions of bereft young ladies sighed with her, while Vaughn Monroe sang wistfully of a time When the Lights Go On Again, all over the world.

Christmas 1943 seemed more somber than usual, with so many empty chairs at Yuletide dining tables and with shortages of such holiday staples as candy and liquor. Major labor troubles loomed as well, on the railroads and in the steel mills, and indeed the President had to step in a few days after Christmas and seize the railroads to head off a threatened major strike.

A couple of days later, Americans got ready to welcome in a new year with relief that the worst seemed past and better times should lie ahead in 1944. They read in their newspapers of a Russian victory over twenty-two German divisions in the Ukraine, of a 1,300-plane strike by the U.S. Army Air Force against targets in the Reich, and the capture of a key airfield near Cape Gloucester, on the island of New Britain, by MacArthur's forces. They took in the news that the British navy had sunk the 26,000-ton German battle cruiser Scharnhorst off northern Norway and that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had arrived back in London to take command of the staff planning the long-awaited cross-Channel invasion.

Americans prepared to celebrate the new year in hotels, USO clubs, nightspots, movie theatres, churches, and homes, wherever a few revelers might get together. Killjoy Paul McNutt, the War Manpower chieftain, warned federal employees against starting the new year with a hangover, as January 1, 1944, was a work day for the government.

So it was, as America prepared for an election year.

2

Politics in Midwar

The midterm elections, in 1942, had not gone well for FDR and his party. In October, the President sent Congress a message asking that the draft age be reduced to cover 18-year-olds. In normal times Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn would have sat on such a politically risky proposal until the election was safely past, but he knew that the military exigencies were great so he brought it up promptly. When it passed, an avalanche of protests from parents buried a number of Democrats who voted for the measure. The 18-year-old draft, the cumulative annoyances of wartime restrictions, regulations, and rationing, and a drift away from the spirit of the New Deal hurt Roosevelt's party. One historian has called the ′42 election more an expression of apathy and of barriers to voting by displaced workers than the result of an electoral shift to the Republican party, but to party politicians in November 1942 it sure looked like the Republicans had won. Out of about eighty million eligible voters nationwide, only some twenty-eight million voted. The Democrats lost seven seats in the Senate and forty-seven in the House of Representatives, leaving the Congress firmly in the control of a coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats.¹

White House staffer Jonathan Daniels lamented that the President, though [a] master politician, [was] not interested in party politics now. Roosevelt seemed to have pushed aside any inclination to further a progressive agenda while the war occupied his time and concern.²

Republicans were almost giddy with delight over the election returns. Arthur Krock, in the New York Times, noted a nation-wide trend…in favor of the opposition party, while a Chicago Tribune writer gleefully called the election a great national court martial by which the Roosevelt administration was tried and adjudged guilty of bungling the war effort. Senator C. Wayland Curly Brooks of Illinois, a pre-war isolationist re-elected in 1942, said the swing to Republicans was an expression of disgust with the administration.³

Republicans considered themselves the natural ruling party of the country. Since the seismic political shifts of Civil War days, the GOP had controlled the White House except when unusual circumstances let Cleveland and Wilson win. The normal order of things had been restored after each of those aberrations. The Depression had led to the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and the threat of war had given him a third term in 1940. Republican partisans felt it was time to restore their party to its accustomed primacy, especially with the war nearing its close.

Once the off-year election was out of the way, the pundits quickly turned to speculation about the presidential election two years hence. Thomas E. Dewey, who had almost captured the Republican nomination in 1940 from a position no higher than district attorney of New York City, was elected New York's governor in 1942 and was immediately granted front-runner status. Other Republican governors who were recognized as possibilities were Dwight Green of Illinois, Harold E. Stassen of Minnesota, Earl Warren of California, John W. Bricker of Ohio, and Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts. U.S. senators thought to have a chance included Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. The wild card in all the guessing was 1940 nominee Willkie, no favorite of the party's leaders but still a definite factor.

On the Democratic side was the incumbent Franklin Roosevelt. Until he made his position clear regarding a possible fourth term, there were no other realistic Democratic candidates.

Meanwhile, early in the war the leaders of organized labor had patriotically agreed to a no-strike pledge in order not to hamper the mass industrial production needed to sustain a worldwide war effort. With such a pledge, of course, they gave up labor's most potent weapon, in effect entrusting their welfare to a wartime agency, the National War Labor Board (NWLB), a twelve-member panel consisting of representatives of business, labor, and the public. With rapid inflation in 1942, the NWLB had to come up with a policy to keep wages in line, a policy that became known as the Little Steel Formula, because it first went into effect with the second-line steel producers. The formula was to restrict wage increases to levels that would not increase inflation. Labor was not happy with the Little Steel Formula, arguing that wage increases did not keep up with cost-of-living increases and that workers suffered while corporations made huge, war-swollen profits.

Complicating matters was the combative, black-browed leader of the coal miners' union, John L. Lewis. Lewis considered himself and his union above all such mundane matters as wartime pledges and regulations, and in the spring of 1943 he called his men out of the mines on a nationwide strike. An outraged Congress passed an anti-labor bill called the Smith-Connally Act. FDR vetoed Smith-Connally, but his veto was quickly overridden.

Measures like this one, as well as low voter turnout in the off year of 1942, which resulted in the large setback for the liberal cause (none of the Democratic losses in ′42 came in the conservative South), pushed organized labor toward a

Reviews for FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944

[plantyfinn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

David M. Jordan's "FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944" is worth a read because the election it studies has often been overlooked. The backdrop of a World War overshadowed the election at the time and since. Yet this was FDR's closest election, and Thomas Dewey was arguably FDR's savviest opponent. Jordan describes the election contest in clear prose and has done excellent research. He highlights the failed and almost delusional effort of Wendell Willkie to regain the nomination, and characters who once were major such as Governor Bricker of Ohio are evaluated again. Jordan also shows the prominence of anti-Communist rhetoric in the GOP campaign; I hadn't realized this previously, assuming that the wartime alliance with Moscow had placed such criticism on hold. Although I'm not usually a big Norman Rockwell fan, Jordan (or his publisher) found a superb illustration for the cover of the book.As with any book on politics, there is always a danger of giving in to your own biases. Jordan clearly favors FDR and paints a picture of Dewey as a somewhat soulless man. On issues of war and peace, he depicts Dewey as a straddler, although I don't think Dewey's practice of politics is that different from politicians through the ages or from FDR's; Dewey's goal was to try to keep his fractious coalition together, and he made compromises not unlike those FDR historically made on civil rights and other issues. Jordan puts context around Dewey's statements by using negative editorial comments (such as saying NY Times "demolished" his arguments in a speech). Jordan occasionally sprinkles in observations such as "If the depiction of Hillman happened to stir up some anti-Semitism, well that might bring out a few extra Republican votes" (news to Jordan: The Republican party wasn't the only one that had anti-semites in its ranks). I wish there had been just a little more balance in the presentation, but Jordan's biases are a small distraction from a generally well done book. I think that Jordan is a little careless in his assessment of GOP rhetoric criticizing FDR for the depression. He repeatedly and unnecessarily repeats that the Depression started under the Republicans instead of trying to understand what Republican politicians meant by such criticism. Were they saying that FDR's policies prolonged the depression? Did their rhetoric appeal to anyone? I had always assumed the GOP just avoided mention of the Depression so it would have been valuable to have a more thorough discussion of why Republicans thought FDR's handling of the Depression was an argument in their favor.A few stylistic flaws to note: I think using FDR's "Fala" speech at the Statler in September 1944 as an introduction to the election was a mistake. I wish it had been integrated into the flow of the election narrative. It was confusing to suddenly have the speech pop up as a done deal halfway through the book's narrative; as I was reading the final chapters, it took me a while to realize that this important speech that commentators are discussing was the one already presented in the introduction. I wish a good editor had broken Jordan of his habit of foreshadowing events with useless phrases such as "remained to be seen". Many of his chapters end with this annoying type of flourish (quick examples: "(Willkie) was not, however, out of the Republican picture, as would become clear in the weeks and months ahead" or "Perhaps some surprises were in store.")

[macdad-236140 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The presidential election of 1944 was one that took place under unusual circumstances: for only the second time in the nation’s history, the voters went to the polls to choose a commander-in-chief while the country was at war. Yet as David M. Jordan explains in his history of the contest that year, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s re-election was far from a sure thing. Opinion polls early on showed that, if the war ended before the election, the Republicans would be a slight favorite to win the White House. This made Roosevelt's candidacy an imperative for Democrats, as they believed that even with his increasing health issues victory was possible only with the incumbent at the top of the ticket.

Jordan's book provides a blow-by-blow account of the campaign as it evolved over the course of that year. From it he conveys to his readers a good sense of the personalities involved, the issues at play, and the course of the campaign through the conventions and during the two months in which Roosevelt and his Republican challenger, Thomas E. Dewey, canvassed the nation in their quest to win the White House. Yet for all of the strengths of Jordan's narrative, there is little in the way of an in-depth analysis of the broader factors at play or an effort to situate the contest among the other political contests that year, save for an acknowledgement near the end of the book of a few notable victories and defeats suffered by candidates in other races. The absence of any deeper exploration of the forces that shaped the campaign or decided the result is a real disappointment, one that limits the value of Jordan's account of a presidential election with enormous consequences for the postwar world.