Afraid of Peace?

Like an able prosecutor, Tom Dewey took his case before the U.S. jury. It was his biggest case, and well he knew it. He was excited, and a trifle nervous. For one thing, he had to overcome a widespread feeling that he was just a little man with a mustache taking off against The Champ.

He had another problem: the people, with their eyes on the war, did not yet seem ready to listen to political oratory. Tom Dewey's job was to convince them of the campaign's urgency.

Dewey wanted no nonsense, no barnstorming, no parades, flags or placards. His first two speeches, as he began his 6,700-mile jaunt to the West Coast and back, were short, crisp, and to the point--good examples of well ordered, factual courtroom talk. His tactical approach was to present one issue in each speech and ram that issue home so hard that the New Deal would be driven into long explanation.

One Carpet. On the Dewey train, no oldster among the 63 newsmen (a record number) could recall any other campaign so deliberately pitched in low key. At Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station the only concession to ceremony was a small and ancient green carpet on the platform. Not more than 25 onlookers, mostly idle switchmen, watched Tom Dewey and his wife clamber aboard the rear platform.

In Philadelphia the crowd was bigger, standing five deep at the station gate, waving small American flags. Dewey went straight to a press conference at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, riding in an open car at the head of a 25-car motorcade. Going down Broad Street, there was a brief shower of ticker tape, no big, organized confetti cascade. In the afternoon, Dewey paid the necessary visit to Independence Hall, required of all political candidates.

"Afraid of America." That night, in Philadelphia's cavernous Convention Hall, Dewey got down to brass tacks. In his second sentence he drove home again the fact --his favorite--that the next President will serve largely in peacetime.

He drove hard again, as he had in earlier speeches, against the "tired, exhausted, quarreling and bickering Administration." Then he opened up.

"This is a campaign against an Administration which was conceived in defeatism, which failed for eight straight years to restore our domestic economy, which has been the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent Administration in the history of the nation, and worst of all, which has lost faith in the American people."

The Republican crowd ate it up. Then Dewey dropped his blockbuster. The New Deal, said he, was planning to demobilize the Army very gradually after victory. And why? For his answer Dewey used a recent quotation from Major General Lewis B. Hershey, director of Selective Service: "We can keep people in the Army about as cheaply as we can create an agency for them when they are out."

There was momentary silence; then cheers from the crowd, who took this Hershey bumble as representing the spirit of the New Deal's demobilization policy. Dewey let the quote sink in, then repeated it for good measure.

He continued: "For six months we have been hearing . . . that this was the plan. Now it is out in the open. They have been working up to it, because they are afraid of peace. They are afraid of a continuance of their own failures to get this country going again. They are afraid of America."

The Roosevelt Depression. Dewey then moved on to attack the "Roosevelt Depression." He asked: "Who was President during the depression that lasted from 1933 until some time in 1940 when war orders from all over the world began to bring us full employment again?"

He played on the themes of New Deal "defeatism" and quarreling. "When one agency fails, the New Deal just piles another on, and we pay for both. . . . Right in the final crisis of this war . . . the War Production Board fell apart before our eyes. This is also the Board in charge of reconversion and jobs. . . . When WPB fell apart, so did your chance under this Administration for jobs after the war."

Dewey saved his own domestic program for a later speech. But he stated his big premise: "The New Deal really believes that we cannot have good social legislation and also good jobs for all. I believe ... we can have both. . . . We can have both opportunity and security within the framework of a free society." "No Hush-Hush Peace." Dewey en trained for Louisville, making two plat form appearances on the way, at Rich mond and Indianapolis. Neither had been advertised in advance; the crowds that turned out were small. In Louisville, Dewey rode through almost empty streets to the Brown Hotel.

That night, in his second address, Dewey sought to quiet the fears of any who felt that U.S. foreign policy might become a football of the 1944 campaign.

But he did more: he completely and final ly dissociated himself from isolationist elements in the G.O.P. And he sought to disabuse any who might think that the G.O.P., under President Dewey, would be for a soft peace. Said he: "The military defeat of Germany and Japan must be complete and crushing. . . .

The criminals, high and low, in both Germany and Japan . . . must be dealt with promptly, justly and relentlessly. Germany and Japan must be completely disarmed . . . and the means of rearmament must be forbidden them. . . ." Dewey drew a careful distinction between the immediate peace with Germany and Japan, and the planning of a long-range peace organization. His conception of a permanent peace organization was squarely in line with the plans submitted to Dumbarton Oaks, but with this difference: "I believe this is a subject which should be talked about widely, earnestly, and publicly. . . . We cannot meet the problems of peace on any hush-hush, pussyfoot basis. . . . That world organization must be the work of many minds. No one man, or three or four men, can shape it. Some 60 nations, great and small, must help shape it, believe in it, join it, and make it work."

To the Mountains. The Louisville crowd, studded with fighting Kentucky Republicans, had cheered Dewey to the rafters, punctured its cheers with rebel yells.

The Dewey train headed north to his native state of Michigan. At his birthplace, he got his biggest ovation so far. Owosso, Mich. (pop. 17,000) drew some 25,000 from Shiawassee County down to Main Street for a Saturday night look at the home-town boy who had made good.*Tom Dewey made a brief, extemporaneous address, then retired to his mother's plain, white-painted home for a Sunday of rest and meditation.

This week, Tom Dewey plowed into the cornbelt--deepest and safest Republican territory. At Des Moines, 4,000 lowans met the campaign special. Tom Dewey headed for the Ft. Des Moines Hotel, and his newsiest press conference of the trip.

The newsmen had been saving the hot ones. First, what did he think of Jimmy Byrnes's reconversion report? "At least it's a start," said Torn Dewey, but: "Six weeks ago in Pittsburgh I said that the present Administration is six months late in planning for industrial reconversion. Now, it is only seven and one-half months late."

Had he heard that Sidney Hillman is critical of him?

"That makes our regard for each other mutual."

Had he read Wendell Willkie's argument (in Collier's) that the U.S. must yield sovereignty in joining a world organization ?

"That's a shibboleth. Every time you sign a treaty you give up a little something, as they give up something."

Did he agree with Willkie that the U.S. must be strong at home to be influential abroad?

"That is what I have been saying for years. And the tragedy of the present situation is that we have an Administration which ... at the end of eight years still had a limping, unproductive economy with 10,000,000 unemployed and absolutely no military preparations for the events which it now claims it foresaw. As a matter of fact, we had an army of 75,000.

Then Tom Dewey pushed on West.

* Previous No. 1 Owosso hero: the late slick-paper fictioneer James Oliver Curwood.

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