It was Dewey in a walkaway. Withoutlifting a finger, without once giving to the men from Maine to Oregon the sign they asked for, Governor Thomas E. Dewey became Candidate Dewey, G.O.P. nominee for the Presidency of the U.S.
The nomination could not come too soon. For bunting and frustration hung equally over the steamy Chicago Stadium as the Republicans met this week in their 23rd convention—the first in wartime since Abraham Lincoln.
As the convention began, the frustration was as tangible as the mammoth blow-up pictures of Dewey that stood about everywhere in Chicago. The thumping bands, the badges, the pretty girls and all the time-honored foofaraw failed to charge up the Republican batteries to the sparking point. The great engine just would not turn over—at the start.
This was not the fault of the war, although this was the blackest of weeks for the enemy on both sides of the world. The steady flow of huge headlines—Cherbourg, Saipan, Vitebsk—could neither blot the Republican convention off the front pages nor out of Americans' minds.
The main trouble was that the convention's main job was finished before it met. The hundreds of empty rooms in Chicago hotels were silent testimony to Tom Dewey's preconvention strength. Americans will travel a thousand miles to see a horse race but they won't look out the window to see a certainty.
"We Have Met the Enemy. . . ." It had not been so cut & dried at first, while other hopefuls still had hope. Handsome John Bricker, tailor-fresh in a blue tropical suit, arrived in town to the strains of Beautiful Ohio from his own brass band. But three days later, jarred to the heels when Illinois caucused and threw its strength to Dewey, the Bricker forces held a desperate eleventh-hour strategy meeting.
It was too late. For Tom Dewey's men were not calling but receiving. Harold Stassen's men sat dutifully and dourly around hotel lobbies, just in case a freak bolt of lightning should strike. John Bricker fought on, he spoke his familiar views with familiar vigor at a jampacked press conference, provided the only good bar for thirsty newsmen. His managers buttonholed and cajoled tirelessly. But hoopla was not enough in Chicago in June 1944. The Dewey nomination rolled on.
No Smoking. The opposition to Dewey collapsed in the face of one question: how can you argue with the people? With Dewey so clearly in front in all public soundings,* to reject him for some other candidate might suggest a picture of sinister men in smoke-filled rooms, defying the will of the people. Tom Dewey's shrewd managers could either afford to sit tight, or had been ordered to, or both. And they did. They staged no preconvention banquets or band concerts. Dewey's No. 1 feminine supporter, tall, grey Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms, occupied inconspicuous basement quarters next to the Blackstone Hotel men's washroom. And the Dewey Triumvirate—Jaeckle, Sprague and Brownell—held court in businesslike fashion in a plain and bannerless 25th-floor suite, until Dewey's nomination was cinched.