The Pittsburgh Press (September 24, 1944)
Hansen: Thomas Dewey’s conservative tendencies frighten writers
Harding-Coolidge reaction feared
By Harry Hansen
Several months ago, I was eating lunch with a gay party of writers when one man remarked that he had just read advance sheets of biography of Thomas E. Dewey. The table fell silent, as if it had just received bad news, and a friend asked: “Who wrote it?”
“Stanley Walker.”
“Is it worth reading?”
Our informant spoke deliberately and, I thought, sadly, “Yes, I really think so.” he said. “But then, you see, Walker likes Dewey.”
This seemed to explain everything, like a doctor’s account of how you got that boil on your neck. The talk turned to other matters, but I reflected that these men found such a book scarcely comprehensible. Stanley Walker has seen similar manifestations of this among columnists, publicists and diners at nightclubs and lashes out at them in his book Dewey: An American of This Century (Whitney House).
Walker can be pretty sarcastic when he gets going, but about the only time he really hits one in this polite narrative is when he considers authors and newspapermen who are opponents of Thomas E. Dewey. He speaks with disdain of those who meet at the Artists and Writers Restaurant, where Walker himself must go for a snort, the Algonquin, the Stork and 21.
“Does anyone give a hoot what saloon society thinks about Dewey?” he asks, “Probably not, but still the matter has a certain importance because these people are not only very talkative, but some of them, unless far gone in crapulence, can actually write stuff that is widely read.” Walker knows that “they fill the magazines and the syndicated newspaper columns to an extraordinary degree.” Some exhibit signs of hysteria when Dewey’s name is mentioned. “In these circles being against Dewey is a fashionable pose.”
Dewey and writers
It 1s quite true that many writers are against Dewey for President. and Stanley Walker’s book would have been stronger if he had discussed the reasons seriously. Writers, on the whole, are not conservatives; they are in the vanguard of reform and fear the conservative influence of Dewey, in spite of their irritation with what they call the conservative tendencies of the Roosevelt administration. They swallow many of the injustices of the administration because they fear a reaction to the Harding-Coolidge days, although, the record of Dewey as prosecutor and governor has given little comfort to the old guard.
As I am not an extreme partisan in either camp. I often view the intolerant attitudes of my friends – who are in the lead in condemning intolerance – with awe. After the First World War I returned a firm believer in the League of Nations. When practically all the writers began to kick the League around, I became a sadly confused man. Now they are all on the other side again, clamoring for a League with teeth in it. A few years ago, they cheered Thomas E. Dewey when he convicted gangsters and crooked politicians. Then word got around that he was a cold proposition, sometimes curt, not hail-fellow-well-met with newspapermen and they fell out. Walker agrees that this trait can be exasperating, but there is something to be said for reticence. “Like it or not, it’s Dewey.”
You can take your choice between the Dewey coolness and the Rooseveltian warmth – especially toward vice-presidential candidates. They seem to cancel out.
Taller than Stalin!
Stanley Walker has given an excellent account of the Governor’s beginnings, his family – strongly, rooted in American pioneer history – and his career in public office. And the book is a model of a campaign biography. There are no log cabins in it and no horny-handed sons of toil, although Tom did pitch hay on Michigan farms. There is no bitter attack on the Roosevelt administration, although included are speeches that criticize it.
The chief objections to Dewey are brought up and answered.
There is the charge that the Governor is young and his own retort: “Is that wrong?” There is the old stock question of the unconvinced: “Has he grown?” There is mention of the charge that he caught a few crooks but did not cleanse New York of sin, that in convicting some he protected and freed others. Stanley Walker has pretty good answers to these stock objections. To the talk that Dewey is a little man, Walker replies: “He is about three inches taller than Joseph Stalin and almost two inches taller than Winston Churchill.”
That ought to put the opposition on its toes. But there is still the matter of the mustache. That’s a tough hurdle. Walker does his best to justify it. He says it gives cartoonists a chance to do things with Dewey’s face. Let the opposition be grateful for that. All the Republicans have had to distort these many years is a cigarette holder.