Crucial Week

In the second week of his campaign, pushing down the West Coast, Tom Dewey fought on in cold, logical and precise fashion. He had a difficult task: to be New Dealish enough to hold the vote of all those who do not want a reactionary administration but are weary of New Deal mismanagements; yet to attack powerfully enough to please those who are just plain mad at Franklin Roosevelt.

In Seattle, he laid down a precise barrage against the New Deal's labor-coddling, against WLB's timidity, red tape and politicking. (Said onetime WLBster Wayne Lyman Morse, now Oregon's G.O.P. Senate candidate: "It is the truth. I know . . . that there was political interference in WLB cases. . . .")

In Portland, his poise unruffled by the morning's train crash, he had lashed out against "the danger of one-man government."

In San Francisco, he made the clearest statement to date of his domestic program. Frankly, he "bought" most of the New Deal social gains. But he made a careful line of separation: "We must create an economic climate in which business, industry and agriculture can grow and flourish. . . . Studied hostility toward our job-producing machinery must cease."

See the Stars. Tom Dewey had come into Los Angeles into the most fabulous and phony, yet effective, political demonstration of the campaign. All day long the Los Angeles radio commercials had trumpeted: "Hear Thomas E. Dewey--and see the stars."

That night, at least 90,000 Angelenos came to the Coliseum to hear & see. Republicans Cecil B. de Mille and David O. Selznick produced the two-hour show, on a script written for split-second timing. Giant spotlights stabbed into the sky to form a giant "V"; the platform backdrop was a 40-foot flag. The Coliseum's playing field, a cool green under the thousands of baby spots, swarmed with performing Indians and cowboys; Actor Leo Carrillo rode energetically back & forth on a white horse, banging his six-shooters into the air. And all the time Radio Announcer Harry von Zell chattered over the microphone, introducing an impressive list of movie stars.

With a great splash of Dewey-like efficiency, the Hollywood GOPsters had dished out advance copies of 50-word speeches by the Big Names; then failed to call back the speeches of some who did not appear. Thus, next morning, the arch-Republican Los Angeles Times reported:

"Barbara Stanwyck, who is Mrs. Robert Taylor in private life, got a cheer when she told the vast audience that at last a man has stepped forward to lead us out of twelve years of doubt. . . ."

But Barbara had not been there.

Continued the Times:

"And Lionel Barrymore, who heads a Hollywood committee backing Dewey and Bricker, was given an impressive reception when, speaking from a wheel chair, he told the crowd they were soon to hear the voice of a new, vibrant, forceful and courageous leader."

Lionel, too, was somewhere else.

But hundreds of stars were there, in jewels and furs and brand-new hats. And, as Announcer von Zell steered them to the microphone, they spoke their ten-second piece--Ginger Rogers, Hedda Hopper, Edward Arnold, Walt Disney, Eddie Bracken, Gene Tierney, Frances Dee, Joel McCrea, Ruth Hussey, etc., etc.

Impossible to Describe. The De Mille script read: "At 7:44 Mr. de Mille cues Governor Dewey's entrance from tunnel. . . ."

At 7:44, Harry von Zell had Adolphe Menjou at the mike. Von Zell: "Tell them about this great sight here tonight." Menjou: "Tell them? How on earth can I?" But the De Mille cue had been given and, suddenly, the wandering blue kleig lights turned from the flag-draped platform to focus on the concrete opening whence football teams usually come rushing out in triumph.

From this tunnel, while the bands played, the crowd cheered, cowbells rattled in the upper tiers, the Deweys appeared, in a cream-colored touring car, flanked by eight motorcycle cops. Said the script: "After Governor Dewey enters, Von Zell brings many stars to the microphone to describe the scene during the time the cars are driving around the track. After one minute of cheering, dial the mikes down so that the continued cheering becomes a background for the stars speaking. . . ."

On the platform, shaking hands with the glittering stars, even Tom Dewey became so excited by the tumult & shouting that, in an unusually prankish gesture, he tossed his grey Homburg a full ten feet into the hands of a waiting bodyguard.

One-Minute Cheer. To this crowd, buoyed up by two hours of hoopla, Tom Dewey chose to talk of expanding social security, of extending old age insurance to 20,000,000 Americans not now covered by the Social Security Act, of planning medical insurance for all. However earnest and sincere the speech may have seemed to radio listeners, it was not the fire-breather that the 90,000 had hoped to hear.

The De Mille script read: "8:30, completion of speech. Two minutes of cheering, led by young Republicans; 8:32, band plays until 8:45." But the cheering lasted less than a minute, and the radio program was quickly switched off.

The Los Angeles meeting had been the second biggest political rally in U.S. history.* What had Tom Dewey gained by it? Enough votes to overcome Franklin Roosevelt's lead in California? If so, it would be a major political achievement. But however well the speech was aimed at the Ham 'n Eggers in Southern California, at the Coliseum it was a total flop. The newsmen wrote it down as another demerit for Dewey.

The Dewey Demerits. In more than two weeks of junketing, they had noted other demerits: the Dewey lack of humor, his unwillingness to pose for trick shots for the photographers, his narrow range of facial expressions, his tinge of Scoutmasterishness (when excited, he uses phrases like "Oh, Lord," and "good gracious"), his lack of warmth (he rarely visited newsmen in the lounge car), his super-efficiency (which sometimes leads him, in normal conversation, to say "period" at the end of a sentence, as if he were dictating).

But the newsmen noted his merits, too. His radio voice is good, and getting better; he had learned much (including such politically important facts as that a candidate never wears a topcoat in California, no matter how chill). He was no amateur; he listened effectively to local complaints. He might not be convivial and gay, but he had a basic, if somewhat stiff, decency and kindness. After the train crashed in Oregon, even the most black-hearted New Deal newsmen threw their hats in the air as they watched Tom Dewey walk through the wreckage, inquire of everyone's injuries, order medical aid instanter.

Merits and demerits aside, and entirely apart from his Oklahoma City answer to Franklin Roosevelt's jabs (see above), Tom Dewey still faces his severest test. With six weeks to go before election, he has to get down to cases.

Last week ex-New Dealer Raymond Moley, a sympathetic Dewey critic, wrote: "He [Dewey] has stated his preference for an economic life more free of restrictions than that which the New Deal has provided. But he has not sufficiently dramatized the conditions that make such a free life attractive to the average American. Nor has he clearly differentiated the way of life which he sees from that which has been created under three terms of Mr. Roosevelt. Somehow, the case against the New Deal has not yet been made."

*Biggest: Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 acceptance speech at Franklin Field in Philiadelphia, heard by 105,000.

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