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Thomas E. Dewey

Thomas E. Dewey

American politician
The basics
Quick Facts
Intro American politician
A.K.A. Thomas Edmund Dewey
Countries United States of America
Occupations Politician Lawyer Writer
Gender male
Birth 24 March 1902 (Owosso)
Death 16 March 1971 (Bal Harbour)
Education University of Michigan, Columbia University, Columbia Law School
The details

Thomas Edmund Dewey (March 24, 1902 – March 16, 1971) was the 47th Governor of New York (1943–1954). In 1944, he was the Republican candidate for President, but lost to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the closest of Roosevelt's four presidential elections. He was again the Republican candidate in 1948, but lost to President Harry S. Truman in one of the greatest upsets in presidential election history.
As a New York City prosecutor early in his career, Dewey was relentless in his effort to curb the power of the American Mafia and of organized crime in general. Most famously, he successfully prosecuted Mafioso kingpin Charles "Lucky" Luciano on charges of compulsory prostitution in 1936. Luciano was given a thirty-year prison sentence. Dewey almost succeeded in apprehending Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz as well, but not before Schultz was murdered in 1935 in a hit ordered by The Commission itself.
Dewey led the moderate or progressive faction of the Republican Party, in which he fought conservative Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft. Dewey was an advocate for the professional and business community of the northeastern United States, which would later be called the "Eastern Establishment". This group consisted of internationalists who were in favor of the United Nations and the Cold War fight against communism and the Soviet Union, and it supported most of the New Deal social-welfare reforms enacted during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In addition he played a large part in the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President in 1952. Dewey's successor as leader of the progressive Republicans was Nelson Rockefeller, who became governor of New York in 1959. The New York State Thruway is named in Dewey's honor.

Early life and family

Dewey was born and raised in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, George Martin Dewey, owned, edited, and published the local newspaper, the Owosso Times. His mother, Annie (Thomas), whom he called "Mater", bequeathed her son "a healthy respect for common sense and the average man or woman who possessed it. She also left a headstrong assertiveness that many took for conceit, a set of small-town values never entirely erased by exposure to the sophisticated East, and a sense of proportion that moderated triumph and eased defeat." One journalist noted that "[as a boy] he did show leadership and ambition above the average; by the time he was thirteen, he had a crew of nine other youngsters working for him" selling magazines in Owosso. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1923, and from Columbia Law School in 1925. While at the University of Michigan, he joined Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a national fraternity for men of music, and was a member of the Men's Glee Club. He was an excellent singer with a deep, baritone voice, and in 1923 he finished in third place in the National Singing Contest. He briefly considered a career as a professional singer, but decided against it after a temporary throat ailment convinced him that such a career would be risky. He then decided to pursue a career as a lawyer. He also wrote for The Michigan Daily, the university's student newspaper.

On June 16, 1928, Dewey married Frances Eileen Hutt. A native of Sherman, Texas, she was a stage actress; after their marriage she dropped her acting career. They had two sons, Thomas E. Dewey Jr. and John Martin Dewey. Although Dewey served as a prosecutor and District Attorney in New York City for many years, his home from 1939 until his death was a large farm, called "Dapplemere," located near the town of Pawling some 65 miles (105 km) north of New York City. According to biographer Richard Norton Smith, Dewey "loved Dapplemere as [he did] no other place", and Dewey was once quoted as saying that "I work like a horse five days and five nights a week for the privilege of getting to the country on the weekend." In 1945, Dewey told a reporter that "my farm is my roots ... the heart of this nation is the rural small town." Dapplemere was part of a tight-knit rural community called Quaker Hill, which was known as a haven for the prominent and well-to-do. Among Dewey's neighbors on Quaker Hill were the famous reporter and radio broadcaster Lowell Thomas, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, and the legendary CBS News journalist Edward R. Murrow. Dewey was an active, lifelong member of the Episcopal Church.


Federal prosecutor


Dewey had used his excellent recall of details of crimes to trip up witnesses as a federal prosecutor; as a state prosecutor, he used telephone taps (which were perfectly legal at the time) to gather evidence, with the ultimate goal of bringing down entire criminal organizations. On that account, Dewey successfully lobbied for an overhaul in New York's criminal procedure law, which at that time required separate trials for each count of an indictment. Dewey's thoroughness and attention to detail became legendary; for one case he and his staff sifted "through 100,000 telephone slips to convict a Prohibition-era bootlegger".

Special prosecutor



Dewey's targets were organized racketeering: the large-scale criminal enterprises, especially extortion, the "numbers game" and prostitution. He pursued Tammany Hall political leaders known for their ties to gangsters, such as James Joseph Hines.


Dewey and La Guardia threatened Schultz with instant arrest and further charges. Schultz now proposed to murder Dewey. Dewey would be killed while he made his daily morning call to his office from a pay phone near his home. However, New York crime boss Lucky Luciano and the "Mafia Commission" decided that Dewey's murder would provoke an all-out crackdown. Instead they had Schultz killed. Schultz was shot to death in the restroom of a bar in Newark.

Dewey next turned his attention to Luciano. Dewey raided 80 houses of prostitution in the New York City area and arrested hundreds of prostitutes and "madams". Many of the prostitutes – some of whom told of being beaten and abused by Mafia thugs – were willing to testify to avoid prison time. Three implicated Luciano as controller of organized prostitution in the New York/New Jersey area – one of the largest prostitution rings in American history. In the greatest victory of his legal career, Dewey won the conviction of Luciano for the prostitution racket, with a sentence of 30 to 50 years.

However, Dewey did more than simply prosecute gangsters. In 1936, Dewey helped indict and convict Richard Whitney, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, for embezzlement. Dewey also led efforts to protect dockworkers and poultry farmers and workers from racketeering in New York. In 1936 Dewey received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York". In 1939, Dewey prosecuted American Nazi leader Fritz Julius Kuhn for embezzlement, crippling Kuhn's organization and limiting its ability to support Nazi Germany in World War II.

Manhattan District Attorney


Governor of New York

In 1938 Edwin Jaeckle, the New York Republican Party Chairman, selected Dewey to run for Governor of New York against the popular Democratic incumbent Herbert H. Lehman. Dewey was only 36 years of age. He based his campaign on his record as a famous prosecutor of organized-crime figures in New York City. Although he was defeated, Dewey's surprisingly strong showing against Lehman (he lost by only 1.4%) brought him national political attention and made him a front runner for the 1940 Republican presidential nomination. Jaeckle was one of Dewey's top advisors and mentors for the remainder of his political career.

In 1942 Dewey ran for governor again, and won with a large plurality over Democrat John J. Bennett Jr. Bennett was not endorsed by the American Labor Party, whose candidate drew almost 10%. The ALP did endorse incumbent Lieutenant Governor Charles Poletti who lost narrowly to Dewey's running mate Thomas W. Wallace. In 1946, Dewey was re-elected by the greatest margin in state history to that point, almost 700,000 votes. In 1950, he was elected to a third term by 572,000 votes.

Usually regarded as an honest and highly effective governor, Dewey doubled state aid to education; increased salaries for state employees; and still reduced the state's debt by over $100 million. He referred to his program as "pay-as-you-go liberalism ... government can be progressive and solvent at the same time." Additionally he put through the first state law in the country that prohibited racial discrimination in employment. As governor, Dewey signed legislation that created the State University of New York. He played a leading role in securing support and funding for the New York State Thruway, which was eventually named in his honor. Dewey also streamlined and consolidated many state agencies to make them more efficient. During the Second World War construction in New York was limited, which allowed Dewey to create a $623 million budget surplus, which he placed into his "Postwar Reconstruction Fund." The fund would eventually create 14,000 new beds in the state's mental health system, provide public housing for 30,000 families, allow for the reforestation of 34 million trees, create a water pollution program, provide slum clearance, and pay for a "model veterans' program." Shortly after becoming governor in 1943, Dewey learned that some state workers and teachers were being paid only $900 a year, leading him to give "hefty raises, some as high as 150%" to state workers and teachers. His governorship was also "friendlier by far than his [Democratic] predecessors to the private sector", as Dewey created a state Department of Commerce to "lure new businesses and tourists to the Empire State, ease the shift from wartime boom, and steer small businessmen, in particular, through the maze of federal regulation and restriction." Between 1945 and 1948, 135,000 new businesses were started in New York.

One criticism that was made of Dewey as governor lay in his treatment of New York legislators and political opponents. Dewey "cracked the whip ruthlessly on (Republican) legislators who strayed from the party fold. Assemblymen have found themselves under investigation by the State Tax Department after opposing the Governor over an insurance regulation bill. Others discover job-rich construction projects, state buildings, even highways, directed to friendlier [legislators]." Dewey "forced the legislature his own party dominates to reform its comfortable ways of payroll padding. Now legislative workers must verify in writing every two weeks what they have been doing to earn their salary; every state senator and assemblyman must verify that [they] are telling the truth. All this has occasioned more than grumbling. Some Assemblymen have quit in protest. Others have been denied renomination by Dewey's formidable political organization. Reporters mutter among themselves about government by blackmail." However, Dewey did receive positive publicity for his reputation for honesty and integrity, as he "insisted on having every prospective holder of a job paying $2,500 or more rigorously probed by state police...[Dewey] accepted no anonymous campaign contributions, and had every large contributor not known personally to him investigated for motive", and, when he signed autographs, he would date them so that no one could imply a closer relationship than actually existed.



He also strongly supported the death penalty. During his 12 years as governor, over 90 people were electrocuted under New York authority. Among these were several of the mob-affiliated hitmen belonging to the murder-for-hire group Murder, Inc., which was headed up by major mob leaders Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Albert Anastasia. Lepke himself went to the chair in 1944.

Presidential elections




Dewey's foreign-policy position evolved during the 1940s; by 1944 he was considered an internationalist and a supporter of projects such as the United Nations. It was in 1940 that Dewey first clashed with Taft. Taft—who maintained his non-interventionist views and economic conservatism to his death—became Dewey's great rival for control of the Republican Party in the 1940s and early 1950s. Dewey became the leader of moderate-to-liberal Republicans, who were based in the northeastern, Pacific Coast and western states, while Taft became the leader of conservative Republicans who dominated most of the Midwest and parts of the South.




Dewey was the frontrunner for the 1944 Republican nomination. In April 1944 he won the key Wisconsin primary, where he defeated Wendell Willkie, former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, and General Douglas MacArthur. Willkie's poor showing in Wisconsin forced him to quit the race. At the 1944 Republican Convention, Dewey's chief rivals—Stassen and Ohio Governor John W. Bricker—both withdrew and Dewey was nominated almost unanimously. Dewey then made Bricker (who was supported by Taft) his running mate. This made Dewey the first presidential candidate to be born in the 20th century. As of 2016, he was also the youngest Republican presidential nominee.

In the general election campaign, Dewey crusaded against the alleged inefficiencies, corruption and Communist influences in incumbent President Roosevelt's New Deal programs, but avoided military and foreign policy debates.

Dewey lost the election on November 7, 1944 to President Roosevelt. However, he polled 45.9% of the popular vote compared to Roosevelt's 53.4%, a stronger showing against FDR than any previous Republican opponent. However, Dewey received slightly fewer votes (22 million to FDR's 25 million) in total than Willkie did four years before. In the Electoral College, Roosevelt defeated Dewey by a margin of 432 to 99.

Dewey nearly included, in his campaign, claims that Roosevelt knew ahead of time about the attack on Pearl Harbor; Dewey added, "and instead of being re-elected he should be impeached." The U.S. military was extremely worried because that would let the Japanese know that the U.S. had broken the Purple code. Army General George C. Marshall made a persistent effort to persuade Dewey not to touch this topic; Dewey eventually yielded.






Thomas Dewey at Bakersfield September 1948










Later career



By the 1960s, as the conservative wing assumed more and more power within the Republican Party, Dewey removed himself further and further from party matters. When the Republicans in 1964 gave Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Taft's successor as the conservative leader, their presidential nomination, Dewey declined to even attend the GOP Convention in San Francisco; it was the first Republican Convention he had missed since 1936. President Lyndon Johnson offered Dewey a number of positions on several blue ribbon commissions, as well as a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, but Dewey declined them all, for he preferred to remain in political retirement and concentrate on his highly profitable law firm. By the early 1960s Dewey's law practice had made him into a multimillionaire.

Although closely identified with the Republican Party for virtually his entire adult life, Dewey was a close friend of Democratic Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, and Dewey aided Humphrey in being named as the Democratic nominee for vice-president in 1964, advising Lyndon Johnson on ways to block efforts at the party convention by Kennedy loyalists to stampede Robert Kennedy onto the ticket as Johnson's running mate.


Dewey's wife Frances died in the summer of 1970, after battling breast cancer for six years. Later in 1970 Dewey began to date actress Kitty Carlisle, and there was talk of marriage between them. However, he died suddenly of a massive heart attack on March 16, 1971, while vacationing with friend Dwayne Andreas in Miami, Florida, following a round of golf with Boston Red Sox player Carl Yastrzemski. He was 68 years old, dying eight days before his 69th birthday. Following a public memorial service at Saint James' Episcopal Church in New York City, which was attended by President Richard Nixon, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and other prominent politicians, Dewey was buried next to his wife Frances in the town cemetery of Pawling, New York. After his death, his farm of Dapplemere was sold and renamed "Dewey Lane Farm" in his honor.

Public perception




Dewey alienated former Republican president Herbert Hoover, who confided to a friend "Dewey has no inner reservoir of knowledge on which to draw for his thinking," elaborating that "A man couldn't wear a mustache like that without having it affect his mind." However, the famed newspaper editor William Allen White praised Dewey as "an honest cop with the mind of an honest cop" and the pollster George Gallup once stated that Dewey was "the ablest public figure of his lifetime ... the most misunderstood man in recent American history."

His presidential campaigns were hampered by Dewey's habit of making overly vague statements, defining his strategy as not being "prematurely specific" on controversial issues. In 1948, President Truman poked fun at Dewey's vague campaign by joking that the GOP (Republican Party) actually stood for "grand old platitudes." Dewey's frequent refusal to discuss specific issues and proposals in his campaigns was based partly on his belief in public opinion polls; one biographer claimed that he "had an almost religious belief in the revolutionary science of public-opinion sampling." He was the first presidential candidate to employ his own team of pollsters, and when a worried businessman told Dewey in the 1948 presidential campaign that he was losing ground to Truman and urged him to "talk specifics in his closing speeches", Dewey and his aide Paul Lockwood displayed polling data that showed Dewey still well ahead of Truman, and Dewey told the businessman "when you're leading, don't talk."

In 1940, Walter Lippman regarded him as an opportunist, who "changes his views from hour to hour… always more concerned with taking the popular position than he is in dealing with the real issues." The journalist John Gunther wrote that "There are plenty of vain and ambitious and uncharming politicians. This would not be enough to cause Dewey's lack of popularity. What counts more is that so many people think of him as opportunistic. Dewey seldom goes out on a limb by taking a personal position which may be unpopular ... every step is carefully calculated and prepared." Adding to that, he had a tendency towards pomposity and was considered stiff and unapproachable in public, with his aide Ruth McCormick Simms once describing him as "cold, cold as a February iceberg". She however added that "he was brilliant and thoroughly honest." Leo O'Brien, a reporter for the United Press International (UPI), recalled Dewey in an interview by saying that "I hated his guts when he first came to Albany, and I loved him by the time he left. It was almost tragic – how he put on a pose that alienated people. Behind a pretty thin veneer he was a wonderful guy." John Gunther wrote in 1947 that some "people may not "like" Dewey, but (a) an inner core of advisers and friends, including some extremely distinguished people, have a loyalty to him little short of idolatrous, and (b) he is one of the greatest vote-getters in the history of the nation."








  • The Case Against the New Deal (1940) Harper & Bros., New York
  • Journey to the Far Pacific (1952) Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY.
  • Twenty Against the Underworld (1974) Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY

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