Thomas Edmund Dewey (March 24, 1902 – March 16, 1971) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 47th governor of New York from 1943 to 1954. He was the Republican Party's nominee for president of the United States in 1944 and 1948, losing the latter to Harry S. Truman in a major upset. The 288 combined electoral votes Dewey received from both elections place him second behind William Jennings Bryan as the candidate with the most electoral votes who never acceded to the presidency.
As a New York City prosecutor and District Attorney in the 1930s and early 1940s, 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 Mafia boss Charles "Lucky" Luciano on charges of forced prostitution in 1936. Luciano was given a 30- to 50-year prison sentence. He also prosecuted and convicted Waxey Gordon, another prominent New York City gangster and bootlegger, on charges of tax evasion. Dewey almost succeeded in apprehending mobster Dutch Schultz as well, but Schultz was murdered in 1935, in a hit ordered by The Commission itself; he had disobeyed The Commission's order forbidding him from making an attempt on Dewey's life.
Dewey led the moderate faction of the Republican Party during the 1940s, and 1950s, in opposition to 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 Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Dewey served as the 47th governor of New York from 1943 to 1954. In 1944, he was the Republican Party's nominee for the presidency, but lost the election to incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt in the closest of Roosevelt's four presidential elections. He was again the Republican presidential nominee in 1948, but lost to President Harry S. Truman in one of the greatest upsets in presidential election history.[1] Dewey played a large role in winning the Republican presidential nomination for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, helping Eisenhower win the presidential election that year.[2] He also played a large part in the choice of Richard Nixon as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956.[3] He was the first major party nominee for president of the Greatest Generation, and the first to have been born in the 20th century.
Following his political retirement, Dewey served from 1955 to 1971 as a corporate lawyer and senior partner in his law firm Dewey Ballantine in New York City. In March 1971, while on a golfing vacation in Miami, Florida, he died from a heart attack. Following a public memorial ceremony at St. James' Episcopal Church in New York City, Dewey was buried in the town cemetery of Pawling, New York.
Dewey was born and raised in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, George Martin Dewey, owned, edited, and published the local newspaper, the Owosso Times.[4] 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."[5] 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 newspapers and magazines in Owosso.[6] In his senior year in high school he served as the president of his class, and was the chief editor of the school yearbook.[7] His senior caption in the yearbook stated "First in the council hall to steer the state, and ever foremost in a tongue debate", and a biographer wrote that "the bent of his mind, from his earliest days, was towards debate."[6] He received his B.A. degree from the University of Michigan in 1923, and his LL.B. degree from Columbia Law School in 1925.[8][9]
While at the University of Michigan Dewey joined Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a national fraternity for men of music, and was a member of the Men's Glee Club. While growing up in Owosso he was a member of the choir at Christ Episcopal Church.[7] He was an excellent singer with a deep, baritone voice, and in 1923 he finished in third place in the National Singing Contest.[10] 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.[11] He also wrote for The Michigan Daily, the university's student newspaper.[12]
On June 16, 1928, Dewey married Frances Eileen Hutt.[13] They met in Chicago in 1923, when Dewey took singing lessons during a summer course offered by Percy Rector Stephens, for whom Hutt worked as a secretary.[13] A native of Sherman, Texas who was raised in Sherman and in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, she was valedictorian of her 1920 high school class.[13] Hutt was a singer and stage actress; after their marriage she dropped her acting career.[14] 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.[15] 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."[16] In 1945, Dewey told a reporter that "my farm is my roots ... the heart of this nation is the rural small town."[17] 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.[18]
During his twelve years as governor, Dewey also kept a New York City residence and office in Suite 1527 of the Roosevelt Hotel.[19] Dewey was an active, lifelong member of the Episcopal Church.[20]
Dewey was a lifelong Republican, and in the 1920s and 1930s, he was a party worker in New York City, eventually rising to become Chair of The New York Young Republican Club in 1931.[21] When asked in 1946, why he was a Republican, Dewey replied, "I believe that the Republican Party is the best instrument for bringing sound government into the hands of competent men and by this means preserving our liberties ... But there is another reason why I am a Republican. I was born one."[21]
Dewey first served as a federal prosecutor, then started a lucrative private practice on Wall Street; however, he left his practice for an appointment as special prosecutor to look into corruption in New York City—with the official title of Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.[22] It was in this role that he first achieved headlines in the early 1930s, when he prosecuted bootlegger Waxey Gordon.[23]
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 per Olmstead v. United States of 1928) to gather evidence, with the ultimate goal of bringing down entire criminal organizations.[22] 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.[22] 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."[24]
Dewey became famous in 1935, when he was appointed special prosecutor in New York County (Manhattan) by Governor Herbert H. Lehman.[25] A "runaway grand jury" had publicly complained that William C. Dodge, the District Attorney, was not aggressively pursuing the mob and political corruption. Lehman, to avoid charges of partisanship, asked four prominent Republicans to serve as special prosecutor. All four refused and recommended Dewey.[26]
Dewey moved ahead vigorously. He recruited a staff of over 60 assistants, investigators, process servers, stenographers, and clerks. New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia assigned a hand picked squad of 63 police officers to Dewey's office. Dewey's targets were organized racketeering: the large-scale criminal enterprises, especially extortion, the "numbers racket" and prostitution. One writer stated that "Dewey ... put on a very impressive show. All the paraphernalia, the hideouts and tapped telephones and so on, became famous. More than any other American of his generation except [Charles] Lindbergh, Dewey became a creature of folklore and a national hero. What he appealed to most was the great American love of results. People were much more interested in his ends than in his means. Another key to all this may be expressed in a single word: honesty. Dewey was honest."[27]
One of his biggest prizes was gangster Dutch Schultz, whom he had battled as both a federal and state prosecutor. Schultz's first trial ended in a deadlock; prior to his second trial, Schultz had the venue moved to Malone, New York, then moved there and garnered the sympathy of the townspeople through charitable acts so that when it came time for his trial, the jury found him innocent, liking him too much to convict him.[22]
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.[22] 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.[22] Schultz was shot to death in the restroom of a bar in Newark.[28]
Dewey's legal team turned their attention to Lucky Luciano. Assistant DA Eunice Carter oversaw investigations into prostitution racketeering. She raided 80 houses of prostitution in the New York City area and arrested hundreds of prostitutes and "madams". Carter had developed trust with many of these women, and through her coaching, many of the arrested prostitutes – some of whom told of being beaten and abused by Mafia thugs – were willing to testify to avoid prison time.[29] Three implicated Luciano as controller of organized prostitution in the New York/New Jersey area – one of the largest prostitution rings in American history.[22] Carter's investigation was the first to link Luciano to a crime. Dewey prosecuted the case, and in the greatest victory of his legal career, he won the conviction of Luciano for the prostitution racket, with a sentence of 30 to 50 years on June 18, 1936.[30][31][32]
In January 1937, Dewey successfully prosecuted Tootsie Herbert, the leader of New York's poultry racket, for embezzlement. Following his conviction, New York's poultry "marketplace returned to normal, and New York consumers saved $5 million in 1938 alone."[33] That same month, Dewey, his staff, and New York City police made a series of dramatic raids that led to the arrest of 65 of New York's leading operators in various rackets, including the bakery racket, numbers racket, and restaurant racket.[34] The New York Times ran an editorial praising Dewey for breaking up the "shadow government" of New York's racketeers, and The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote "If you don't think Dewey is Public Hero No. 1, listen to the applause he gets every time he is shown in a newsreel."[35]
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 1937, Dewey was elected New York County District Attorney (Manhattan), defeating the Democratic nominee after Dodge decided not to run for re-election.[36] Dewey was such a popular candidate for District Attorney that "election officials in Brooklyn posted large signs at polling places reading 'Dewey Isn't Running in This County'."[37]
As District Attorney, Dewey successfully prosecuted and convicted Richard Whitney, former president of the New York Stock Exchange, for embezzlement. Whitney was given a five-year prison sentence.[38] Dewey also successfully prosecuted Tammany Hall political boss James Joseph Hines on thirteen counts of racketeering. Following the favorable national publicity he received after his conviction of Hines, a May 1939 Gallup poll showed Dewey as the frontrunner for the 1940 Republican presidential nomination, and gave him a lead of 58% to 42% over President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a potential 1940 presidential campaign.[39] In 1939, Dewey also tried and convicted American Nazi leader Fritz Julius Kuhn for embezzlement, crippling Kuhn's organization and limiting its ability to support Nazi Germany in World War II.
During his four years as District Attorney, Dewey and his staff compiled a 94 percent conviction rate of defendants brought to trial,[40] created new bureaus for Fraud, Rackets, and Juvenile Detention, and led an investigation into tenement houses with inadequate fire safety features that reduced "their number from 13,000 to 3,500" in a single year.[41] When he left the District Attorney's office in 1942 to run for governor, Dewey said that "It has been learned in high places that clean government can also be good politics...I don't like Republican thieves any more than Democratic ones."[42]
By the late 1930s Dewey's successful efforts against organized crime—and especially his conviction of Lucky Luciano—had turned him into a national celebrity. His nickname, the "Gangbuster", was used for the popular 1930s Gang Busters radio series based on his fight against the mob. Hollywood film studios made several movies inspired by his exploits; Marked Woman starred Humphrey Bogart as a Dewey-like DA and Bette Davis as a "party girl" whose testimony helps convict the mob boss.[43] A popular story from the time, possibly apocryphal, featured a young girl who told her father that she wanted to sue God to stop a prolonged spell of rain. When her father replied "you can't sue God and win", the girl said "I can if Dewey is my lawyer."[44]
In 1984, journalists Neal Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom summarized Dewey's governorship by saying, "for sheer administrative talent, it is difficult to think of a twentieth-century governor who has excelled Thomas E. Dewey ... hundreds of thousands of New York youngsters owe Dewey thanks for his leadership in creating a state university ... a vigorous health-department program virtually eradicated tuberculosis in New York, highway building was pushed forward, and the state's mental hygiene program was thoroughly reorganized."[45]</