Where Was the Opposition?

November 15, 1948

It is Jules Verne, I think, who somewhere tells the story about how the inhabitants of the earth agreed that on a given night and minute they would all raise a mighty shout in unison, in the hope that this terrific noise would be heard on the moon. When the appointed night and moment arrived, there was an unprecedented silence. Everybody, out of curiosity, had decided to keep still so that he might be the one listener to this historic marvel.

Something like that seems to have happened on Nov. 2. The complete unanimity of the polls and predictions made many voters regard the election as a preordained event that they personally could do nothing to determine. It was going to determine itself. So lukewarm supporters of Dewey stayed home, and others even gave President Truman, as the hopeless underdog, a token vote of sympathy for his plucky fight—only to be astounded, on Wednesday morning, at the collective result of what they had done.

Speaking more seriously—though I think there is at least some truth in the foregoing explanation—it was Dewey, not Mr. Truman, who was the real victim of the opinion polls. Dewey believed in them and based his whole campaign strategy upon them. He assumed that he already had a comfortable and even overwhelming lead, that the way to hold it was simply not to make any mistakes, and that the way not to make any mistakes was not to take any stand that would cost him any of his supporters. The result was that he repeated tediously high-sounding truisms about national unity and that he failed to debate the merits of a single major issue. He avoided all the little errors only by making the one tremendous error that defeated him.

Never in our history has a candidate been offered a more tempting profusion of crucial issues to debate. Never did a candidate throw them all away as disdainfully and systematically as did Dewey. He never troubled to explain to the voters just why the President’s Vinson appeasement gesture would have been so disastrous. He never hinted, except in the vaguest generalities, how he would halt inflation. On New Deal policies such as farm parity payments, social security, public housing, and Federal minimum wages he adopted a me-too attitude that many of his opponents thought was insincere and that many of his supporters hoped was insincere.

The outstanding example of his failure was the way he dealt with the Taft-Hartley Act. Here was a law passed by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in both Houses. The Republican Presidential candidate, therefore, was bound in the interest of his party to defend it. President Truman, moreover, was in an extremely vulnerable position on the act. A majority even of the Democrats in Congress had voted for it over his veto. None of his dreadful veto predictions about its consequences had been borne out by events. He had himself made use of its provisions repeatedly to combat major strikes.

Most of all, whatever its shortcomings, the Taft-Hartley Act was and is immensely superior to the Wagner Act that it displaced. It is not an “anti-labor” law but a pro-labor law. It protects the interests of the rank-and-file union member against the labor bosses. Mr. Truman blasted this law from beginning to end of his campaign. And Governor Dewey defended it with obvious reluctance, in a few apologetic sentences, chiefly emphasizing that it could be improved. Small wonder he was defeated on it.

Everybody is trying to figure why the polls were wrong. My guess is that they were probably right, as of the time they were taken, but that a sufficient number of voters (which did not have to mean more than three or four in every hundred) changed their minds in the last few days to reverse the result. With all respect to Mr. Truman’s unflagging fight, this was mainly, I think, the final consequence of Dewey’s say-nothing campaign.

The net result is that we are drifting into further inflation and collectivist planning by political default.