U.S. At War: The Man They Loved

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For those days of 100-degree heat and soaking humidity, the shirt-sleeved Republican crowd sat and fanned themselves apathetically with newspapers, panamas, 50¢ souvenir programs, hunted vainly for elbow room at an air-cooled bar, gasped uneasily all night on their stove-hot beds. But the heat was really only incidental; the main thing was that the Convention was phenomenally dull.

The big show had cost only one-third ($50,000) of what it cost in 1940. After six days & nights of uneventful horse-trading in a small, ovenlike buff and gilt hotel ballroom, the Resolutions Committee had patched together a 1944 G.O.P. platform—no more ambiguous and no more forthright than most—which neither offended nor excited the 1,057 delegates. For the first time in G.O.P. convention history, no one bothered to submit a minority platform report or to offer suggestions from the floor.

For two days the delegates listened with medium attention and much perspiration. But although they thought the speeches able, nothing had made them forget the heat.

The Convention's deep emotional lethargy was in part schizophrenic; it was in love with one candidate but had made up its mind to be sensible and take another.

Suitable Match. Outside the Stadium entrances, in the long perambulatory corridor, the cardboard placards mounted on poles (a blown-up Dewey photograph; Dewey the People's Choice; Dewey Witt Win) were piled in chin-high clumps. They were the same nononsense, black-lettered placards which had decorated the sober-looking Dewey headquarters at the Stevens Hotel for two days. Delegates who had visited the businesslike headquarters to look in awe at the machinelike efficiency of the Dewey staff had already seen them.

As a clerk sang out the roll call of states, four husky men in shirt sleeves began lugging armloads of placards down the Stadium aisles and stacking them neatly at the end of each row of delegates. The whole thing ticked as smoothly as Swiss watchworks. On the second roll call Nebraska's squarish Governor Dwight Griswold, his hair plastered down tight, approached the speakers' microphone and the posters began bobbing briskly down each row of seats. By now the Stadium's high, bunting-hung galleries were crowded with spectators waiting to see the nomination. Governor Griswold wound up his twelve-minute oration with the expected name: "I give you the nominee who is the candidate of the future—Thomas E. Dewey."

The delegates rose on cue, shouted, lifted their Dewey placards. The band struck up Anchors Aweigh. Milling in the timehonored, slow elephants' dance of a floor parade, the delegates whistled, whooped, marched. The demonstration lasted three minutes—and then the bands and the organ took over, and eked it out to another four. It was probably the shortest such demonstration in any U.S. convention's history.