The Elephant And The Bull Moose: 1948
1952
Throughout most of Dewey's second term, the Republicans found themselves in substantial trouble. The conservative wing of the party had not only begun to foster isolationist and feverently anti-Communist sentiment, but was utilizing dissatisfaction with Dewey for his moderate record and support for the dispatch of UN and American forces to intervene in the Korean War to gain ground, garnering more support in Congress in the 1950 midterms.
However, this surge in support had begun to become dangerous to the party by the time of the 1952 primaries. Despite more efforts to court Eisenhower and MacArthur, neither man was interested in receiving the nomination. As a result, the leading figure in the primaries was the prominent conservative Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, and despite solid challenges from Vice President Stassen and California Governor Earl Warren, Taft had a strong grassroots organization and support base which made his rise to the nomination in hindsight inevitable.
However, Taft tried to play the election on a very contentious note, picking Senator Joseph McCarthy, the most prominent anti-Communist in the party, to be his running mate. Surprisingly, this did not lead to enormous dissent from moderate or liberal Republicans; while McCarthy's speech was greeted in some quarters with booing, the majority of Republicans opposed to the ticket bit their tongues to avoid establishing a troublesome record which would cause problems in future elections.
The Democratic primary was mostly made up of inexperienced and minor figures, such as Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, diplomat W. Averell Harriman, and Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. The main figures fighting for the nomination, however, were Truman and Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver (one of the few liberal Southern Democrats to survive the segregationist purge of four years prior). Truman had the almost unanimous backing of the party bosses, but Kefauver put up an aggressive fight against him, helped by memories of Truman's catastrophic defeat in 1944.
In the end, despite Kefauver outperforming Truman in the primaries, Truman and the party bosses instead turned to Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Stevenson originally wanted to decline the nomination and run for re-election as Governor, but after negotiation which concluded with Truman convincing his delegates to vote for Stevenson, and in response to the extremity of the Republican ticket, Stevenson was convinced to run. To avoid a revolt from the delegates, he picked Kefauver as his running mate.
Stevenson attacked Taft and McCarthy for being 'demagogues', and criticized those in the GOP 'who hunt communists in the Bureau of Wildlife and Fisheries while refusing to help the brave men and women confronting the real thing in Europe and Asia'; he even had the bravery to condemn McCarthy's behaviour to the hardline conservatives of the American Legion. In addition, Stevenson expressed (mostly populist) support for an end to the Korean War, Dewey's mishandling of which was a major point of contention for the Republicans.McCarthy, meanwhile, repeatedly asserted the Democrats were overrun with communists in their ranks without any real evidence; the irony was most of the more questionable Democratic ideologues were demonstrably on the other side of the spectrum.
Stevenson/Kefauver (Democratic): 472 EVs, 55.1%
Taft/McCarthy (Republican): 59 EVs, 44.5%
Stevenson won a dominant victory, but in a rather unexpected pattern. Taft performed well in the South, cutting into the Democratic margins in numerous states heavily, but Stevenson outdid himself in the populous Northern states, especially New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and his home state of Illinois. The Democrats also recaptured both Houses of Congress, with numerous liberal and moderate figures being elected (and a handful of less hardline Southerners, such as Al Gore Sr., being elected in defiance of segregationists); these results, in effect, significantly helped alleviate the Red Scare and mark the beginning of a return to prosperity.
However, Stevenson's administration would see a series of events which proved immensely influential on Democratic policy.