thomas dewey

1948 was seen as the year that the GOP would finally reclaim the White House after sixteen years of Democratic domination. Not only was Truman seen as a weak incumbent, but it was also assumed that Wallace and Thurmond would further hurt him with their third-party campaigns. However, the...

What if Senator Kefauver beat then-Vice President Warren in the 1956 Presidential Election? Will the Democrats move to dismantle the Dewey-era defense spending? What effect would the Kefauver administration have on the Civil Rights Act? For that matter, how would this change the political...

In this poll, you're provided with losing candidates from 1900 to 2012 who were nominated by the two major American political parties but never became President. Candidates who did at one point lose but then came back to win, such as Richard Nixon, or candidates who won once but lost a second...

In the 1920s, a young man from Michigan named Thomas E. Dewey wanted to become a professional singer. With a deep baritone voice, he showed great promise. But after contracting a throat infection, Dewey decided against becoming a singer and instead he went to law school. This lead him down the...

Prologue: . A Decade of War and Peace The 40s, the decade of World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the rise of an unexpected contender. But before we learn about all of this we must first learn the beginnings of this all, the United States Presidential Election of 1940. The parties...

Thomas Dewey and Adlai Stevenson are best remembered as two-time losers for their respective parties. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have Dewey and Stevenson run against each other in a presidential election. Under the circumstances, who would win and why?

1948 was one of the great upsets in US political history. Just about every poll predicted that Republican Tom Dewey would be elected, yet President Truman narrowly beat him. Historians have attributed this to the Republicans running a bland, passive campaign as a result of their overconfidence...

In 1952, as Truman was completing his last full year in office, there was speculation that he would run for the US Senate once again. But Truman declined. Had Truman lost in 1948, and he were a former President in need of a job in 1952, might he have been more willing to run for the Senate...

The frontrunner for the 1940 GOP presidential nomination was Thomas Dewey, but he was upset at the convention by dark horse Wendell Willkie. What if Dewey had won the nomination and gone on to face Roosevelt in November? Does Dewey do any better than Willkie? At the time Dewey was an...

In OTL, Thomas Dewey narrowly defeated Harry Truman in 1948 and appointed J. Edgar Hoover Attorney General. This was part of a secret deal Hoover had made with Dewey to feed him dirt on his opponents in exchange for the AG spot. Soon afterwards, Hoover was appointed an Associate Justice of the...

If Thomas Dewey got elected President in 1948, does he win in 1952? Is Korea still an issue? Does Dewey handle it better than Truman? Who do the Democrats nominate? Stevenson as in OTL or perhaps Kefauver?

Similar to another recent thread of mine on Truman and Korea, I'd like to ask about how Truman might have handled Vietnam. In 1950 Dewey gave extensive aid and military advisers to the French in order to help them reclaim their colonies in Indochina. This effort failed as Vietnam defeated France...

After his narrow victory over Truman in 1948, President Dewey ordered a military build up and decided to keep US troops in South Korea. In 1950 there was a war scare when North Korea threatened to invade South Korea and expel the Americans from the peninsula with help from Communist China...

Henry Wallace has been a long time favorite of alternate history writers. Well, maybe "favorite" isn't exactly the best word since nearly everyone agrees that Wallace wouldn't have been a successful President and he would certainly have been defeated in 1948. But here is a man who came so close...

Suppose that in 1948 Dewey had gone with his gut and aggressively counterattacked Truman during the fall election campaign. The President still gains ground against his opponent, but it is not enough to deprive Dewey of an electoral college majority. On January 20, 1949 Thomas E. Dewey is sworn...

In 1948, New York Governor Thomas Dewey easily defeated President Harry Truman in an electoral margin of 307 to 185, with Strom Thurmond gobbling up 39 votes in the South. New York Mayor Wendell Willkie of the Liberal Party and his running mate Henry Wallace took 7.2% of the popular vote by...

If Dewey had defeated Truman as expected and a Republican was in the White House in the early 1950s, would McCarthyism have still happened? Remember, if McCarthy wants to cry wolf about Communism in the State Department he'd be attacking a Republican President. Would McCarthy have tried to...

Any student of history should be familiar with this photo of President Harry Truman, successor of the great FDR, smirking while holding a newspaper declaring that he'd lost to his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, in the 1948 election. Of course this turned out to be far from true, and Truman...

In 1948, Thomas Dewey was elected the 34th US President by a comfortable margin, carrying 307 electoral votes to Truman's 185. Dewey had been the heavy favorite to win from the outset, and his aggressive, energized campaign against the unpopular Truman administration was eaten up like candy by...

An interesting quirk in US history is that FDR and Wendell Willkie, opponents in 1940, discussed forming a new "Liberal Party" after WWII but both men died before this could happen. Roosevelt also offered Willkie the position of Vice President in 1944, but negotiations fell apart. This might...