Taft, Dewey, and Ike | The Republican War over a New Direction after FDR
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- In this episode, we explain the war within the Republican Party after the New Deal between Robert Taft and his conservative faction and Tom Dewey and his establishment faction over the Republican Party’s Direction.
While Franklin Roosevelt remained president, the Republican Party had little luck at the polls. The candidates in those years, Alf Landon in 1936, Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Tom Dewey in 1944, were by modern standards quite moderate. Yet in each election the Republicans would rail against Roosevelt and his New Deal and promise, if they got the chance, to undo everything Roosevelt had done reversing his New Deal revolution. The American people soundly rejected them.
Then in 1945, Roosevelt passed away and soon after the Second World War came to an end. For the first time since the 1930s, the Republican saw an opportunity back into the White House. Roosevelt had been unbeatable for the Republicans, but the new president, the far less popular Truman, was someone they thought that they could beat.
Over the next two elections the Republican Party broke out into an internal war between two factions with very different ideas about how to get back into power. The conservative faction, headed by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, son of former President Howard Taft, wanted to continue fighting against Roosevelt New Deal and promising to undo it. They believed the fight that had begun in the 1930s was not yet lost, and that America need the Republicans to prove a clear contrast with the Democratic Party agenda.
Another faction, which came to be called the establishment, thought this was political suicide. They thought the Republicans had tried this strategy for election after election and gotten crushed. They believed the time had come to accept that America liked the New Deal and there is no undoing what Roosevelt had done. Republican could continuing fighting the advance of the New Deal agenda, could promise to administer the New Deal government better, and could offer alternative ways to achieve the same goals as Democrats. To even again promise to dismantle the institutions, programs, and agendas the Democrats had created however was now impossible.
This wasn’t a philosophical battle over ideas. It was a fight over tactics-how should the Republicans sell their ideas now in his new post New Deal world?
The establishment won this internal fight. In 1948, they nominated Dewey who very nearly won using this new strategy of a positive campaign without a lot of specifics and without attacking the New Deal directly. In 1952, the Dewey’s establishment won the nomination battle with a new leader, hero of the Second World War Dwight Eisenhower. America liked Ike and for the first time in twenty years like the Republicans back into the White House.
The establishment believed they had been proved right and over the eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency the establishment’s perspective became the dominant one within the Republican Party. Until a small band of dissidents began to form who thought the establishment had made a mistake. They called themselves the Conservative Movement.
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Hey Frank I want to let you know that I feel lucky to have found your RUclips channel and Ive been watching since you started. I finally made the move and bought your book!
Thanks so much.
Oscar.
Interesting commentary! Looking forward to further episodes.
Will you cover the Dixiecrats and how they play into your understanding of the party system?
I don't intend to get much deeper into Strom's 1948 Dixiecrat campaign, but there's a lot more to say about the Southern Democrats and South's later demographic transition toward the Republicans.
Fun trivia: Howard Buffett (father of a certain Warren Buffett) was Robert Taft's best friend in politics. Mr. Taft also stood against the Nissei Internment.
Parties in the US were originally not base don ideology at all. Your downplaying the ideological differences between these camps at the start of the video is annoying. First of all the New Deal was also opposed by many Democrats. Before the New Deal era the only thing all Republicans agree on was Protectionism, this split in the party largely began form the Eastern Republicans abandoning Protectionism and becoming Free Trade proponents. Also even Robert Taft supported some New Deal programs. So your right their ideological distinction is misunderstood, it's actually more complicated then simply where everyone fits on a Binary Right-Left scale.
Taft was originally associated with many things that would NOT be considered Conservative today, like being strongly Anti War, both in regards to WWII and later the Cold War.
The Republicans were NOT defining themselves as a Small Government Party till way later then all of this. Ike and Nixon were New Deal Democrats at their core.
This segment was very entertaining. Thank you!
I'm always so excited when you upload one of these
Came here from the Realignment Podcast.
It's a shame Taft was robbed.
Robert Taft was a lunatic who bolstered conspiracy theorist wackos like Robert Welch. You think Eisenhower was a communist, too? 😂
Yes 😢
Your most recent episode on The Realignment pod was excellent. Gained a sub and buying your book!
Thanks! I appreciate the support and hope you enjoy the book!
Frank great stuff! Other than your terrific book can you direct readers to a reading list, I think that would be great to follow along with? Appreciate your presentation and content!
Here are a few books I like on the topic of this lastest video:
Michael Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party (probably the most thorough account of the battle in the Republican party of that era)
Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin (a good treatment of the rise and fall of the old Republican establishment, plus Geoff is a very good guy)
Then I'd throw in Stephen Ambrose's multivolume Eisenhower biography to dive more into the Ike part of the story.
8:48 he kind of sounds like Tucker Carlson
Goldwater, Nixon, and Rockefeller next?
Next up is Buckley and Goldwater, which will include a little Rocky. Nixon is still a few away as part of the story of the Great Society and the upheaval of the 1960s-1970s.
@@FrankDiStefano I replied this to you on an older video about the southern strategy and I’m curious to hear your take: I don’t think the southern strategy was as racially motivated as many democrats claim it was especially considering that Nixon enforced integration of schools in his first term and still carried the south. It’s seems to me like it was more of a religious reason than race because there was a “great awakening” in the seventies and eighties and that coupled with roe v wade would explain why the south started to vote republican. They even voted for jimmy carter on the basis of religion in 76’ but his liberal policies made the south turn against him. This would also explain why (white) Catholics, who previously were part of the democratic coalition, ended up supporting republicans today because of issues like abortion.
Also can you please explain if jfk was liberal or conservative or a bit of both because Republicans claim he would be a Republican today and democrats claim that he would be a democrat today so please explain that thx
@@lilpitt4860 This is a huge debate, and one that's naturally contentious. People have very strong instincts about Nixon's law and order campaigns and courting of the South, and what it all signifies. Since it involved many different strands at a very disruptive time, depending on what you emphasize, you can tell a lot of competing stories pretty convincingly.
We'll be getting into a lot of this individually later in the series, so I don't want to oversimplify what I'll be going into more detail later. So let me just dip a toe in the water of what we'll be talking about (and more of this is all set out in the book).
There were several things going on that caused the South to demographically switch party affiliation--a switch that took decades to play out and didn't really finally happen until into the 1990s. It was less about party switching than a younger generation forming different party attachments than their elders. Most of the old Southern Democrats in fact never switched parties. They stayed Democrats throughout their lives. It was their Baby Boomer children who became Republicans.
Why? When the nation switched to moral policies in the 1960s, focusing now more on social issues (economic liberalism extending into the Great Society and economic conservativism fighting "big economic government" becoming "big social government") the party philosophies appealed to people differently. In large part Nixon and LBJ didn't even really change but rather applied their existing party philosophies to the rise of new social issues. A Republican Party that was built around fighting New Deal "big government" inevitably looked different when the "big government" issues were now the social ones of the 60s and 70s.
Thus, the story of Nixon cynically changing his party to harness the backlash over race is simplistic. Add onto that the Evangelical religious revival of the 1970s you mentioned, another powerful factor in changing the Baby Boomer's party preference. Then the social disruption of the era and rise in crime, which Nixon saw as an opportunity to run on law and order which would win over his great target of the people he called "white ethnics" who traditionally voted Democratic (mainly Irish, Italians, Catholics, and Poles). But on top of that, there are also plenty of documents in which the Nixon people explicitly hoped to ride the racial backlash to win over those "white ethnics," which was part of it as well.
To me, however, all of this is related and an outgrowth of the most powerful factor driving this change, the moral revival and all its results--counterculture, social upheaval, and new social issues. I see the parties as mainly adapting to America's shift from a pragmatic political culture and economic issues to a crusading moralistic political culture and focus on new social issues. This shift, extending their existing philosophies to new facts and new pressures in society, looks like a huge change on the surface. In reality, it was more like an adaptation and extension of what they were already doing. So the racial backlash was hardly all of what was going on, but also was a part of the larger story.
W video
Why does his face look different? Is it lighting?
Love to see your historic sources
Very well put!
Was the only major disagreement between Dewey and Taft camps (at least by 1948) on Foreign Policy?
Much more than that.
@@JK-gu3tl I'd like to know all of the points of disagreement.
@@novelkars835 it was isolationist vs internationist, and keeping the New Deal vs repelling the New Deal, and those are the only 2 points I know.
@@idkwhatsgoingon4584 I've read something like that. The internationalist side wanting to keep aspect of the New Deal and the isolationists being completely anti-New Deal. Is that right?
@@novelkars835 the Eastern Establishment (Dewey's side) wanted to keep the New Deal fully intact, the Conservatives wanted to keep only certain aspects, as they thought it was draining the economy and keeping the Great Depression around, so they were against the New Deal, but were for Social Security, Minimum Wage, and a few others they thought would help people, but no pressure the economy