Up the Mountain

(See Cover)

West of Miles City, Montana, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific R.R. runs through the valley of the winding Musselshell River. It uses the tracks of a forgotten railroad that laconic Westerners called the Jawbone Line, because it was built on promises. It goes through Roundup, Ringling, Three Forks (where the Missouri begins) and just before Butte, 5,755 feet above sea level, it crosses the Continental Divide.

And then it is in the heart of the Far West, where there are 15 people per lovely square mile, where most of the cities were built within the living memory of the oldest inhabitants, where there are rivers that have never been explored, lakes that have been seen only from the air, mountains that have never been climbed, and where few & far between are citizens who believe that the last U. S. chapter has been written.

Fortnight ago the Milwaukee's Olympian carried Presidential Candidate Thomas Edmund Dewey up the mountain. Behind him lay 1) a record as a racket-buster so phenomenal that people were tired of hearing about it; 2) a record as a politician based on the narrow margin (about 64,000 votes) by which he was defeated for the Governorship of New York in 1938; 3) a favorite's position as voters' preconvention choice--56%, according to the Gallup poll--in the race for the Republican nomination. And before him, besides the Western ranges, lay a series of talks in Helena, Spokane, Portland, Salt Lake, Boise, 20-odd weeks before the Republican convention would meet in Philadelphia (see p. 17), and a chance to preach the doctrine of future growth in the least stagnant section of the country.

Last week Candidate Dewey got back from the hopeful country to the cynical city of New York. In eleven and a half days he had traveled 7,500 miles, appeared on the rear platform of his train at 48 Western stations, made 36 impromptu station platform speeches (three of them in snowstorms, and one, in La Grande, Ore.

to a large crowd further swelled by a number assembled to say farewell to a departing evangelist), delivered ten formal addresses, held eleven big press conferences, appeared at ten scheduled receptions, and shaken hands with 15,000 voters. He had collected two ten-gallon hats, a case of canned corn, had watched the dance of the Nez Perce Indians and had been serenaded in Portland, Ore., by a fife & drum corps of Civil War veterans whose leader was 95. His secretary, yclept Lemoyne Jones in the effete East, became plain Lem Jones as soon as he was west of the mountains. Like all Presidential candidates, Candidate Dewey came back with fine words to say for the strong, intelligent and courageous people he had seen on his junket. He was still in the mood of his Minneapolis speech two months ago when he stepped from the train, exclaimed: "This is good Republican weather." But unlike most, Candidate Dewey had gone up the mountain in a figurative as well as a literal sense, came back pointing out to Republicans those fine houses still to be built, that land still to be settled, those companies and cooperatives still to be formed, profits still to be made--and elections still to be won.

-- Gradual was the ascent. At Aberdeen, S. Dak., where 2,479 farms spread over Brown County produce 2,026,300 bushels of wheat a year, where 1,500 appeared beside the tracks, Candidate Dewey's hopeful note was muted. ("The country is young; it's only started. If we go to work. . . .")

-- At Miles City, where cattle drives once ended after dangerous, difficult months on the 1,200-mile trail from Texas, 500 Montana Republicans waited by the tracks.

("And history laughs ... as each time the dynamic forces of a free Republic led by free men have given the lie to the defeatists . . . sweeping the nation's increased population to full employment and ever higher living standards.") They came from Beaverhead County, which has 6,706 people, 32 mines, 31,410 head of cattle, and is larger than Connecticut. They came from Granite County, from Madison County which have silver, lead, sheep, water power, and where 9,300 inhabitants including Indians are all cramped up in space half as big as Belgium. ("I wish the long-haired theorists at Washington could come out here and learn fundamentals.")

-- Candidate Dewey drove through a blizzard from Butte to Helena, where in 70 miles there are abandoned mines, a school for the feeble-minded and one town with 760 souls, one with 250, one with 125, and one with 68. At Helena, where the Parade of the Vigilantes is an annual affair, where Main Street runs along the bottom of Last Chance Gulch, and where natives eke out a meagre existence from gold, copper & silver mines, sheep & cattle ranches, the production of wheat, corn, oats, potatoes, etc., 1,000 of the city's 11,800 turned out to make the biggest political rally in Montana's history. ("That is the greatest financial error in history! . . . Who can that group of advisers be who would so mislead a President?")

-- Driving at night to Deer Lodge through the National Forest, where elk, deer, bighorn sheep and mountain goat find pasture on the upper slopes, a group of skiers carrying torches popped out of the woods, stopped the caravan, asked Candidate Dewey for a speech.

-- At Spokane at 7:15 a.m. on Sunday morning over a hundred turned out at Union Station to greet Candidate Dewey; 3,000 were turned away from an Early Birds' Club breakfast; crowds lined the sidewalk outside the Civic Building for an afternoon reception. ("Is your industrial plant built? Are you all through? Are you just going to sit still and struggle over the division of what you have now?")

-- At Grand Coulee Candidate Dewey met New Dealish Chief Harry Owhi of the Nez Perce Indians but was not invited to join the tribe. He looked over the dam that will produce 2,646,000 h.p., provide irrigation for approximately 1.200,000 acres, said that as an American he was proud of it, denied that it could be an issue of 1940's campaign. ("There is an important and vital issue, though, in whether the country will go ahead on the basis of free private enterprise, so that you can employ the power that is generated there to give employment to your people.")

At Portland only President Roosevelt rated more flashlight bulbs; he had drawn no such crowds when he was a candidate in 1932. Back up the mountain hurried Candidate Dewey, to Salt Lake City, where Republicans were cordial to the point of frenzy; to the Snake River Valley of Idaho, where he lauded the independence of homegrown cooperatives; to Boise past the irrigation projects, the forest reserves, the oil reserves, the region of Thousand Springs, where underground rivers pour from the cliffs in enough volume to provide water for all the cities of the U. S. ("Here in our own America we have the manpower, the wealth, the natural resources, the genius to invent and create. We have the industrial skill to release that ever-flowing stream of new inventions and greater productivity wherein lies the future of our own America. I don't say to you, close your eyes and have faith--I say to you, open your eyes, look around you and be convinced.")

Reputation. Even Dewey campaign headquarters admitted that many a watcher beside the Western tracks came not to hear ringing words but to look at Dewey the Racket-Buster. When Tom Dewey at 23, a young man with a new mustache, a background of boyhood in Owosso, Mich., glee clubs at the University of Michigan, law school at Columbia, entered a Manhattan law office in 1925, nobody needed to talk of future U. S. growth. But rackets were a prime subject for discussion in any gathering. No social historian has traced the spread of the word racket through U. S. common talk, but if such a study is ever made it might well begin with racketeering under prohibition, lead to the spreading belief that law is a racket, jump to the thought that every successful man has his own racket, move on to the natural conclusion that business is a racket, politics a racket, government a racket, ideals a racket, organizations a racket, religion a racket, and so, with inexorable logic, reach the final bleak conviction that life itself is one.

Most Dewey listeners last week knew the broad outlines of the story of Dewey the Racket-Buster: his appointment, at 28, as Chief Assistant United States Attorney, the conviction of Beer Baron Waxey Gordon, the runaway grand jury that balked at the frail measures of a lethargic Tammany prosecutor, Governor Lehman's appointment of Tom Dewey (married, father of one, earning $50,000 a year) as Special Prosecutor -- and then the bang-up conclusion with Racketeers Luciano, Pennochio, Coulcher, et al. going to jail for 15, 20, 30 to 50 years, and the linking of rackets to Tammany Hall in the jailing of Jimmy Hines.

If listeners had read Rupert Hughes' campaign biography of Thomas Dewey they knew all this and a good deal more: Dewey's record as District Attorney of New York, with 79% convictions in 3,253 General Sessions Court cases, 14 convictions in first-degree murder cases (six acquittals), 9,703 convictions in 14,063 misdemeanor cases, along with the head lined smashing of the policy ring, the break-up of a prostitution syndicate. Dewey the Racket-Buster drew crowds, but stories, reputation and record told little of Dewey the Presidential Candidate. And to Westerners properly suspicious of the Big City, his record might add up to the fact, not that Dewey is capable, but that there are a lot of crooks in Manhattan.

Politician. But they saw Dewey the politician -- well-prepared, well-trained, with appointments scheduled to the minute, with attacks on the New Deal shrewdly keyed to the mood of the section where they were to be delivered. Political success of Candidate Dewey to date has been less that of a veteran campaigner than that of the fabled strong man who began by lifting a new born calf, hoisted it each day as it grew until he was able to lift a full-grown bull, with bystanders waiting for the day when Dewey's success, growing faster than he did, would finally floor him.

He was ringing doorbells and making speeches for the unsuccessful Senatorial campaign of his discoverer, bald George Zerdin Medalie, when Candidate Roosevelt made his Commonwealth Club address that has since provided Tom Dewey (and the Republican Party) with the text of its sermon for 1940. When he ran against Lehman for Governor, he was up against an opponent faultlessly liberal, mellowed, with no disquieting ambitions. Nevertheless Dewey got in his say on housing, a balanced budget, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, and told graphic stories of racket-busting in the process.

Unlike those speeches, unlike the lucid anti-New Deal arguments of Senator Taft, are Candidate Dewey's current blasts. Nor has he raged intemperately on foreign affairs. He has expressed approval of traditional U. S. foreign policy (except for the New Deal "blunder"' of recognizing Soviet Russia), esteems seasoned well-respected ex-Secretary of State Henry Stimson, who in turn thinks highly of Secretary of State Hull. Dewey's slugs at the New Deal are sudden, savage, singleminded, are concentrated mostly on the New Deal's failure to put the unemployed to work. Single-minded is his answer to the U. S. economic problem: the New Deal belief that the U. S. productive plant has been overbuilt leads naturally to the belief that the new adventures, the new plants, the new industries, are unnecessary. The aspirations that would normally flower are frustrated.

The energy of American enterprise, great and small, can create employment, generate purchasing power, and "set in motion once- more the surging flow of commercial venture'' if released. Dammed up, it leads to defeatism, despair, and to the "ultimate, unforgivable crime" of doubting the survival of the Republic. The failure in turn leads to Government spending on a scale that makes it impossible for the New Deal to balance its budget, to confusion of purpose and administration, to explanations of the reason for the failure, such as the famed "strike of capital" that turn into New Deal propaganda. ("The business men of America had all secretly conspired. More amazing, they had all agreed. Hating the national administration more than they loved to make profits. . . . [But] we were not told where the convention of conspirators had been held. . . .")

Major campaign contribution of Candidate Dewey to date has been to bring down to concrete instances the human distress he finds represented by astronomical figures, without making the prospect so hopeless as to contribute to the defeatism he condemns. At Portland, heart of the region where soil erosion has been a popular subject, Candidate Dewey lifted the campaign up a notch by talking about the erosion of capital: the U. S. industrial plant wears out at the rate of about $6,000,000,000 a year, said he; in six years of the New Deal the grand total of capital put into the productive plant was only $29,000,000.000; the U. S. productive plant has consequently deteriorated to the extent represented by $7.000,000,000.

Neither amateur nor veteran is Thomas Dewey as a politician. He got through a cleanup of labor racketeers without giving substance to hysterical charges that he was antilabor; fought a bitter campaign for the governorship against a Jewish banker and slapped down attempts to inject anti-Semitism into the campaign; for the first time in U. S. history has made one of the 3,070 county District Attorney's offices a jumping-off place for a major-party run for the Presidency. He has a quick political eye that would be useful in a hard campaign: reading the morning paper one day a fortnight ago he spotted President Roosevelt's $9,000,000,000 error in his remarks on the national debt, got his economic adviser Elliott Bell on the telephone, had the error nailed down, with his name on the nail, in time for the evening editions.

Cynical City. After 17 years in New York City, Thomas Dewey still bears the mark of Owosso. Newspapermen who got along fine with Jimmy Walker find him a little on the heavy side. Nor is the District Attorney a sophisticated, well-adjusted metropolitan politico like Republican National Committeeman Kenneth Simpson, who has a Matisse on his wall, Alexander Kerensky for his guest. Thomas Dewey takes his career and campaigning hard, has never been able, like most New Yorkers, to slide easily through the city's life, or pay without questioning the physical and intellectual tribute it demands. He remembers dirty deals, remembers, too, triumph in spite of them. He is hardworking, intent, an excellent administrator, with plenty of nerve, a fine radio voice, a record of action, a pretty wife, two sons, a home in the country and scarcely a handicap except the politically unusual one of being too young. His New York friends were hard put to it to find the right remark to make after he left the room, at last produced one: "It's almost impossible to dislike Tom Dewey until you know him well."

But for Boise, Salt Lake, Portland, Cheyenne, Owosso and most of the U. S., New York, if not exactly Sodom and Gomorrah, is still the city of sin and cynicism, full of rackets. And nobody ever gave them such a bill of particulars as Thomas Dewey.

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