‘Me Too—But Not as Much’

February 21, 1949

Governor Dewey’s Lincoln Day speech in Washington underlined one major reason why he was twice defeated for the Presidency. It is his lack of a coherent political and economic philosophy, his lack of great convictions on great issues. Many voters complained during the campaign that they did not know where Dewey stood. As the campaign wore on, their perplexity turned to misgiving. He started as a sure winner. By the second of October he had defeated the prospects of a Republican Congress, and by the second of November he had defeated even himself.

Now that he has spoken again, it is harder than ever to tell where he stands. He begins by asserting that “the Republican Party is split wide open.” (Such an announcement, on the part of the “titular head,” is certainly the way to split it wide open or to widen any split.) He goes on to picture the party as consisting on one side of extremists against all “progress” and on the other side of extremists “who seem to embrace the entire New Deal and want to go far beyond it.... Both courses are fatal to our party.” What he fails to see is that the most fatal course of all is precisely the sort of “middle road” he recommends—one in which the Republicans accept the basic premises of the New Deal but allow themselves to be outbid in their application.

Surely he should have learned this from the last campaign. He accepted the principle of farm price supports. This prevented him from pointing out that farm price supports raise the cost of food for city workers. So he lost potential votes in the cities and even votes of the farmers themselves. For his belated and halfhearted acceptance of the “parity” nonsense made them suspect that he and the Republicans would offer them less of the taxpayer’s money than Mr. Truman. Can the Republicans hope to win if they endorse the principle of Federal minimum-wage laws but offer only 65 cents an hour instead of 75 or only 75 instead of $1? Can they hope to win if they come out belatedly for building private housing at public expense but offer only 500,000 units instead of Mr. Truman’s 1,000,000? Why so little of a wonderful thing? In the first half of his speech Mr. Dewey seems to be for social security without reservation. In the second half he expresses concern about “a system where everything man gets from cradle to grave is doled out to him by a ruling clique.” But he does not tell us on what principle he decides how much social security is very, very good and how much more makes it sinister and bad. He does not tell us how, once we embark upon compulsory social security, we can prevent politicians of all parties from outbidding each other till the system has become a crushing burden. Does Mr. Dewey know that in France the cost to the employer of social benefits in 1947 was placed at some 36 percent over and above the wages in the metal industries and some 47 percent in the electrical industries?

In the admirable second half of his speech Mr. Dewey points out that our free system produces more than all the rest of the world together of steel, automobiles, and telephones. He properly ridicules “a little nationalizing” as “like putting just one drop of strychnine in a glass of perfectly good milk.” But his speech as a whole, like the 1948 Republican platform that he praises, is a tissue of self-contradictions (see this column, Newsweek, July 5, 1948).

Mr. Dewey wants to eat his cake and have it too. He wants a planned economy and a free one. He wants to face both ways. He is trying both to accept and reject the New Deal. His program, in six words, is: “Me too—but not as much.” Such a program could only lead to a third disastrous defeat.

The choice before the world today is nothing less than the choice between private enterprise and collectivist planning, between capitalism and socialism, between economic freedom and totalitarian serfdom. We must make up our minds. There is no right amount of strychnine in the milk.