The only Presidential debate there ever was

When America dodged a bullet.

Harold Stassen (left) and Thomas E. Dewey

On the evening of Thursday, June 27, 2024, CNN will put on a TV show starring President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. It will be called a "debate." Technically, it fits one of the word's definitions as they will "contend in words."

But there are "candidate debates," and then there are real debates where there's a resolution in which one argues in favor and another against. That kind of debate between Presidential candidates has happened just once in the entire history of broadcast media, and perhaps in all of American history. 

The debate happened on May 17, 1948, in the studio of radio station KPOJ serving the Portland, Oregon area. It was between Thomas E. Dewey and Harold Stassen, four days before the Republican Presidential primary.

Dewey, the respected New York governor, had been the presumed favorite to repeat as the Republican nominee after losing to incumbent Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. But Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota, defeated Dewey in the Wisconsin and Nebraska primaries. 

Oregon was next, and Dewey went all-in, spending three weeks in the state with record amounts of Eastern Establishment donor money spent on ads. 

The debate was broadcast nationally on radio with 40 to 80 million listening over the issue of whether the American Communist Party should be outlawed. Stassen was viewed as a liberal but favored a ban. Dewey was against it. 

You can also listen to the debate for yourself.

Tom Swafford was the program director of KPOJ at the time and wrote about how the debate came to be decades later in American Heritage magazine. It was almost called off because Dewey insisted it be held in the radio studio, not in front of an audience. Swafford visited Stassen in his hotel room. Swafford writes:

The former governor of Minnesota, the man favored to be the next President of the United States, was in green pajama bottoms, and he was shaving. I occupied the only available seat.

Stassen wouldn’t budge. “No. I’ve given on every point. Let him give on this one.”

I tried my best shot: “Governor, if you can beat Dewey in a debate, does it make any difference whether you do it in front of a live audience? There’ll be millions of people listening. They’ll know you beat him. Isn’t that what will count, the voters?”

Stassen put down the razor and looked in the mirror for a moment. Then, smiling through the lather, he said: “You’re right, of course. All right. Look, I’ll debate that little son of a bitch anywhere, anytime, on any subject!”

I recommend reading Swafford's entire account, but this was the turning point. Stassen already lost the debate in his pajamas, in that hotel room. And, he lost the primary,  the nomination, and his future as a viable Presidential candidate.

Stassen lost the debate from the beginning because he lost his advantage. Stassen was an imposing figure, much taller than Dewey. Taller men tend to impress the public more, so Stassen may have had an audience's respect from the beginning. And he held the position - outlawing the Communist Party - that would most likely garner enthusiastic applause or cheers from an audience, cheers that radio listeners would hear, skewing their impressions of how the debate was going.

If Stassen refused to give in to Dewey's demands, there would have been no debate and Stassen likely would have won the primary. And if the debate was held before an audience, it might have been perceived as closer than it was, perhaps as a draw. Stassen still might have won the primary and Dewey would have spent the rest of the year in his Albany office.

But there was no audience in a theater hall, only in living rooms. 

Dewey won the debate as he came across as more knowledgeable and thoughtful. Behind in the polls before the debate, he narrowly won the primary (51.8%-47.6%) he so desperately needed. He regained his front-runner status and won the nomination. He lost the election, but just because he lost to Truman doesn't mean Stassen would have.

In 1938, when Stassen was only 31, he was elected governor of Minnesota. Re-elected twice (to two-year terms), he resigned in 1943 to join the Navy during World War II, in which he served meritoriously. In 1945, he was a delegate to the conference that founded the United Nations and was a signatory to its Charter.

Dewey is said to have blown an election he should have won. Stassen could have blown it as well if he had been nominated. But he also might have sailed to victory if millions of WWII veterans got to choose one of their own.

And that's a scary thought.

The behavior of powerful anti-communists in the late 1940s-early 1950s was bad enough: The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Blacklist, followed by the McCarthy Era. (Sen. Joseph McCarthy, then an obscure junior Senator from Wisconsin, was at the debate to support Stassen.)  The hypothetical President Stassen wouldn't have been cheerleading them, he would have been leading them.

We would have had a President who had said at the debate, "We must not coddle Communism with legality."

1948 was only 30 years after President Woodrow Wilson's World War I censorship that sent Eugene Debs and others to prison, and just a few years after the internment of Japanese-Americans. Nationalism carried more weight than individual rights. One wonders what anti-communist Executive Orders President Stassen would have decreed under the guise of "national security."

I think Stassen had a better chance at defeating Truman, but he didn't get past Dewey. For one evening, May 17, 1948, Americans seemed persuaded by Thomas E. Dewey's principles and common sense.  

"I am unalterably, wholeheartedly, and unswervingly against any scheme to write laws outlawing people because of their religion, political, social, or economic ideas. I am against it because it is a violation of the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, and clearly so. I am against it because it is immoral and nothing but totalitarianism itself. I am against it because I know from a great many years experience in the enforcement of the law that the proposal wouldn't work, and instead would rapidly advance the cause of Communism in the United States and all over the world. ... Stripped to its naked essentials, this is nothing but the method of Hitler and Stalin. It is thought control, borrowed from the Japanese war leadership. It is an attempt to beat down ideas with a club. It is a surrender of everything we believe in."

Stassen went on to some prestigious offices: president of the University of Pennsylvania, top Eisenhower Administration posts for foreign aid and disarmament, and president of the American Baptist Convention. To his credit, he was an early and ongoing proponent of civil rights for blacks dating to his time as Minnesota governor.

But he never held elective office again despite many attempts including seven more runs at the Presidency, which after 1952 almost nobody took seriously. In 1950, Dewey was re-elected governor of New York one more time before retiring to private life as a corporate lawyer and behind-the-scenes power broker. 

The Communist Party was finally outlawed in 1954, but the worst of the anti-communist crusade was fading by then. The entire era could have been worse under President Stassen, but thanks to Dewey, it wasn't.  

James Leroy Wilson writes The MVP Chase (subscribe) and JL Cells (subscribe) and is a monthly columnist at Meer. Thank you for your subscriptions and support! You may contact James for writing, editing, research, and other work: jamesleroywilson-at-gmail.com.