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130 The preconvention campaign ended after Texas with the nomination too close to call. Heading into the national convention in July, each faction claimed it had commitments from roughly 500 to 600 pledged delegates out of 1,209, a much tighter race than the previous two election cycles. The Dewey wing also expected to benefit from the return of Eisenhower, who in June resigned his military commission to actively seek the presidency . This marked the end of a difficult five months for Dewey and his organization , having been forced to fend off Taft’s charges that Eisenhower lacked principles and experience. Eisenhower’s appearance eroded Taft’s position and weakened his arguments. Following Eisenhower’s highly contested nomination, the Taftites struggled over their role in the gop. Though the general election would be remembered as an easy victory for the Republicans, unity between the factions did not come easily. Taft continued to have faith that the American people preferred a conservative alternative to the New Deal, and he and his followers reluctantly worked for Eisenhower once Taft had received assurances that the Old Guard would not be shut out of party affairs. From January through Taft’s death in the summer of 1953, the two factions maintained a public facade of harmony while the Deweyites plotted to purge their more conservative colleagues from the national organization. The split that began out of frustration over the gop’s minority status in 1944 continued unabated during the first Republican administration in twenty years, and ideology, now the commonly recognized dividing line between the groups, took on even more importance in public discourse and the affairs of party insiders. On 4 June, a week after the controversial Texas state convention, Eisenhower addressed voters for the first time as a presidential candidate in his hometown of Abilene, Kansas. In front of 5,000 rain-soaked onlookSIX If We Sleep on This, We Are Really Suckers, 1952 if we sleep on this, we are really suckers : 131 ers, Eisenhower quickly dampened the spirits of the Taft faction when, counter to its rhetoric, he emphatically disavowed Democratic policies and echoed Taft’s own talking points. He distanced himself from the Truman foreign policy and called the “loss” of China to the Communists “one of the greatest international disasters of our time.” He linked growing in- flation to the fiscal policies of the New and Fair Deals and firmly pledged to protect the nation from Communist subversion. In less than an hour he established himself as a traditional Republican and countered one of the most fundamental aspects of Taft’s campaign: that Eisenhower was really a masquerading Democrat. Eisenhower took some deserved criticism for his overall performance, but the tone of his address was more combative than the speeches Dewey had delivered in 1948.1 Eisenhower joined his own campaign at a critical time in the election cycle. A Gallup poll released on the day of the Abilene speech showed Taft gaining three points over the last two weeks and trailing Eisenhower by seven. On 20 June, Gallup showed that 61 percent of Republican county chairmen favored Taft versus 31 percent for Eisenhower. Among Republican Party officials, Taft led Eisenhower in every section of the country , with the South and the Midwest giving him his largest majorities. Many believed Taft was very close to securing the nomination.2 Polls also showed both Republicans trending ahead of the Democrats on the three key issues of the election: foreign policy, Communism, and corruption. The Republicans conveniently repackaged these topics into the formula c2k1, for “Communism, corruption, and Korea.” A number of secondary issues, such as high taxation and farm subsidies, concerned voters in the Midwest and the South particularly, but c2k1 had salience throughout the nation. With Eisenhower an active candidate, Taft now had the opportunity to challenge his opponent on specific policy questions, but he found it difficult to find an advantage because both took similar lines on the major issues. Taft was at a decided disadvantage on the question of foreign policy. Since the end of World War II, he had privately opposed many aspects of the Democratic foreign program but deferred to Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg’s leadership on international affairs in the Senate. Until Vandenberg’s death in 1951, Taft reluctantly accepted a bipartisan foreign policy. By 1952 Taft had evolved from his previous isolationism and grudgingly accepted the premise of American involvement in world affairs, all while believing that...

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