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201 The generational change that brought the strong conservatives to prominence also occurred on the other side of the factional divide. In 1959 Sim DeLapp, leader of the 1952 pro-Eisenhower forces in North Carolina, wrote a long letter to Dewey protesting a patronage appointment that went to a Democrat. Dewey had left the governor’s mansion five years earlier and returned to private life, yet he felt compelled to forward the letter to Brownell with a puzzled confession. “How shall I answer Mr. DeLapp?” Dewey asked. “I remember him, but I do not clearly remember which side of the fence he was on at what time, nor do I know whether there is anything either of us should do to help him.”1 His response to DeLapp is not noted in the archives, but it is clear that Dewey’s role in the party hierarchy had diminished. His outlook on the gop’s campaign strategy, however, remained the same. In 1966, in the midst of another round of factionalism, this time between strong conservatives who had nominated Goldwater in 1964 and moderates under newly installed rnc chairman Ray Bliss of Ohio, Dewey stepped into the fray as senior statesman and voice of reason. He rereleased his 1950 Princeton lectures, where he had forcefully pled his case for liberal Republicanism , as a slim volume titled Thomas E. Dewey on the Two-Party System. In the book’s foreword, John Wells, manager of Nelson Rockefeller’s failed 1964 preconvention campaign, wrote, “Protection of our fundamental political liberty depends on two parties with reasonably equal strength, and that means the Republican party must be broad-based, moderate, and forward-looking.”2 In twenty years, the terms used had changed little and the battle was far from over. By making Barry Goldwater and his abortive presidential campaign the flashpoint for political conservatism, scholars have downplayed imporConclusion 202 : conclusion tant continuities with the previous two decades. The ideological realignment of the two-party system was a slow, heavily contested process, but one rooted in a particular political moment. The 1930s and 1940s were dark times for the gop. Though Republicans were unified in the 1944 campaign , the anxiety over the possibility of losing in 1948, which would be the fifth defeat on the trot, sent them scrambling for new ways to connect with the electorate. In normal circumstances, rnc members and leaders of the various state party meetings would hash out these issues in their proverbial smoke-filled rooms with one eye on building their personal power bases. But the early postwar period was anything but normal. Taft and Dewey, two titans who would have easily dominated the national party had the other not existed, deadlocked the organization between them. To break the stalemate, they plotted differing campaign strategies and, even though they governed in largely identical fashions, stressed their differences as indicators of their “true” Republicanism. As their rhetoric grew more heated, common ground disappeared and animosity reigned. As the party fractured, the concepts of liberalism and conservatism were also evolving and growing more determinative to American political behavior. These terms existed in political discourse well before the 1940s, but after the New Deal they took on new meanings, becoming shorthand for a particular set of policies and an overarching style of governance. Though journalists and intellectuals set the parameters of the debate in the 1950s, office-seekers spent a great deal of time and energy positioning themselves and the policies they supported on the political spectrum to score votes. Single issues like the Bricker Amendment or the Taft-Hartley Act, on their own, were not necessarily liberal or conservative, but their champions went out of their way to promote them as signs of their ideological predilections. Taft’s 1950 senatorial run and Dewey’s Princeton lectures were early examples of candidates elevating their ideological views above their specific policy goals. Dewey called himself a progressive and portrayed the Old Guard as hopelessly lost in the past. At Princeton he selected certain aspects of his record in New York and claimed that he represented a liberal future for the party, as opposed to Taft and his associates , who advocated different, and therefore imprudent, policies. In 1948 Taft rarely called his platform conservative in his campaign rhetoric, though in private correspondence he associated himself with the Right when comparing himself with Dewey. In 1950 and 1952, however, the notion of conservatism featured more prominently in his stump speeches and fliers, even...

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