Circle of Willis
Well-known member
1949
“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” By reciting this oath in his famous baritone with one hand raised and the other on the Holy Bible, Thomas Edmund Dewey formally succeeded Harry Truman as the 34th President of the United States and took the duties of that high office onto his shoulders. The first Republican President since Hoover, the first to have facial hair since Taft and the second-youngest after Teddy Roosevelt carried into his new office a reputation as an honest but aloof and pompous man, even a stiff one at times, and three family members: his auburn-haired wife Frances, considered far prettier and livelier than her husband, and their two sons.
Dewey's first order of business was to form a cabinet. In this regard, most of his picks were conventional Republicans and thus confirmed quite smoothly with strong bipartisan support, despite significant Democratic gains in Congress the previous year.
Secretary of State: John Foster Dulles[1]
Secretary of the Treasury: Elliott V. Bell[2]
Secretary of Defense: Robert A. Lovett[3]
Attorney General: J. Edgar Hoover[4]
Secretary of Commerce: John W. Bricker[5]
Secretary of the Interior: John C. Vivian[6]
Secretary of Agriculture: Usher L. Burdick[7]
Secretary of Labor: Fred A. Hartley, Jr.[8]
Postmaster General: Edwin F. Jaeckle[9]
Of these, the only really controversial picks were his choices for Attorney General and Secretary of Labor. The president had tapped J. Edgar Hoover, the domineering and controversial Director of the FBI, to fill the former spot; there was speculation that Hoover had offered Dewey clandestine aid in the 1948 campaign in exchange for the position, bolstered by how nonchalantly Hoover (a man known to be jealously possessive of ‘his’ bureau) accepted Dewey’s nomination and how Clyde Tolson, his devoted deputy, was guaranteed to succeed him. This would, of course, effectively keep the FBI under Hoover’s thumb even after his promotion to Dewey’s cabinet. As for the Secretary of Labor, Dewey’s nomination of the co-author of the Taft-Hartley Act ruffled many a labor union’s feathers and those of politicians aligned to them, even if it was wholly expected and in line with the prevailing Republican economic orthodoxy, which was hardly friendly to union interests.
Much less controversially, Dewey also rewarded key aides from his time in New York and on the campaign trail with the usual patronage positions. Edwin Jaeckle was nominated to the office of Postmaster General while his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, was retained in a position even closer to Dewey himself as White House Chief of Staff, and his longtime press secretary James Hagerty would continue in that same role at the White House.[10] In a rather less orthodox appointment, he tapped Allen Dulles – brother to his Secretary of State pick and another 1948 campaign aide – to replace rear-admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter as Director of Central Intelligence, making him the first civilian leader of the young Central Intelligence Agency.
It would not be long before this cabinet and the relatively young, mustachioed President it served faced their first tests. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army had dealt their overextended, undersupplied and demoralized Nationalist counterpart multiple crippling defeats through late 1948, and were parading in Beijing by January 31 – just 11 days after Dewey’s inauguration. Dewey tried to up existing efforts to arm and supply the Kuomintang, but it was far too late: the devastation brought on by the Second Sino-Japanese War, persistent and uncontrollable corruption permeating the Nationalist ranks from top to bottom, and Truman’s and George C. Marshall’s ill-advised attempts to force a ceasefire (even to the point of threatening to suspend all aid to Chiang Kai-shek) which the Communists simply took advantage of had doomed the Kuomintang’s efforts to retain power, years before Dewey even started his second campaign for the White House. The National Revolutionary Army was in constant retreat all through spring and summer 1949, losing their capital Nanjing within three days of Communist forces crossing the Yangtze in April and Shanghai by early June.[11]
Though an exultant Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing on October 1 while the Nationalists on the mainland were obviously on the verge of total defeat, a silver lining appeared soon after was the Nationalist Chinese success in repelling PLA attempts to land on Quemoy/Kinmen Island. This gave the Nationalist government and supporters a safe haven to retreat to in the form of Taiwan, as Chiang Kai-shek would indeed do in December, though immediately following the fall of the mainland most American supplies and advisors were bound for Hainan (as the next frontline against the new PRC) instead. Through the ‘China Lobby’ and its congressional champions, such as Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota and Senator Bill Knowland of California, the KMT managed to retain relevance not just in its dwindling Chinese territories but also in the halls of Washington. And the Dewey administration, which looked for any way to lay the blame for China’s fall squarely on the shoulders of their Democratic predecessors, was all too eager to join itself to this lobby.
Even worse, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear bomb in August. This had come as a rude shock to the president and his administration, as they had been informed by US military intelligence and the CIA that the Soviets would not be able to produce nuclear weapons until at least 1953. In response, Dewey opted to authorize development on Edward Teller’s proposal for a ‘Super’ hydrogen bomb.[12]
While he was still reeling from the Nationalist defeat in Asia, Dewey at least had some good news in Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, joining the United States and 11 European nations into a defensive alliance to counter the spread of Communism, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO for short. And later in the year, the Greek Civil War ended in a resounding royalist victory: only a few thousand Communist fighters were able to flee across the border to Bulgaria, eventually ending up in Tashkent once the Soviets got a hold of them, while as many as 100,000 of their comrades were left at the non-existent mercy of the victorious royalists.
Moreover, the electoral victory of Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats ensured that West Germany would be led not just by anti-Communists (Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher was one), but a man friendly to American interests as well. And lastly, the Export-Import Bank, the IMF and the World Bank cleared their first loans to Tito’s Yugoslavia just as it absorbed Koci Xoxe’s Albania: Dewey and Dulles had agreed that exploiting the Tito-Stalin split would be a good way to curb growing Soviet influence, even if Tito himself was also an unapologetic Communist. None of these were considered great or shocking triumphs like the Red victory in China had been for the Communist bloc, indeed all of these developments had been years in the making, but the President was eager to trumpet whatever foreign policy victories he could in the wake of that calamity.[13]
Internally, Dewey took the reform programs he’d pioneered in New York to great success and worked to export them to the rest of the country, aided in no small part by the popularity of these reforms across the political spectrum. The first of his great achievements on that front this year, and certainly the one better-remembered in history books, was the passage of the Housing Act: even Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft and the other conservative Republicans in Congress were on board with the act, which provided for slum clearance programs, the construction of 800,000 housing units and research into new building techniques around the country.[14]
Dewey’s second domestic achievement was an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, increasing the minimum wage from 40¢ to 60¢ per hour and finally fully outlawing child labor in the United States.[15]
Thirdly, in the face of an economic slowdown later in the year, Dewey pushed for the passage of modest tax relief for the working and middle classes, and in particular less modest ones for businesses in general[16]. In so doing he signaled his commitment to promoting economic growth even at the expense of growing deficits, something the more conservative elements of the GOP resented but fully expected out of the liberal Republican figurehead, and which virtually no moderates and liberals objected to at this time.
Fourthly, Dewey – who had already proven himself a strong opponent of segregation as Governor of New York – strove to seriously enforce Truman’s executive order desegregating the military. Secretary of Defense Lovett and Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray were tasked with integrating all-black units and desegregating military bases, hospitals and schools, starting with the integration of the Montford Point training camp for black Marines into neighboring Camp Lejeune. The White House also leaned on the Veterans Administration to award G.I. Bill benefits to black veterans who had returned home with ‘blue ticket’ (considered neither honorable nor dishonorable) discharges, which had then been used as an excuse to deny them those benefits, as part of Dewey’s greater plan to alleviate black poverty by providing greater access to education and promoting the startup of new businesses.[17]
Finally, Cabinet officials weren’t the only appointments Dewey would be making this year. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy died in July; the president nominated Harold Stassen, former Minnesota Governor and his fiercest rival for the GOP nomination last year, to succeed him. Justice Willy Rutledge died two months later, and this time Dewey’s choice of replacement was Earl Warren, the Governor of California. Both men were reputed to be quite progressively-minded, and so like so much of Dewey’s actions to date, their nomination by the liberal Republican president may have mildly annoyed conservatives but hardly came as a surprise to them or anyone else.[18]
Perhaps the only person more vexed by this choice of Justices than Bob Taft and Vice President Halleck was Attorney General Hoover, who had shared his ambition to sit in a Supreme Court Justice’s seat at the earliest opportunity with his close associates. Evidently Dewey felt it was improper to bump him up onto the bench so soon after giving him a cabinet position…or perhaps there was just plenty of animosity between the two men, just as there had been between Hoover and Truman before. Still other Beltway insiders speculated that Dewey had made some other, bigger promise to Hoover to allay the latter’s anger, though they were at a loss as to what that promise could be.
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[1] The Dulles brothers were important supporters of Dewey’s in the 1948 campaign. Seemed logical that he’d give them the roles Eisenhower would a few years later IOTL, considering John was Dewey’s foreign policy advisor on the trail and Allen’s OSS experience.
[2] IOTL Bell was a close financial advisor to Governor Dewey, as well as a bigshot banker and news publisher.
[3] Lovett was Dewey’s SecDef choice had he won the 1948 election and, in addition to being a banker who favored huge military buildup, had already developed strong bipartisan defense and foreign policy credentials from his time as Assistant Secretary of War for Air under FDR and Undersecretary of State under Truman.
[4] According to Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, the Dewey-Hoover deal was real, motivated at least in part by Hoover’s extremely bad relationship with Truman. Hoover, Tolson and Lou Nichols had cooked it up with the expectation that Dewey wouldn’t just make Hoover his AG, but also give him a SCOTUS seat as soon as one opened up.
[5] Bricker was Dewey’s running mate in the 1944 election and a conservative Republican, a sharp contrast to the liberal Eastern Establishment figurehead Dewey.
[6] Vivian was Governor of Colorado 1943-47 and another noted conservative.
[7] Burdick was a Congressman from North Dakota and a liberal more in tune with Dewey than the previous three picks, best known for being the sole Republican Congressman not to support the Communist Control Act IOTL.
[8] Hartley was a Republican Congressman from New Jersey and, as said, co-sponsor of the Taft-Hartley Act which put the first major post-New Deal limits on union power and made future right-to-work legislation possible.
[9] Jaeckle was a longtime New York Republican grey eminence, party chairman 1940-44 and Dewey’s political mentor, having orchestrated the latter’s rise to the governorship and first presidential election campaign.
[10] Brownell was indeed Dewey’s campaign manager in 1948, and IOTL became Attorney General under Eisenhower. Hagerty was historically the White House Press Secretary under Eisenhower, but before that he was Dewey’s – both as Governor of NY and on the campaign trail in 1944 and ’48.
[11] The Nationalists’ backs were broken by the destruction of their armies in Manchuria and northern China through late 1948 and early 1949, but they had been on the back foot against the Communists for a while before that. The fatal Huaihai Campaign had ended even before Dewey was inaugurated ITL, just as it did historically.
[12] Just a little earlier than Truman’s decision to do the same IOTL, which came in 1950.
[13] Mostly the same as the course of European events in OTL's 1949, except for that mention of Yugoslavia absorbing Albania. Dewey’s an internationalist who would have no problem with NATO, unlike isolationist Republicans like Taft; much like the Chinese Civil War, the course of the Greek Civil War and the Tito-Stalin split had already pretty much been set before election day in 1948; and Schumacher’s SPD was hobbled by factors out of their and Dewey’s control, namely the loss of the most SPD-friendly parts of Germany to East Germany and fear of the brutal policies enforced by the Soviets & East German Communists there, which damned them by association despite his efforts to dissociate from the latter in the strongest terms possible.
[14] Pretty much Truman’s OTL Housing Act of 1949, which was actually sponsored by Taft as well. Dewey was a firm advocate of urban renewal and housing programs in New York when he was its Governor, and there’s no reason to think that would change if he were to move up to the White House.
[15] Also similar to OTL, the only difference is that Dewey and the Republicans passed a smaller minimum wage increase than Truman did – from 40¢ to 60¢ rather than 75¢.
[16] Truman did something similar in 1949, though in line with Republican economics, Dewey’s tax breaks are a bit more favorable to the middle class and businesses and a bit less so toward blue-collar workers.
[17] Historically, Truman passed the order to desegregate the military, but it went mostly unenforced until Eisenhower. Dewey – a Northern Republican with one of the best records in fighting racial discrimination among the state governors of the 1940s – has essentially started Eisenhower’s work early, with an extra eye on growing the black middle class by way of providing GI Bill benefits to black veterans.
[18] Other than being a perennial candidate for the presidency, IOTL Stassen was known as the youngest governor of any US state in his day and a liberal Republican like Dewey himself, though unlike the latter he was on board with the idea of banning the Communist Party outright. Warren had been Governor of California since 1943 and was appointed to SCOTUS in 1953 IOTL.
“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” By reciting this oath in his famous baritone with one hand raised and the other on the Holy Bible, Thomas Edmund Dewey formally succeeded Harry Truman as the 34th President of the United States and took the duties of that high office onto his shoulders. The first Republican President since Hoover, the first to have facial hair since Taft and the second-youngest after Teddy Roosevelt carried into his new office a reputation as an honest but aloof and pompous man, even a stiff one at times, and three family members: his auburn-haired wife Frances, considered far prettier and livelier than her husband, and their two sons.
Dewey's first order of business was to form a cabinet. In this regard, most of his picks were conventional Republicans and thus confirmed quite smoothly with strong bipartisan support, despite significant Democratic gains in Congress the previous year.
Secretary of State: John Foster Dulles[1]
Secretary of the Treasury: Elliott V. Bell[2]
Secretary of Defense: Robert A. Lovett[3]
Attorney General: J. Edgar Hoover[4]
Secretary of Commerce: John W. Bricker[5]
Secretary of the Interior: John C. Vivian[6]
Secretary of Agriculture: Usher L. Burdick[7]
Secretary of Labor: Fred A. Hartley, Jr.[8]
Postmaster General: Edwin F. Jaeckle[9]
Of these, the only really controversial picks were his choices for Attorney General and Secretary of Labor. The president had tapped J. Edgar Hoover, the domineering and controversial Director of the FBI, to fill the former spot; there was speculation that Hoover had offered Dewey clandestine aid in the 1948 campaign in exchange for the position, bolstered by how nonchalantly Hoover (a man known to be jealously possessive of ‘his’ bureau) accepted Dewey’s nomination and how Clyde Tolson, his devoted deputy, was guaranteed to succeed him. This would, of course, effectively keep the FBI under Hoover’s thumb even after his promotion to Dewey’s cabinet. As for the Secretary of Labor, Dewey’s nomination of the co-author of the Taft-Hartley Act ruffled many a labor union’s feathers and those of politicians aligned to them, even if it was wholly expected and in line with the prevailing Republican economic orthodoxy, which was hardly friendly to union interests.
Much less controversially, Dewey also rewarded key aides from his time in New York and on the campaign trail with the usual patronage positions. Edwin Jaeckle was nominated to the office of Postmaster General while his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, was retained in a position even closer to Dewey himself as White House Chief of Staff, and his longtime press secretary James Hagerty would continue in that same role at the White House.[10] In a rather less orthodox appointment, he tapped Allen Dulles – brother to his Secretary of State pick and another 1948 campaign aide – to replace rear-admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter as Director of Central Intelligence, making him the first civilian leader of the young Central Intelligence Agency.
It would not be long before this cabinet and the relatively young, mustachioed President it served faced their first tests. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army had dealt their overextended, undersupplied and demoralized Nationalist counterpart multiple crippling defeats through late 1948, and were parading in Beijing by January 31 – just 11 days after Dewey’s inauguration. Dewey tried to up existing efforts to arm and supply the Kuomintang, but it was far too late: the devastation brought on by the Second Sino-Japanese War, persistent and uncontrollable corruption permeating the Nationalist ranks from top to bottom, and Truman’s and George C. Marshall’s ill-advised attempts to force a ceasefire (even to the point of threatening to suspend all aid to Chiang Kai-shek) which the Communists simply took advantage of had doomed the Kuomintang’s efforts to retain power, years before Dewey even started his second campaign for the White House. The National Revolutionary Army was in constant retreat all through spring and summer 1949, losing their capital Nanjing within three days of Communist forces crossing the Yangtze in April and Shanghai by early June.[11]
Though an exultant Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing on October 1 while the Nationalists on the mainland were obviously on the verge of total defeat, a silver lining appeared soon after was the Nationalist Chinese success in repelling PLA attempts to land on Quemoy/Kinmen Island. This gave the Nationalist government and supporters a safe haven to retreat to in the form of Taiwan, as Chiang Kai-shek would indeed do in December, though immediately following the fall of the mainland most American supplies and advisors were bound for Hainan (as the next frontline against the new PRC) instead. Through the ‘China Lobby’ and its congressional champions, such as Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota and Senator Bill Knowland of California, the KMT managed to retain relevance not just in its dwindling Chinese territories but also in the halls of Washington. And the Dewey administration, which looked for any way to lay the blame for China’s fall squarely on the shoulders of their Democratic predecessors, was all too eager to join itself to this lobby.
Even worse, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear bomb in August. This had come as a rude shock to the president and his administration, as they had been informed by US military intelligence and the CIA that the Soviets would not be able to produce nuclear weapons until at least 1953. In response, Dewey opted to authorize development on Edward Teller’s proposal for a ‘Super’ hydrogen bomb.[12]
While he was still reeling from the Nationalist defeat in Asia, Dewey at least had some good news in Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, joining the United States and 11 European nations into a defensive alliance to counter the spread of Communism, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO for short. And later in the year, the Greek Civil War ended in a resounding royalist victory: only a few thousand Communist fighters were able to flee across the border to Bulgaria, eventually ending up in Tashkent once the Soviets got a hold of them, while as many as 100,000 of their comrades were left at the non-existent mercy of the victorious royalists.
Moreover, the electoral victory of Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats ensured that West Germany would be led not just by anti-Communists (Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher was one), but a man friendly to American interests as well. And lastly, the Export-Import Bank, the IMF and the World Bank cleared their first loans to Tito’s Yugoslavia just as it absorbed Koci Xoxe’s Albania: Dewey and Dulles had agreed that exploiting the Tito-Stalin split would be a good way to curb growing Soviet influence, even if Tito himself was also an unapologetic Communist. None of these were considered great or shocking triumphs like the Red victory in China had been for the Communist bloc, indeed all of these developments had been years in the making, but the President was eager to trumpet whatever foreign policy victories he could in the wake of that calamity.[13]
Internally, Dewey took the reform programs he’d pioneered in New York to great success and worked to export them to the rest of the country, aided in no small part by the popularity of these reforms across the political spectrum. The first of his great achievements on that front this year, and certainly the one better-remembered in history books, was the passage of the Housing Act: even Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft and the other conservative Republicans in Congress were on board with the act, which provided for slum clearance programs, the construction of 800,000 housing units and research into new building techniques around the country.[14]
Dewey’s second domestic achievement was an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, increasing the minimum wage from 40¢ to 60¢ per hour and finally fully outlawing child labor in the United States.[15]
Thirdly, in the face of an economic slowdown later in the year, Dewey pushed for the passage of modest tax relief for the working and middle classes, and in particular less modest ones for businesses in general[16]. In so doing he signaled his commitment to promoting economic growth even at the expense of growing deficits, something the more conservative elements of the GOP resented but fully expected out of the liberal Republican figurehead, and which virtually no moderates and liberals objected to at this time.
Fourthly, Dewey – who had already proven himself a strong opponent of segregation as Governor of New York – strove to seriously enforce Truman’s executive order desegregating the military. Secretary of Defense Lovett and Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray were tasked with integrating all-black units and desegregating military bases, hospitals and schools, starting with the integration of the Montford Point training camp for black Marines into neighboring Camp Lejeune. The White House also leaned on the Veterans Administration to award G.I. Bill benefits to black veterans who had returned home with ‘blue ticket’ (considered neither honorable nor dishonorable) discharges, which had then been used as an excuse to deny them those benefits, as part of Dewey’s greater plan to alleviate black poverty by providing greater access to education and promoting the startup of new businesses.[17]
Finally, Cabinet officials weren’t the only appointments Dewey would be making this year. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy died in July; the president nominated Harold Stassen, former Minnesota Governor and his fiercest rival for the GOP nomination last year, to succeed him. Justice Willy Rutledge died two months later, and this time Dewey’s choice of replacement was Earl Warren, the Governor of California. Both men were reputed to be quite progressively-minded, and so like so much of Dewey’s actions to date, their nomination by the liberal Republican president may have mildly annoyed conservatives but hardly came as a surprise to them or anyone else.[18]
Perhaps the only person more vexed by this choice of Justices than Bob Taft and Vice President Halleck was Attorney General Hoover, who had shared his ambition to sit in a Supreme Court Justice’s seat at the earliest opportunity with his close associates. Evidently Dewey felt it was improper to bump him up onto the bench so soon after giving him a cabinet position…or perhaps there was just plenty of animosity between the two men, just as there had been between Hoover and Truman before. Still other Beltway insiders speculated that Dewey had made some other, bigger promise to Hoover to allay the latter’s anger, though they were at a loss as to what that promise could be.
====================================================================================
[1] The Dulles brothers were important supporters of Dewey’s in the 1948 campaign. Seemed logical that he’d give them the roles Eisenhower would a few years later IOTL, considering John was Dewey’s foreign policy advisor on the trail and Allen’s OSS experience.
[2] IOTL Bell was a close financial advisor to Governor Dewey, as well as a bigshot banker and news publisher.
[3] Lovett was Dewey’s SecDef choice had he won the 1948 election and, in addition to being a banker who favored huge military buildup, had already developed strong bipartisan defense and foreign policy credentials from his time as Assistant Secretary of War for Air under FDR and Undersecretary of State under Truman.
[4] According to Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, the Dewey-Hoover deal was real, motivated at least in part by Hoover’s extremely bad relationship with Truman. Hoover, Tolson and Lou Nichols had cooked it up with the expectation that Dewey wouldn’t just make Hoover his AG, but also give him a SCOTUS seat as soon as one opened up.
[5] Bricker was Dewey’s running mate in the 1944 election and a conservative Republican, a sharp contrast to the liberal Eastern Establishment figurehead Dewey.
[6] Vivian was Governor of Colorado 1943-47 and another noted conservative.
[7] Burdick was a Congressman from North Dakota and a liberal more in tune with Dewey than the previous three picks, best known for being the sole Republican Congressman not to support the Communist Control Act IOTL.
[8] Hartley was a Republican Congressman from New Jersey and, as said, co-sponsor of the Taft-Hartley Act which put the first major post-New Deal limits on union power and made future right-to-work legislation possible.
[9] Jaeckle was a longtime New York Republican grey eminence, party chairman 1940-44 and Dewey’s political mentor, having orchestrated the latter’s rise to the governorship and first presidential election campaign.
[10] Brownell was indeed Dewey’s campaign manager in 1948, and IOTL became Attorney General under Eisenhower. Hagerty was historically the White House Press Secretary under Eisenhower, but before that he was Dewey’s – both as Governor of NY and on the campaign trail in 1944 and ’48.
[11] The Nationalists’ backs were broken by the destruction of their armies in Manchuria and northern China through late 1948 and early 1949, but they had been on the back foot against the Communists for a while before that. The fatal Huaihai Campaign had ended even before Dewey was inaugurated ITL, just as it did historically.
[12] Just a little earlier than Truman’s decision to do the same IOTL, which came in 1950.
[13] Mostly the same as the course of European events in OTL's 1949, except for that mention of Yugoslavia absorbing Albania. Dewey’s an internationalist who would have no problem with NATO, unlike isolationist Republicans like Taft; much like the Chinese Civil War, the course of the Greek Civil War and the Tito-Stalin split had already pretty much been set before election day in 1948; and Schumacher’s SPD was hobbled by factors out of their and Dewey’s control, namely the loss of the most SPD-friendly parts of Germany to East Germany and fear of the brutal policies enforced by the Soviets & East German Communists there, which damned them by association despite his efforts to dissociate from the latter in the strongest terms possible.
[14] Pretty much Truman’s OTL Housing Act of 1949, which was actually sponsored by Taft as well. Dewey was a firm advocate of urban renewal and housing programs in New York when he was its Governor, and there’s no reason to think that would change if he were to move up to the White House.
[15] Also similar to OTL, the only difference is that Dewey and the Republicans passed a smaller minimum wage increase than Truman did – from 40¢ to 60¢ rather than 75¢.
[16] Truman did something similar in 1949, though in line with Republican economics, Dewey’s tax breaks are a bit more favorable to the middle class and businesses and a bit less so toward blue-collar workers.
[17] Historically, Truman passed the order to desegregate the military, but it went mostly unenforced until Eisenhower. Dewey – a Northern Republican with one of the best records in fighting racial discrimination among the state governors of the 1940s – has essentially started Eisenhower’s work early, with an extra eye on growing the black middle class by way of providing GI Bill benefits to black veterans.
[18] Other than being a perennial candidate for the presidency, IOTL Stassen was known as the youngest governor of any US state in his day and a liberal Republican like Dewey himself, though unlike the latter he was on board with the idea of banning the Communist Party outright. Warren had been Governor of California since 1943 and was appointed to SCOTUS in 1953 IOTL.