“A Whale of a Chance”: Thomas E. Dewey, the U.S. South, and the Election of 1948

This article examines the Republican Party's campaign in the South in 1948. It argues that many national and state Republicans believed that there was a real opportunity for the party's presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, to win Border South states. Dewey and other influential national Republicans also expressed interest in boosting the party's fortunes in the region and made efforts—which they had not in 1944—to cultivate southern Republicanism's growth. Optimistic about the party's prospects but wary of the potential risks associated with personal excursions into the South, Dewey sent Republican National Committee chair Hugh Scott and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio into the region on his behalf. There, as this article argues, they honed a pro‐states' rights message with a non‐racial veneer to capitalize on President Harry S. Truman's unpopularity and foster Democratic defections without jeopardizing Dewey's support outside of the former Confederacy. Though Dewey performed poorly in the South in 1948, this article reveals a serious and at times thoughtful Republican engagement with the region that year, thereby complicating discussions of Dwight D. Eisenhower's success in 1952. This article demonstrates that Eisenhower was not the first to pinpoint Republican opportunity in the postwar South and argues that the basic outlines of his rhetorical appeals were in fact formulated by Republicans at least 4 years earlier. This encourages a reassessment of conventional scholarly periodizations in the study of southern Republicanism, which focus on the later twentieth century, and the development of a longer‐term framework for understanding the party's success in Dixie.