Thomas E. Dewey

Not much happening today.  Sunday is downtime for the house project.  Jim's masons should be back at work tomorrow.  The weather forecast calls for mostly sunny through the first half of the week, with a 30% chance of rain on Thursday.  That's encouraging.

I'm going to attend the Township Board meeting on Monday evening, and then drive to Detroit on Tuesday.  On Wednesday I'll go back to Grand Haven, and then return here Friday.  I'm afraid I won't have much to blog about for the next few days.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm reading Truman, by David McCullough.  This morning I found the following item in the section on the 1948 presidential campaign:

"Like Truman, [Republican candidate Thomas E.] Dewey was a product of small-town middle America.  He had grown up in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, the editor of the local newspaper, was vitally interested in politics, just as John Truman [Harry's father] had been.

"Beyond there, however, the similarities ended.  Where Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man — raised, educated, formed in thought and outlook in the era before World War I — Dewey was of a different generation.  Dewey had never lived with the burden of farm debt; he had never been to war; he had never been bankrupt.  Born in 1902, eighteen years after Truman, he was the first candidate for President born in the twentieth century.  His middle American origins, moreover, were hardly apparent any longer.  Educated at the University of Michigan and the Columbia Law School in New York, he had made his entire career in the East, and with his homburg hats and cultivated voice, he had left Owosso behind."  (Truman, pp. 670-71)

I'm not sure I ever knew Dewey was an Owosso native.  Interesting! •••