Editing Thomas E. Dewey (section)

== Rivalry with Robert A. Taft ==
Dewey's biographer Richard Norton Smith wrote, "For fifteen years&nbsp;... these two combatants waged political warfare. Their dispute pitted East against Midwest, city against countryside, internationalist against isolationist, pragmatic liberals against principled conservatives. Each man thought himself the genuine spokesman of the future; each denounced the other as a political heretic." 

In a 1949 speech, Dewey criticized Taft and his followers by saying that "we have in our party some fine, high-minded patriotic people who honestly oppose farm price supports, unemployment insurance, old age benefits, slum clearance, and other social programs... these people believe in a [[laissez-faire]] society and look back wistfully to the miscalled 'good old days' of the nineteenth century... if such efforts to turn back the clock are actually pursued, you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country." He added that people who opposed such social programs should "go out and try to get elected in a typical American community and see what happens to them. But they ought not to do it as Republicans."<ref>(Smith, p. 547-548)</ref>

In the speech, Dewey added that the Republican Party believed in social progress "under a flourishing, competitive system of private enterprise where every human right is expanded&nbsp;... we are opposed to delivering the nation into the hands of any group who will have the power to tell the American people whether they may have food or fuel, shelter or jobs."<ref>(Smith, p. 548)</ref> Dewey believed in what he called "compassionate capitalism", and argued that "in the modern age, man's needs include as much economic security as is consistent with individual freedom."<ref name="Smith, p. 34">(Smith, p. 34)</ref> When Taft and his supporters criticized Dewey's policies as liberal "me-tooism", or "aping the New Deal in a vain attempt to outbid Roosevelt's heirs", Dewey responded that he was following in the tradition of Republicans such as [[Abraham Lincoln]] and [[Theodore Roosevelt]], and that "it was conservative reforms like anti-trust laws and federal regulation of railroads&nbsp;... that retained the allegiance of the people for a capitalist system combining private incentive and public conscience."<ref name="Smith, p. 34" />

His rivalry with Taft notwithstanding, Dewey nevertheless went surreptitiously to the hospital in 1953 to visit with Taft when the latter was gravely ill. The two talked for half an hour, and afterward Taft joked that "Tom came around to see whether I am really out of the running."<ref>(Smith, p. 617)</ref>