Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism

424 Pages·2013·1.533 MB·English

by  Thomas W. Devine

Henry Wallace’s
1948 Presidential Campaign
and
the Future of Postwar
Liberalism
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Henry Wallace’s
1948 Presidential Campaign
and
the Future of Postwar
Liberalism
THOMAS W. DEVINE
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
© 2013 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Set in Miller by codeMantra
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press
has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Devine, Thomas W.
Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign and the future of
postwar liberalism / Thomas W. Devine. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978–1–4696–0203–5 (hardback)
1. Wallace, Henry A. (Henry Agard), 1888–1965. 2. Political campaigns—
United States. 3. Presidents—United States—Election—1948 4. United States—
Politics and government—1945–1953. I. Title.
e748.w23d48 2013
973.918—dc23
2012046984
17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as
“The Communists, Henry Wallace, and the Progressive Party of 1948,”
Continuity: A Journal of History , no. 26 (Spring 2003): 33–79.
Used with permission.
To
William E. Leuchtenburg
and
Farzin Avaz
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CONTENTS
Preface, ix
1 / A Frenchman Named Duclos, 1
The Communists and the Origins of the Progressive Party
2 / I Shall Run as an Independent Candidate for President, 3 5
Launching Gideon’s Army
3 / One Robin Doesn’t Bring No Spring, 71
Early Victories and Mounting Attacks
4 / Wall Street Is in the Saddle, 95
Henry Wallace’s Critique of Containment
5 / Like a Silken Thread Running Through the Whole Thing, 1 23
Lead-Up to the National Convention and the Crafting
of a Third Party Platform
6 / The Whole Place Has Gone Wallace Wacky, 156
The Founding Convention of the Progressive Party
7 / Rolling Downhill, 180
Post-Convention Fallout and Dropouts
8 / Too Damned Long in the Woods to Be Fooled by Weasels, 2 00
Youth, Labor, Spies, and the Post-Convention Campaign
9 / Thirty Years Too Soon, 2 33
Gideon’s Army Invades Dixie
10 / Truman Defeats Wallace, 2 69
Denouement
Conclusion, 286
Notes, 293 Bibliography, 3 55
Acknowledgments, 395 Index, 399
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PREFACE
In the election of 1948, Henry A. Wallace set out to challenge conven-
tional wisdom. At a time when both major parties supported President
Harry Truman’s foreign policy, Wallace claimed that militarists and in-
ternational bankers had taken over the government and were deliberately
leading the nation down the road to war. Though public opinion polls
showed that most Americans viewed the Marshall Plan as a humanitar-
ian aid program that would produce stability and economic recovery in
Europe, he denounced it as a reactionary Wall Street plot designed to
corner foreign markets, suppress civil liberties, and split the world into
two “warring camps.” At a time when the vast majority of the population
feared the spread of communism and considered the Soviet Union the
primary impediment to world peace, Wallace insisted that domestic fas-
cism and American imperialism posed the greater threat. American “mo-
nopolists,” he maintained, had manufactured the Cold War to divert atten-
tion from their global grab for power and profi ts. As the government took
steps to clamp down on the activities of the American Communist Party,
Wallace denounced the “Red Scare” and welcomed Communists into his
campaign, arguing that it would violate the principles of Jeffersonian de-
mocracy to turn them away. And, as southern segregationists split from
the Democratic Party rather than accept a platform that supported racial
equality for African Americans, Wallace journeyed into the heart of Dixie
and proclaimed that segregation was sin.
I nevitably, the Progressive nominee drew criticism for his unorthodox
beliefs. Throughout 1948, many journalists and politicians dismissed
Wallace as a bitter and confused man, full of contempt for President
Truman and easily manipulated by the cynical “agents of the Kremlin” who
surrounded him. Cartoonists portrayed him as marionette, mindlessly de-
livering the latest Moscow line while Stalin pulled the strings. Many of
the nation’s newspaper editors assailed him as an “appeaser,” and even
a traitor, who preached the insidious doctrine of “peace at any price.”
Conservative columnists ridiculed the Iowa native as a “corn-fed mystic,”
the unbalanced author of the bizarre “Guru letters,” and as an eccentric
who had a long history of consorting with charlatans and falling hard
ix
for their save-the-world schemes. Southerners made Wallace the target
of eggs, tomatoes, and a torrent of ugly invective, while many northern
liberals considered him the unwitting ally of “reaction.”
L ess impassioned critics viewed Wallace as a well-intentioned but as-
tonishingly naive fi gure, a utopian who was more comfortable dreaming
about the future than confronting the problems of the present. The 1948
presidential campaign, they believed, had brought out the worst in him.
His crusading fervor hardened into dogmatic intolerance; his always emo-
tionally charged oratory grew reckless and strident; his populist suspicion
of concentrated economic power devolved into a dubious “devil theory”
of Wall Street conspirators plotting to destroy civilization. And, most
notably, his tendency to reduce human history into a zero-sum struggle
between good and evil kept him from comprehending the moral ambigui-
ties that would characterize international relations in the postwar era—a
shortcoming, it should be noted, that Wallace shared with many of the
American leaders he criticized.
Wallace’s admirers saw an entirely different person. To them, he was
the rightful heir to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, a man of
principle who would have been president if not for the meddling of a small
group of “party bosses.” Wallace was the people’s advocate who would never
have heeded the counsel of international fi nanciers and warmongers; the
fi ghting liberal who would have scorned compromise and courageously
advanced the march of progressivism; the peacemaker who would have
reached an accord with Stalin rather than throwing him on the defensive
with “get tough” posturing; the world leader who would have ensured that
a “democratic revolution,” and not a “Cold War,” emerged from the car-
nage of World War II. In short, Wallace was the symbol of all that might
have been had not the “forces of reaction” so cruelly betrayed their postwar
dreams.
In 1948, however, Wallace elicited not only wistful regret for the path
not taken but also hope for a better future. Progressives found his glit-
tering promises of “peace and abundance” infi nitely more attractive than
the grim talk of “Soviet aggression” and “communist totalitarianism”
emanating from the Truman White House. At the beginning of the cam-
paign, his supporters expressed confi dence that regardless of who won the
presidency in November, they were building a “people’s party” that would
eventually achieve the objectives Wallace had laid out. Their self-styled
“Gideon’s Army,” small but determined, would undercut the entrenched
power of Wall Street and the military that they believed dominated the
two major parties. Once the voters returned progressives to positions of
x / Preface