Democratic Party cannot be reformed. But a reflection on Wallace raises a question in this moment of political, economic and social ferment, of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and resurgent democratic socialism and Elizabeth Warren’s promise of “big, bold structural change”: Might today’s Democratic Party take up where FDR and his vice president left off, and become an alternative to the overt and covert American fascism Wallace warned us about?
Answering this in the affirmative is the mission of an insurgency within the Democratic Party that has grown from Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid and the efforts of a new generation of activists who have often operated outside the political arena but now seek to transform electoral debates about domestic and foreign policy. This makes Wallace’s struggle more than an isolated story from an all-but-forgotten past.
Trump’s election created a sense of urgency. But Democrats must know something about how it all fell apart in order to see how it all might be put together again. In the search for answers, it is easy to be drawn to the 1948 campaign, as it provided a rare glimpse of what multiparty competition might look like in a country dominated by the two “old parties” that so frustrated Wallace and his contemporaries, and that still frustrate the majority of Americans who tell pollsters they long for different and better political options. The 1948 race offered more plot twists than all but a handful of campaigns in American history, along with a dramatic conclusion that produced the greatest wrong headline of all time: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman was, of course, not defeated, and his victory defined the Democratic Party going forward.
There have been significant examinations of the 1948 campaign in general and of Wallace’s crusade in particular. Curtis D. MacDougall’s deeply reported 1965 text, Gideon’s Army, tells an essential story, as does Thomas Devine’s thoughtful 2013 book, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism. For those on the old left who remember it, and for a rising generation of young leftists, the 1948 campaign has become the electoral equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, where a Gideon’s Army of campaigners armed with leaflets and placards takes the place of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. For guardians of the status quo, the 1948 campaign is something else altogether: a blunt instrument to pull out whenever they feel it necessary to warn against what Wallace described as a “keep the door open” popular-front politics that makes common cause with socialists, communists, social justice crusaders and radical reformers. The contention is less intense now than it was in the days when Democrats shuddered at the mention of the term “Wallace-ite” and its successor: “McGovernism.” History will circle back to the 1948 campaign and it will continue to evoke radically different interpretations of what was, and what might have been. More books will be written on Wallace’s presidential bid in general, and its courageous challenge to racism in particular.
But this book begins with a recognition that, by 1948, the guardians of the New Deal ethic had already lost. The Democratic Party had already compromised the ideals of the Four Freedoms and the Economic Bill of Rights. Despite the best efforts of Wallace and his most prominent allies, FDR’s Democratic Party died when it rejected the man whom Eleanor Roosevelt described as “peculiarly fitted to carry on the ideals which were close to my husband’s heart.” The power within the party passed to the men who expelled Wallace from the vice presidency and who were more than ready to join in a two-party dance, where the tune would eventually be called by the neoliberal theorists favored by Wall Street, and the neoconservatives who did the bidding of a military-industrial complex always seeking a new war to fight.
The deck was then—as it is now—so effectively stacked against those seeking to break the grip of the two major parties that the rebels were thwarted long before Election Day. That was what happened to Wallace in 1948. When his New Party project was initially imagined in 1947, the former vice president was addressing crowds that packed some of the nation’s largest stadiums and arenas, his speeches were reproduced in their entirety in daily newspapers and regularly broadcast nationwide by radio networks, he had a following in every state and polls suggested that at the very least he could expect to secure the strongest third-party vote since Robert M. La Follette took 16 percent of the total in 1924. Yet as Election Day 1948 approached, the fear that Wallace’s vote might tip the contest to Republican Thomas Dewey convinced even true believers to cast their ballots for a candidate they frankly despised: Harry Truman.
Wallace finished fourth, behind Truman, Dewey and South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond of the segregationist States’ Rights Party, better known as the Dixiecrats. While Thurmond carried four Southern states, Wallace carried none, and the number crunchers noted that the substantial vote totals he attained in the labor and left-wing strongholds of Detroit and Brooklyn probably tipped Michigan and New York to Dewey. Even Wallace would eventually admit that the 1948 campaign was something of a fiasco. As radical journalist and Wallace backer I.F. Stone mused, “In thirty minutes, cross-legged, saying ‘Oom’ with alternative exhalations, I can conjure up a better third-party movement than Wallace’s.”
It had not been so four years earlier, however, and that is why this book places its primary focus on the nomination fight of 1944. Then, Henry Wallace came agonizingly close to turning the Democratic Party into something strikingly distinct from what it has become. Had he prevailed, a radically different party might have emerged from the war. We would have gotten to the future sooner.
The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has been waged, with varying degrees of intensity, since the Democratic National Convention of 1944 that rejected Wallace. In 2017, when members of Congress made themselves “the legislative arm of the resistance” to Donald Trump, in the words of Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan, they did not do so as mere foes of his presidency. They spoke as advocates for a bolder agenda than Democrats had embraced for a very long time. Pocan and CPC co-chair Pramila Jayapal proposed a “21st-century economic policy” to restore the power of workers and their unions, a power denied them since conservative Republicans and segregationist Democrats overturned the essential infrastructure of the New Deal by enacting the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded a “Green New Deal” agenda, she and her allies borrowed not just a name but the thrilling ambition of the partisans who cheered when Roosevelt said of his presidency, “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Today’s progressives speak of a next politics that refuses, in the words of Representative Ro Khanna, “to be limited by the compromises and the mistakes of the past.” To be so unlimited, the advocates of this next politics of the Democratic Party must recognize what they are up against. They are not just fighting the Third Way compromises of contemporary centrists. They are fighting Democrats who claim the mantle of FDR but battle as vigorously as the economic royalists of old to avert a new New Deal.
Henry Wallace was attacked and then dismissed because he proposed “a century of the common man and woman.” Almost eighty years of that century have passed since his dismissal, and his fight for the future is largely forgotten. This is what must change. Just as young radicals with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America are freeing the political discourse from the Red-Scared caution of their elders by embracing the word “socialist,” Democrats must free their party from the mental shackles of Wall Street and the generous campaign donations proffered by the “bundlers” for fossil-fuel combines and the military-industrial complex. Progressives, no matter what their partisanship or independence, must free their minds and dream again of the peace and prosperity Henry Wallace championed.
