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

6 The Whole Place Has Gone Wallace Wacky: The Founding Convention of the Progressive Party

156 6 THE WHOLE PLACE HAS GONE WALLACE WACKY The Founding Convention of the Progressive Party On the evening of Friday, July 24, attention shifted from press conferences , platform writing, and other preliminaries to the opening of the convention itself. With great fanfare, some thirty-two hundred delegates and alternates crowded into steaming Convention Hall to baptize their new “people’s party.” Under blazing television lights—a new attraction in 1948—they shouted out the catchy lyrics of the Wallace campaign songs with an evangelistic fervor. On average, observers noted, the Progressives were twenty years younger and thirty pounds lighter than their Democratic and Republican counterparts. One reporter covering the convention spoke of a “soda parlor atmosphere, not a smoke-filled room.” The crowd was also less formal, less wealthy, and less white. Men dressed in polo shirts and the women went hatless. “If you see a man with a necktie,” the delegates joked, “he’s a reporter”—or an FBI agent, they might have added. Many had hitchhiked to Philadelphia and pitched tents in the parking lot to save on hotel bills. An estimated 150 African American delegates were in attendance, three times the combined total that had participated in the Republican and Democratic conventions. The interracial character of the gathering went well beyond mere tokenism. One black delegate told an observer that it was “the first time his people had walked into a public place where it didn’t occur to them to look for their own people or feel self-conscious.”1 The Whole Place Has Gone Wallace Wacky / 157 Politically, the delegates presented an unusual amalgam. Most were making their first foray into campaign work, hoping to substitute earnestness and zeal for what they lacked in experience and sophistication. To many observers, they seemed wedded to no particular ideology, but rather were “aginners”—against the two old parties, against “Big Business,” against “red-baiters,” and, most certainly, against war. On the other hand, however, these fresh-faced partisans expressed an almost messianic devotion to Henry Wallace. They dismissed all criticism of their leader as an intolerable heresy unworthy of consideration. For the Progressive delegates, there were no degrees of faith—those who expressed any doubts were the enemies of virtue. Wallace, and only Wallace, had the solutions that would bring peace, freedom, and abundance. “I am a very eligible young man to go to war, and I don’t want to go,” declared Jack Hester, a sixteen-year-old delegate from Omaha. “Wallace is my only hope.”2 But, like Wallace, one reporter remarked, his followers “gave the impression of Orphean good will circumscribed by uncertainty and confusion.” Interviewing delegates on the convention floor, the Alsop brothers found that, when pushed to the wall on specific points of fact, “they reveal an astonishing fund of misinformation —that Russia has been disarming completely while America has been building atom bombs; that no one has ever tried to ‘get along with Russia;’ that the governments of Eastern Europe are what they are because ‘the people want it that way’; that the Marshall Plan was ‘cooked up in Wall Street,’ and so on.” Frederick Schuman, certainly a more sympathetic observer, largely concurred. “The dominant qualities of the Convention ,” he wrote in his private notes, “were enthusiasm, fervor, confusion, and a disposition by many to think, talk, and act in terms of stereotypes (reflecting no particular ideology, save that of traditional American Populism and Progressivism) rather than in terms of concrete problems.”3 Striking a sharp contrast to these political amateurs were their Popular Front allies, the Communists—“the only group,” one newspaper editor asserted, “which really knew what it wanted, and had some notion of how to get it.” The syndicated columnist and Socialist Party stalwart Norman Thomas noted wryly that he had no difficulty at the convention distinguishing the CPers from the liberals. “The Communists who saw me nearly spit,” he explained, “the non-Communists said: ‘Oh, Mr. Thomas, why aren’t you with us?’” To the Alsops, the “comrades” were “instantly recognizable—the slick automatic line, the mechanical indignation, the old hackneyed phrases.” Their obvious presence greatly troubled those who were otherwise sympathetic to the delegates’ youthful idealism and depth of commitment. Indeed, the liberal columnist Thomas Stokes 158 / The Whole Place Has Gone Wallace Wacky found that the Communists’ maneuvering within the Wallace movement gave the entire convention “a deep undertone...