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

2 I Shall Run as an Independent Candidate for President: Launching Gideon’s Army

35 2 I SHALL RUN AS AN INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT Launching Gideon’s Army After reading a New York Times translation of the Zhdanov manifesto in mid-October 1947, Michael Straight, the young publisher of the New Republic , grew worried. As he would reveal thirty-five years later, Straight was no stranger to the international communist movement. During the 1930s, he had been involved with Soviet espionage as an associate of the infamous “Cambridge spies,” Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt. Disillusioned, he quietly broke with the Party in 1940 and thereafter remained wary of any entanglements with the Communists . He now sensed that the establishment of the Cominform would precipitate a major shift in the CPUSA line—one that would directly affect his magazine’s editor, Henry Wallace. Straight immediately telephoned Harold Young, Wallace’s “cheerful man Friday” and longtime political aidede -camp. “There’s going to be a third party,” he informed Young. “You’re crazy!” laughed the portly, cigar-chomping Texan. As far as Young was concerned, the third party talk that had been swirling around Wallace in recent months was merely a bluff to catch the attention of the Democratic Party hierarchy. Indeed, Young himself had instigated much of the speculation as part of a calculated strategy to line up support for the former vice president should he choose to challenge Truman for the Democratic 36 / I Shall Run as an Independent nomination. A practical political operative, Young had not hitched himself to Wallace’s star merely to pursue some quixotic third party adventure.1 Nonetheless, Straight remained uneasy. During the past year, he had watched Wallace come under the influence of a small coterie of new advisers , primarily officers of the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), some of whom he knew were concealed members of the Communist Party. If the CP decided on a third party, he presumed that these men and women would exert great pressure on Wallace to be its presidential candidate, a move Straight vehemently opposed. “I had bound the New Republic to Henry Wallace,” he recounted. “He, in turn, had allowed himself to be bound to the PCA. To whom was the PCA bound? I asked myself that question and I feared the answer.” When Wallace returned from a national speaking tour in the spring of 1947, Straight tried to alert the former vice president to the Communists’ behind-the-scenes maneuvering, urging him not to mistake the noisy demonstrations of a small left-wing minority for an accurate reading of the public mood. The most successful mass rallies , Straight told him, had all been led and organized by the Communists. “Can you prove that?” Wallace asked. “No, I can’t,” said Straight. “Then you shouldn’t say it,” Wallace replied. Recalling their exchange years later, Straight reminisced, “We glanced at each other. We were like passengers on passing ships, Henry heading for the land of illusions from which I had come. I knew from my own experience that collaboration with the Communist party would destroy Wallace, but I could not share my experience with him. He looked on collaboration with the Communists, in or out of Russia, as an idea. He had traveled on a broad highway from Iowa to Washington, and by daylight. He knew nothing of the back alleys of the political world.”2 A week after speaking with Young, Straight paid a visit to Calvin Benham “Beanie” Baldwin, the PCA’s executive vice president. Baldwin, a native Virginian, had come to Washington in 1933 as an assistant to Wallace who was then serving as the secretary of agriculture. In 1940, President Roosevelt had appointed Baldwin to head the Farm Security Administration , where he proved a staunch defender of the independent farmer and a thorn in the side of big agriculture and its congressional patrons. Harried by the relentless attacks of Capitol Hill conservatives, Baldwin left government service in 1943 to join the staff of the CIO Political Action Committee, founded that year by Sidney Hillman, the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. He went on to manage the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), the CIO-PAC’s middle-class analogue, and was instrumental in bringing about its merger I Shall Run as an Independent / 37 with ICCASP in December 1946 to form the PCA. (Hillman, who died in July 1946, had opposed this combination, fearing it would...