Last Gasp: Henry A. Wallace and the End of the Popular Front

The election of 1948 was many things: an upset win by Harry S. Truman that stunned the nation, the first presidential election of the postwar era, the first after the United States had become an undisputed superpower, the first of the Cold War, and the first since 1876 in which black civil rights was a major issue. As historian Thomas W. Devine shows, it was also the last gasp of the so-called “Popular Front” alliance between American Communists and progressives.

The 1948 third-party campaign by Henry A. Wallace has been the subject of many previous studies. The iconic study on the campaign, the three-volume Gideon’s Army by former Wallace campaign worker Curtis D. MacDougall (1965), painted Wallace in a largely favorable light and downplayed the influence of Communists in the movement. Karl M. Schmidt, a former activist in Progressive Youth for America, similarly argued for Wallace’s independence and for the influence of his campaign in forcing Truman’s administration to the left (Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1960). Others subsequently took up the pen to assert the benign character of Wallace’s campaign; see, for instance, Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (1973). A number of scholars and participants in the events disputed this view. For example, Allen Yarnell argued that Wallace had little influence on Truman (Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Presidential Election as a Test of Postwar Liberalism [1974]), while former Communist Party member Joseph R. Starobin indicted Wallace’s campaign as having been heavily infiltrated by Communists (American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 [1972]). Until now, the lines drawn up by Wallace’s supporters and detractors in the 1960s and 1970s have largely remained in place.

In this richly textured, exhaustively researched, and nuanced study, Devine offers an analysis that does not quite fit any previous narrative. He traces the interaction of American Communists, the Soviets, liberals, unions, and Wallace from 1945 through the election of 1948. The hammer of his research falls heaviest on Wallace and those who have maintained that Communists played only a minor role in his campaign, but the book approaches the question with complexity. Unlike most earlier scholarly efforts, Devine’s utilizes not only previously public sources but classified U.S. and Soviet files, post–Cold War interviews with American Communist Party members, and even information found in the Venona cables, the intercepted communications between Soviet intelligence officers in Moscow and Washington illuminated by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999).

Devine answers a number of issues central to the dispute. He begins by contending that the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) made a conscious decision to abandon its wartime approach to Popular Front partnerships when the Soviet line, transmitted in 1945 through French Communist Jacques Duclos, indicated that Moscow no longer approved. The more compromising party head Earl Browder was removed, “Browderism” was discredited, and Browder’s successor William Z. Foster instituted instead a policy of working with non-Communist forces only if Communists were in the lead. This determination was subsequently fortified by the CPUSA interpretation of a notable speech by Andrei Zhdanov in October 1947, in which he emphasized the Soviet line that the world was divided into “two camps” (the socialist camp and the reactionary camp) that were ultimately irreconcilable. Devine argues that the American Communists may have misinterpreted the Zhdanov speech, which was not meant for them but for European Communists organizing in the Cominform to oppose the Marshall Plan. Together, Duclos and Zhdanov drove the CPUSA to a more aggressive stance in which it was willing to seek allies but only on a temporary basis and only if it was in control.

Meanwhile, Wallace, having been fired by Truman in September 1946 for...