Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism by Thomas W. Devine (review)

The decade following the Soviet Union’s demise ushered in the heyday of communist and anticommunist historiographical debates, with such scholars as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr doing battle with Ellen Schrecker and Maurice Isserman over the usable past of Cold War history. Haynes and Klehr represented a long-standing “traditional” camp whose members argued that American communists had always been a significant threat to US security and especially so in the immediate postwar years. That position, they claimed, was bolstered by recently released Soviet archival documents. In response, “revisionist” scholars such as Schrecker and Isserman argued that despite sometimes strong links between the Soviet government and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the threat to national security during the early Cold War period defined by McCarthyism had been vastly overstated by forces carrying out a political agenda to eviscerate the American left. Engaging each other in the pages of not only scholarly journals but also publications such as the New York Times, The Nation, and The New Republic, traditionalists and revisionists argued sometimes raucously about whether the communist left had been romanticized by social historians, yet they appeared to duel to a draw. Thomas W. Devine’s study suggests that the battle may not be over.

Henry Wallace remains a central figure in these debates about early postwar history, and scholars from both camps have used his 1948 third-party presidential campaign to demonstrate the relationship between Popular Front liberals and communists at the dawn of the Cold War. Wallace was a cabinet member for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and served as his second vice president until Roosevelt replaced him with Harry Truman. For the most part, traditionalists conclude that communists controlled the Wallace campaign, weakening the left-liberal alliance of the Popular Front years and, more importantly, weakening liberalism. Revisionists consider this a gross exaggeration and hold liberals responsible for harsh red-baiting that smeared Wallace and left him with less than three percent of the presidential vote. As the title of Devine’s book implies, it is the “usable past” of the Wallace campaign that interests him, particularly what Jacqueline Dowd Hall and others have identified as the political uses of the past.

Devine begins his story with a strong introduction laying out three perspectives of Wallace that prevailed in 1948: those who dismissed him as “bitter and confused”; those who saw Wallace as “well-intentioned but astonishingly naïve”; and those who admired his work and viewed him as the “rightful heir to Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Devine concludes that ultimately even Wallace supporters became disillusioned with their naive peace candidate (ix–x). Yet Devine also attempts at times to reach beyond traditionalist arguments. His observation that Soviet sources now “confirm Wallace’s position that Moscow’s behavior was not as relentlessly aggressive as many believed at the time,” for example, offers readers more nuance than many previous analyses (xiv).

Devine’s use of primary print sources from the period is another strength of this study. Newspapers published in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta are listed among the nearly one hundred papers and periodicals he cites. The short-lived leftist daily PM and the anti–New Deal Chicago Tribune are both included in his expansive bibliography. Devine’s use of secondary sources is more problematic, however, as he seeks to demonstrate why romanticization of the American left can no longer stand in post–Cold War histories. Claiming new primary sources as the basis of his analysis, he writes that proof of the American left’s support for the Soviet agenda has been irrefutably established in decrypted Soviet documents translated by the Venona Project. Devine and other historians assert that public release of the Venona files starting in 1995 established strong ties between the Soviets and the CPUSA. Yet the author relies not on primary but on secondary sources to support his claims, most...