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

7 Rolling Downhill: Post-Convention Fallout and Dropouts

180 7 ROLLING DOWNHILL Post-Convention Fallout and Dropouts “It was a great convention,” Frederick Schuman wrote to Beanie Baldwin three days after leaving Philadelphia. “You did a magnificent job. It’s a good platform. The extent of the smear campaign encourages me. The boys are afraid we are going places. Let’s go!” Henry Wallace shared Schuman’s unbridled optimism. Referring to the third party’s previous high point—the Isacson victory in February—Wallace told supporters, “I was going on faith in those days. But since this convention I’m not going on faith. I know we’ve just begun to roll. . . . We’re getting rolling now and they simply can’t stop us.” “If the people’s movement continues to spread as rapidly as it is at present,” one exuberant North Carolina delegate predicted , “Wallace will carry at least forty states in the November elections.” As the summer progressed, however, emotional fervor gave way to political reality. By Labor Day, the official opening of the 1948 presidential campaign , few Progressives would venture such hopeful forecasts.1
Undoubtedly, the three-day gala proved an invigorating morale-builder for many Wallace partisans who had been languishing in the political wilderness . On their arrival in Philadelphia, those who had been ridiculed as “crackpots” or denounced as “commies” in their hometowns happily discovered that they had thousands of like-minded colleagues. On the floor of Convention Hall, a movement culture began to coalesce as the delegates recounted their common experiences and exchanged tales from the trenches. They reveled in this newfound spirit of community, confidently Rolling Downhill / 181 reassuring each other of the righteousness of their cause and of the campaign ’s growing strength and widespread appeal. “For the first time in all my life,” declared the novelist Howard Fast, one of the many well-known writers drawn to the Progressive cause, “I began to understand the deep reaching implications of people’s democracy.”2 The convention, planned more as a well-scripted pep rally than a forum for debate, encouraged this infectious enthusiasm. At the height of the Shibe Park celebration, the columnist Dorothy Thompson reported, young delegates dancing among the newspaper correspondents had turned to her and announced ecstatically, “Don’t you see now that we are going to sweep the country? It’s dynamic; it’s invincible.” “They certainly, I thought, believed it,” Thompson remarked.3 The lively shouting of party slogans and group sing-alongs also forged a common bond among the delegates, a bond the leadership effectively reinforced with constant admonitions to maintain party unity in the face of “outside” pressure. Indeed, as one observer noted, at a convention teeming with political dissenters of every stripe, the unanimity of opinion was strikingly anomalous.4 Those who had witnessed such left-wing enthusiasm at previous mass gatherings cautioned against overestimating its significance. According to the Associated Press correspondent Hal Boyle, the convention’s strategic location in Philadelphia—one of the nation’s largest cities and easily accessible from New York, Baltimore, and Washington—made it difficult to determine if the unexpectedly large crowd was the result of “an all-out effort by Communist and Communist-front organizations, or whether it was a spontaneous outpouring of people dissatisfied with the two major political parties.” Such a turnout in Cleveland, St. Louis, or Kansas City would have more clearly demonstrated “a powerful cross-section of American discontent ,” he maintained. Though the emotional demonstrations in Convention Hall and Shibe Park had made for a “good show,” the attendance at Wallace rallies during the upcoming campaign, Boyle predicted, would provide a more reliable gauge as to “whether the Progressive Party has astonishing popular strength—or merely was born in a town where all the relatives could get there in time for the baptism.” Confirming Boyle’s analysis, Sally Turpin, a Philadelphia Communist who went to the Shibe Park rally, observed that most of the faithful seemed to have been bused in from New York City. Discerning the first signs of a coming defeat, she worried about the Progressives’ failure to attract enough Philadelphians and about the need to rely on the “comrades” from New York to fill the stadium’s seats.5 Ironically, the heightened sense of camaraderie on display at Philadelphia may have further contributed to the Wallaceites’ political isolation. 182 / Rolling Downhill “The Progressive Party convention,” the columnist Edwin Lahey...