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

9 Thirty Years Too Soon: Gideon’s Army Invades Dixie

233 9 THIRTY YEARS TOO SOON Gideon’s Army Invades Dixie On August 29, 1948, Henry A. Wallace boarded a plane to Norfolk, Virginia , thereby launching a weeklong, seven-state southern tour that would provide his third party crusade with many of its most dramatic moments. Wallace’s decision to challenge segregation in the heart of the Jim Crow South grabbed front-page headlines throughout the country, winning the Progressive Party the most sustained media coverage it would receive during the campaign. Had it not been for President Truman’s dramatic comeback , one veteran reporter later recalled, the Wallace tour would have been the biggest political story of the year.1 Expectant Progressives’ hopes ran high. Many believed that Wallace’s trip would focus nationwide attention on the injustice of segregation, and, more important, unite southern working-class blacks and whites against those who exploited racial divisions to preserve their own special privilege. In the short term, they hoped that Wallace’s courageous stance would win him the votes of white liberals and African Americans in the North and inspire a major voter registration drive among blacks in the South, giving the party the shot in the arm it so badly needed. Convinced that the southern “masses” of both races constituted a natural alliance, the Wallaceites offered their party to the South as a vehicle through which the “common man” could challenge and ultimately overcome the bourbon elite that had long prevented the development of genuine democracy in Dixie. Especially in the one-party South, Progressives argued , the only realistic strategy to combat the wealthy white reactionaries’ 234 / Thirty Years Too Soon monopoly of political power was to build a New Party to represent the interests of farmers and working people. In building such a political force, they maintained, southerners of both races would come to understand that they needed each other’s help to succeed. For years, segregation and the fanning of racial animosities had obstructed the progress of blacks and whites alike. But the specious barrier of racism that blocked majority rule could be overcome. Integrated political activity, using the Progressive Party as an electoral forum, could be the catalyst for sweeping change.2 “The Wallace candidacy,” Clark Foreman, the Progressive Party treasurer and a native Georgian, declared, “offers the South the greatest chance it has ever had to escape from the feudalism that has been such a curse to its people and to the rest of the country.” John Coe, the state chairman of the Florida Progressive Party concurred. “We are in a movement which immeasurably transcends in importance a mere political campaign,” he wrote a colleague. “We are in line with the historical development of democracy .”3 For well-born white southern liberals like Foreman and Coe, the Progressive Party was no mere protest movement; rather, it provided the instrument that allowed them to play a leading role in reshaping the South’s political and economic landscape. Henry Wallace’s “invasion” of Dixie, they hoped, might finally unleash the potential progressivism they were convinced existed in their region. Several historians have taken up the theme of “latent progressivism” in the South during the immediate postwar period. They portray the failure to cultivate this force—particularly on the part of the CIO—as a “lost opportunity” to bring fundamental change to the region. Indeed, some scholars have sharply criticized the CIO leadership’s reluctance to work closely with Communists in the labor unions to pursue a militant civil rights agenda. To varying degrees, they have also blamed anticommunist southern liberals for betraying the progressive ecumenism of the New Deal and for thwarting the emergence of a labor- and left-led civil rights movement.4 This line of reasoning has not gone unchallenged, however. Alan Draper, for one, contends that historians of the “lost opportunity” persuasion who blame union leaders for failing to build on alleged rankand -file militancy are “blinded by romanticism” and fail to appreciate “the depth of and commitment to white supremacy” on the part of the southern white working class. Moreover, they ignore the disproportionate power of the white southern elite, a factor Robert Norrell has emphasized in his study of racial politics in Alabama. “The civil rights activism of the early 1940s,” Norrell notes, “worked to reinforce the concerted effort of Thirty Years Too Soon / 235 Birmingham’s upper class to make all whites think in racial or sectional ways—indeed...