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

Henry A. Wallace isn’t much remembered in Alabama these days. But back in the fall of 1948, Wallace was center of attention in Gadsden, Birmingham and all across the South. The former vice president of the United States was a candidate for president on the Progressive Party ticket and he was challenging the long standing southern tradition of segregation. Some observers later suggested that Wallace was a harbinger of the Civil Rights movement that came in the next decade.

But it is hard to know what to make of Wallace’s role in presidential politics. Historian Thomas W. Devine argues that Wallace was both prophet and oddball and provides the first detailed account in more than a generation of his hapless campaign for president. Written initially as a doctoral dissertation under the direction of William Leuchtenburg at the University of North Carolina, the book is the culmination of a prodigious amount of research and analysis.

Devine does an excellent job of tracing the origins of Wallace’s complex personality. The most prominent member in a family of agricultural journalists, Wallace became a national spokesman for the American farmer in the 1920s and further added to his reputation during his tenure as secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1941. He was also at the forefront of the agronomical revolution that led to high yield seed corn and parlayed that achievement into personal wealth as a founder of Pioneer Hybrid, now a division of DuPont.

Wallace greatly impressed FDR, who selected him to be the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in 1940. And as vice president from 1941 to 1945, Wallace was something of an “assistant president” who controlled prices and supplies on the home front. In fact, he might well have succeeded FDR as president had Wallace’s opponents not maneuvered him off the Democratic ticket in 1944.

Wallace never quite recovered from that embarrassing defeat. And to lose out to Harry S. Truman, who Wallace believed was a political hack, was almost more than he could bear. Wallace served for a short time as Secretary of Commerce in the Truman administration, but he came to detest the new president. In such an environment, it is not surprising that Wallace was so responsive to liberals who urged him to run for president in 1948.

There is little question that the Progressive Party in 1948 was an extension of Wallace’s own personality and political philosophy. Without him, the party had little visibility or clout. In speech after speech, Wallace proposed a world of racial equality and world peace and was more concerned about the policies of the Truman administration than he was about threats from the Soviet Union. In fact, it was widely rumored that Wallace was a tool of the Communist Party.

Although members of the Communist Party contributed substantial manpower to the Wallace campaign, there is no evidence that the Soviets made any direct effort to influence the candidate. To be sure, many of Wallace’s ideas were compatible with Communist positions, but Wallace came to these views independently. There was no question that Henry Wallace was his own man.

It seemed that more Americans were sympathetic to the Wallace’s ideas than they were to the man himself. “He is saying all the things I have wished to hear some public man say for years,” wrote Rexford Tugwell after a Wallace rally in 1948 (66). Liberals on the two coasts loved him, but the rest of the country was ambivalent at best.

And Wallace might have been his own worst enemy on the campaign trail. “The more he campaigned, the more votes he lost,” notes Devine (284). Gallup polls in 1948 had Wallace dropping from a high of seven percent of the vote in January to the eventual outcome of little more than two percent of...