Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul
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“What do the Communists really want from Henry Wallace?” asked the Alsop brothers in their popular newspaper column right after Wallace announced his candidacy. “That is the question Wallace’s third-party candidacy poses.”
To the powerful elite of Washington, many of whom were caught up in Cold War fever, Wallace’s seemingly obvious ties to Communist concerns were inexplicable. But Wallace had answers for his critics. Was America not a free country? Was it not legal for Americans to be Communists? Wasn’t the whole nation founded on the idea of political and religious freedom? “If the Communists want to support me,” Wallace told one crowd at a rally in Seattle, “they must do it on my terms. If the Communists are working for peace with Russia, God bless them. If they are working for the overthrow of the Government by force, they know I am against them.”
The truth was more complicated. In the months leading up to Wallace’s announcement, he had been working as editor of the small but influential magazine the New Republic. According to William Harlan Hale, one of the magazine’s writers, Wallace was “seeing more and more of fewer and fewer people.” These were men the Washington Post called Wallace’s “stage managers,” his “influential insiders”—the people shaping his campaign.
There was John Abt, a University of Chicago–trained lawyer who had for much of his career worked with labor unions. For years Abt had been a subject of interest for the FBI. He first came to the bureau’s attention on May 10, 1945, during the secret testimony of a Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers, who was (according to the FBI’s records) a “self-admitted espionage agent for the Soviet Union and [a] former member of the Communist Party.” Chambers had admitted to being part of what the FBI called an “underground group” of Communists. Abt had been one of “the leaders of this group,” which had in fact met at Abt’s home at the time, on Fifteenth Street in Manhattan, according to Chambers.
Abt was a member of the Communist Party USA. (The FBI would later mark in his file that, according to informants, he had visited the USSR as recently as 1945 and “was reportedly in contact with various officials of Russia and satellite nations during the late 1940’s.”) Abt’s sister Marion was public relations director for the Communist Party USA. Abt knew he was on the FBI’s radar and he feared that his presence in the Wallace camp would cause problems. When he expressed these fears personally to Wallace, the candidate “brushed aside my concerns,” Abt later recalled. “He urged me to become general counsel for the new party.” Abt took on the role. It would be his job to use his legal expertise to get Wallace on the ballot in as many of the forty-eight states as he could.
There was Lee Pressman, a labor attorney who had studied at Harvard and Cornell and who had become politically active in left-wing groups. The same informant who had named Abt as a leader in an underground Communist movement had also named Pressman as a member.
Then there was Calvin Benham “Beanie” Baldwin, the slick-haired politico who was becoming the loudest voice in Henry Wallace’s ear, and would in fact be Wallace’s campaign manager. Baldwin had been Wallace’s assistant when Wallace was secretary of agriculture, and had in 1947 helped to found the Progressive Citizens of America, a precursor to the new Progressive Party. The PCA, as it was called, had declared itself open to “all progressive men and women in our nation, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, or political affiliation.” By “regardless [of] political affiliation,” the party was tacitly declaring itself open to those from the far-left flank—Communists and so-called fellow travelers.
“The facts . . . are,” Abt later recalled, “that the Communist party was active at every level of the Progressive Party, most important in the state and local organizations.”
The FBI knew this. “As you are undoubtedly aware,” a field investigator wrote in a report to J. Edgar Hoover as early as June 3, 1947, “the Progressive Citizens of America is a new front organization which is propagating the Communists’ political aims for 1948.”
As for Wallace’s own personal philosophy, he once told the head of the Communist Party USA, Eugene Dennis, personally what divided his thinking from Communist thinking. “All I said,” remembered Wallace later, “was that there were two things I wanted him to understand—that the Communist Party doesn’t believe in God, I do believe in God; the Communist Party doesn’t believe in progressive capitalism, I do believe in progressive capitalism.”
* * *
Henry Wallace knew, perhaps more than any other candidate, that someone declaring a run for the most high-powered office on the planet was putting himself at great personal risk. “I certainly told him before he made the decision,” campaign manager Beanie Baldwin later remembered, “that it was going to be very rough going and a very rough campaign.” Politicians, Wallace knew, were human beings, who are in essence made up of all the deeds they have ever done and all the things they have ever said. While a cloud of suspicion hung over Wallace already, he had more to worry about—a proverbial skeleton in his closet, an uncomfortable truth about his past that would be impossible to hide from the burning spotlight of a presidential campaign.
Wallace hailed from the conservative state of Iowa, born into a religious family that became, during his youth, highly influential in American farming communities. Leadership was part of the Wallace DNA. Wallace’s father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, served as the secretary of agriculture under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and was a journalist and publisher as well. Young Henry Wallace grew up on a farm, graduated from Iowa State University in 1910, and began writing for his family’s newspaper—Wallaces’ Farmer.
In the early 1920s, shortly after his marriage to Ilo, Wallace began experimenting with hybrid corn seeds, and in 1926 he created Hi-Bred Corn. The seed spawned hearty stalks and high yields, and soon millions of rows of Wallace corn were reaching up to the sun across America and abroad. The company made Wallace fabulously rich, though he lived ascetically. During the Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age—young Wallace remained a teetotaler.
His family background and success in farming brought Wallace to the attention of Franklin Roosevelt. Days after Roosevelt became the thirty-second president in 1933, he offered Wallace a cabinet post as secretary of agriculture, and from the early days of FDR’s presidency, Henry Wallace was a rising star of the New Deal movement.
Wallace also earned a reputation as a first-rate eccentric. He dressed in dusty wrinkled suits, drank milk made out of soybeans, and was skilled in the art of throwing a boomerang. He was a font of seemingly far-fetched ideas, some of which would prove remarkably prescient. He imagined a day, for example, when people would wear wristbands that could both tell the time and deliver news, and a pill that would contain all the nutrients of a full meal. Long before many Americans had heard of tennis, Wallace had mastered a mean stroke. Once, while sparring in a boxing ring in a gym, he famously knocked out Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana. But early on, Wallace’s eccentricities served only to burnish his reputation.
One day in the early 1930s Wallace was visiting a museum dedicated to the work of the artist Nicholas Roerich, at 310 Riverside Drive in New York. There he met Roerich himself for the first time. Roerich was Russian born, and had come to the United States in 1920. By then he had gained fame for his explorations into untamed lands, his spiritual writings, and his art. With his wild, flowing goatee, he had the appearance of an aging mystic. Even by 1920s standards, when eccentricity was in vogue, Roerich took individuality to an extreme. Once in 1927, he disappeared in Asia for eight months. Newspapers chronicled the mystery, until he unexpectedly reappeared in Mongolia. On another occasion, officials in India refused to allow him to enter their country for fear he was a Russian spy.
Days into Henry Wallace’s tenure as secretary of agriculture, he wrote Roerich, addressing him as “Dear Guru.” “I have been thinking of you holding the casket—the sacred most precious casket,” Wallace wrote. “And I have thought of the New Country going forth to meet the seven stars under
the sign of the three stars. And I have thought of the admonition ‘Await the Stone.’” He signed the letter, “In great haste of this strange maelstrom which is Washington.”
A collection of letters to Roerich attributed to Wallace date from the 1930s, letters full of incomprehensible innuendos and hints of the occult. Washington figures were referred to in veiled terms: the “flaming one,” the “sour one,” the “wavering one.” The letters spoke of “earth beat, the Indian rhythm of ancient America,” and “fire from the heights.” Only once in his life would Wallace ever comment on these missives, in an interview around 1950. The letters, he said, were “unsigned, undated notes, which I knew I never sent to Nicholas Roerich, but there were a few letters addressed to Nicholas Roerich signed by me and dated which were written in rather high-flown language.”
In 1935 Wallace nominated Roerich for the Nobel Peace Prize and employed the artist-philosopher, sending him on a quixotic mission to Central Asia to search for plant life, on the payroll of the US Department of Agriculture. Roerich sped off with his wife and an entourage, and began to engage in activities that made local officials in Asia anxious. “The gist of the whole thing was that Roerich was playing international politics over there,” Wallace later recalled. What made Roerich dangerous was his followers, Wallace believed. “When I use [the word] followers, I mean followers of the type of the most extreme Communists or most extreme Catholics or Fascists or Hitlerites—completely and utterly devoted fanatics.”
Soon American diplomats in the region were reporting on Roerich’s activities. Wallace became panicked. He ended funding for the trip and wrote Roerich, saying, “There must be no publicity whatever about [the] recent expedition. There must be no quoting of correspondence or other violation of Department publicity regulations.”
Wallace never heard from Roerich again. The “guru letters” remained a secret, for the time being.
* * *
In 1940 FDR chose Wallace to run as his VP candidate, and the ticket breezed to victory. When the United States entered World War II, Wallace was one of the first in Washington to learn of the top secret Manhattan Project. It was during these early months of the war, when all appeared bleak in the wake of Nazi advances in Europe, that Wallace formed ideas that would fuel his postwar obsessions. Long before others did, he saw that the Soviet Union, the United States’ most valued military ally against Hitler, would emerge from the war as an unprecedented power in the East. He foresaw the Cold War, years before most others did.
“It is highly essential that the United States and Russia understand each other better,” Wallace wrote in his diary as early as 1942. “This means there must be better understanding among United States citizens concerning Russia and among Russian citizens concerning the United States . . . It means we must cooperate with Russia in the postwar period.”
In 1942 Wallace distilled his thinking into a speech he called “The Century of the Common Man.” “Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’” Wallace said. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century that will come out of this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.” The speech envisioned a future world peace, a world without racism, a world without greed, based on communal welfare. It was translated into more than a dozen languages and made Wallace an icon for left-wing intellectuals.
Wallace headed into 1944 believing he would remain on the Democratic ticket in the forthcoming election. According to a Gallup poll leading up to the Democratic National Convention, 65 percent of Democratic voters favored Wallace as the VP candidate to run with FDR in his historic fourth-term campaign. (Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky ranked second at 17 percent; Harry Truman was way back in the pack, with 2 percent.) However, unbeknownst to Wallace, conspirators within the White House had created an almost Shakespearean plot to remove him from power. Wallace was just too weird, FDR’s inner circle believed, and too liberal, even in the New Deal era. Democratic National Committee treasurer George Allen called him “the boomerang throwing mystic from the place where the tall corn grows.”
At a wildly raucous 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Wallace was dumped in favor of the obscure senator from Missouri—Harry S. Truman. Wallace left Chicago devastated, the victim of brutal subterfuge. As a consolation, FDR told Wallace that there would be “a job for you in world economic affairs.” Two weeks after the Chicago convention, Truman went to see Wallace in his office. The Missourian told Wallace how unhappy he was.
“You know,” Truman said, “this whole matter is not one of my choosing. I went to Chicago to get out of being Vice President, not to become Vice President.” Truman assured Wallace he had not involved himself in any “machinations” to knock Wallace off the 1944 ticket.
The important thing, Wallace said, was to look forward, not back. After Truman left, Wallace wrote of Truman in his diary: “He is a small opportunistic man, a man of good instincts but, therefore, probably all the more dangerous. As he moves out more in the public eye, he will get caught in the webs of his own making . . .”
In November, the FDR-Truman ticket won the election, and Wallace was appointed commerce secretary—a position he retained until Truman, now president, fired him from the cabinet in 1946.
Now in the winter of 1947, before any Democratic candidate had officially declared a run for president, Wallace began his campaign odyssey. He knew he could not win. But he also knew that he had an opportunity to change the national political landscape, perhaps even to steer the Cold War toward an end. “I had no illusions about being elected President . . . ,” he later recalled, “and my reason for running was that I finally had to make good my bluff. When I threatened the Democratic party with either/or and they didn’t come through on the either, I had to come through on the or . . . If the Democratic party was a war party, there was only one thing I could do, it seemed to me.”
There was a giddiness about his run, a sense that the future of the country was wide open, and that a campaign about peace could enlighten people beyond the scope of a political power struggle. “We all had grandiose ideas of the possibilities of the Wallace campaign,” recalled John Abt.
Wallace set up headquarters at 39 Park Avenue in New York City, a lavish four-story brownstone rented for $1,500 a month. Soon its rooms and offices were buzzing with publicity agents and party operatives and fund-raising experts. Well-known figures came out in support of Wallace: the writers Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Studs Terkel; the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Aaron Copland; the architect Frank Lloyd Wright; the deaf-blind activist Helen Keller; even Franklin Roosevelt’s son Elliott. Campaign donations came in from top-ranked writers like Norman Mailer and Clifford Odets. The famed artist Ben Shahn signed on to create campaign posters.
For a running mate, Wallace chose the forty-three-year-old US senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho. Taylor added color to the ticket. He had grown up in a poor family, one of thirteen children, the son of an itinerant preacher. Taylor had joined the theater after the eighth grade and had been in the entertainment business as a country-and-western singer and a stage performer for years before he was elected to the Senate in 1944. He was known as the “singing cowboy.” A tall, bald man who wore an obvious hairpiece of his own construction, Taylor had once ridden his horse, Nugget, up the steps of the US Capitol building.
In their first campaign event together, soon after Wallace announced his candidacy, Wallace and Taylor sat down in the CBS radio studio in New York. On a live national broadcast, Taylor boldly said, “I am going to cast my lot with Henry Wallace in his brave and gallant fight for peace.”
When asked about the Communist controversy clouding their campaign, Taylor said he would be “glad to have their votes.”
“I’m trying to get elected,” Taylor said. “I’d be glad to have the votes of bank robbers too.”
When asked why they were bolting the Democratic Party, Taylor answered for the two of them. “I am not leaving the Democratic Par
ty,” he said. “It left me. Wall Street and the military have taken over.”
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“There’ll Be No Compromise”
Never in our history have we been faced with such conditions—and a presidential campaign year. The campaign must go on, but remember the safety of the world and ourselves are inextricably tied together.
—Harry Truman, April 1948
IN NOVEMBER 1947—one year from the presidential election—a secret memo began circulating the White House entitled “The Politics of 1948.” The document was written by a Democratic operative named James H. Rowe Jr. and had fallen into the hands of Clark Clifford. Clifford knew that Truman mistrusted Rowe, as they had had differences of opinion in the past, but the piece itself, Clifford thought, was brilliant. (Many years later the Washington Post would describe it as “one of this century’s most famous political memorandums.”) Clifford strengthened Rowe’s polemics with the help of his assistant George Elsey, and delivered the memo to the president bearing his own byline, figuring that Truman would not take seriously a document authored by Rowe.
In remarkable detail, this memo dictated the road map for the Democrats’ 1948 campaign, and for the next year it would remain in the president’s desk drawer for easy reference.
“The basic premise of this memorandum—that the Democratic Party is an unhappy alliance of Southern conservatives, Western progressives and Big City labor—is very trite, but it is also very true,” the Rowe-Clifford memo said on the first page. “And it is equally true that the success or failure of the Democratic leadership can be precisely measured by its ability to lead enough members of these three misfit groups to the polls on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, 1948.”