Progressive Party (United States, 1948–1955)
Wallace won 2.4% of the vote, which was far less than the share received by Theodore Roosevelt and Robert M. La Follette, the presidential nominees of the 1912 and 1924 Progressive Party tickets, respectively.
The Progressive Party of Henry Wallace was, and remains, controversial due to the issue of communist influence.
The party served as a safe haven for communists, fellow travelers and anti-war liberals during the Second Red Scare.
Prominent Progressive Party supporters included U.S. Representative Vito Marcantonio, writer Norman Mailer[2] and, briefly, actress Ava Gardner.
[4] Wallace had first espoused such views in 1944, but before long they took a more dramatic tone, as a sense of urgency and anxiety for peace settled in with the beginning of the arms race and the Cold War: I urge elimination of groups and factions in this new party movement.
While the "New Party" may be best remembered for its anti-war, pro-Soviet relations, it sought to include a very broad range of issues and interests.
Among the policies the Progressive Party hoped to implement were the end of all Jim Crow laws and segregation in the South, the advancement of women's rights, the continuation of many New Deal policies including national health insurance and unemployment benefits, the expansion of the welfare system, and the nationalization of the energy industry among others.
[7] Wallace dissented from the hard line that Truman was taking against the Soviet Union, a stance that won him favor among fellow travelers and others who were opposed to what became known as the Cold War.
[4] The NCPAC and ICCASP held a conference in Chicago from September 28–29, 1946, in order to discuss a common political strategy.
Harold L. Ickes, Claude Pepper, Philip Murray, Jack Kroll, Walter White, and Henry Morgenthau Jr. were among the speakers.
Senator Wayne Morse rejected their efforts and stated that "the only hope for sane and sound progressive politics is through liberalizing the Republican party".
The party needed to collect 275,970 signatures in three months in order to be on the 1948 ballot, but Wallace had not announced his presidential candidacy yet.
During the Progressive Party's convention Elinor S. Gimbel was on the Arrangements committee, Leo Isacson on Credentials, Vito Marcantonio and John Abt on Rules, and Lee Pressman, W. E. B.
The CIO called for all of its ALP-affiliated unions to disaffiliate and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America withdrew its support of the ALP after the party endorsed Wallace for president.
[18] Albert Fitzgerald and Julius Emspak of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America formed a committee supporting Wallace, but were unable to have the executive board endorse him.
[23] Secretary of State Mike Holm accepted the left-wing slate, but those electors were invalidated by a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling.
[27] Running as peace candidates in the nascent Cold War era, the Wallace-Taylor ticket garnered no votes in the United States Electoral College and only 2.4% of the popular vote, a far smaller share than most pundits had anticipated; some historians have suggested that the Progressive campaign did Truman more good than harm, as their strident criticism of his foreign policy helped to undercut Republican claims that the administration's policies were insufficiently anti-Communist.
[citation needed] The following month, however, on June 29, one of the African-American leaders of the Progressive Party, Paul Robeson, was allowed to speak in the Crystal Ballroom in Boston's Hotel Bradford.
Wallace proposed a program with ten points that would stop the United States from falling to war, fascism, and communism.
His speeches started to include mild criticism of Soviet foreign policy, which was anathema to many leftists in the party.
[40] Orson Welles, a friend of Roosevelt who had endorsed him in the 1944 election, refused to be involved with Wallace's presidential campaign.
[43] More broadly, in the run-up to the presidential election, the Democrats nominated Harry Truman to run for a full term while New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had lost to Roosevelt in 1944, was renominated by the Republican Party.
Dewey had defeated the isolationist, non-interventionist senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio for the GOP nomination and favored an aggressive policy against the USSR.
This made it extremely easy for Communists and fellow travelers to infiltrate into important positions within the party machinery.
Words were uttered by Wallace that did not sound like him, and his performance took on a strange Jekyll and Hyde quality—one moment he was a peace protagonist and the next a propaganda parrot for the Kremlin.
One historian (further to the left than the Schapsmeiers) explores the internal dynamic (Schmidt 258–9): In her book School of Darkness (1954), Bella Dodd, an American Communist Party National Committee member who later left and went on to give anti-Communist testimony before Congress, wrote about a June 1947 Communist National Committee meeting she attended at which the founding of the 1948 Progressive Party was planned: The point of it all came near the end, when [John] Gates read that a third party would be very effective in 1948, but only if we could get Henry Wallace to be its candidate.
It was also clear that [Eugene] Dennis and his clique of smart boys were reserving to themselves the right to make the final decision, and that the Party in general was being kept pretty much in the dark.
But although his campaign's anti-fare increase song was subsequently turned into a national hit record in the 1950s, O'Brien failed to win the local Boston election in 1949.
[45][46] When The Kingston Trio decided to record "The MTA Song", it was apparently agreed to change the first name of the O'Brien referred to in the song from "Walter" to "George", because it was feared that a hit record which referred to "Walter O'Brien" would make it even more difficult than it already was for the former Progressive Party candidate to find a New England employer who was willing to hire him during the McCarthy Era.
Among those who publicly supported Wallace were Larry Adler, George Antheil, Marc Blitzstein, Kermit Bloomgarden, Morris Carnovsky, Lee J. Cobb, Aaron Copland, Howard da Silva, W. E. B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Howard Fast, Ava Gardner, Uta Hagen, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Judy Holliday, Libby Holman, John Huston, Burl Ives, Sam Jaffe, Garson Kanin, Howard E. Koch, John Howard Lawson, Canada Lee, Norman Mailer, Albert Maltz, Thomas Mann, Lewis Milestone, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Linus Pauling, S. J. Perelman, Anne Revere, Budd Schulberg, Adrian Scott, Artie Shaw, Philip Van Doren Stern, I. F. Stone, Louis Untermeyer, Mark Van Doren, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charlie Chaplin, Oona O'Neill, Gregory Peck, Lena Horne, Edward G. Robinson, Jose Ferrer, Gene Kelly, Zero Mostel, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Katharine Hepburn.
