My own take on Wallace:
During the 1930s there were opportunities for a third party based on the
trade union movement, but because of the hegemony of the Communist
Party, they were squandered. FDR's New Deal attracted the blind support
of the CP, even as the party ran its own ineffective propaganda
campaigns for president.
Ironically it was the turn of the US ruling class against the New Deal
consensus that precipitated a third party initiative in 1948, the
Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace. In many ways Wallace
symbolized the most progressive aspects of the New Deal. As Secretary of
Agriculture, he and colleague Harold Ickes played the role of liberal
conscience in the FDR cabinet. He took the principles of the New Deal at
face value and decided to launch the Progressive Party in the face of
what he considered their betrayal at the hands of Harry Truman.
The Wallace campaign has served as a whipping boy for dogmatic Marxist
electoral theorizing, much of which I took seriously when I was in the
Trotskyist movement. It was supposed to prove what a dead end middle
class electoral politics was, in contrast to the insurmountable power
and logic of a Labor Party. Unfortunately, the Labor Party existed only
in the realm of propaganda while the Wallace campaign, with all its
flaws, existed in the realm of reality.
While most people are aware of Wallace's resistance to the Cold War and
to some of the more egregious anti-union policies of the Democrats and
Republicans, it is important to stress the degree to which his campaign
embraced the nascent civil rights movement.
Early in the campaign Wallace went on a tour of the south. True to his
party's principles, he announced in advance that he would neither
address segregated audiences nor stay in segregated hotels. This was
virtually an unprecedented measure to be taken at the time by a major
politician. Wallace paid for it dearly. In a generally hostile study of
Henry Wallace, the authors begrudgingly pay their respects to the
courage and militancy of the candidate:
"The southern tour had begun peacefully enough in Virginia, despite the
existence in that state of a law banning racially mixed public
assemblies. In Norfolk, Suffolk, and Richmond, Wallace spoke to
unsegregated and largely receptive audiences. But when the party went on
into supposedly more liberal North Carolina, where there was no law
against unsegregated meetings, the violence started. A near riot
preceded his first address, and a supporter, James D. Harris of
Charlotte, was stabbed twice in the arm and six times in the back. The
next day there was no bloodshed, but Wallace was subjected to a barrage
of eggs and fruit, and the crowd of about five hundred got so completely
out of control that he had to abandon his speech. At Hickory, North
Carolina, the barrage of eggs and tomatoes and the shouting were so
furious that Wallace was prevented from speaking, but he tried to
deliver a parting thrust over the public address system: 'As Jesus
Christ told his disciples, when you enter a town that will not hear you
willingly, then shake the dust of that town from your feet and go
elsewhere.' If they closed their minds against his message, he would,
like Jesus Christ, abandon them to their iniquity." (Henry A. Wallace:
His Search for a New World Order, Graham White and John Maze)
Wallace was trounced badly as a result of Truman's demagogic appeal to
some bread-and-butter issues supported by the trade union bureaucracy,
which was also working overtime to purge CP'ers out of the trade unions.
Furthermore, since the CP had done nothing to defend trade union
prerogatives during WWII, even to the extent of supporting speedup, many
rank and filers considered them to be enemies of the labor movement. On
top of this, the 1948 CP coup in Czechoslovakia against the social
democratic government of Edward Benes alienated many liberals and even
some leftists. Despite efforts by Wallace to keep Stalin at arm's
length, the rightwing in the United States was able to exploit
resentment over the situation in Czechoslovakia and paint Wallace as a
"Communist dupe".
When the votes were counted, Wallace only received 2.37 percent of the
total. This disaster set the tone for a general offensive against the
left in the US, focusing particularly on the CP. In no time at all, the
witch-hunt was unleashed, mobs attacked the Paul Robeson concert in
Peekskill, and the Korean War broke out. There is very little doubt that
the Wallace campaign and the forces gathered around it were the sole
force capable at that time of putting a roadblock in the way of this
quasi-fascist movement. If the labor movement had not been put on the
defensive, if the civil rights movement had been able to move ahead
under the general framework of Progressive Party campaigns, perhaps the
dismal 1950s would have not been inevitable. This is not socialist
revolution, but it is the real class struggle nonetheless. Seeing the
relationship between the two processes requires some dialectical insight.
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/Nader2000.htm
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