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Progressive Party (United States, 1948–1955)

The Progressive Party was a left-wing political party in the United States that served as a vehicle for the campaign of Henry A. Wallace, a former vice president, to become President of the United States in 1948. The party sought racial desegregation, the establishment of a national health insurance system, an expansion of the welfare system, and the nationalization of the energy industry. The party also sought conciliation with the Soviet Union during the early stages of the Cold War.

Progressive Party
ChairHenry A. Wallace (IA)
Deputy ChairGlen H. Taylor (ID)
General SecretaryElliot Roosevelt (NY)
Founded1948 (1948)
Dissolved1955 (1955)
Merger ofProgressive Citizens of America
Split fromDemocratic Party
Succeeded byCitizens Party (indirectly)
state Progressive Parties (CA, WA, OR, MN, VT)
HeadquartersWashington, D.C.
IdeologyProgressivism
Progressive capitalism
Left-wing populism
Political positionLeft-wing
Colors  Green

Wallace had served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt but was dropped from the Democratic ticket in 1944. Following the end of World War II, Wallace emerged as a prominent critic of President Harry S. Truman's Cold War policies. Wallace's supporters held the 1948 Progressive National Convention, which nominated a ticket consisting of Wallace and Democratic Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho. Despite challenges from Wallace, Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, and Strom Thurmond of the segregationist Dixiecrats, Truman won election to a full term in the 1948 election. Wallace won 2.4% of the vote, which was far less than the share received by Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette, the presidential nominees of the 1912 and 1924 Progressive Party tickets, respectively. Neither of those parties was directly related to Wallace's party, though these parties did carry over ideological groups and influenced many members of the 1948 Progressive Party.

In 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War, Wallace recanted his foreign policy views and became estranged from his former supporters.[1] The party nominated attorney Vincent Hallinan to run for president in 1952, and Hallinan won 0.2% of the national popular vote. The party began to disband in 1955 as opponents of anti-Communism became increasingly unpopular, and was fully dissolved, with the exception of a few affiliated state Progressive Parties, by the late 1960s.

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.[3]

Foundation Edit

 
Progressive Citizens of America members, 1947. From left, seated, Henry A. Wallace, Elliott Roosevelt; standing, Dr. Harlow Shapley, Jo Davidson.

The formation of the Progressive Party began in 1946, after United States Secretary of Commerce and former Vice President and Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace was sacked in 1946 from the Truman administration having begun to publicly oppose Truman's policies. Calls for a third party had been growing even before Wallace, whom Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced as vice president with the more moderate Truman at the 1944 Democratic National Convention, left the Truman Administration.

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. He received support from two major organizations, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), political action committees (PACs) that had been created to support Roosevelt.[4] These two organizations merged in December 1946 as the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which formed the backbone of the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace's bid for US president on July 23–25, 1948, when the 1948 Progressive National Convention in Philadelphia launched a "New Party" to a crowd of enthusiastic liberal and left-leaning citizens.[4] Carl Marzani's film of the convention, whose soundtrack consists of inspirational words and songs recorded elsewhere, shows both meetings leading up to the convention and the convention itself.[5]

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.

There it was, plainly stated. The Communists were proposing a third party, a farmer-labor party, as a political maneuver for the 1948 elections. They were even picking the candidate.

When Gates had finished, I took the floor. I said that while I would not rule out the possibility of building a farmer-labor party, surely the decision to place a third party in 1948 should be based not on whether Henry Wallace would run, but on whether a third party would help meet the needs of workers and farmers in America. And if a third party were to participate in the 1948 elections, the decision should be made immediately by bona-fide labor and farmer groups, and not delayed until some secret and unknown persons made the decision.

My remarks were heard in icy silence. When I had finished, the committee with no answer to my objection simply went on to other work.

However, it was becoming evident that the top clique was having a hard time with this proposition. 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.[6]

Communist influence Edit

In February 1948, two days before a special election put American Labor Party candidate Leo Isacson into Congress, The New York Times analyzed the shifting background of the Progressive Party:

The question involved in the special election is how strongly the Labor [ALP] party vote will hold up after withdrawal of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and other anti-Communist unions from the Labor party because of its support of Mr. Wallace's candidacy for President, which has left the Communists and other left-wing elements in complete control of that party's organization.[7]

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.

The American Communist Party did not field a presidential candidate, and instead endorsed Wallace for President, given that the Cold War was beginning to gain momentum and with it the Red Scare and anti-Communist sentiment. This endorsement was to hinder Wallace far more than it would help him. When Wallace refused to expel Communists working in the party during the 1948 election, his campaign was severely criticized by both the firmly anti-Communist Truman and Dewey camps.

The former Communist National Committee member Bella Dodd asserts in School of Darkness that the Progressive Party of 1948 had Wallace as its voice and "inspirational leader" but was really controlled by top U.S. Communists, in particular William Z. Foster and Eugene Dennis, who filled the staff of the new party with people loyal to themselves and dictated self-defeating policies to the Progressive Party. Dodd concluded:

The reason they wanted a small limited Progressive Party was because it was the only kind they could control. They wanted to control it because they wanted a political substitute for the Communist Party, which they expected would soon be made illegal. A limited and controlled Progressive Party would be a cover organization and a substitute for the Communist Party if the latter were outlawed.[8]

Historians have disputed the degree to which Communists shaped the party. Most agree that Wallace paid very little attention to internal party affairs. Historians Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier argue (1970 p 181):

[The Progressive Party] stood for one thing and Wallace another. Actually the party organization was controlled from the outset by those representing the radical left and not liberalism per se. This made it extremely easy for Communists and fellow travelers to infiltrate into important positions within the party machinery. Once this happened, party stands began to resemble a party line. Campaign literature, speech materials, and campaign slogans sounded strangely like echoes of what Moscow wanted to hear. As if wearing moral blinkers, Wallace increasingly became an imperceptive ideologue. 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):

  • At one pole were the extreme leftists, three closely related groups—admitted Communists, past and present; the party-liners and fellow travelers who failed to differ noticeably with the Communists as to either policy or principle; and finally those non-Communists who, in … 1944–50 failed to take issue with the Communists on policy, but whose underlying principles seemingly differed.…
  • In the middle were grouped an apparently large majority of Progressive Party followers—the moderates. Exemplified by both national candidates, these individuals were willing to accept Communist support, because they felt that it was inconsistent, in the light of their ideals, to oppose Redbaiting by others, yet attempt to read Communists out of the new party.
  • At the right were arrayed those who, feeling that Communist support should have been disavowed in no uncertain terms, yet were unwilling to adopt the ADA tactic of violent attack on the Communists. This group would have approved making the Progressives "non-Communist" rather than "anti-Communist", excluding but not assailing the Reds. Most persons sharing this view had, like Max Lerner, completely avoided the party, but others like Rexford Guy Tugwell joined and stayed, if reluctantly, through the campaign.…
  • In the period following 1948, party members were hounded by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, from job to job. Members found themselves fired from even the lowest of day labor jobs by FBI agents and others. Although historians point out that groups tended to leave the party in the order of their views from right to left, with most of the rightists departing during or shortly after the campaign, accompanied by many of the moderates. And the moderate defection, so marked following election day, 1948, becoming a nearly complete walkout in the summer of 1950, with the policy rift over Korea and Wallace's departure. Consequently, by the close of 1951 the few remaining portions of the Wallace Progressive Party were composed almost exclusively of the earlier extreme left group. These were the ones who had favored a "narrow" organization; after the Wallace break, they finally achieved this goal, with the departure of almost everyone else, this does not take into account the huge pressure to conform and stop the activism by HUAC and FBI. The fact that the member of congress defeated by Joe McCarthy was Robert La Follette Jr, as an irony not lost on these activists.

U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr., whose father "Fighting Bob" La Follette had run for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924, had been head of the Wisconsin Progressive Party (which was not related to Wallace's party), though he had returned to the Republican fold by 1946. He lost to McCarthy in the Republican primary.

Orson Welles, a friend of Roosevelt who had endorsed him in the 1944 election, refused to be involved with Wallace's presidential campaign. Welles later described Wallace as "a prisoner of the [U.S.] Communist Party. He would never do anything to upset them."[9]p. 66

Views Edit

I urge elimination of groups and factions in this new party movement. This movement is as broad as humanity itself. I urge that we accept all people who wish for a peaceful understanding between the United States and Soviet Russia. … We can get the support of these people if they realize that we do not represent one group. If we are going to be a party of 20 million, there are going to be many kinds of people in that party. Keep the door open.

— Henry A. Wallace, from a speech given in April 1948[10]

The slogan of the "New Party", and the name many used to refer to the party forming around Henry Wallace, was appropriately "Fight for Peace". A major drive for Henry Wallace had always been the ending of the hostile relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and the acceptance of Soviet influence in Europe.[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. Yet, 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. Wallace, and many others in the party, sought to create something more than a single-issue party, to the objection of other leaders in the party who felt that would be their undoing.[11] Nevertheless, the platform of the party and the range of issues it covered show the diversity of the people who formed the "New Party" in 1948, who included many socialists as well as Communists. 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.[4]

Support in New York from ALP Edit

 
Women surrounded by posters in English and Yiddish supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, and the American Labor Party teach other women how to vote, 1936.

The American Labor Party (ALP) "formally organized itself as the New York branch of the Progressive Party."[12]

The ALP also helped form a "New York State Wallace for President" conference, held on April 3, 1948. ALP leaders Isacson and Marcantonio both spoke there.[12]

During the Progressive Party's convention in July 1948 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the following committees had the following ALP members:

Prominent supporters Edit

Henry Wallace's bid for the presidency attracted the support of many prominent people in academia and the arts. 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, and Frank Lloyd Wright.[13]

Lawson, Maltz and Scott were members of the Hollywood Ten, members of the movie industry who were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for suspected membership in the Communist Party. Many of Wallace's public supporters were similarly brought before HUAC and were blacklisted if they did not cooperate.

Election results Edit

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. Nearly half of these votes came in New York (possibly tipping the state and its 47 electoral votes from Truman to Dewey), where Wallace ran on the American Labor Party ballot line.

On September 11, 1948, for instance, the national committee of the Progressive Party passed a resolution which observed:

The totally unjustified decisions of the Illinois Electoral Board to rule the Progressive Party off the ballot is a clear violation of the most basic democratic concepts.

The decisions rob millions of the free citizens of Illinois of their right to vote for the Party and candidate of their choice. They force the war policies of the old parties down the throats of freedom and peace-loving Americans.

Free Americans cannot—and will not—tolerate stolen elections.

This reflects a growing move by states to limit ballot access by any candidate other than the Republican or Democratic party candidates.[citation needed]

The party at state level Edit

In Massachusetts, the anti-war Progressive Party was active in 1948 and faced discrimination in this state also. On May 31, 1948, for instance, Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston, a Democrat, denied the use of the bandstand on the Boston Common to the Progressive Party of Massachusetts.[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. In Virginia, in 1948, Virginia Foster Durr ran for the U.S. Senate seat on the Progressive ticket.

The party had 228,688 registered voters in New York and 22,461 in California.[14]

Pop culture connection Edit

One of the Kingston Trio's most popular folk songs in the 1950s, "The MTA Song", was written by supporters of the Progressive Party of Massachusetts' 1949 Boston mayoralty candidate, Walter A. O'Brien. After Boston's publicly funded MTA purchased the privately owned Boston Elevated Railway's subway and trolley system for $30 per share more than each share was worth, the MTA imposed a fare increase on the citizens of Boston. Progressive Party mayoral candidate O'Brien then led unusually large protests against the MTA fare increase before the 1949 mayoral election. 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. 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.[15][16][17]

Disbandment Edit

After the 1948 election, Henry Wallace grew increasingly estranged from the Progressive Party. His speeches started to include mild criticism of Soviet foreign policy, which was anathema to many leftists in the party. The final break came in 1950, when the Progressive Party's executive committee issued a policy statement against US military involvement in Korea, and soundly rejected Wallace's proposed language criticizing the invasion by communist North Korea. Wallace came out in support of the US intervention in the Korean War, and quit the Progressive Party three weeks later.[18]

In 1952, the Progressive Party ran lawyer Vincent Hallinan for president. Their vice presidential candidate was Charlotta Bass, the first African-American woman ever to run for national office. The campaign attracted little media attention and few votes, and was not even on the ballot in many states. Erstwhile Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace supported General Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential candidacy as a Republican and published an article in the September 7, 1952, issue of This Week magazine (a Sunday supplement that was included in 37 American newspapers) entitled "Where I Was Wrong," detailing some of his mistakes in not having opposed Joseph Stalin strenuously enough. The Progressive Party disbanded in 1955, as the Cold War dominated the political spectrum, and any party which had not taken an anti-Communist position was deemed to be unviable.

The 1948 Progressive Party is only tenuously connected to the original Progressive Party (1912–1932). Members of the 1948 Progressive Party, however, have joined the later state Progressive Parties, thus linking the 1948-1960s group to the Vermont Progressive Party, Wisconsin Progressive Party, Minnesota Progressive Party, California Progressive Party, Oregon Progressive Party, and Washington Progressive Party, as well as the Citizens Party of the 1980s and 90s.

Presidential tickets Edit

Year Presidential nominee Home state Previous positions Vice presidential nominee Home state Previous positions Votes Notes
1948  
Henry A. Wallace
  Iowa United States Secretary of Agriculture
(1933–1940)
Vice President of the United States
(1941–1945)
United States Secretary of Commerce
(1945–1946)
 
Glen H. Taylor
  Idaho United States Senator from Idaho
(1945–1951)
1,157,328 (2.4%)
0 EV
[19]
1952  
Vincent Hallinan
  California Lawyer  
Charlotta Bass
  New York Newspaper publisher, educator, activist 140,746 (0.2%)
0 EV
[20]

See also Edit

References Edit

  1. ^ John C. Culver and John Hyde, American dreamer: a life of Henry A. Wallace (2001). p. 508
  2. ^ Lennon, Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781439150191.
  3. ^ Kaplan, Peter W. (February 25, 1985). "Gable to J.R. with Ava Gardner". The New York Times. Vol. CXXXIV, no. 46331. Retrieved 5 October 2021. "When I appeared for Henry Wallace when he ran for President in 1948... Louis B. Mayer called me in and told me I had to stop. He told me that Katharine Hepburn had ruined her career doing things like that."
  4. ^ a b c d Epstein, Mark J. (April 1972). . Books at Iowa. 16: 34–40. doi:10.17077/0006-7474.1338. Archived from the original on 7 January 2020. Retrieved 17 October 2018.
  5. ^ Max Glandbard (director) (1948). A People’s Convention (Motion picture). Union Films. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
  6. ^ Dodd, Bella (1954). School of Darkness. New York: The Devin-Adair Company. pp. 203–204. ISBN 0815968043.
  7. ^ Hagerty, James A. (15 February 1948). "Wallace Will Test Strength Tuesday: Showing of His Candidate for House Seat to Be Watched Closely by Politicians". The New York Times. p. 46.
  8. ^ Dodd, Bella (1954). School of Darkness. New York: The Devin-Adair Company. p. 205. ISBN 0815968043.
  9. ^ Peter Biskind (ed.). My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, Macmillan (2013)
  10. ^ Karl M. Schmidt, Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade 1948. Syracuse University Press, 1960, p. 93
  11. ^ Karl M. Schmidt. Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade 1948. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1960. pgs 93–94
  12. ^ a b c Wolfe, Alan (1968). "The Withering Away of the American Labor Party". The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries. Journal of Rutgers University Libraries. 31 (2): 49. doi:10.14713/jrul.v31i2.1483. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
  13. ^ Johnson and Ruth Krauss, Crockett. ""We Are For Wallace" (Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss Biography, Appendix B)". Nine Kinds of Pie. Retrieved 14 December 2014.
  14. ^ . Ballot Access News. November 11, 2016. Archived from the original on January 17, 2022. Retrieved January 17, 2022.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  15. ^ Moskowitz, Eric (December 26, 2010). "Charlie's true history moves out from the underground". The Boston Globe.
  16. ^ . The Kingston Trio. 2010. Archived from the original on 21 December 2010. Retrieved 26 December 2010.
  17. ^ See letter from Kate O'Brien Hartig, daughter of Walter, to Rod MacDonald, February 3, 2001. Retrieved July 26, 2007.
  18. ^ John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: a Life of Henry A. Wallace (New York: Norton, 2000) 505–507.
  19. ^ The ticket was cross-nominated by the American Labor Party and received 8.25% in New York, its best showing.
  20. ^ The ticket's best result was in New York, where it received 0.9% of the vote.

Further reading and sources Edit

  • Busch, Andrew E. "Last Gasp: Henry A. Wallace and the End of the Popular Front” Reviews in American History 42#4 (2014), pp. 712–17. online
  • Culver, John; Hyde, John (2000). American dreamer: the life and times of Henry A. Wallace. New York: Norton. ISBN 0393322289. OCLC 804488410.
  • Devine, Thomas W. The eclipse of Progressivism: Henry A. Wallace and the 1948 presidential election (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). See online review
  • Hesseltine, William B. (1957). The Rise and Fall of Third Parties: From Anti-Masonry to Wallace. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith. ISBN 0844612375. OCLC 185063. Retrieved 25 May 2021.
  • Lovin, Hugh T. "New Deal Leftists, Henry Wallace and ‘Gideon’s Army,’ and the Progressive Party in Montana, 1937—1952" Great Plains Quarterly 43#4 (2012), pp. 273–86. online
  • Markowitz, Norman D. (1973). The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948. New York: Free Press. OCLC 1017763077. online
v. 1. The components of the decision
v. 2. The decision and the organization
v. 3. The campaign and the vote
  • Nash, Howard P. Jr.; Hesseltine, W.B. (1959). Third Parties in American Politics. With ills compiled by M.B. Schnapper and an introd. by W.B. Hesseltine. Washington: Public Affairs Press. OCLC 943180107. Retrieved 25 May 2021.
  • Schapsmeier, Edward; Schapsmeier, Frederick H. (1970). Prophet in politics : Henry A. Wallace and the war years, 1940-1965. Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press. ISBN 081381295X. OCLC 1004915002. online; also see online review
  • Schmidt, Karl M. (1960). Henry A. Wallace : Quixotic crusade 1948. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. ISBN 0815600208. OCLC 876257951.
  • White, Graham; Maze, J. R. (1995). Henry A. Wallace : his search for a new world order. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807821896. OCLC 30700369.
  • Walker, J (1976). Henry A. Wallace and American foreign policy. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0837187745. OCLC 1145223548. online

Archives Edit

  • Records of the Progressive Party. Archive maintained by University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department. 1940 – 1969. This collection is apparently the material the MacDougall collected for writing his book Gideon's Army. Accessed May 29, 2006.
  • George E. Rennar Papers. 1933–1972. 37.43 cubic feet. At the Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections. Contains materials about the Progressive Party organization in 1948.

progressive, party, united, states, 1948, 1955, this, article, about, 1948, progressive, party, other, uses, progressive, party, disambiguation, progressive, party, left, wing, political, party, united, states, that, served, vehicle, campaign, henry, wallace, . This article is about the 1948 Progressive Party For other uses see Progressive Party disambiguation The Progressive Party was a left wing political party in the United States that served as a vehicle for the campaign of Henry A Wallace a former vice president to become President of the United States in 1948 The party sought racial desegregation the establishment of a national health insurance system an expansion of the welfare system and the nationalization of the energy industry The party also sought conciliation with the Soviet Union during the early stages of the Cold War Progressive PartyChairHenry A Wallace IA Deputy ChairGlen H Taylor ID General SecretaryElliot Roosevelt NY Founded1948 1948 Dissolved1955 1955 Merger ofProgressive Citizens of AmericaSplit fromDemocratic PartySucceeded byCitizens Party indirectly state Progressive Parties CA WA OR MN VT HeadquartersWashington D C IdeologyProgressivismProgressive capitalismLeft wing populismPolitical positionLeft wingColors GreenPolitics of United StatesPolitical partiesElectionsWallace had served as vice president under Franklin D Roosevelt but was dropped from the Democratic ticket in 1944 Following the end of World War II Wallace emerged as a prominent critic of President Harry S Truman s Cold War policies Wallace s supporters held the 1948 Progressive National Convention which nominated a ticket consisting of Wallace and Democratic Senator Glen H Taylor of Idaho Despite challenges from Wallace Republican nominee Thomas E Dewey and Strom Thurmond of the segregationist Dixiecrats Truman won election to a full term in the 1948 election Wallace won 2 4 of the vote which was far less than the share received by Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette the presidential nominees of the 1912 and 1924 Progressive Party tickets respectively Neither of those parties was directly related to Wallace s party though these parties did carry over ideological groups and influenced many members of the 1948 Progressive Party In 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War Wallace recanted his foreign policy views and became estranged from his former supporters 1 The party nominated attorney Vincent Hallinan to run for president in 1952 and Hallinan won 0 2 of the national popular vote The party began to disband in 1955 as opponents of anti Communism became increasingly unpopular and was fully dissolved with the exception of a few affiliated state Progressive Parties by the late 1960s 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 3 Contents 1 Foundation 2 Communist influence 3 Views 4 Support in New York from ALP 5 Prominent supporters 6 Election results 7 The party at state level 8 Pop culture connection 9 Disbandment 10 Presidential tickets 11 See also 12 References 13 Further reading and sources 13 1 ArchivesFoundation Edit nbsp Progressive Citizens of America members 1947 From left seated Henry A Wallace Elliott Roosevelt standing Dr Harlow Shapley Jo Davidson The formation of the Progressive Party began in 1946 after United States Secretary of Commerce and former Vice President and Secretary of Agriculture Henry A Wallace was sacked in 1946 from the Truman administration having begun to publicly oppose Truman s policies Calls for a third party had been growing even before Wallace whom Franklin D Roosevelt replaced as vice president with the more moderate Truman at the 1944 Democratic National Convention left the Truman Administration 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 He received support from two major organizations the National Citizens Political Action Committee NCPAC and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts Sciences and Professions ICCASP political action committees PACs that had been created to support Roosevelt 4 These two organizations merged in December 1946 as the Progressive Citizens of America PCA which formed the backbone of the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace s bid for US president on July 23 25 1948 when the 1948 Progressive National Convention in Philadelphia launched a New Party to a crowd of enthusiastic liberal and left leaning citizens 4 Carl Marzani s film of the convention whose soundtrack consists of inspirational words and songs recorded elsewhere shows both meetings leading up to the convention and the convention itself 5 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 There it was plainly stated The Communists were proposing a third party a farmer labor party as a political maneuver for the 1948 elections They were even picking the candidate When Gates had finished I took the floor I said that while I would not rule out the possibility of building a farmer labor party surely the decision to place a third party in 1948 should be based not on whether Henry Wallace would run but on whether a third party would help meet the needs of workers and farmers in America And if a third party were to participate in the 1948 elections the decision should be made immediately by bona fide labor and farmer groups and not delayed until some secret and unknown persons made the decision My remarks were heard in icy silence When I had finished the committee with no answer to my objection simply went on to other work However it was becoming evident that the top clique was having a hard time with this proposition 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 6 Communist influence EditIn February 1948 two days before a special election put American Labor Party candidate Leo Isacson into Congress The New York Times analyzed the shifting background of the Progressive Party The question involved in the special election is how strongly the Labor ALP party vote will hold up after withdrawal of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and other anti Communist unions from the Labor party because of its support of Mr Wallace s candidacy for President which has left the Communists and other left wing elements in complete control of that party s organization 7 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 The American Communist Party did not field a presidential candidate and instead endorsed Wallace for President given that the Cold War was beginning to gain momentum and with it the Red Scare and anti Communist sentiment This endorsement was to hinder Wallace far more than it would help him When Wallace refused to expel Communists working in the party during the 1948 election his campaign was severely criticized by both the firmly anti Communist Truman and Dewey camps The former Communist National Committee member Bella Dodd asserts in School of Darkness that the Progressive Party of 1948 had Wallace as its voice and inspirational leader but was really controlled by top U S Communists in particular William Z Foster and Eugene Dennis who filled the staff of the new party with people loyal to themselves and dictated self defeating policies to the Progressive Party Dodd concluded The reason they wanted a small limited Progressive Party was because it was the only kind they could control They wanted to control it because they wanted a political substitute for the Communist Party which they expected would soon be made illegal A limited and controlled Progressive Party would be a cover organization and a substitute for the Communist Party if the latter were outlawed 8 Historians have disputed the degree to which Communists shaped the party Most agree that Wallace paid very little attention to internal party affairs Historians Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier argue 1970 p 181 The Progressive Party stood for one thing and Wallace another Actually the party organization was controlled from the outset by those representing the radical left and not liberalism per se This made it extremely easy for Communists and fellow travelers to infiltrate into important positions within the party machinery Once this happened party stands began to resemble a party line Campaign literature speech materials and campaign slogans sounded strangely like echoes of what Moscow wanted to hear As if wearing moral blinkers Wallace increasingly became an imperceptive ideologue 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 At one pole were the extreme leftists three closely related groups admitted Communists past and present the party liners and fellow travelers who failed to differ noticeably with the Communists as to either policy or principle and finally those non Communists who in 1944 50 failed to take issue with the Communists on policy but whose underlying principles seemingly differed In the middle were grouped an apparently large majority of Progressive Party followers the moderates Exemplified by both national candidates these individuals were willing to accept Communist support because they felt that it was inconsistent in the light of their ideals to oppose Redbaiting by others yet attempt to read Communists out of the new party At the right were arrayed those who feeling that Communist support should have been disavowed in no uncertain terms yet were unwilling to adopt the ADA tactic of violent attack on the Communists This group would have approved making the Progressives non Communist rather than anti Communist excluding but not assailing the Reds Most persons sharing this view had like Max Lerner completely avoided the party but others like Rexford Guy Tugwell joined and stayed if reluctantly through the campaign In the period following 1948 party members were hounded by the House Unamerican Activities Committee from job to job Members found themselves fired from even the lowest of day labor jobs by FBI agents and others Although historians point out that groups tended to leave the party in the order of their views from right to left with most of the rightists departing during or shortly after the campaign accompanied by many of the moderates And the moderate defection so marked following election day 1948 becoming a nearly complete walkout in the summer of 1950 with the policy rift over Korea and Wallace s departure Consequently by the close of 1951 the few remaining portions of the Wallace Progressive Party were composed almost exclusively of the earlier extreme left group These were the ones who had favored a narrow organization after the Wallace break they finally achieved this goal with the departure of almost everyone else this does not take into account the huge pressure to conform and stop the activism by HUAC and FBI The fact that the member of congress defeated by Joe McCarthy was Robert La Follette Jr as an irony not lost on these activists U S Senator Robert M La Follette Jr whose father Fighting Bob La Follette had run for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924 had been head of the Wisconsin Progressive Party which was not related to Wallace s party though he had returned to the Republican fold by 1946 He lost to McCarthy in the Republican primary Orson Welles a friend of Roosevelt who had endorsed him in the 1944 election refused to be involved with Wallace s presidential campaign Welles later described Wallace as a prisoner of the U S Communist Party He would never do anything to upset them 9 p 66Views EditI urge elimination of groups and factions in this new party movement This movement is as broad as humanity itself I urge that we accept all people who wish for a peaceful understanding between the United States and Soviet Russia We can get the support of these people if they realize that we do not represent one group If we are going to be a party of 20 million there are going to be many kinds of people in that party Keep the door open Henry A Wallace from a speech given in April 1948 10 The slogan of the New Party and the name many used to refer to the party forming around Henry Wallace was appropriately Fight for Peace A major drive for Henry Wallace had always been the ending of the hostile relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and the acceptance of Soviet influence in Europe 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 Yet 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 Wallace and many others in the party sought to create something more than a single issue party to the objection of other leaders in the party who felt that would be their undoing 11 Nevertheless the platform of the party and the range of issues it covered show the diversity of the people who formed the New Party in 1948 who included many socialists as well as Communists 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 4 Support in New York from ALP Edit nbsp Women surrounded by posters in English and Yiddish supporting Franklin D Roosevelt Herbert H Lehman and the American Labor Party teach other women how to vote 1936 The American Labor Party ALP formally organized itself as the New York branch of the Progressive Party 12 The ALP also helped form a New York State Wallace for President conference held on April 3 1948 ALP leaders Isacson and Marcantonio both spoke there 12 During the Progressive Party s convention in July 1948 in Philadelphia Pennsylvania the following committees had the following ALP members Arrangements Elinor Liebmann Gimbel wife of Louis Gimbel Jr Credentials Leo Isacson Charles Collins Jose Lopez Nominations Ada Jackson Grace Liebman Morris Pizer Rules Vito Marcantonio Saul Mills John Abt Paul Kern Platform Lee Pressman Elinor Gimbel W E B Dubois Estelle Osborne Alfred Stern husband of Martha Dodd Mary Van Kleeck 12 Prominent supporters EditHenry Wallace s bid for the presidency attracted the support of many prominent people in academia and the arts 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 and Frank Lloyd Wright 13 Lawson Maltz and Scott were members of the Hollywood Ten members of the movie industry who were called before the House Un American Activities Committee HUAC for suspected membership in the Communist Party Many of Wallace s public supporters were similarly brought before HUAC and were blacklisted if they did not cooperate Election results EditRunning 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 Nearly half of these votes came in New York possibly tipping the state and its 47 electoral votes from Truman to Dewey where Wallace ran on the American Labor Party ballot line On September 11 1948 for instance the national committee of the Progressive Party passed a resolution which observed The totally unjustified decisions of the Illinois Electoral Board to rule the Progressive Party off the ballot is a clear violation of the most basic democratic concepts The decisions rob millions of the free citizens of Illinois of their right to vote for the Party and candidate of their choice They force the war policies of the old parties down the throats of freedom and peace loving Americans Free Americans cannot and will not tolerate stolen elections This reflects a growing move by states to limit ballot access by any candidate other than the Republican or Democratic party candidates citation needed The party at state level EditIn Massachusetts the anti war Progressive Party was active in 1948 and faced discrimination in this state also On May 31 1948 for instance Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston a Democrat denied the use of the bandstand on the Boston Common to the Progressive Party of Massachusetts 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 In Virginia in 1948 Virginia Foster Durr ran for the U S Senate seat on the Progressive ticket The party had 228 688 registered voters in New York and 22 461 in California 14 Pop culture connection EditOne of the Kingston Trio s most popular folk songs in the 1950s The MTA Song was written by supporters of the Progressive Party of Massachusetts 1949 Boston mayoralty candidate Walter A O Brien After Boston s publicly funded MTA purchased the privately owned Boston Elevated Railway s subway and trolley system for 30 per share more than each share was worth the MTA imposed a fare increase on the citizens of Boston Progressive Party mayoral candidate O Brien then led unusually large protests against the MTA fare increase before the 1949 mayoral election 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 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 15 16 17 Disbandment EditAfter the 1948 election Henry Wallace grew increasingly estranged from the Progressive Party His speeches started to include mild criticism of Soviet foreign policy which was anathema to many leftists in the party The final break came in 1950 when the Progressive Party s executive committee issued a policy statement against US military involvement in Korea and soundly rejected Wallace s proposed language criticizing the invasion by communist North Korea Wallace came out in support of the US intervention in the Korean War and quit the Progressive Party three weeks later 18 In 1952 the Progressive Party ran lawyer Vincent Hallinan for president Their vice presidential candidate was Charlotta Bass the first African American woman ever to run for national office The campaign attracted little media attention and few votes and was not even on the ballot in many states Erstwhile Progressive candidate Henry A Wallace supported General Dwight D Eisenhower s presidential candidacy as a Republican and published an article in the September 7 1952 issue of This Week magazine a Sunday supplement that was included in 37 American newspapers entitled Where I Was Wrong detailing some of his mistakes in not having opposed Joseph Stalin strenuously enough The Progressive Party disbanded in 1955 as the Cold War dominated the political spectrum and any party which had not taken an anti Communist position was deemed to be unviable The 1948 Progressive Party is only tenuously connected to the original Progressive Party 1912 1932 Members of the 1948 Progressive Party however have joined the later state Progressive Parties thus linking the 1948 1960s group to the Vermont Progressive Party Wisconsin Progressive Party Minnesota Progressive Party California Progressive Party Oregon Progressive Party and Washington Progressive Party as well as the Citizens Party of the 1980s and 90s Presidential tickets EditYear Presidential nominee Home state Previous positions Vice presidential nominee Home state Previous positions Votes Notes1948 nbsp Henry A Wallace nbsp Iowa United States Secretary of Agriculture 1933 1940 Vice President of the United States 1941 1945 United States Secretary of Commerce 1945 1946 nbsp Glen H Taylor nbsp Idaho United States Senator from Idaho 1945 1951 1 157 328 2 4 0 EV 19 1952 nbsp Vincent Hallinan nbsp California Lawyer nbsp Charlotta Bass nbsp New York Newspaper publisher educator activist 140 746 0 2 0 EV 20 See also EditProgressive Citizens of America PCA Progressive Party United States 1912 Progressive Party United States 1924 Jencks v United StatesReferences Edit John C Culver and John Hyde American dreamer a life of Henry A Wallace 2001 p 508 Lennon Michael 2013 Norman Mailer A Double Life New York Simon amp Schuster ISBN 9781439150191 Kaplan Peter W February 25 1985 Gable to J R with Ava Gardner The New York Times Vol CXXXIV no 46331 Retrieved 5 October 2021 When I appeared for Henry Wallace when he ran for President in 1948 Louis B Mayer called me in and told me I had to stop He told me that Katharine Hepburn had ruined her career doing things like that a b c d Epstein Mark J April 1972 The Progressive Party of 1948 Books at Iowa 16 34 40 doi 10 17077 0006 7474 1338 Archived from the original on 7 January 2020 Retrieved 17 October 2018 Max Glandbard director 1948 A People s Convention Motion picture Union Films Retrieved 26 May 2021 Dodd Bella 1954 School of Darkness New York The Devin Adair Company pp 203 204 ISBN 0815968043 Hagerty James A 15 February 1948 Wallace Will Test Strength Tuesday Showing of His Candidate for House Seat to Be Watched Closely by Politicians The New York Times p 46 Dodd Bella 1954 School of Darkness New York The Devin Adair Company p 205 ISBN 0815968043 Peter Biskind ed My Lunches with Orson Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles Macmillan 2013 Karl M Schmidt Henry A Wallace Quixotic Crusade 1948 Syracuse University Press 1960 p 93 Karl M Schmidt Henry A Wallace Quixotic Crusade 1948 Syracuse Syracuse University Press 1960 pgs 93 94 a b c Wolfe Alan 1968 The Withering Away of the American Labor Party The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries Journal of Rutgers University Libraries 31 2 49 doi 10 14713 jrul v31i2 1483 Retrieved 13 July 2017 Johnson and Ruth Krauss Crockett We Are For Wallace Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss Biography Appendix B Nine Kinds of Pie Retrieved 14 December 2014 Libertarian Party Becomes First Nationally Organized Party Other than the Republican and Democratic Parties to Have 500 000 Registrants Ballot Access News November 11 2016 Archived from the original on January 17 2022 Retrieved January 17 2022 a href Template Cite news html title Template Cite news cite news a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Moskowitz Eric December 26 2010 Charlie s true history moves out from the underground The Boston Globe Kingston Trio Tribute Photos The Kingston Trio 2010 Archived from the original on 21 December 2010 Retrieved 26 December 2010 See letter from Kate O Brien Hartig daughter of Walter to Rod MacDonald February 3 2001 Retrieved July 26 2007 John C Culver and John Hyde American Dreamer a Life of Henry A Wallace New York Norton 2000 505 507 The ticket was cross nominated by the American Labor Party and received 8 25 in New York its best showing The ticket s best result was in New York where it received 0 9 of the vote Further reading and sources EditBusch Andrew E Last Gasp Henry A Wallace and the End of the Popular Front Reviews in American History 42 4 2014 pp 712 17 onlineCulver John Hyde John 2000 American dreamer the life and times of Henry A Wallace New York Norton ISBN 0393322289 OCLC 804488410 Devine Thomas W The eclipse of Progressivism Henry A Wallace and the 1948 presidential election The University of North Carolina Press 2000 See online reviewHesseltine William B 1957 The Rise and Fall of Third Parties From Anti Masonry to Wallace Gloucester Mass P Smith ISBN 0844612375 OCLC 185063 Retrieved 25 May 2021 Lovin Hugh T New Deal Leftists Henry Wallace and Gideon s Army and the Progressive Party in Montana 1937 1952 Great Plains Quarterly 43 4 2012 pp 273 86 onlineMarkowitz Norman D 1973 The Rise and Fall of the People s Century Henry A Wallace and American Liberalism 1941 1948 New York Free Press OCLC 1017763077 onlineMacDougall Curtis Daniel 1965 Gideon s Army New York Marzani amp Munsell OCLC 1074676 Reviewed in Johnson Oakley C January 1 1967 A Time of Heroes PDF Freedomways 7 1 90 94 ISSN 0016 061X JSTOR community 28036998 Retrieved 23 May 2021 Three volumes v 1 The components of the decision v 2 The decision and the organization v 3 The campaign and the voteNash Howard P Jr Hesseltine W B 1959 Third Parties in American Politics With ills compiled by M B Schnapper and an introd by W B Hesseltine Washington Public Affairs Press OCLC 943180107 Retrieved 25 May 2021 Schapsmeier Edward Schapsmeier Frederick H 1970 Prophet in politics Henry A Wallace and the war years 1940 1965 Ames Iowa The Iowa State University Press ISBN 081381295X OCLC 1004915002 online also see online reviewSchmidt Karl M 1960 Henry A Wallace Quixotic crusade 1948 Syracuse N Y Syracuse University Press ISBN 0815600208 OCLC 876257951 White Graham Maze J R 1995 Henry A Wallace his search for a new world order Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press ISBN 0807821896 OCLC 30700369 Walker J 1976 Henry A Wallace and American foreign policy Westport Conn Greenwood Press ISBN 0837187745 OCLC 1145223548 onlineArchives Edit Records of the Progressive Party Archive maintained by University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department 1940 1969 This collection is apparently the material the MacDougall collected for writing his book Gideon s Army Accessed May 29 2006 George E Rennar Papers 1933 1972 37 43 cubic feet At the Labor Archives of Washington University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Contains materials about the Progressive Party organization in 1948 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Progressive Party United States 1948 1955 amp oldid 1179450589, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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