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.
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 M. 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. 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, later Minnesota Progressive Party's name was used by Eugene McCarthy as one of three minor state political parties supporting his independent campaign for president in 1988.
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 and, briefly, actress Ava Gardner.
Ideology
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. 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: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.
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.
History
Foundation
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.The political action committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations formed the National Citizens Political Action Committee during the 1944 election to broaden its support outside of labor. The Independent Voters Committee, which was formed during the 1940 election, grew into the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions in 1944.
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, NCPAC and ICCASP. 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. Morgenthau and White were both critical of efforts to form a third party.
File:Marcantonio 1948 PNC.jpg|thumb|left|Congressman Vito Marcantonio is carried on the shoulders of delegates to the party's first convention, July 23–25, 1948
These two organizations merged on December 30 into the Progressive Citizens of America, which formed the backbone of the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace's bid for 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. 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. Wallace and the PCA attempted to gain support from liberal Republicans, but U.S. Senator Wayne Morse rejected their efforts and stated that "the only hope for sane and sound progressive politics is through liberalizing the Republican party".
Whitney, who was previously critical of Truman and threatened to finance a third-party campaign, praised him after Truman vetoed the Taft–Hartley Act and stated that the veto "vindicated him in the eyes of labor". Whitney and Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen had been supporters of Wallace since the 1944 convention. Kroll and the CIO announced on October 16, 1947, that they would not lead in the formation of a new political party.
The Independent Progressive Party was formed in California with the support of Francis Townsend's organization. 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. The PCA announced its support for a Wallace candidacy on December 17. Wallace stated that during 1947 it was Frank Kingdon, co-chair of the PCA, that pressured him the most to run for president. However, Kingdon, who was seeking the Democratic nomination in New Jersey's U.S. Senate election, resigned as co-chair and stated that he wanted Wallace to run for the Democratic nomination rather than as a third-party candidate. Bartley Crum, vice-chair of the PCA, also resigned. Wallace launched his presidential campaign on December 29.
The American Labor Party "formally organized itself as the New York branch of the Progressive Party." The ALP also helped form a "New York State Wallace for President" conference, held on April 3, 1948. 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. Du Bois, and Mary Van Kleeck on Platform. The Progressives declined to create their own ballot line in New York and instead solely used the ALP's line.
Wallace was uninvolved with the creation of the party's organization and instead had Calvin Benham Baldwin manage it. The party held its national convention each year, rather than the traditional four, in the vein of the Labour Party.
1948 election
The party suffered from a lack of union support. 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. 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. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee and United Auto Workers opposed Wallace. William Green, president of the AFL, also opposed Wallace.Isacson was elected to the United States House of Representatives from New York's 24th congressional district in a 1948 special election. Baldwin, Wallace's campaign manager, stated that Isacson's victory was proof that the United States wanted a new party.
Wallace attempted to gain the support of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. Wallace supporters controlled a majority of the DFL's executive committee and would have controlled the state convention had Hubert Humphrey not held an unscheduled meeting of the party's central committee. Humphrey was able to set all of the convention details and committees. Wallace's supporters only won 19 of the 85 county convention delegations and the convention's credentials committee refused to seat these delegates. Left-wing members of the DFL held a rival convention and nominated a slate of pro-Wallace electors. Secretary of State Mike Holm accepted the left-wing slate, but those electors were invalidated by a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling.
The party initially expected Wallace's campaign to cost around $3 million. This would come from fundraisers by the PCA, left-wing unions, and admissions to rallies. Anita McCormick Blaine, an heiress of International Harvester, donated over $100,000 to the party according to Wallace. The party planned on raising $1 million from union organizations, but only raised $9,025 compared to Truman's $1.5 million. The membership of the International Fur & Leather Workers Union, under the leadership of communist Ben Gold, was the largest union donors, with over $21,000. Over $3.3 million was raised during the campaign, $1.2 million at the national level and $1.3 million at the state and local level.
If all of the votes Wallace received had gone to Truman, then only the states of New York, Michigan, and Maryland would have gone to Truman instead of Dewey. 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, where Wallace ran on the ALP ballot line.
The Progressives ran 114 candidates for U.S. House across twenty-five states and nine U.S. Senate candidates. Marcantonio, who was an incumbent representative, was their only candidate to win and Isacson lost reelection. Taylor, who was the party's only member in the U.S. Senate, left and returned to the Democratic Party after the election.