When Vandenberg accused Wallace of making “treasonable utterances,” the former vice president responded with equally flammable rhetoric.
“There is only one circumstance under which phrases like ‘treasonable utterances’ could be used to describe my speeches,” Wallace told reporters in London. “That would be when we were at war . . . The fact that such words as ‘treason’ have been used in describing my trip [to Europe] indicates that, in the minds of the men who use these phrases, we actually are at war.”
On April 10 Truman held his weekly press conference, and a reporter asked the president if Wallace was “in good standing of the Democratic Party.”
“Certainly,” Truman said.
“Would you like to have him campaign on the Democratic ticket next year, Mr. President?”
Truman said he thought Wallace “will probably campaign for the Democratic ticket.”
From Britain, Wallace responded to Truman directly after reading of this conversation in the press. “I shall be campaigning in 1948 with all my power,” Wallace said. “But I will be campaigning for the ideals of the free world and the men who best express these ideals. I hope, but I cannot guarantee, that they will be on the Democratic ticket.”
Back in the United States, Wallace continued on the road, holding anti-Truman rallies. FBI agents began to prowl these events as rumors surfaced that Wallace’s supporters included numerous individuals with Communist sympathies. In Cleveland on May 2, Wallace drew an audience of four thousand people, with another fifteen hundred outside unable to get tickets. In Minneapolis on May 12, six thousand people paid to hear Wallace speak. In Chicago on May 14, twenty thousand people paid from sixty cents to $2.40 to hear Wallace, “filling Chicago Stadium for the first time in political history,” according to an account sent to the FBI’s chief, J. Edgar Hoover. Five days later, Wallace spoke before twenty-seven thousand rally participants at Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles.
Increasingly, Wallace drew a line between the Soviet and American ways of thinking, and while Americans were growing paranoid of Communists abroad and rumored secret Communist cells at home, Wallace became the only major public figure in the United States pointing blame for the Cold War not on the USSR but on America and its president. Wallace warned that the Truman Doctrine was no plan for peace but rather an attempt to insert American influence into affairs abroad where it did not belong. He warned that the Marshall Plan would lead down “a road to ruthless imperialism.” He slammed Winston Churchill for his “hatred of Russia,” calling Churchill “an imperialist.”
Far-left liberals, mostly in California and on the East Coast, found a haven in Wallace’s peace rallies. Others saw in them a strange threat; there was a whiff of pro-Sovietism to Wallace’s message, which made many suspicious of his motivations. In April 1947 Churchill called Wallace a “crypto-Communist” who was part of a “vast system of Communist intrigue which radiates from Moscow.” In June, the American Anti-Communist Association sought a court injunction to keep Wallace from speaking at the Watergate Amphitheater in Washington.
Was Wallace a conduit for Communist infiltration? Even a stooge for Stalin himself ? Wallace confronted the issue head-on.
“If it is traitorous to believe in peace,” he said at a conference in New York, “we are traitors. If it is communistic to believe in prosperity for all, we are communists. If it is red-baiting to fight for free speech and real freedom of the press, we are red-baiters. If it is un-American to believe in freedom from monopolistic dictation, we are un-American. I say that we are more American than the neo-Fascists who attack us. I say on with the fight!”
Days after Wallace uttered these words, in June 1947, the first organized “Wallace for President” group met in Fresno, California. The “Wallace in ’48” movement was on.
7
“The Defeat Seemed like the End of the World”
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 29, 1947, as debate over the Marshall Plan raged in offices all over Washington and Henry Wallace was on tour battering the Truman administration, the Secret Service delivered the president to the Lincoln Memorial, to give a speech Truman knew could shatter what was left of his own party. The president was met by Walter White, head of the NAACP, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Together the three walked toward a stage set up at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, the lanky Mrs. Roosevelt awkwardly towering over both Truman and White.
For months, Truman’s stand on race matters had become a prickly mystery in Washington. Now Truman would solve that mystery, and accept the consequences. He was going to become the first president to address the NAACP.
All four major radio networks were set to broadcast the speech, in addition to networks overseas. Huge crowds of NAACP members were already on hand. They were young. They were old. They were in uniform. They were war veterans in wheelchairs. They made up the biggest gathering in the NAACP’s thirty-eight-year history.
White spoke first. “There are 100,000 people here today at the foot of Abraham Lincoln in Washington,” he began. “I am told that between 30 and 40 million other Americans may be listening to the radio at this hour. Countless others listen overseas . . .”
When it was Truman’s moment, he looked out from the podium and saw a sea of brown faces. Behind the crowd, the Washington Monument stood erect against a blue sky. Truman’s speech called for federal protection against violence and discrimination and equality in employment and education. It stressed the right to vote for every citizen as critical to the definition of Americanism. America had “reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to our citizens,” Truman said.
“Every man,” he continued, “should have the right to a decent home, the right to an education, the right to adequate medical care, the right to a worthwhile job, the right to an equal share in making the public decisions through the ballot, and the right to a fair trial in
