Reaction to Wallace’s announcement focused less on Wallace than on Truman. The following day, the Washington Post’s political columnist Edward Folliard described the political fallout: “Henry A. Wallace’s hat-in-the-ring announcement last night met with scornful indifference at the White House, but evoked from Republicans a joyous cry of ‘We’re in in ’48!’” Others saw in Wallace something far more dangerous. It was hardly a secret that Communists were supporting the Progressive Party, and following Wallace’s campaign announcement, the story began to unfold in public. The liberal group Americans for Democratic Action put out a report stating, “New reinforcements—Communist-dominated unions and individuals well-known as CP [Communist Party] apologists—took their place at the front” of the Wallace movement.
“What do the Communists really want from Henry Wallace?” asked the Alsop brothers in their popular newspaper column right after Wallace announced his candidacy. “That is the question Wallace’s third-party candidacy poses.”
To the powerful elite of Washington, many of whom were caught up in Cold War fever, Wallace’s seemingly obvious ties to Communist concerns were inexplicable. But Wallace had answers for his critics. Was America not a free country? Was it not legal for Americans to be Communists? Wasn’t the whole nation founded on the idea of political and religious freedom? “If the Communists want to support me,” Wallace told one crowd at a rally in Seattle, “they must do it on my terms. If the Communists are working for peace with Russia, God bless them. If they are working for the overthrow of the Government by force, they know I am against them.”
The truth was more complicated. In the months leading up to Wallace’s announcement, he had been working as editor of the small but influential magazine the New Republic. According to William Harlan Hale, one of the magazine’s writers, Wallace was “seeing more and more of fewer and fewer people.” These were men the Washington Post called Wallace’s “stage managers,” his “influential insiders”—the people shaping his campaign.
There was John Abt, a University of Chicago–trained lawyer who had for much of his career worked with labor unions. For years Abt had been a subject of interest for the FBI. He first came to the bureau’s attention on May 10, 1945, during the secret testimony of a Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers, who was (according to the FBI’s records) a “self-admitted espionage agent for the Soviet Union and [a] former member of the Communist Party.” Chambers had admitted to being part of what the FBI called an “underground group” of Communists. Abt had been one of “the leaders of this group,” which had in fact met at Abt’s home at the time, on Fifteenth Street in Manhattan, according to Chambers.
Abt was a member of the Communist Party USA. (The FBI would later mark in his file that, according to informants, he had visited the USSR as recently as 1945 and “was reportedly in contact with various officials of Russia and satellite nations during the late 1940’s.”) Abt’s sister Marion was public relations director for the Communist Party USA. Abt knew he was on the FBI’s radar and he feared that his presence in the Wallace camp would cause problems. When he expressed these fears personally to Wallace, the candidate “brushed aside my concerns,” Abt later recalled. “He urged me to become general counsel for the new party.” Abt took on the role. It would be his job to use his legal expertise to get Wallace on the ballot in as many of the forty-eight states as he could.
There was Lee Pressman, a labor attorney who had studied at Harvard and Cornell and who had become politically active in left-wing groups. The same informant who had named Abt as a leader in an underground Communist movement had also named Pressman as a member.
Then there was Calvin Benham “Beanie” Baldwin, the slick-haired politico who was becoming the loudest voice in Henry Wallace’s ear, and would in fact be Wallace’s campaign manager. Baldwin had been Wallace’s assistant when Wallace was secretary of agriculture, and had in 1947 helped to found the Progressive Citizens of America, a precursor to the new Progressive Party. The PCA, as it was called, had declared itself open to “all progressive men and women in our nation, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, or political affiliation.” By “regardless [of] political affiliation,” the party was tacitly declaring itself open to those from the far-left flank—Communists and so-called fellow travelers.
“The facts . . . are,” Abt later recalled, “that the Communist party was active at every level of the Progressive Party, most important in the state and local organizations.”
The FBI knew this. “As you are undoubtedly aware,” a field investigator wrote in a report to J. Edgar Hoover as early as June 3, 1947, “the Progressive Citizens of America is a new front organization which is propagating the Communists’ political aims for 1948.”
As for Wallace’s own personal philosophy, he once told the head of the Communist Party USA, Eugene Dennis, personally what divided his thinking from Communist thinking. “All I said,” remembered Wallace later, “was that there were two things I wanted him to understand—that the Communist Party doesn’t believe in God, I do believe in God; the Communist Party doesn’t believe in progressive capitalism, I do believe in progressive capitalism.”
Henry Wallace knew, perhaps more than any other candidate, that someone declaring a run for the most high-powered office on the planet was putting himself at great personal risk. “I certainly told him before he made the decision,” campaign manager Beanie Baldwin later remembered, “that it was going
