“It is highly essential that the United States and Russia understand each other better,” Wallace wrote in his diary as early as 1942. “This means there must be better understanding among United States citizens concerning Russia and among Russian citizens concerning the United States . . . It means we must cooperate with Russia in the postwar period.”
In 1942 Wallace distilled his thinking into a speech he called “The Century of the Common Man.” “Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’” Wallace said. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century that will come out of this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.” The speech envisioned a future world peace, a world without racism, a world without greed, based on communal welfare. It was translated into more than a dozen languages and made Wallace an icon for left-wing intellectuals.
Wallace headed into 1944 believing he would remain on the Democratic ticket in the forthcoming election. According to a Gallup poll leading up to the Democratic National Convention, 65 percent of Democratic voters favored Wallace as the VP candidate to run with FDR in his historic fourth-term campaign. (Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky ranked second at 17 percent; Harry Truman was way back in the pack, with 2 percent.) However, unbeknownst to Wallace, conspirators within the White House had created an almost Shakespearean plot to remove him from power. Wallace was just too weird, FDR’s inner circle believed, and too liberal, even in the New Deal era. Democratic National Committee treasurer George Allen called him “the boomerang throwing mystic from the place where the tall corn grows.”
At a wildly raucous 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Wallace was dumped in favor of the obscure senator from Missouri—Harry S. Truman. Wallace left Chicago devastated, the victim of brutal subterfuge. As a consolation, FDR told Wallace that there would be “a job for you in world economic affairs.” Two weeks after the Chicago convention, Truman went to see Wallace in his office. The Missourian told Wallace how unhappy he was.
“You know,” Truman said, “this whole matter is not one of my choosing. I went to Chicago to get out of being Vice President, not to become Vice President.” Truman assured Wallace he had not involved himself in any “machinations” to knock Wallace off the 1944 ticket.
The important thing, Wallace said, was to look forward, not back. After Truman left, Wallace wrote of Truman in his diary: “He is a small opportunistic man, a man of good instincts but, therefore, probably all the more dangerous. As he moves out more in the public eye, he will get caught in the webs of his own making . . .”
In November, the FDR-Truman ticket won the election, and Wallace was appointed commerce secretary—a position he retained until Truman, now president, fired him from the cabinet in 1946.
Now in the winter of 1947, before any Democratic candidate had officially declared a run for president, Wallace began his campaign odyssey. He knew he could not win. But he also knew that he had an opportunity to change the national political landscape, perhaps even to steer the Cold War toward an end. “I had no illusions about being elected President . . . ,” he later recalled, “and my reason for running was that I finally had to make good my bluff. When I threatened the Democratic party with either/or and they didn’t come through on the either, I had to come through on the or . . . If the Democratic party was a war party, there was only one thing I could do, it seemed to me.”
There was a giddiness about his run, a sense that the future of the country was wide open, and that a campaign about peace could enlighten people beyond the scope of a political power struggle. “We all had grandiose ideas of the possibilities of the Wallace campaign,” recalled John Abt.
Wallace set up headquarters at 39 Park Avenue in New York City, a lavish four-story brownstone rented for $1,500 a month. Soon its rooms and offices were buzzing with publicity agents and party operatives and fund-raising experts. Well-known figures came out in support of Wallace: the writers Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Studs Terkel; the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Aaron Copland; the architect Frank Lloyd Wright; the deaf-blind activist Helen Keller; even Franklin Roosevelt’s son Elliott. Campaign donations came in from top-ranked writers like Norman Mailer and Clifford Odets. The famed artist Ben Shahn signed on to create campaign posters.
For a running mate, Wallace chose the forty-three-year-old US senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho. Taylor added color to the ticket. He had grown up in a poor family, one of thirteen children, the son of an itinerant preacher. Taylor had joined the theater after the eighth grade and had been in the entertainment business as a country-and-western singer and a stage performer for years before he was elected to the Senate in 1944. He was known as the “singing cowboy.” A tall, bald man who wore an obvious hairpiece of his own construction, Taylor had once ridden his horse, Nugget, up the steps of the US Capitol building.
In their first campaign event together, soon after Wallace announced his candidacy, Wallace and Taylor sat down in the CBS radio studio in New York. On a live national broadcast, Taylor boldly said, “I am going to cast my lot with Henry Wallace in his brave and gallant fight for peace.”
When asked about the Communist controversy clouding their campaign, Taylor said he would be “glad to have their votes.”
“I’m trying to get elected,” Taylor said. “I’d be glad to have the votes of bank robbers too.”
When asked why they were bolting the Democratic Party, Taylor answered for the two of them. “I am not leaving the Democratic Party,” he said. “It left me. Wall Street and the military have taken over.”
10
“There’ll Be No Compromise”
Never in our history have we been faced with such conditions—and a presidential campaign
