In Indianapolis, he and his team were denied hotel rooms. When he reached Iowa, officials at the University of Iowa barred him from speaking on campus. In Detroit, the union leader Walter Reuther was shot in his home by an unknown assailant, and Reuther’s colleague, union man Pat Greathouse, accused Wallace followers of committing the crime (based on no apparent evidence). “It must be part of a communist plot,” Greathouse told reporters. “[Reuther] has enemies among Wallace’s followers.”
In Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, Wallace’s running mate, Senator Taylor, was scheduled to speak to a black church congregation. When he attempted to enter through the front door, a white police officer stopped him.
“This is the colored entrance,” the cop said. “The white entrance is on the side.”
“I’ll go through here anyway,” Taylor said.
When he pushed forward, a scuffle broke out. Officers jumped on Taylor and his head hit the concrete sidewalk. “This is it,” he was thinking. “They’re going to beat me to death.” He ended up in a jail cell, bleeding, booked for breach of the peace and disorderly conduct. In the cell a fellow prisoner said to Taylor, “They got me for pukin’ on a sidewalk. What’s your racket?”
“I am a United States Senator,” Taylor said. “And they got me for trying to enter a meeting through a colored entrance.”
When Wallace hit New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, however, he was once again wildly embraced. After attending a Wallace rally, the political columnist Roscoe Drummond commented, “I have never seen a pre-convention campaign tour, even those of Wendell L. Willkie and Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, command even no-paying audiences of such size.” A Chicago Daily News reporter who attended a Wallace event at Chicago Stadium wrote, “I’m here, I’ve seen it, and I still don’t believe it.”
The actress Katharine Hepburn warmed up the crowd at a Wallace event in Los Angeles. Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson contributed money to the campaign. Former Interior secretary Harold Ickes embraced Wallace (“Thousands of people believe that Mr. Wallace possesses the qualities they are looking for”), as did the black leader W.E.B. Du Bois (“Let the mass of American negroes, north, south, east, and west, cast their votes for Henry Wallace in 1948”). Frank Lloyd Wright wrote the candidate on June 1, 1948, in support of Wallace’s campaign “to turn the rascals out.”
Democratic Party operatives kept close tabs on the Wallace campaign. “The Third Party candidate has embarked way ahead of normal schedules, on a far-flung campaign which carries him into remote areas, unfrequented by other national campaigners,” according to a report by the Americans for Democratic Action. “By April [1948] he had made over 26 major orations since announcing his candidacy . . . Wallace, according to any reasonable estimates, will have conducted the equivalent of nearly two full Presidential campaigns by the time the major parties and the third party hold their conventions.”
Just how real was the Wallace threat? In February 1948 a young attorney named Leo Isacson answered that question. A political novice and supporter of Henry Wallace, Isacson ran in a special election to fill a US congressional seat in New York’s Twenty-Fourth District—the Bronx—as the candidate of the far-left American Labor Party. Wallace endorsed Isacson, who was running against a Democrat, Karl Propper. The New York Times called the special election a “test of Truman-Wallace strength.” Isacson stunned the establishment by winning. Suspected of being a Communist, he was so controversial that the State Department refused to issue him a passport, because officials believed his politics could make him a dangerous voice abroad. Never before had a member of the US Congress been denied an American passport.
The Isacson victory proved that Wallace was going to be a draw at the ballot box in places like New York City, but it further raised concern over the support Wallace was getting from Communists and fellow travelers. At a St. Patrick’s Day address in 1948, a month after Isacson’s win, Truman told a crowd in Manhattan: “I do not want and I will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his Communists. If joining them or permitting them to join me is the price of victory, I recommend defeat. These are days of high prices for everything, but any price for Wallace and his Communists is too much for me to pay. I’m not buying.”
On April 14 and April 30, the United States detonated two more atomic test shots over the Pacific’s Enewetak Atoll—code-named X-Ray and Yoke. X-Ray set a record for the highest yield of energy released during an atomic blast, until Yoke eclipsed it sixteen days later. Truman had authorized these operations as part of the Operation Sandstone tests. The effort to build these weapons and set them off had required more than ten thousand government personnel.
The bombs went off in secret but soon after made front-page headlines, sparking more debate on just how long it would take for the Soviets to develop a bomb, and what would happen to an American city should it be struck by an atomic weapon. The Army Medical Corps stoked the fear by releasing information gleaned from research these nuke tests provided, warning people to stay calm if atomic bombs began raining down on American cities, because hysteria would only cause more loss of life. “There is no known method of protecting those in the immediate neighborhood of an atomic bomb when it explodes,” a Medical Corps spokesman told reporters, adding that “there is not much even a medical man can do” about radiation exposure.
Wallace saw these test shots as more US aggression toward the Soviet Union. They further fueled his campaign to stop what he saw as a march toward war.
On May 11, 1948, Wallace made his most controversial move yet: He released an open letter to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In it, he called for “definite, decisive steps” to end the “international crisis” that was coming to a head in Berlin.
