On August 11 Congressman Richard Nixon took a train to New York to visit the Dewey headquarters at the Roosevelt Hotel. Present was John Foster Dulles. Nixon had brought with him transcripts of hearings and private testimony in which Chambers revealed details about Hiss. Dulles read through the transcripts and began to pace in his office. He looked up at Nixon and said, “There’s no question about it. It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.”
The investigation had to continue. Where it would lead, none could say.
As the American press kept the story front and center, paranoia surrounding a Communist conspiracy grew. Americans were pressed to ask themselves: Which candidate in 1948 would more effectively expose Communists at home? Which would fight hardest to rid the nation of what appeared to be a sinister enemy? Candidates would now have to prove themselves on the issue. “Red Activity Looms Big in Campaign,” the Chicago Daily Tribune declared in a front-page story. The Red Scare had begun.
Alger Hiss was not the only figure to pay a high price as a subject of the HUAC hearings. The proceedings brought renewed scrutiny to the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace.
Whittaker Chambers had publicly outted as members of an underground Communist ring John Abt and Lee Pressman—two of the most influential members of Wallace’s Progressive Party. Photographs of Abt and Pressman appeared in newspapers nationwide. On August 19, 1948, the committee ordered the two men to testify the next day. When it was Abt’s turn to speak, Congressman Nixon leaned over to a colleague and said, “Watch your step with this one. He’s a smart cookie.”
“It was clear that these were not regular, garden variety hearings,” Abt later recalled. “Implicit was a threat of great danger. We had engaged in no illegal activity. But we were radicals.”
Asked continuously to admit he was a Communist, Abt refused, pleading the Fifth Amendment so as not to incriminate himself. Lee Pressman did the same, and after the proceedings were over, he issued a statement, calling the hearing “a shameful circus,” and the committee’s leader, J. Parnell Thomas, “a Republican exhibitionist.” He accused Thomas of “stale and lurid mouthings” that intended to steer attention away from the 1948 election’s more important issues. Rather than comment on whether he was or was not a Communist, Pressman chose to catalog the Progressive Party platform: “civil rights, inflation, housing, justice for the heroic state of Israel, and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.”
Following Abt’s and Pressman’s testimony members of the press once again attacked Henry Wallace. A Georgia judge named Lee B. Wyatt told one reporter, “If I had my way about Wallace, I would say ‘get the hell out and go back to Russia.’ It makes my blood boil to hear Wallace and his Progressive Party presidential running mate say that we are provoking a war with Russia.”
Nine days after Abt and Pressman pleaded the Fifth, Wallace headed south to begin a six-state campaign swing. He was going deep into Strom Thurmond territory. Wallace knew before he arrived that the potential for embarrassment and even violence was high. He had no support among whites from the South. Wallace’s support of “Negroes” and civil rights, his highly publicized Communist connections, his call to appease the Soviets during this new Cold War—all of this made him a public enemy in the eyes of whites in the region who—though Democrats—were as conservative or more so than many Republicans.
As his campaign manager Beanie Baldwin later said, “I don’t think any person in American political life ever demonstrated the sheer personal courage that Wallace did in that trip through the south.”
Wallace arrived in Virginia on August 29, 1948. Before leaving, he made a statement that he would not speak to any crowd that segregated blacks from whites. He would not sleep in any building that segregated blacks from whites. He was traveling with a mixed-race campaign staff, and when he learned that certain hotels had canceled his reservations because they did not serve black Americans, he was not surprised. “This meant I had to stay in Negro homes everywhere I went,” he recalled, “which was really slapping the southern tradition.”
On his first day, Wallace addressed roughly a thousand people at a theater in a black neighborhood in Suffolk, Virginia. “We must learn from Jesus and Jefferson,” he said. “The military strategies of history can give no answer to the problems of the atomic age.” He proposed a billion-dollar-a-year federal subsidy for southern industry and agriculture. The Marshall Plan money pouring out of the United States to war-torn nations abroad could be better spent at home, he said, in towns like Suffolk. When Wallace left the hall, a dozen young white men heckled him.
“Hey, Joe Stalin is looking for you.”
“Why don’t you go to South Carolina?”
When Wallace reached Durham, North Carolina, protesters carried signs outside a state Progressive Party convention where he was scheduled to speak.
SEND WALLACE BACK TO RUSSIA, read one.
WALLACE—THE HITLER OF TODAY, read another.
“They continually shouted, ‘Go back to Russia, you nigger lover,’” Wallace later recalled.
Inside the hall, Progressive Party supporters—black and white—intermingled. As Wallace made his way to the podium, escorted by an armed guard, a melee broke out outside and a Wallace supporter was repeatedly stabbed. The wounded man lay bleeding on the stairs leading to the hall while police tried to establish control. One officer fired a warning shot into the air to try to calm the tumult. As the stabbing victim was pulled from the ground and rushed to the hospital (he survived), inside the hall, Wallace gave his address, proposing a Marshall Plan that would send federal dollars not to Europe, but to the southern states. Boos and catcalls repeatedly interrupted him, causing the candidate to plead with his audience: “Please sit down! Please sit down!”
After the event, the members of the Wallace campaign team were unnerved. Beanie Baldwin asked Wallace, “Do you think
