“In their traitorous bids for power, the three candidates—Dewey, Truman and Wallace—have endorsed force bills which they falsely call ‘civil rights,’” Thurmond said. “We hereby put those three politicians on notice. American democracy cannot be bartered away like piece goods, and the Presidency of the United States is not for sale!”
“All agree that the Russians appear anxious to settle the real issues between us,” Henry Wallace told an audience from atop a stage in Rochester, New York, on September 17. “I regretfully predict that the present negotiations between the United States and Russia will be interrupted by another war scare, unless the American people say ‘no’ in such uncertain terms that the negotiations will not dare to fail.” The sponsors of World War III were “few,” said Wallace, “but they are in the seats of power.”
While Truman and Dewey both headed toward California, and Thurmond appeared in the nation’s capital, Wallace took his message to New England and then to the Pacific Northwest, in an attempt to ratchet up publicity. But he faced surprising amounts of vitriol in places where he did not expect to find it. In Boston, a parade of marchers turned out carrying signs reading WHY NOT CONDEMN RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM TOO? The taunts of “Go back to Russia!” continued. Due to the threat of another outbreak of violence, Wallace required forty bodyguards when he attended a Boston Braves game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Sitting in the stands, he could hear the fans booing and hissing at him.
The crowds attending his rallies were beginning to thin, and Wallace’s tone began to change. He was nearing the end of one of the longest presidential campaigns any candidate had ever run, and he was growing exhausted. The people working against him were no longer just his opponents. They were his “enemies,” he said. His message became less about policy and more about imminent calamity. The banks, the major corporations, the major political parties, all the powers that be were bullying the American public into war with the Soviet Union, and getting away with it, he believed.
“Their real intention is to surrender this country,” he told a crowd in Portland, Oregon, “its resources—its people—our earnings—our children—to a chosen few who will march us either to slavery or to war—or to both.”
Wallace’s rhetoric was laced with an increasingly spiteful tone toward Truman—the man who had usurped Wallace’s vice presidency during the 1944 election, the president who in 1946 had fired Wallace from the cabinet. Truman would “live in history as the worst defeated Democratic candidate who ever sought the Presidency,” Wallace said.
The people working with Wallace were becoming more in tune with his idiosyncratic thought processes. He could steer from political policy into the metaphysical and back again seamlessly, though not always with convincing effect. “Wallace did not come without his own problems,” remembered John Abt. “He was, quite literally, a mystic, and it was often impossible to appeal to his practical sense.” One campaign staffer recalled Wallace talking about some issue and interrupting himself “to talk about the emanations he was receiving from the sky.” When this staffer approached campaign manager Beanie Baldwin about the conversation, Baldwin said, “Of course. Didn’t you know that about Wallace?”
As the election drew closer, the most uncomfortable truth about Wallace’s campaign continued to play out before the American public. Wallace had said over and over again that he was not a Communist, and that he had no designs to inject Soviet influence into American policy. But the evidence linking his campaign to Communist causes had become blatantly obvious. At one point the New York Times ran the Communist Party USA’s 1948 political platform and Wallace’s Progressive Party platform side by side, to illustrate their striking similarities. Commented the writer William Henry Chamberlin: “It could reasonably be suspected that the same brain trust composed both.”
“There was no secret about Communist support,” Abt later said. “It can be said that the Communists did the bulk of the nitty-gritty work in the campaign and that, without them, there would have been no campaign to speak of . . . Wallace and [his running mate Glen] Taylor knew this, never tried to hide it and couldn’t if they wanted to.”
Abt, like many in the organization, looked at the matter almost patriotically. “Why shouldn’t the Communists have every right—the same as all other U.S. citizens—to participate openly in a political campaign? Communists throughout Europe and Japan and Latin America were a legitimate part of the political landscape, winning seats in parliament and holding offices in city halls around the world.”
Not a single person of public renown had gone on record saying that Wallace could win. His candidacy had become one not of hope but of protest. His staff was struggling to get his name on state ballots. Wallace was expecting his best results in New York, California, and Illinois, the states with the largest cities (and largest concentration of Communists and far-left-wing voters). But in Illinois, a state electoral board had voted to strike his name from the ballot. Abt had filed a lawsuit that, within a month, would reach all the way to the US Supreme Court (Wallace would lose in a 6–3 vote).
Wallace soldiered on, but he was becoming increasingly isolated. Even his wife refused to remain by his side on the campaign trail. She remained secluded at their farm in South
