The Democratic Convention of July
1944 must rank as one of the most dramatic in history. The drama did not concern
the presidency, since Franklin Roosevelt, with WWII still raging, was sure to
be nominated for his fourth term. The question concerned his Vice President,
Henry A. Wallace. Wallace had been the center of FDR’s New Deal, the greatest
Secretary of Agriculture in history—responsible for initiating food stamps,
support for small farmers (he himself farmed in his native Iowa) going bankrupt
due to overproduction and plummeting crop prices, the policy of storing grain
against lean years, and a host of other far-reaching programs. He was generally
considered to be the brightest cabinet officer in a cabinet of giants, a
renaissance man whose activities ran the gamut from dirt farming himself to
inventing hybrid corn to teaching himself genetics to philosophy and mysticism.
In 1940, over the objection of many conservatives, FDR chose him to be his vice
president. After a controversial three years serving as possibly the most
powerful vice president ever up to that time, and with the worldwide conflict
still not decided, the time came to set the stage for the 1944 campaign. The
problem was that most pols knew that FDR would probably not last through his
fourth term: weakened by 11 years of furious activity due to Depression and
War, the President had recently been found to have hypertension and
arteriosclerosis, his once-legendary energy reduced to a shadow of its former
level. Whoever became Vice President was virtually certain to be President, and
the conservatives in the party were terrified that it would be Henry
Wallace—the man many considered to be not only a dreamer and a hopelessly naïve
idealist, but a virtual Communist (he was, in fact, a quintessentially American
democrat and capitalist, though keenly aware of the need for the world to
realize its unity and interdependence in the post-World War II era, and its
need for the self-determination of all its peoples). For that reason, an actual
conspiracy gathered to deny Wallace the nomination and give it to one of the
other contenders: presidential assistant Jimmy Byrnes; Supreme Court Justice William
O. Douglas; Senator Alben Barkley; or, most importantly, an obscure product of
the infamous Boss Pendergast machine of St. Louis, Missouri Senator Harry S.
Truman. The conspiracy was initiated by Edwin Pauley, the wealthy conservative oilman
from California who would later play a role in bringing Ronald Reagan to the
presidency. Pauley loathed Wallace and his ideas of “economic democracy,” and
was determined to block him from ever ascending to the presidency. He recruited
allies like “Pa” Watson, FDR’s appointments secretary who controlled access to
the President, along with other bosses from the Democratic Party, and they
hatched their plans—first to get to the ailing FDR to see if he would deny
Wallace the job, and if not, to try for some sort of commitment from the
president to accept one of the replacements, hopefully Truman. They did manage to get a semi-approval from
FDR for either Douglas or Truman, if Wallace weren’t nominated, but as usual, FDR
was loathe to commit himself. He would leave it up to the convention, he said,
and then took off for a secret meeting with General MacArthur and the military
in Honolulu.
FDR’s half
approval gave the conspirators the opening they needed. They put out a steady
drumbeat of anti-Wallace propaganda, most suggesting that the Vice President
was a socialist if not an outright Communist (making it perhaps the first campaign targeting a government official for being “soft on Communism.”) They were helped in this by
Wallace’s ill-advised trip to Asia just prior to the convention, in which he
extolled the accomplishments of the Soviet Union in Siberia, and criticized
Chiang-Kai-shek for ignoring the threat building within his country by Mao’s
communists. They were also helped by Wallace's genuine interest in what he thought of as the Soviet experiment in bringing about a
more equal society, a society that would emphasize economic as well as
political democracy. He also knew of the indispensable role the Soviet Union
had played in stopping Hitler (the Soviets lost 6,000,000 men in halting
Hitler’s eastern thrust, literally saving the Allies and Britain from certain
destruction, at enormous cost to their homeland), and the double-crossing British
role in delaying the “second front” invasion of France. Churchill and the
British, Wallace knew, were working hard to put off the Allied invasion as long
as possible so the Soviets and Nazis would continue “killing each other.” Wallace
also knew the British were more concerned about maintaining the last elements
of their empire than in aiding their Soviet ally, and certainly more interested
in reviving their empire after the war than in bringing about the postwar age
of cooperation among all nations and peoples that Wallace had spoken about
often. In fact, the British sent Roald Dahl (later of Willy Wonka fame) to the U.S. to spy on Wallace and keep
them apprised of his “loony” ideas for post-war peace—especially about providing
self-determination to the former British colonies such as India. So Wallace had
not only a homegrown conspiracy working against his re-election to the vice
presidency, he also had an international one featuring Winston Churchill.
Thus were set in
motion the machinations at the convention. The conspirators—especially Robert
Hannegan, a Truman protégé who was named chairman of the Democratic National
Committee in 1944; Chicago Mayor and political boss, Edward Kelly; national Democratic
secretary George Allen; and two previous national chairmen, Ed Flynn, boss of
the Bronx, and Postmaster General Frank Walker—planned every detail to deny
Wallace the nomination on the first ballot, and then arrange a favorite-sons floor
fight to dilute Wallace’s strength and maneuver a compromise nomination of
Truman. Their plan was byzantine, thorough and brilliantly crafty. What they
did not count on, however, was Wallace’s genuine popularity with both Democrats
and the American public. On the eve of the convention, a Gallup poll revealed
that Wallace was running at 65% favorable, with the other putative VP candidates
running in single digits and Truman barely registering 2%. Though alarming,
such news could be dealt with. What shocked the conspirators was the response
to Wallace’s convention speech. Not noted for his oratory or his charisma, the
shy, self-effacing Wallace, who had not even wanted to attend the convention,
eventually relented and entered the fight in earnest. Most notably, he prepared
a barn-burner of a speech. It was distinctly not political; in fact it was
called “tactless,” for it did everything a politician usually tries to avoid:
give direct voice to his deepest philosophy and the policies he believed in,
and throw it in the faces of his enemies. Here’s some of what he said:
“The strength of the Democratic Party has always been
the people—plain people like so many of those here in this convention—ordinary
folks, farmers, workers, and business men along Main Street….The future belongs
to those who go down the line unswervingly for the liberal principles of both
political democracy and economic
democracy regardless of race, color
or religion. In a political, educational and economic sense there must be
no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Equal educational opportunities must
come. The future must bring equal wages
for equal work regardless of sex or race.
Roosevelt stands for all this. That is why certain
people hate him so…” (p. 360, American
Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace, by John Culver and John Hyde. Emphasis
added.)
The 40,000
convention goers in Chicago Stadium went crazy, cheering and demonstrating for
the man they clearly favored as vice president. Commentators like Thomas Stokes
called the speech magnificent, causing him to leap from his feet in tears, but to
write “goddam it, it isn’t smart politics.” Time
magazine called it “the first speech that riveted the delegates’
attention..blunt, grave, tactless.” And former senator George Norris, too ill
to attend but listening in Nebraska, wrote this to Wallace:
“If you had been trying to appease somebody you made a
mistake, but you were talking straight into the faces of your enemies who were
trying to defeat you, and no matter what they may think or what effect it may
have on them, the effect on the country and all those who will read that speech
is that it was one of the most courageous exhibitions ever seen at a political
convention in this country.” (p. 361, American
Dreamer)
In fact, the effect on Wallace’s
enemies was panic. They tried to get word to reporters that FDR had privately endorsed
not Wallace, but either Truman or Douglas, but few were convinced. Most were anticipating
the evening session when the President himself was to deliver a speech
radio-broadcast from his wartime location, a Pacific naval base. The speech was
vintage Roosevelt, denying that he had any eagerness for the job, but insisting
that he was doing so out of his sense of duty, to complete the job he had
started: winning the war, winning the peace afterwards, and then building a
peacetime economy to employ returning veterans and all Americans. Predictably,
the convention crowd cheered loud and long for their heroic president. But then
came the unpredictable—at least to the conspirators. The crowd segued from
cheering for Roosevelt to cheering and calling for the vice president: “We want
Wallace! We want Wallace!” Sam Jackson, in on the conspiracy, tried to gavel
the crowd back to order, but to no avail. The chant went on, growing louder by
the second. It grew even more raucous when the organist, though a loyalist to
Chicago Boss Kelly, got caught up himself, and began playing the “Iowa Corn Song.” The convention turned
to pandemonium, and was fast slipping into acclamation for Wallace and well out of conspiratorial
control.
There was only
one card for the conspirators to play, and they played it: close the convention
down. There were fire laws, said Mayor Kelly and he began to throw open doors
and direct workers to cut off the organ and cut power cables if necessary.
Meantime, Senator Claude Pepper, a staunch New Deal liberal and leader of the
Florida delegation, began trying to put Wallace’s name in nomination, knowing the
vote would have been overwhelmingly in the vice president’s favor on the first
ballot. Pepper began jumping up and down trying to get recognized by the
podium, but Chairman Jackson refused to acknowledge him. Nor could the Florida
senator address the chair by microphone because the power had been cut. Desperate,
Pepper began shoving and elbowing his way to the podium, got to the steps and
was five feet from the podium pushing his way up. Chairman Hannegan saw the
situation and screamed to Chairman Jackson to call for adjournment, but Jackson
was fearful or a riot, saying “This crowd is too hot. I can’t.” Hannegan then shouted
louder for adjournment, insisting that “I’m taking orders from the president!” Which,
of course, he was not.
By now Claude
Pepper was one step away from changing the course of history, but Jackson
finally called for yeas and nays to adjourn, and though the crowd screamed “No,
no, no, no!” Jackson doggedly insisted that the ayes had it, and gaveled the
session to a close. The organ was stopped, the lights were cut, and police
began to clear the aisles. Culver and Hyde conclude with this comparison to
another valiant but failed American charge:
“It was over.
Pepper had led the Pickett’s Charge of the Wallace movement.”
Sadly, that was the case. By next
morning, the bosses had reasserted control, kept anyone they thought might be a
Wallace supporter out of the convention hall, promised bribes to most of the
leaders of state delegations, and went through the motions of pretending to
have a first ballot—which Wallace came within 100 votes or so of winning. Then
they proceeded to orchestrate subsequent ballots, calling in their favors, and
managed a landslide on the third ballot for the until-then obscure senator from
Missouri, Harry S. Truman.
Though for
politicians the result meant only that a new, more conservative bosses’ pick
had become vice president, within less than a year and throughout the rest of
the twentieth century, the 1944 convention theft had monumental effects. On
April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt suffered a massive cerebral
hemorrhage, and the New Deal he had crafted so carefully and in the face of so
much opposition, died with him. So did FDR’s ability to deal with Joseph
Stalin, the Russian leader, in a partly even-handed way. President Truman
immediately came under the influence of conservatives like Jimmy Byrnes of
South Carolina, the military, Wall Streeters, and the southern senators who
controlled much of the Senate. When he learned that the United States had
successfully exploded an atomic device, the diffident son who had always been
bullied at school became a cock of the walk. He dominated and threatened Stalin
at the Potsdam conference, and he heartily approved the bombing of Hiroshima
and then Nagasaki, even though the Japanese had already signaled they were
defeated, and even in the face of contrary advice from some on his general
staff. And thereafter, he bought completely into the concept of the Cold War
with the Soviet Union that dominated world affairs for the second half of the
twentieth century.
No one knows, of
course, what might have happened if Henry Wallace had been allowed the victory
he clearly deserved at that 1944 convention. Or if he had been successful in
his independent run for the presidency as a Progressive in 1948 (he lost badly,
viciously tarred as a Communist, and finishing behind even the Dixiecrat, Strom
Thurmond). But given his record as a man who wanted peace instead of conflict,
who understood that cooperation rather than competition was the only way
forward for a world weary of war and selfishness, we can speculate. As early as
1933, in one of his first speeches as Agriculture Secretary, he said to the
Federal Council of Churches that “the world is one world.” In the Fall of that
same year, he said in a radio broadcast, “Selfishness has ceased to be the
mainspring of progress…there is something more…There is a new social machinery
in the making.” In 1941, in answer to Time/Life
publisher Henry Luce’s claim that the twentieth century was poised to become
the ‘American Century,’ a time of unparalleled power and domination for the
United States, Wallace countered with his most famous utterance, the
Century-of-the-Common-Man speech:
Some have spoken of the “American Century.” I say that
the century on which we are entering—the century which will come out of this
war—can be and must be the century of the common man. Everywhere the common man
must learn to build his own industries with his own hands in a practical
fashion…No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older
nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the push
to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic
imperialism…the people’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his
angels cannot prevent it.
Finally, and on a similar theme, he
said in a 1957 interview with Rexford Tugwell that what all people need is a
“Declaration of Interdependence, a recognition of our essential unity and our
absolute reliance upon one another.”
This is not to
say that Henry A. Wallace never made a mistake, or would have been an effective
president. One never knows about that. But given what has happened to others
who ascended to that high office (Harry Truman comes immediately to mind, whom
Wallace described in his diary as “a small, opportunistic man, a man of good
instincts, but therefore probably all the more dangerous”), we might expect
that something similar would have happened to Wallace. We might also expect
that much of the suffering and wastage of American treasure that has been sunk
into wars and preparation for wars and propaganda about the alleged strength of
our enemies necessitating wars might have been avoided. We might also
expect—especially from his behavior on the campaign trail in 1948, when he
refused to abide by segregationist laws in the South and openly drove alongside
his Negro secretary—that the endlessly delayed road to full civil rights for
African Americans and full economic rights for them and all Americans might
have taken a front, rather than a back seat in our national affairs. How
refreshing, how salutary, how even salvational that might have been.
Lawrence DiStasi
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