Progressive Party, 1948

PROGRESSIVE PARTY, 1948. The last major expression of the Popular Front politics of the New Deal period, the Progressive Party was founded in 1948 to oppose the Truman administration’s Cold War policies and the domestic anticommunist, anti-labor, and anti–civil liberties campaigns that accompanied those policies. Former vice president Henry Wallace, who had embodied Left New Deal political values for millions by his wartime advocacy of a “Century of the Common Man,” based on prolabor and anti-monopoly policies in the United States, and U.S.-Soviet cooperation through the United Nations to internationalize New Deal reforms, was the presidential candidate of the party. The Communist Party and its activists in the Congress of Industrial Organizations and other mass movements served as the Progressive Party’s leading grass-roots organizing force, joining with non-communists to try to organize mass opposition to the Cold War and to save both the substance and the style of the labor- and social-welfare-oriented New Deal politics that had given the Left in the 1930s and 1940s its greatest influence in U.S. history.

Centering on the presidential election, the Progressive Party had hoped to draw millions of working-class and minority voters away from the Democrats, and early polls showed Wallace getting as many as eight million votes (party strategists saw four million as necessary for a successful campaign). However, Truman’s shift to a Left New Deal election strategy (deemphasizing the Cold War, identifying with a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform, and calling for national health insurance, protection for small farmers, proconsumer price controls, and repeal of the anti-trade union Taft-Hartley Act) combined with massive bipartisan red-baiting against the Progressives to doom their efforts. Wallace ultimately polled 1,157,140 votes, 2.4 percent of the total ballots cast. The Progressive Party lived on after 1948 in an atmosphere of mounting repression, running San Francisco labor lawyer Vincent Hallinan and Charlotta Bass, a black activist, for president and vice president on an anti-Korean War platform in 1952 before it finally went out of existence. Hallinan garnered only 140,000 votes.

However, it was never a real national force after the 1948 campaign, in which its failure to win over significant numbers of New Deal coalition voters from the Democrats served as a signal to right-wing forces in the Congress of Industrial Organizations to purge Communist-led Left unions, and as a signal to the Truman administration and the conservative coalition in Congress to broaden and deepen their anticommunist campaign. This campaign included trials of the Communist Party national leadership and the Hiss and Rosenberg political “espionage” trials, and was followed by the enactment of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. This act established the Subversive Activities Control Board and made provisions for the establishment of political concentration camps.

Internationally, the Progressive Party’s political failure removed a domestic deterrent to the broadening of the Truman administration’s Cold War interventionism into the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, the building of the hydrogen bomb after the Soviets developed an atomic bomb in 1949, and the involvement of U.S. troops in the Korean War (1950–1953). Internally, its defeat encouraged many in the New Deal coalition to either follow the redefinition of New Deal politics into Cold War terms represented by the organizations like the Americans for Democratic Action, politicians like Senator Hubert Humphrey, and political intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or to retreat from political activism in disillusionment, struggling to map out private space and expand personal freedom in new academic or artistic subcultures.

Without underestimating the short-term significance of its defeat, it is important to remember that many stands pioneered by the Progressive Party campaign in 1948 would be vindicated in later struggles. Henry Wallace’s challenge of segregation in southern campaign meetings, the party’s emphasis on women’s rights and commitment to functional representation for minorities and women in its organization and conventions, and its calls for direct meetings between the U.S. president and the Soviet premier to settle Cold War conflicts (all of which were condemned at the time as extreme or subversive) were harbingers of later civil rights, women’s rights, and peace struggles (in which Progressive Party supporters sometimes played important roles).

Also, the Progressive Party’s attacks on the alliance of Wall Street and the Pentagon was a harbinger of subsequent critiques of a military-industrial complex and a permanent war economy. Finally, as the rise of Senator Joe McCarthy and the subsequent effects of Cold War internventionism in Vietnam and other parts of the world showed, the Party’s stand against a “bipartisan” anticommunist national policy as leading to reaction and war was borne out.

MacDougall, Curtis. Gideon’s Army. 3 vols. New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965.

Markowitz, Norman D. The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948. New York: Free Press, 1973.

Schmidt, Karl M. Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1960.