The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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Party had abandoned what was visionary in its past to become the managerial party of Bill Clinton and the surrender caucus that showed up whenever the party was in a position to prevail. For some, it was sufficient to see President Clinton and the New Democrats as the source of the disease. But that was also shallow. The Democratic Party began pulling its punches long before both Clintons arrived on the scene.
The more I traced the roots of the decay of a party that could not beat Nixon or Reagan or George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush or Donald Trump, the closer I got to the last days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency—and to the great unraveling that began when Harry Truman was maneuvered onto the 1944 Democratic ticket by the party bosses and Southern segregationists who knew FDR was dying and wanted to bury the New Deal with him. Truman, who was willing to compromise with the bosses, established a pattern of ideological and strategic concession by the party that extends to this day. But Truman did not just grab the nomination, the vice presidency and the promise of the presidency in a vacuum. He came to power after a struggle. The more I focused on that definitional fight, the clearer it became that the lost soul of the Democratic Party was a man. And his name was Henry Wallace.
Wallace has been so thoroughly written out of our popular history that he is often confused with a politician who was his polar opposite, Alabama segregationist George Wallace. Even those who know bits and pieces of the good Wallace’s story imagine him as a tragic figure who, after a brief moment of New Deal glory, was ruined by the excesses of his idealism. Wallace was an idealist; arguably, with Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie and A. Philip Randolph, one of the greatest idealists among the cadre of dreamers who remade America in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Indeed, the bare-bones biography of Henry Wallace is sufficient to identify him as one of the most striking political figures in U.S. history.
A progressive Republican editor and farmer from Iowa who supported Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign that realigned American politics, Wallace became an original member of FDR’s cabinet and turned the Department of Agriculture into the roaring engine of the New Deal. He so impressed the president that, in 1940, Roosevelt forced the Democratic Party to accept Wallace as his running mate in an audacious bid for a third term. After an overwhelming election victory on the eve of World War II, Wallace emerged as the liberal conscience of the administration, championing the fight against fascism abroad and racism at home. He was controversial and so uncompromising that the bosses took advantage of an ailing and distracted Franklin Roosevelt to force him off the ticket in 1944, making way for the more malleable Truman. Yet FDR kept him close, making Wallace his secretary of commerce for a fourth term in which the original New Dealers dreamed of advancing the radical vision of Four Freedoms abroad and an Economic Bill of Rights at home.
When Roosevelt died in 1945, the dream began to fade. Yet Wallace refused to give it up. He fought for a time within the Democratic Party, objecting to Truman’s compromises at home and abroad. He warned of the dawning of a Cold War—and of the domestic Red Scare that would extend from it. He attempted to maintain the popular-front coalition that had elected and re-elected Roosevelt, welcoming farm-state populists and urban intellectuals, civil rights campaigners and the defenders of immigrants, feminists and militant trade unionists, socialists and communists.
Wallace was no communist; he was a progressive capitalist who preached the anti-monopoly gospel of the upper Midwest, and who believed that honest competition and diplomacy as opposed to militarism and hubris could keep the postwar peace. As FDR and Willkie had before their deaths, Wallace refused to be drawn into the anti-Communist fervor that the monopolists and the segregationists had ginned up in hopes of undoing the unity of antifascist purpose that had moved America well to the left during World War II. He was skeptical of the Soviet Union. He recognized it as a rival, and a threat. Yet Wallace refused to accept that the threat would be well or wisely answered with a “cold war.” Even as his reservations regarding the Soviets grew, Wallace held out for diplomacy, and for peace.
At home, Wallace recognized the dark machinations of the economic royalists who sought to renew the supremacy they had enjoyed in the pre–New Deal moment. He warned, even before the war was finished, that wealthy and powerful men would seek to divide the nation in order to further enrich and empower themselves. Wallace dared to identify the threat posed by these men as that of an “American Fascism,” just as he dared to compare homegrown racists with the Nazis of Germany. He spoke these dangerous truths before it was fashionable, and for this he was labeled a communist dupe, a mystic, a zealot.
The Democrats who feared a new New Deal, and who were not prepared to fight as hard to “win the peace” as they had to win World War II, determined to erase the memory of the man who fought the hardest to maintain FDR’s legacy. They largely succeeded, but in so doing they undid the visionary ambition that had characterized their party in the period of its greatest strength. This is a tragic story of abandoned values and missed opportunities.
Wallace made the work of his rivals easier. He gave up on the Democratic Party and in 1948 mounted a poorly thought-out and ill-timed independent Progressive presidential bid. While the threat that Wallace’s candidacy posed would briefly pull Truman to the left, it failed to pull many votes. And it gave Wallace’s detractors an opening to unleash a furious assault on the man they portrayed as clueless and calculating, marginal and dangerous. Wallace made plenty of political missteps, and this book does not imagine that they should be ignored. In fact, it focuses on a number of them. But the antiracist, antisexist champion of peace and progress ended up on the right side of history far more frequently than his critics.
After the collapse of his desperate 1948 bid to forge a “Gideon’s Army,” Wallace was consigned to the political wilderness. He retreated to a farm in upstate New York, where the man whose proposals to reform capitalism were ridiculed as naïve engaged in pioneering agricultural research. His work would eventually revolutionize farming and form the basis for multibillion-dollar endeavors. He built a fortune so great that, to this day, it helps to sustain the Wallace Global Fund’s support for struggles against racism and violence, poverty and disease, climate change and the rise of the corporate state.
The fund maintains the memory of its namesake, recalling that “Henry A. Wallace was deeply concerned by what he saw as the rise of a corporatist state that concentrates power in the hands of the few and wields unchecked authority at the expense of the common good.” It takes as its mission the work of promoting “an informed and engaged citizenry, to fight injustice and to protect the diversity of nature and the natural systems upon which all life depends.”
That is a fair assessment of what Henry Wallace was all about, a subject that this book will examine in significantly more detail in Chapter 1. The ensuing chapters set the scene for and explore the fights that he waged not only against segregationists and party bosses but also, more importantly, against the surrender of the New Deal ethic of going big and going bold. These chapters rely heavily on Wallace’s own words, quoting at length from the speeches and articles the man produced during those few years when everything was up for grabs. They draw also from the champions and the critics of Wallace in his time, from the inheritors of his legacy and from the historians who have wrestled with it. They conclude with an extended examination of the ongoing struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party that began in July 1944 and remains unresolved. The final interviews were done on the 2020 campaign trail.
The story of the party’s rejection of Wallace, and of the bolder, more visionary politics that he proposed, tells us much that we need to know—not just about the decline of Democrats from the New Deal era to now, but about the decay of our politics in general. And, more hopefully, about the prospects for reversing that decline and decay.
For 75 years, the Democratic Party has refused to unify around the principles that Wallace outlined in his address to the 1944 Democratic National Convention. “The future,” Wallace proposed, “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 1944, the party bosses and the segregationist senators who aligned with them thought Wallace’s calculus was wrong. The partisan descendants of those who constrained the Democratic Party’s vision then have never stopped trying to constrain it.
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