Progressive Presidential Campaigns, Conclusion

 

I have been accused over and over of being harsher on the left in my political then the right. The reason I have been is not because I view their ideology worse then the other side. On the contrary, I have no problem with progressive values not only today but historically. Our country has always been better when it chooses to lead the masses rather than follow and Progressives have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to values.

But over and over again when it comes to the left, we see that their approach to democracy has been the other side of the coin when it comes to conservatism: no matter which political party they are a part of, they are always in the minority. And in a democracy, being on the right side of history is meaningless if you don’t have a method to get your goals accomplished. And from the abolitionists to the Radical Republicans to the La Follette Progressives and the Gideon’s Army of Henry Wallace there has never been a democratic method to their righteousness. The old adage “I’d Rather Be Right Than Be President’ doesn’t apply to political leftists the same way. They know they’re right, so they don’t want to be President or even in a position to get legislation passed by just means. If that means running roughshod over anyone who gets in their way, even if that happens to be the majority of the American people, well, they’ll thank us for it down the road.

Almost from the start so many political leftists have argued in the combination of jeremiad and iconoclast, from Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens of the Radical Republicans to Robert La Follette of the Progressives to William Jennings Bryan. Their ideology is right more often then not but they would rather preach their gospel to the faithful then try to broaden their message and win elections and get their goals accomplished. As a result, they have just enough of a following to control certain aspects of the party mechanism but never enough to win on their own and get their ends accomplished. La Follette made it very clear the year he joined the Senate that getting legislation through Congress was not his ultimate goal, that he had little use for democracy as it worked at the time and that no President had a platform progressive enough to satisfy him. He wasn’t always right but he was never wrong even when he contradicted himself in his voting, such as when he voted against entry into World War I and against ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. For most of his career in Congress La Follette viewed himself alone as what Progressivism should represent and those who stood against him were enemies of progress.

Had La Follette been willing to work with a Progressive like Theodore Roosevelt rather than view him as an obstacle, the progressives might have eventually become the overriding wing of the Republican Party. Instead the battle he had with TR for the Republican nomination in 1912 was so brutal that he refused to see the larger truths that it was more a battle of personality then anything else. Had he led his progressive with TR into the Bull Moose Party, they might have had a better chance of winning the Presidency in 1912 and perhaps become a national party in their own right. Instead La Follette chose to essentially sit out the 1912 campaign. He was the definition of so many of today’s progressives who don’t vote because they truly believed both parties are the same. The Bull Moose platform wasn’t but La Follette was so blinded by his contempt for his enemies that he destroyed his long term ambitions.

T.R. can’t be held blameless either, of course. Had he been willing to get out of the way in 1912, he would likely have been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. But as with La Follette, there was a refusal to compromise and a decision that the party had to be all about him. When he had no use for it four years later, it collapsed and the consequences were far greater then one election. T.R’s defection from the causes was part of the slow process of the left leaving the Republican party and the party moving more to the right. They would mostly be in the center for the next half century but eventually the moderates completely left which has led to the fact that the far right is the entire Republican Party.

Of course some progressive Republicans did end up going to the Democratic party. One of the most prominent was Harold Ickes, who after La Follette’s 1924 third party run endorsed Democratic candidates. Eventually he became a key member of FDR’s administration. Many of La Follette’s followers, including George Norris and Burton Wheeler – La Follette’s running mate in 1924 – would become key supporters of the New Deal.

Yet part of me wonders if La Follette had lived until 1932, whether he would have gone that far. La Follette spent his entire career arguing that no President could truly accomplish a Progressive platform other than him. One could easily see him shrugging of the New Deal the same way he did Wilson’s platform as ‘weak sauce’ and that one Roosevelt was as bad as another. He would no doubt have seen the fact that so many of his ilk following FDR in 1932 as tantamount to treason, even if his own son chose to do so. Even in the midst of the greatest crisis of our time, I could see La Follette choosing to sit the 1932 election out.

And this same level of intractability was to be found in many of his followers. Ickes was an often prickly presence in FDR’s administration with little use even for men like Henry Wallace. His loyalty to the Democratic Party was almost entirely to FDR  and when Truman forced him to resign as Secretary of Interior he took it personally. He spent much of the next two years openly campaigning against Truman, first in giving his reputation behind Henry Wallace, but refusing to join his campaign. He sat out the Democratic Convention and it was not until October that he half-heartedly endorsed Truman, mainly because he detested the alternative. He didn’t believe for a moment Truman could win. He died before the 1952 Presidential campaign could begin but it’s hard to imagine him having any patience for any candidate who came afterward.

Sadly the Progressive Candidate that has the most pertinence to today’s politics is Henry Wallace. Like all progressives, he had a loyal following and would listen to almost no one else. The fact that he wasn’t a politician would be considered a strength by today’s leftists, not a weakness. The most devoted followers of him were intellectuals and celebrities. His strongest support came from New York and California – the coastal elites. The level of how the Progressive convention played out is the definition of how one could see any convention of leftists working – intellectuals talking to half-empty galleries and refusing to accept the slightest dissent from their ridiculous positions. Even the fact that there was no path to victory and that they chose not to support viable candidates for Congress and gubernatorial races is completely in keeping with the leftist mindset of purity above all else. They had one goal: to deny Harry Truman electoral victory. They failed at that, cut themselves out of power in Democratic circles and helped bring about the worst of the McCarthy era.

And from that point on, the left has basically decided that the only role that they want to have in electoral politics is to disrupt the order of things. One sees in Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire challenge in 1968 that would eventually drive LBJ from office. That McCarthy had no interest in running for President and no campaign for the nomination after LBJ chose not to seek renomination going forward did nothing to dissuade young leftists from endorsing him. That they chose ultimately to stay home rather than vote against Richard Nixon is something the left has refused to acknowledge even today. The left’s current political standpoint can be seen solely to play spoiler. There is a line from Wallace’s 1948 run to Nader’s run in 2000, Jill Stein’s in 2016 – and the fact that ten percent of Sanders’ voters chose to vote for Trump that same year.

Aside from that, the left has decided to abdicate any role they have in electoral politics going forward, actually seeming annoyed at even the idea of having to participate in it. What they have essentially done for more than half a century is to endlessly rewrite the history of America so that there are only villains and the left has essentially, since their arrival in the country, been innocent bystanders. They are fine arguing America is a racist, xenophobic, nation, only interested in serving the corporate interest and that democracy is a sham. Part of me wonders if they do so with the attitude of sour grapes that the rest of the world has rejected what they know to be right.

Henry Wallace might be amused to know that there is an entire bloc of intellectuals arguing that his positions were right after all. They have little to do with the actual Henry Wallace – they ignore his links to the Soviets and his actual ineptitude towards every aspect of political life. Instead he is a straw man for their arguments that the Cold War was entirely an American invention. It was one of the most hysterical things in Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States where he told us that Stalin would have lived up to his word at Yalta and that he was basically a man of honor. Even Wallace-ites like Pete Seeger eventually admitted the errors of their ways when they saw the gulags in Soviet Russia. For all the arguments against imperialism in the twentieth century, Stalin’s actions in the immediate aftermath of World War II always get a free pass. Today’s left is frequently more compassionate to Stalin then Wallace was.

Even the few leftists who stick with the Democratic Party are rewriting history so that all Republicans are evil and always have been. There will be no mention of Bob La Follette in any progressive newsletter, no mention of Radical Republicans and if TR comes up at all, it’s to argue that he was a bigot. Today’s left would not have argued against the one moral highpoint of Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign – his swing through the Jim Crow South. “You really want to risk your life for those people?”  Today’s left views the South as a country that should have left behind after the Civil War and that all the residents deserve what they get. They will deny that they were the most reliable Democratic voters for eighty years because that means acknowledged the flaws in the idol they currently are supporting. Even the progressives in the South would rather Republicans win elected office than vote for Democrats that they consider only giving them half a loaf. A century later, they still hold to Bob La Follette’s vision of how the world should work and it’s no more tenable today than it was then.

What all three third-party progressive campaigns for President show us is that, sadly, the fundamental message at the core of the left has not changed. Their moral righteousness has always eclipsed the number of people who believe in them and their decision that compromise is a dirty word. If they were willing to work within the system, try to expand beyond the base they had, or be willing to listen to conflicting points of views, they might be able to have greater success and managed to have a bigger impact on the political landscape. Instead, they focus their energy on complaining about the status quo, berating both sides as equally evil even though some of them think one is notably worse, insist on purity campaigns and constantly refuse to acknowledge their principles could survive reality. Social media has made it simpler for them to listen ‘more and more to fewer and fewer people’. They constantly find people like Henry Wallace and say the tragedy of our country is no one listened to him. The reason for their bond with Wallace is because of what he and all these other men did – they refused to listen to anyone who disagreed with them, and it made their goals, however well-meant or righteous, impossible to achieve. That is the true tragedy of these Progressive campaigns – not that any of today’s progressives will ever admit it,  even to themselves.

 

 

 

The Griffith Dynasty, Part 1: Walter Johnson, The Greatest Pitcher Who Ever Lived

One of the great pleasures of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary were the interview sections with Shirley Povich, the sportswriter for the Washington Post. (Yes, Povich was a man but that didn’t stop him from being listed in ‘Who’s Who’s Among American Women”  Even though it made clear that at the time he was a father of three.)

Povich started writing for the Post in 1924, covered sports for half a century and was still alive to write an article when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak in 1995. Throughout the documentary we got the pleasure of hearing Povich read excerpts from some of the baseball articles he wrote over the years, including his coverage of Bobby Thomson’s ‘Shot Heard Around the World’ and his article about the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series in 1955.

Povich was one of the most famous sportswriters of sportswriter’s most famous eras. Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner were the most famous writers from that period, as much for their fiction as their sports-writing. Others like Ford Frick would move up in the baseball establishment later on. But Povich remembered the players from the 1920s. And it has been hard to forget just how much esteem he held Walter Johnson:

“He’s referred to as a legend. A legend, according to Webster…is a bit mythical. There’s nothing mythical about Walter Johnson. He existed, and he was probably the greatest pitcher who ever lived.”

Here’s the thing. I know this. I know that Walter Johnson lived. There’s photographic evidence, there’s film footage. There are interviews of him, there are box scores of games he’s played. There have been countless books written about him and one that I am using a source material. I know Walter Johnson lived and played baseball. But when you see what he accomplished as a pitcher…well, my brain does wonder if he is some kind of mythic figure, like Paul Bunyan or John Henry were.

And it’s not just Johnson I have the same cognitive dissonance. It’s with so many of the greatest ballplayers of all time. Not the ones with the home run records like Babe Ruth – that you can sort of process given all the slugging we see in the game. No, it’s the .400 hitters and the pitchers of the first twenty to 30 years of the century I can’t wrap my head around.

I mean seriously. Rogers Hornsby averaged better than .400 over a five year period. Shoeless Joe Jackson batted .408 his rookie year and lost the batting title to Ty Cobb? Cobb, for the record, hit. 401 when he was thirty six and lost the battle title to George Sisler who batting .420. That seems even more impossible. Men like Harry Heilmann, who win four batting titles hitting .390 or higher each time,  Napoleon Lajoie who hits .422 in 1902, Tris Speaker hitting 793 doubles… you see their statistics, and you still can’t comprehend it.

And the pitchers of the first two decades of the twentieth century? I realize that we are not supposed to look at things like wins and losses, or ERA, or all the other things but in the case of men like Walter Johnson…I can see a pitching coach of the 1950s berating a rookie for not saying he felt tired after seven innings. “When Walter Johnson was your age, he shutout the Yankees three times in four days.”  It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing any human being could do at any point, and yet Johnson did it.

Walter Johnson had already been signed by the Senators by the time Clark Griffith bought the team in 1912 but by then he was already the greatest player they’d ever have. With many franchises there are debates as to who the greatest hitter and pitcher to wear the uniform was. Many of the less successful expansion franchises – the Padres and the Marlins the most obvious ones – have fewer contender. For the sixty years the Senators were in D.C., there was never any debate. For all the nostalgia factor which sportswriters are more than guilty of abusing, it is hard to argue that Povich might actually be understating the case.

One has to acknowledge that pitchers in the first twenty years of the twentieth century had advantages their successors never would. A pitcher’s first job when he got the ball was to dirty it up. The spitball was not only legal back then but was one of the least of the tactics in the pitchers arsenal. It was rubbed with an emery board, blackened with shoe polish, cut with rings. All of these things were completely legal and understood by players of the era.

As a result when the ball was hit, it didn’t travel far. Home runs were not only not prioritized, they were incidental to strategy. ‘The inside game’  was what flourished and all players of that era had to use speed in a way they just don’t these days. Almost all of the major stolen base leaders occurred during the 1900s and 1910s as well. Ty Cobb was not just a brilliant high average hitter, but he was also the most dominant baserunner. Most of the great hitters of that era – Cobb, Lajoie, Speaker and Eddie Collins – all stole over 700 bases in their careers. All ball players knew how to steal bases to create runs. In 1911, the year Griffith bought the Senators the World Series featured John McGraw’s Giants against Connie Mack’s A’s. The Giants had stolen a record 341 bases that year while Mack’s A’s stole 228. In that series third baseman Frank Baker, earned the nickname ‘Home Run’ because he hit two to win consecutive World Series games not because he led the American League in homers – with 11.

That year Walter Johnson went 25-13, struck out 207, threw 6 shutouts and had a 1.89 ERA. By his standards. He’d gone 25-17 the previous year with a 1.32 ERA, struck out 313 and threw 8 shutouts. These are gaudy statistics by today’s standards but it’s clear they’re only half the story when you consider how microscopic his ERA was – and yet he was in double digits in losses both years. This gets to the other reason Povich thought Johnson was undervalued:

“New York sportswriters are determined to make Christy Mathewson the greatest pitcher who ever lived and they tend to ignore Johnson. They couldn’t do this because Johnson was superior to Mathewson in every way. If Johnson had pitched for a team with the winning percentage of Mathewson’s Giants, there’d be no comparison.”

And it is here why Johnson’s statistics are half the story. Because he won 417 games in his long career – by far the most in the 20^th century and second only to Cy Young. But despite having a lifetime earned run average of 2.17,  he also lost 279 games, the fourth most of all time. Another statistic drives the point home further. Johnson was involved in 64 1-0 games and he lost 26 of them. That also strikes a chord of myth: “He was the greatest pitcher whoever lived and he pitched for the least offensive team that ever existed.”

And that’s before you get to what may be the most astonishing thing. Walter Johnson accomplished what he did with one pitch. He had no curveball to speak off, didn’t use trick pitches and we don’t know whether the spitball was prominent. All he had was a fastball. But that fastball…

In Donald Honig’s classic book Baseball America he mentions several names of pitchers who had a fastball at the level of Johnson’s. Lefty Grove, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan. In the forty years since that book was published, one might add two more names: Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson.

Feller and Koufax spent their early careers struggling with control issues and both of them had devastating curveballs. Ryan, as anyone who observed him knows, never resolved his control issues. Grove is the only pitcher who truly can be compared to Johnson and there are many who consider him as great a pitcher as Johnson and possibly better. But when Grove himself was interviewed by Honig, he made it very clear that Johnson threw harder than him.

We will never know how fast Johnson’s pitch was because, unlike his successors, he lived in an age where radar guns did not exist. What evidence we have is anecdotal and that also sounds like urban legend were it not from players who stood against him. Ray Chapman, shortstop for Cleveland, once left the plate after Johnson had thrown two strikes. He was told he had one swing left. “You can have the next one,” he told the umpire. “It won’t do me any good.” He was declared out. Birdie Cree, a veteran outfielder once said there was only one way to hit Johnson. “When you see the arm start forward, swing.”

Ty Cobb thought Johnson was the greatest pitcher who ever lived. The first time he saw him pitch in 1907 the future batting champion of the American League told his teammates that he had the fastest pitch he’d ever seen. The two men would be almost exact contemporaries in baseball, Johnson’s career would end the year before Cobbs. Cobb told people the only way he’d been able to get hits off Johnson was by essentially cheating. He knew that Johnson was afraid of killing a man with his fastball, so he’d crowd the plate making sure Johnson pitched him wide. He got 83 hits off Johnson, 64 of them were singles and he never tried to get anything bigger. “If you swung (against him) you were dead,” he said years later.

Mere mortals had no chance. Walter Johnson’s major league record of 3508 strikeouts would stand for 56 years, until it was surpassed by Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton and Gaylord Perry in 1983. Many more have passed it since, but all pitched an era where the batters swung more freely. Johnson would lead the league in strikeouts twelve times and while Nolan Ryan tied him for that many, no one else has come close to surpassing it. Of course players must have gotten hits against him – he gave up more than 5000 – but aside from Cobb, few would openly claim it.

Outpitching him, though, that was a feather in your cap than many of the greats were proud of – and not all of them were pitchers by trade. George Sisler would hit .340 lifetime and bat over .400 twice but when asked of his greatest accomplishment, it was that when he came up as a pitcher for St. Louis he managed to defeat Johnson – twice. Babe Ruth, in the course of his 1916 season with the Boston Red Sox, went 23-12 with a 1.75 ERA and nine shutouts. That year he was the best pitcher in baseball and that was including Walter Johnson. Johnson went 25-20 with a 1.89 ERA. Ruth pinned five of those defeats on his record that season.

But the most famous rival of Walter Johnson was a left-hander named Smoky Joe Wood. In 1912, Johnson  went 32-12 with a 1.39 ERA, seven shutouts and 303 strikeouts. It was one of the greatest seasons in baseball history – and that year he was outpitched by Wood who went 34-5 with ten shutouts. That year Johnson himself said no man alive threw harder than Smoky Joe Wood.

That year Johnson set an American League record with 16 consecutive victories, all managed between July 3 and August 23. But on July 8^th, Wood began his own streak and on September 6^th, he was gunning for his fourteenth. The Senators were scheduled to play at Fenway Park and according to legend, Johnson told Wood: “Joe, if you want to beat my record, you will have to beat me. “ Wood wasn’t scheduled to start for another day, but according to him he said: “All right, Walter. I’ll see you tomorrow and we can settle it.”

There was no meanness, the two men were amicable and genuinely respected each other. The Boston papers played it up like a heavyweight fight, comparing their height, weight, and measurements of their arms. More than 30,000 Bostonians filled the newly built Fenway Park to see the match.

It was, as you’d expect, a 1-0 game, and Wood prevailed. Wood fanned 9, walked three and gave up just six hits. Johnson struck out five, walked one and gave up five. The lone run was scored in the sixth. With two out, Tris Speaker doubled to left. Duffy Lewis did the same to right, with right fielder Danny Moeller leaping for ball and just missing it. After the game Moeller approached Johnson in tears for his blunder. Johnson didn’t blame him. “I should have struck him out,” he told Moeller.

Wood would go on to win sixteen consecutive games himself. The mark would be tied by Lefty Grove in 1931 and Schoolboy Rowe in 1934. Wood capped his season with three wins over the Giants in the World Series, including a relief stint in the final game that gave the championship to the Red Sox. However, the next April he slipped while fielding, and broke his thumb. While he pitched well when he could – he actually led the league in ERA in 1915 – he was never the same. Still he remained a legend, living well into his nineties – and insisting until the day he died that Walter Johnson threw harder than him.

History consistently says that the three greatest pitchers of all time were Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Grover Cleveland Alexander. They are always talked of in the same breath, but they rarely saw each other: Mathewson and Alexander both pitched their entire careers in the National League and when Alexander began his career in 1911, Mathewson was on the slow descent of his.

But Alexander’s peak was pretty much around the same time as Walter Johnson’s. In his first 7 seasons from 1911 to 1917, the two men were pitching at a level that their rivals in each league could not match. A comparison is more than fitting:

In Alexander’s first seven years he went 190-88. He went 28-13 his rookie year with 260 strikeouts. He had three consecutive seasons of thirty wins or more, from 1915-1917. In 1915, he pitched four one-hitters. In 1916, he threw an incredible 16 shutouts.

During this same period, Johnson went 197-99, which is close to the same winning percentage. In 1913, he went 36-7 with a 1.09 earned run average and eleven shutouts.

  Johnson led the American League in strikeouts every year from 1912-1917. Alexander matched him every year except for 1913. Alexander led the National League in wins five times during this period and in shutouts five times. Johnson led the league in wins four times during this period and shutouts four times. And just like Johnson, Alexander did not have much of an offense to work with when he was pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies. They managed to contend during this period almost entirely on his shoulders, winning the National League Pennant in 1915 and finishing second in 1913, 1916 and 1917.

Johnson, however, didn’t have the same luck. Johnson’s pitching was the key factor in the Senators being in contention during the first years of Griffith’s ownership. They got to second place in 1912 and 1913 and third in 1914. But after that, they began to slide into the second division. And this was an agony to Johnson. Because while Mathewson and Alexander were tasting the World Series at least once and some of his great rivals such as Ed Walsh of the White Sox and Eddie Plank of the A’s made multiple trips to the Series during this period the Senators never could.

During the peak of Johnson’s career, the American League was dominated by dynasties: Cobb’s Tigers from 1907-1909, Connie Mack’s A’s from 1910-1914 and the Red Sox and White Sox taking all the ones that were left. In 1920 The Indians won their first World Championship. By 1921 the Yankees had won their first pennant and  by 1923 their first World Championship.

By that point the hitters were in full control and Johnson was clearly on the downside of his career. He was still capable of pitching well, by the standards of a thirty-five and thirty-six year old, leading the league in strikeouts in 1922 and 1923. But his peak seemed behind him and by 1923 he was considering hanging it up. He had decided before spring training began in 1924 that would be his final season as a pitcher.

He had no reason to believe – nor did anyone in Washington – know what glories were coming at the end of the season.

In the next article I will deal with the 1924 Season, the pennant race and the triumphs of Walter Johnson that led to a glorious World Series.

Lost Rewatch On VHS: Dead is Dead

 

VHS Notes:  Not much to report that hasn’t been there the last few weeks. We see trailers for the forgettable sequel to the forgettable Jason Statham vehicle Crank, for the Channing Tatum-Terrence Howard vehicle Fighting and for the Robert Downey, Jr. Jamie Foxx weepie The Soloist, which would turn out to be the lesser Downey feature in 2009. (He’d play the title character in the Guy Ritchie reimagining of Sherlock Holmes.)

 

This episode is significant for a couple of dubious reasons. The first is this particular episode was watched by the fewest viewers in Lost’s history, well below 10 million viewers. It’s also the episode that features the fewest cast members from Season 1 and indeed all of Season 5. (Three characters who will be regulars in the final season, however, do appear and are all critical to the story.)

I have no idea why this episode was not watched by more fans, considering that it centered on Ben, and given the teaser we got at the end of last week’s episode it sounded very much like Ben was going to face some kind of punishment for his actions. Unlike many teasers, including some that Lost had done, this preview was accurate. Ben Linus does face judgment for his action and it’s worth noting from a character standpoint, after this episode Ben is never the same again.

In hindsight Dead is Dead represents a critical point in the story. Up until this point Ben has been considered such a monster that when Sayid shot the young Ben Linus, an action Darlton was certain would lead to immense hostility from the fans, most viewers were actually okay with it. Some may very well have been rooting for Ben to die, despite whatever Miles said in the previous episode about it being impossible. Despite whatever we might hear about whether Ben or Widmore was the villain in the piece, by this point it was purely a judgment of the lesser of two evils. We’d had sympathy for Ben after Alex’s death for a bit but all of our sympathy for that had been gone watching Ben’s actions to manipulate the Oceanic 6 so that he could return to the island. Young Ben might be sympathetic but grown-up Ben had shown no sign of being anything but evil incarnate. Even when Ben tells Locke that he was going to be judged, it’s second nature that not for a moment do we truly believe it. This is Ben, he lies without even thinking once.

But this episode is significant in how it shifts how the viewer forever sees Ben. Though we don’t know it, watching this episode Ben becomes more honest than we’ve seen him be in the entire series to this point. Some is inadvertent, to be sure but he’s more candid in Dead is Dead than he has been to this point. The flashbacks show a different side to Ben, one that we’ve no experience with. And by the time the episode ends we see that Ben, who has seemed the ultimate manipulator of events for nearly three seasons, is now a position where he is truly powerless and that begins to undo him in a way that not even the events of Season 4 did.

It’s fitting that the theme of the episode deals with Ben’s breaking the rules because all of the episodes that have centered on Ben have broken the rules of how episodes centering on a character work. In ‘The Man Behind The Curtain’ we saw Ben’s birth, how he was a child in the Dharma Initiative and how as an adult he participated in the Purge. All of the previous flashbacks had dealt with events in relatively close succession; this was the first that dealt with huge passages of time between some of them. In The Shape of Things to Come we saw a flashforward that was different from the ones we’d already seen; Ben’s spent much of the episode traveling the globe in a way none of the other characters had done. Now in Dead is Dead we have a flashback (or flashforward, depending on how you look at it) that breaks the rules of the ones we’ll see in Season 5. It spans nearly thirty years, takes place almost entirely on the island and jumps a decade between each set. Holding them together is Ben’s conflict with Widmore as we see the true nature of what has been a thirty year struggle for control over the island.

Because the final season did much to undercut almost everything we had learned about Charles Widmore during the previous two seasons one could look at what we see here as meaningless to the plot of Lost. But it is relevant and both powerful because Widmore and Ben have been parallel to each other for the last two seasons particularly involving struggles for power. The flashbacks do an incredible job of this in a way they rarely do and much of it is because of the masterful work of Alan Dale in what is really his finest hour on Lost.

We’ve already known Widmore was capable of violence even as a teenager in 1954 and it’s clear little has changed when we first meet him. He snaps as Richard when he learns that he has acted to heal the young Ben Linus and only falls back when he is told that Jacob wanted it to happen. We have no idea if this is the case but the mention of Jacob is enough to cause Widmore to back off, even though he clearly disagrees. In their first scene together, it’s clear Widmore is trying to find a way to manipulate this young, healing boy and put him under his palm.

Ten years later Widmore sends Ben (and apparently a very young Ethan) on a mission to kill Rousseau. Clearly Widmore is following the Other party line that outsiders are a threat to the island and he wants to see if Ben has the mettle to be a triggerman. Twenty-five year old Ben clearly doesn’t have what it takes yet (the Purge hasn’t happened yet) and he can’t bring himself to kill either Rousseau or the infant Alex. Whether Ben is being merciful or a monster depends on how you look at it; while he does spare Danielle’s life, his opinion both of her or his abduction of Alex never change in sixteen years. He justifies it by saying Danielle is insane, but he never considers that this action might have driven her over the edge.

Widmore no doubt proves that his actions were correct; he would have had no problem killing both of them and has no regard for Alex as a human being. Ben challenges Widmore in front of the camp, again bringing Jacob’s name into play – and once again Widmore storms off. We never know what the factor is that leads to Ben usurping Widmore as leader of the Others but the fact that Richard witnesses the event – and has never felt much about Widmore – may be the turning point.

Roughly ten years later Ben watches as Widmore is officially exiled from the island. Despite what he tells Widmore we know Ben is there to gloat. We know based on what we saw in Season 4 that Ben is guilty of much the same sins Widmore is when it comes to leaving the island so this isn’t about breaking the rules. Ben tells Widmore that he will never lead the island the same way Widmore did, and as we have seen Ben’s leadership wasn’t really much better. Ben always told us that everything he did was for the island, but much of the time that was an excuse for what he thought was good for the island. When Ben learned he had a fatal tumor on his spine and two days later John Locke managed to walk out of the wreckage of Oceanic 815 Ben knew that things were changing on the island and that those changes were not likely to include him.

He spent the next hundred days trying to be the Wizard of Oz but it was clear that his time was over. (If Richard hadn’t been off the island when the crash happened, it might have ended sooner.) All of his actions since he left the island have been getting revenge on his enemies and manipulating the Oceanic 6 so that he could come back to the island and lead again. If he really was going to be judged, it’s clearly because he thought if he survived he’d be worthy.

And then he wakes up and sees John Locke, the man he killed, standing over him. Because Ben is such a good liar when he tells John that he knew this would happen – and because the viewer has expected it – we believe him. But it’s clear watching Ben in this episode that’s he unsettled in a way he never has been ever since we met him three years ago.

Both Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson take their acting game to new levels in their scenes together. It’s always wonderful whenever these two are onscreen together, but the viewer can sense the difference now in both men. Ben knows that the dynamics between him and Locke have shifted forever and he’s clearly unsettled by John’s presence in a way he never was before. For all that Locke may tell Sun that’s he the same man he always was, we know this isn’t the truth because the old Locke isn’t afraid or even nervous around Ben anymore. Indeed, he spends much of the episode cheerfully smiling, cracking jokes about how all the awful things Ben does and using a sarcasm bordering on snideness around Ben we’ve never seen. (My all time favorite line in Season Five comes when Ben, after stumbling around explaining why he killed Locke and that it all worked out, Locke looks at him and says serenely: “I was just hoping for an apology.” Hysterical.) The power that we see of Emerson in the flashbacks is mirrored by how completely off-kilter Ben is every time Locke says just about anything.

That’s why when he tells Sun that he had no idea John Locke was going to come back from the dead I take him at his word. I realize he may be using the same tone he used around Caesar about Locke where we knew he was lying but I think the only reason he could get away with it was because Caesar was a complete stranger. In the scene in his old house, he’s clearly unnerved to see the photo with the Oceanics in 1977, and he’s equally unsettled to know that Christian told Sun and Frank to wait for John Locke to show up. Ben thought he knew what he was coming back to when he returned to the island, and now it seems he’s deliberately being left behind. And when Locke tells him that he knows how to find the monster, he’s truly rattled. That’s more then clear when he tries to sarcastically ask Locke how he knows all these things about the island and Locke makes it all too clear how the dynamic between them has changed.

So when Locke and Ben go to the Temple we see fear in Ben for the first time in a very long time. It’s not clear even as he summoned the monster in his house whether he truly expected the judgment to come but now he knows it’s coming and he doesn’t expect to survive.

Before we get there we get to the final flashback. It’s the day of Ajira 316 and Ben calls Widmore to tell him that he will get back to the island – and before he does he will keep his word. We see Widmore unsettled for the first time.

The final flashback is a highlight of the season because it demonstrates Ben’s Achilles Heel on the show – he never took Desmond seriously. Not in regard to the Swan, not when it came to dealing with the Looking Glass, not in regard to the freighter when the Oceanics were rescued. When Desmond notices him, he casually turns around and shoots him, not even bothering to see if he’s finished the job. His attention is always on a different agenda. The scene parallels how Ben dealt with Rousseau nearly twenty years ago: he has a gun on an innocent woman and is about to kill her when her child shows up., This time, however, he pays for his inattention as Desmond leaps on Ben, beats him to a pulp and throws him in the water. Perhaps when he tells Sun about wanting to apologize to Desmond, it’s not for what he actually did but for what he might have done: permanently separated a child from its parents.

Now Ben realizes what he has to be judged for, and it is his guilt in the death of Alex. He has spent the last three years trying to blame it on everyone else, first Keamy, then Widmore. Now he realizes that he chose the island over his daughter and as a result he lost both. Locke told him that he wants to be judged for killing his daughter and whether the island can actually do that, it’s clear Ben thinks that he has to be. I also think given how Ben acts in the final minutes that he doesn’t think this is something he can be forgiven for. And as we shall see later on, it is because of that guilt that Ben has become susceptible to the manipulations of the island.

Michael Emerson won his only Emmy for Lost in 2009. I have no idea whether he submitted this episode for consideration; his work is of such high caliber that any of the episodes he appeared it could have gotten it. What I do know is that his work in the final minutes of Dead is Dead is among the best he’s ever done on Lost because it’s a different kind of brilliance. Most of Ben’s power comes from his dialogue but in this scene he says remarkably little and he expresses so much in his face. The wonder when he comes across the pillar in the declination that shows hieroglyphics and as his torch blows out. The resignation as the smoke billows out of the grate and begins to surround him. The emotion as he sees his past – but through the eyes of others and Alex, including the moment he let her die. The shock as the smoke pulls back suddenly and the torch reignites. The amazement as he hears Alex’s voice again and turns around. Then he apologizes and we see tears in his eyes. And the horror as Alex grabs him by the lapels, throws him against the wall and orders him to do every Locke says or she will kill him.

And then he opens his eyes and Alex is gone. He hears Locke coming back with a rope. Then Ben walks out of the darkness. The last lines of the episode are: “It let me live.” And the tone in Ben’s voice and the tears in his eyes make you wonder if he’s now considering if that’s a good thing.

By this point in Lost we know that every character who came to the island was broken in some way. In Dead is Dead we saw that Ben was healed by the island and that he has given his allegiance to it but it found other ways to break him. He clearly returned to the island hoping to be made whole and now he has fractured in a way we haven’t seen before – and in a sense, he’ll never truly be the same. The difference is eventually this destruction will make him whole – though there’s going to be a lot more death before he gets there.

Apples Never Fall Final Assessment

 

Less then two weeks ago when I wrote my initial review of Peacock’s Apples Never Fall I made it clear that, unlike with most adaptions where I try not to read the book before I see the series in order to not bias myself, I had already done so with Lianne Moriarty’s novel. Indeed, I had written as a recommendation for one of my first Book of the Month entries. I said that when I finished watching the series, I would write an assessment going into detail on the differences, whether that affected my enjoyment of the series, and my overall impression of it.

Well I finished the most recent episode today. The fact that I watched all seven episodes in less than two weeks probably means something to those of you who follow my TV reviews over the years; this is as close to binge watching something as I’ve gotten since I completed Dahmer last October  - and it took me a year to even look at that series. That doesn’t necessarily mean Apples Never Fall is a masterpiece at the level of some of the great series of 2024; it just means it was immensely watchable. So now I’ll discuss some of the critical differences between the book and the series, besides the obvious change in the setting

Warning Spoilers for both the book and the movie follow.

For those who might have been disappointed how the mystery resolved itself in the final episode all that means is that showrunner Melanie Marnich was faithful to the original book. There were a couple of changes that in my opinion improved the ending, but I’ll get to those later on. Fundamentally both the series and the book follow the skeleton of the book which is a character study more than a whodunit. Like Big Little Lies (the book and Season 1 of the HBO adaptation) Moriarty uses the structure of a mystery to get below the patina of perfection that exists in an element of our society. In Lies, she looked at the idea of the perfect marriage; in Apples, she looks at the myth of the perfect family.

The series opens with the retirement of Joy and Stan who have spent forty years being the pillar of the Miami community and whose children film a video of how happy their family has been. The entire series tells the story of how much of a lie that this has always been and there are details that have been added that make the changes more obvious.

In the case of Troy (Jake Lacy) he has changed from working to a venture capitalist to working with a charitable foundation. From the beginning of the series he has been having an affair with his boss’ wife and as the show unfolds, it’s clear that he has thought the relationship was far deeper than it actually was. In the episode centering on him Troy gives her a lavish gift which her husband discovers. Out of guilt, he tells him the truth – and her husband explodes on him, for being ungrateful. “I treated you like a son,” he says. Offscreen, Troy beats him to a pulp. But as shocking to him is the fact that the man’s wife is angrier at him for what he’s done and she knows why he did. “You could have a fight with your actual father, so you had one with your surrogate one.” When she walks out the door, Troy is in agony – and that’s when the cops show up.

The story at the center of Troy’s issues with Stan is the same as the book. Stan’s best student, Harry Haddad, was cheating in matches; the two got into a fight and Stan sided with Harry. That night Harry’s father called Stan and told them he was quitting. Harry has become one of the greatest tennis players in history and Stan has never been able to let go of that. In the episode centered on him, Joy reveals that she caused to the split to happen because she was afraid of who Stan was becoming. Just as in the novel, all of the children tend to walk away from both parents in the weeks leading up to Joy’s disappearance. It is for that reason that Troy is now certain that Stan could have killed his mother. “Stan Delaney does not forget,” he tells the cops.

Logan (Connor Merrigan Turner) has changed the most of the characters. In the novel his character is named Roger and he is a college professor, in the series, he works at a marina. In both cases his relationship with a  woman named India has ended before the series begins, mainly because as an adult he is still tied to his parent’s apron strings. He tried to buy the academy but Troy refused to give him the money. He wouldn’t leave Miami because he couldn’t leave his parents behind. And in the weeks leading up to Joy’s disappearance, he keeps trying to play peacemaker but neither Troy nor Stan are willing to accommodate.

Amy (Alison Brie) is more or less the same as she was in the novel, still trying to find a way forward as the oldest child, still clinging to faith in a ridiculous way. When she holds a prayer circle in the episode centered on her, it truly seems to be something that she is making about herself. Most of her story – her relationship with the much younger roommate and her determination to believe her father is innocent – is the same, except for the fact of her depression and the fact that she once tried to kill herself.

Brooke has the biggest shift of all the characters, in regard to the plot. As I mentioned in the original review she is a lesbian who is on the verge of marrying Gina. The biggest shock came when an infuriated Amy tells the police that Brooke “f—ked Savannah. A lot.” And in Brooke’s episode we do see this long-term affair carry on, and that Savannah keeps it going on for much longer than Brooke wants. Eventually we learn Brooke did so because she falsely believed Gina was having an affair when she wasn’t. When Gina learns the truth their relationship is effectively blown up – and in the aftermath of the series, she has the least cheerful future to look forward too.

Another difference is that while in the novel, the Delaney children are divided from the start as to what happened to their mother, as the series progresses all four children increasingly move into the camp that Stan is the murderer to the point that when Stan is arrested at the end of the sixth episode, they are all convinced that their father has killed their mother. It may have come as an anticlimax that Joy was alive at the end of that episode – but when we finally see what has happened from her perspective, we get to see the biggest improvement Marnich makes from Moriarty’s original novel.

At the end of Moriarty’s book, it is revealed that Joy has essentially gone on a walkabout with Savannah for two weeks, even while knowing she’s not a good person and makes no effort to even try to contact her family during the two weeks she’s missing. Joy more or less just pops up near the end as sort of deux ex machina when things are looking at their darkest for Stan.

In the series we get a more interesting approach. Like in the book Joy did try to call her children the day of the accident and no one picked up, she and Stan did get into a loud argument the day of the fight and Stan did walk out, and Joy and Savannah do go off together when Joy ends up calling Savannah. But it is clear from the moment Savannah takes Joy to her home that Savannah’s intentions are not the least the bit benign. She is lying about no cell service and she cuts the landline on the first day.

Joy is on vacation the way that she was during those two weeks. She wanted to walk out on her husband, she felt that she had lost the part of her that she was and she wanted her children to miss her. But Joy actually wanted to go back to her family earlier than expected and once she learns about the hurricane that devastated her hometown (it is the center of the episode focused on Brooke) she immediately needs to get back in touch with them. Savannah immediately starts to dawdle, and it’s clear she knows about Stan being arrested when she comes back to see Joy. But by that time, Joy knows who Savannah really is – and so do we.

I don’t recall if this is in the original novel, but in the series Savannah is Harry Haddad’s younger sister. Harry is not the quite the factor he was in the book but in his one scene with the Delaneys, he makes it very clear why he was so devoted to tennis. His mother and sister Lydia were horrible people to be around and Lydia increasingly extorted him for money throughout his career. At one point she came after him with a gun and that is why he got a restraining order against her and retired. Lydia targeted the Delaneys because she blamed them for destroying her life and while she seemed more benevolent at the end of the novel towards Joy, it is only because we know that she left her mother to die and feels no remorse about it.

In the final episode it is clear at last how disturbed Lydia is. Whether she was kidnapping Joy with the intention of doing her harm or whether she was deluded enough to believe she would stay with her, by the end of their series Joy knows just how dangerous Savannah is. It’s not clear what Savannah’s intentions were in the final scene between her and Joy but it seemed she was determined to complete what she had intended at the start of the novel. That Joy came out alive and relatively unharmed may have been pure luck than anything else.

Apples Never Fall ends on the same optimistic note that the book did – more because the characters have faced their demons in a way that just wasn’t’ clear the same way. Troy does the right thing and signs over the embryos to his ex-wife. Logan has decided to move to Seattle with India. Brooke has gotten closer to getting her life together and Amy has begun to realize how destructive her personality is. And Stan has finally realized the trauma of his father (that too is part of the original novel.) That the novel ends with the Delaney family working together to clear up the tennis court that has been the foundation of their childhoods is parallel to the story – they have spent their lives making a mess for their mother, and now they are working together to clean it up.

I think, particularly in the final episode, the changes that Marnich and her staff have made to Moriarty’s book make for a more interesting and deeper study that certain elements of the novel were. In that sense Apples Never Fall the series enters the rare category of limited series adaptations that improve on their source material such as the Hulu adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere and Showtime’s recent adaptation of Fellow Travelers. Whether that will be enough to allow Apples to contend for Emmys in the next few months in a different question: the field is already ridiculously strong. Among adaptations of novels alone we already have Fellow Travelers, Lessons in Chemistry and FX’s Shogun. The first two have been dominant among the Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations, almost always a precursor to Emmy nods later on, and the latter is a near certainty.

However I think there is a strong argument for many of the actors to receive Emmy nomination down the road. Annette Bening seems a near lock for a Best Actress  nomination even though we mostly see her character in flashbacks until the final episode. Personally I hope Sam Neill is considered for Best Actor. It’s not just his health issues that make me root for him; it’s the fact that in his entire career on film and TV he has always been one of the most undervalued and unrecognized character actors in the world. This is one of the best performances he’s given in his long career and it deserves recognition, if not the prize itself.

I would like to see Jake Lacy and Alison Brie considered for supporting awards. Lacy, for the first time in a while, gets to play a character with more layers than we’ve seen and in the final episode we see a self-realization his character in The White Lotus never came close to. Brie’s work is just as brilliant, particularly because her performance is entirely against the type she’s been playing for the last decade. Considering how little recognition she got for GLOW I think she’s due.

I’m not prepared to say that this is one of the best shows of 2024 yet because it isn’t. It’s a very good and watchable show but in comparison to say Capote Vs. The Swans, it’s not  in the same league. But in comparison to other limited series this year that will likely contend -  Night Country and possibly The Regime – Apples is superior in every way. I was certainly more upset to be done with Apples then I am hyped to watch Night Country on my DVR and if there’s any decision about which series driven by a nominee from Nyad deserves to be contending, well Bening’s beats Foster’s in straight sets, no contest.

My Final Score: 4.5 stars.

 

A Tale of Two Cities: The Griffith Dynasty, Introduction

 

One of the most famous shows in Broadway history is Damn Yankees a musical known for his brilliant score and the first collaboration of Broadway power couple Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse. The show has become a Broadway institution but I imagine that people younger than 50 who have been to the revivals or seen the film will ask the question: Who are the Washington Senators?

Now a personal disclosure. I own and have read the book that was the inspiration for the musical: The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant by Douglas Wallop. Written in 1954, I believe it is superior to the musical in most ways because it has a more daring satirical approach that the show fundamentally abandons in favor of spending more time in hell. Indeed if read today I imagine it would resonate with baseball fans just as much as it did seventy years ago.

The novel is set in 1958 and the Yankees appear on their way to their tenth  consecutive American League Pennant. In reality that nearly came true: the Yankees won nine pennants and seven World Series by 1958. One of the best recurring jokes of the novel is Joe’s decision to sell his soul. At one point Lola says that at least he did so for a noble cause. She tells him she was in Japan and was asked: “When will the Yankees not win the pennant?” There are many brilliant jokes along this line, the best of which is that the devil himself is a Yankee fan and has tricked Joe for the sole purpose of having an exciting pennant race this year. He wants the rest of the world to be in mourning when the Yankees end up winning the pennant on the last day of the season. Anyone who has followed major league baseball over the last century could only nod along in sorrow with this line of satire: even now, the Yankees loom over the sport like few other professional teams ever do.

The other joke, the one that audiences of the era would have appreciated just as much, was that the devil chose a die hard Washington Senators fan rather than one of the Indians or Red Sox, which were at least contending. Because one of the biggest jokes in major league baseball was the famous line: “Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” This was a truth held even deeper than the Yankees dominances because in 1954 that was basically the story of the Senators. A more brutal joke in the novel comes when Roscoe Ent, essentially a clown who performs antics on the field for the Senators, is fired by the team because once the Senators start doing well the fans actually have a better reason to come to the games. “I thought I had a lifetime gig,” Roscoe complains at one point. “I mean, who would have thought the Senators would ever be a winning team?

(In fact, this is based in reality. During the Senators tenure, Nick Altrock and Al Schacht performed comedy routines for Washington fans during the 1940s and fifties, usually during rain delays or the seventh inning stretch Both had once been former players but their job was to entertain the few Senator fans who would come to the game.)

All of this was based on a painful fact. The Senators were one of the original teams when the American League was founded. But by the 1950s, with the exception of the St. Louis Browns (who were about to move to Baltimore) they were also one of the worst. In their entire history they had won only three pennants and one World Series. And most of their tenure in Washington was spent in seventh or eighth place and almost always finishing below .500.

The tradition of the President throwing out of the opening pitch of the baseball season begins in 1910 when William Howard Taft did so at the Senators opening game. This tradition continued for the next sixty years and there’s an argument it was the highlight of the Senator season. After that, it was invariably a ride to the bottom. This was a sad fact made clearer that for Washington’s tenure it was run by one of the founders of the league. Clark Griffith.

Born in 1869, Clark Griffith had been a brilliant pitcher when he debuted with the St. Louis Browns of the American Association, going 22-7 his rookie year. Not long after, however, the league dissolved and Griffith spent the next few years in the minors before he ended up with the Chicago White Stockings (later the Cubs) in 1894. He would win 20 games or more for the next six seasons.

But in 1900 Ban Johnson, owner of a new minor league called the Western League, offered Griffith higher pay and a manager spot with the brand new Chicago White Sox. In 1901, helped by his 24-7 record, he led them to the American League pennant. When the League established a team in New York, Griffith jumped to that team and served as manager and one of the first relief pitchers in history. He finished in second twice in New York but never won another pennant.

During the 1911 World Series, the director of the Washington Nationals (they were known by that name and the Senators) offered Griffith both the managerial spot and an offer to buy stock in the team. As one of the founding members of the American League, Griffith decided to join fellow members Charles Comiskey and Connie Mack in becoming the owner. He became the full owner in 1911, a job he would hold for the next forty-four years.

After he passed in 1955, his stepson Cal Griffith would take over the team. Not long after that he moved the team to Minnesota and would control it until 1984 before he sold the team.

The Griffith dynasty controlled the Senators-Twins for much of the twentieth century. Both men were known for operating the poorest franchise in the American League, with far less money to compete then their rival owners. As a result during their combined seventy-three years ownership, the Griffiths would only win 4 pennants and a single World Series.  Still both men were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame; Clark in 1946, Calvin in 2010.

But the family legacy was greater then the sum of its pennants. In both Washington and Minnesota, the teams would have moments in the sun where some of the greatest – and in many cases, the most unsung  -  ballplayers of all time ended up playing for them. That they were not greater teams than they were had more to due with the relative poverty of the Griffith’s and bad luck on multiple occasions.

There are two reasons to write this series now. The first is that this year will be the centennial of what was the Washington Senators only World Series. The city would not see another one until 2018, when the Nationals finally won the World Series. Furthermore, last year the Veterans committee inducted two Minnesota Twins of the 1960s, Jim Kaat and Tony Olivia, into the Hall of Fame. In addition to being two of the greatest players of all time, they were incredible forces on one of the most undervalued teams of all time and one in the immediate aftermath of the Yankees Dynasty’s collapse in 1964 were among the most dominant and least appreciated. Neither of those teams could have been developed without the work of the Griffith family who deserves more appreciation then some of the troubled comments Calvin made near the end of his tenure as owner of the Twins.

And with the Twins slowly beginning to climb back into contention in the American League – they won the A.L Central and for the first time in twenty years won a postseason series (the Wild Card defeat over the Twins) they may be do an appreciation. So let’s play ball!

 

Progressive Presidential Campaigns, Part 6: Wallace's Doomed Campaign And The Long-Term Consequences

 

For the rest of his life George McGovern, who had been a Wallace follower and attended the Progressive Convention insisted that not only was Wallace not a communist but that 95 percent of the delegates were ‘church people and right out of the soil of America’.

This was not the opinion of journalists. Hearst columnist George Dixon reported: “I am aware it is not cricket to dwell upon the physical infirmities of people, but I have never seen so many obvious defectives gathered together before.” They insisted on going into dining rooms unproperly attired where the dress code demanded formal wear and tried to force entry. They seemed determine to cause a fight in elevators whenever they got a chance. Alistair Cooke, reporting for the Manchester Guardian, said that the men dressed like emancipated clerks in Atlantic City or fledgling Los Angelenos. “ Both men were appalled by them.

The speakers at the convention including Leo Isacson, who said the new nation of Israel would ‘commence the affair of making itself submit to Anglo-American tutelage. Their addresses. All three minutes, were speeches on ‘the arts’, the Negro’, Women and Science.” The keynote address was delivered by Charles Howard, a longtime Republican, a citizen of Iowa – and had lost his license to practice law for six months because of misappropriation of funds.

3240 delegates assembled in a conventional hall to a half-empty gallery. One police sergeant joked that half of those present were FBI agents checking on Communists.

H.L. Mencken, present for the entire thing, observed that while he didn’t think the affair was being maneuvered from the Kremlin he added that there were ‘not many dark faces spotted in the hall, no Jewish faces, Chinese, Malays, Eskimos or Arabs.” In other words this party of the people was populated by mostly artists and dilettantes.

When this article was published a member of the Maryland delegation offered a resolution condemning Mencken’s reporting and his ‘Hitlerite references to the people of this convention…The fighting spirit of equality is entirely lost to Mencken…He Red baits, Jew Baits, and Negro baits.” (The delegate who put forth this motion was an overt Communist.)

The resolution got nowhere because as a Philadelphia newspaper observed: “Rumors spread that they decided if there were to be any martyrs to come out of the convention they would be Wallace and Taylor. No mere reporter was to be wafted off to glory on the wings of martyrdom.”

While he was initially outraged Mencken would ultimately laugh it off. “I’m only sorry the resolution was not passed.” He was one of the few people at the convention who was treating it with the seriousness it deserved.

The nomination was practically a family affair: Glen Taylor’s nomination was seconded by his sister and brother. It was followed by a fundraising affair at Shibe Park, where the moribund Philadelphia Phillies and A’s played baseball and was about as much fun as most of those games were. A band led by Pete Seeger struggled to be heard. Vito Marcantonio, the original Wallace, gave  what would be an unintelligible speech. (The sound system barely worked). Glen Taylor’s speech in the aftermath of his nomination was followed by a rendition of ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ sung horribly by the Taylor family.

Wallace’s speech was little more than a formation of his old platitudes, excoriating Truman and blaring down the Republican Party. Like Thomas Dewey in his acceptance speech, however, he spoke in generalities on domestic policy. However, he made an exception for Germany and the crisis in Berlin. He assured those in the stadium and listening over the radio: ‘IF I were President, there would be no crisis in Berlin today.”

The nominations took place before the platform was finally adapted at the end of the convention. The New York Times compared it line by line to the Communist Party platform – and found many similarities. The platform denounced the Nationalist movement of Chang Kai-Shek, opposed the Marshall Plan, damned HUAC and advocated the creation of a Cabinet level department of Culture. The party agreed to supported Moscow’s refusal to recognize the state of Macedonia entirely in lockstep. Even when a minority amendment was proposed simply not giving a blanket endorsement of the Soviet Union, was ‘interpreted as an insinuation against a foreign ally.” The man who proposed the Amendment was shouted down, led off-stage and then nervously said majority rule would be fine. The Chairman had already ruled there was not going to be a vote on the amendment.

In every possible way the Progressive Party convention was taken on the model of the leftist model that we see reflected today: refusing to listen to any dissent, taking a criticism of them as something that needed to be publicly excoriated and with a major presence of prominent celebrities.

One of the ironies of the 1948 campaign was that both major parties were in bipartisan accord over the international situation. During 1948, what was unfolding Germany and Berlin was becoming so dangerous that James Forrestal was certain that World War III might break out any day. Yet despite having a major issue to campaign on Thomas Dewey did not make it an issue of the fall campaign. In part it was because of past experience, four years earlier he had tried to make failures at Pearl Harbor a campaign issue against FDR and it had backfired. On July 24, Dewey spoke alongside Arthur Vandenberg and John Foster Dulles and told Americans that: ‘We shall not allow domestic partisan irritations to divert us from indispensable unity.” Wallace was the only candidate willing to challenge Truman on foreign policy – and because of the clear links to Communism, no one could take him seriously.

Perhaps the most genuine move of Wallace during the fall campaign was when he had a campaign tour through the South. Since Reconstruction the South had been solidly Democratic and in all the years since no standard bearer from either party had bothered to campaign there. Considering that what votes weren’t going to go to Truman would almost certainly go to Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party, it seemed a futile cause.

Wallace was determined to do so. There was the calculation that if he did so he would reinvigorate his African-American support in the North, perhaps take votes from Truman. But he genuinely believed that the inequities of Jim Crow needed to be challenged by a man of national stature. It was a noble gesture that one can’t believe today’s leftists who disdain the South’s existence would have considered making.

Wallace spent two weeks in the South, addressing 30 integrated audiences in 28 cities in seven southern states. There was immense outrage from Southerners. In North Carolina, one of his bodyguards was cut eight times with a knife – and threatened with arrest from the police. Wallace and his party were pelted garbage. In Burlington, a father held an eight year old on his shoulders so the boy could fling tomatoes and ice cream at him. An outraged Wallace placed his hands on an elderly resident with a livid look on his face. A supporter described what happened next:

“…As suddenly as that emotion had been aroused, something miraculous happened. His grip relaxed. The anger went off his face….And with a composed gesture that seemed almost messianic, he waved to the crowd. ‘Goodbye friends. I’ll see you again.”

He received protests and threats in Alabama and Louisiana. And some of his speeches were the most genuine of the campaign. A journalist wrote that: “he said a good many things that needed to be said about the brotherhood of man. He may even have jolted the complacency of a few citizens who never doubted that the lord preferred them to those born with darker skins. He established in at least a dozen places that unsegregated meetings could be held without civil war.”

It was the moral highpoint of the campaign. Almost everything else was a disaster. The lion’s share of Wallace’s most prominent supporter were celebrities past and present. They included S.J. Perlman, Aaron Copland, Linus Pauling, I.F. Stone, Clifford Odets, Frank Lloyd Wright, Arthur Miller and the young Leonard Bernstein. But none of this could relieve Wallace’s many blunders prior to the campaign and his continued embrace of Communists during it. It didn’t help that HUAC was now in full force and they would occasionally bring in Wallace campaigners – who chose to take the Fifth.

Even some of Wallace’s early followers began to realize just how Communist he was. Lillian Hellman lunched with Wallace and he asked her if much of the central core of his campaign was Communist. She told him it was true. “I thought you must have known that. The hard, dirty work in the office is being done by them and a good deal of the bad advice you’re getting is given by the higher ups. I don’t think they mean any harm, they’re stubborn men.” Wallace said. “I see.”

Nothing changed. Hellman eventually had to chaperone Wallace’s wife, Ilo around. Ilo had little use for Communists, Jews, or even her husband’s campaign. For a month Hellman hosted her at her house in Martha Vineyard to basically shut her up. In October, she fled the campaign to go to Yugoslavia to witness the premiere of her play The Little Foxes in Belgrade. She went to interview Marshall Tito about his break with Moscow. He wanted to ask her about Henry Wallace.

Always at the heart of the campaign was a question they could never easily answered: did it make sense to punish Democrats only to replace them with retrograde Republicans? The Progressive Party decided to oppose many very liberal Democratic nominee for elected office, including Helen Gahagan Douglas in California, Minnesota Senate hopeful Hubert Humphrey and Illinois nominee for governor Adlai Stevenson.

On September 21, Beanie Baldwin told major supporters that they would be backing Chester Bowles for governor in Connecticut and that they might back Douglas in California. Wallace, who was next to speak, openly told them that they couldn’t endorse Bowles which led many to think they had split. On September 30, thirteen Progressive candidates withdrew from key congressional races, including Bowles, Humphrey and Douglas. Even before October began, the new party was raising the white flag.

When the election was over and Harry Truman had been the surprise winner it was a disaster in every possible way. They received little more than 1.1 million votes. They’d never had anything resembling a strategy for victory, unlike the Dixiecrats. It was telling the States Right Party, which was on the ballot in just thirteen states to Wallace’s 50 gathered slightly more popular votes than Wallace: Thurmond got 1,176,125 to Wallace’s 1,157,326. The Thurmond campaign carried 4 Southern States with 39 electoral votes. The lion’s share of Wallace’s votes were from New York, where he got nearly half a million votes and California, where he got two percent. All his campaign accomplished was to take enough votes away from Truman in New York and Michigan to give them to Dewey.

The consequences were infinitely worse for progressives long-term. All they had wanted was to defeat Harry Truman. The cost came to their ranks in both the Democratic party and labor. Worse by goading Truman to counterattack by labeling his anti-Communist protocols which would lead pretty much directly to the McCarthy era. And for decades many on the left would be tarred with the label of Communism.

In 1950 when Helen Gaghan Douglas attempted to run for the Senate in California, she was labeled the ‘Pink Lady’ by a 37 year old two term Congressman who had shot to prominence during the meetings of HUAC in August of 1948. In part this Congressman used Douglas’ association with the Wallace campaign to label her with Communist leanings by association.

Less then three years later Richard Nixon would be sworn in as Vice President.

 

In the final section of this article I will summarize the commonalities between all three failed Progressive campaigns for President and what they haven’t learned from them in all that time.