The History of Hollywood and Politics, Part 1: Henry Wallace's 1948 Third Party Run as Entertainment Gets in at The Ground Floor of Politics

 

There are very few 'great men' in history who fall under the left's definitions. And those who are usually involve the greatest of contortions. One of them is Henry Wallace, FDR's second Vice President.

According to  some revisionist historians narrative and propagated through Oliver Stone's 'documentary series' The Untold History of America' Henry Wallace was 'cheated' out of the Vice Presidency in 1944 because his favorable opinion of the Soviet Union was counter to what the political establishment wanted. They were aware of FDR's failing health and they didn't want Wallace to become President because he was going to follow up with FDR's policy of treating the Soviets with respect and courtesy as Stalin took over Eastern Europe after World War II.  (That part's ignored of course in those contortions.) So they forced the choice of Harry Truman on the party and 'cheated' Henry Wallace from the Presidency, therefore starting the Cold War which was, of course,  just an excuse for American empire.

As with every version of what passes for history by these revisionists it involves ignoring most of the facts, not the least of which is when FDR wanted Wallace to run with him in 1940 the convention was planning to revolt and only a last minute visit by Eleanor Roosevelt managed to get Wallace on the ticket the first time. There's also the very really fact that so much of the idealization of Henry Wallace basically involves ignoring what he was:  which was possibly the most naïve political figure in FDR's entire cabinet and one of the most deluded figures in the 20^th century. He conducted seances, privately thought eugenics might not be the worst idea, was frequently silly on the campaign trail when he talked about and wrote letters to a figure known as The Guru an exiled Russian mystic which he signed the letters to as 'Galahad'. He did all of this, I should be clear,  before FDR nominated him for Vice President the first time.

And that's before you consider that by the time of the 1944 election he was sent on a 'goodwill trip to Siberia' where he described the Soviet gulags as 'a combination of the TVA and Hudson's Bay company and admired the embroidery at a women's concentration camp. Eventually members of the Secret Police would infiltrate Wallace's inner circle without his knowledge. Honestly they probably could have shown him their ID and he would have asked if they knew certain people from his trips to the east before promoting them to higher positions.

After he was kicked to the curb in FDR offered mercy by naming him Secretary of Commerce. His new Vice President Harry Truman was not happy about this, as he later wrote he had to cast two tie-breaking votes in the Senate just to do so. He kept Wallace on as a holdover from FDR's cabinet when he ascended to the Presidency and he did listen to his advice for a time. But the liberals loved Wallace and hated Truman. Wallace should have known better than to stay in the administration afterwards but he stayed in as much for spite then anything else. And he was the only Commerce Secretary with his own foreign policy which was completely at odds with the one Truman was finding was not attainable with Stalin.

After Wallace was forced to resign he was increasingly at odds with the rest of the country. In an October 1947 poll with the Truman Doctrine already in effect, 62 percent of Americans thought Truman was 'too soft on Communism'. Only six percent thought it was too hard. Wallace was part of that six percent and even though that might be a factor in the election it was a fringe that was increasingly becoming Communist. By early 1948 American members of the Communist Party had a big influence in the 'Wallace movement'  which caused almost all of the members of the non-communist left – almost all of them the political ones – to almost completely jump ship by late April.

To be clear by the time Wallace announced his campaign under the Progressive Party platform there was never any chance of a victory. Wallace himself had never had anything resembling a strategy even as a spoiler. It was clear early on he had one goal and one goal only: to deny the Presidency to a man who held a job Wallace was convinced should have been his and that he clearly thought he was more qualified for.

Wallace was running a poorly managed campaign, made statements that were out of touch with reality (when Jan Masaryk was pushed out a winder he parroted the Daily Worker line: "Maybe he had cancer" ) talked only to people who told him what he wanted to hear and delivered policies that were completely out of touch with America. It may be a bit glib to say that it makes perfect sense that his biggest supporters were from the entertainment industry as a result but the fact remains the major draw of his campaign, from his major followers to campaign events to the Progressive Party Convention, came from either Broadway or Hollywood.

At one point the Progressive Citizens of America involved such luminous stars as Edward G. Robinson, Katherine Hepburn, Jose Ferre, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly and Gregory Peck, it also had such CPUSA (US communist party members) as John Garfield and Lee J. Cobb. However eventually it became too far left even for these hard core celebrity and aside from Cobb, the only ones who went the distance were Zero Mostel, Paul Robeson and a young Pete Seeger.

Lillian Hellman, known for her Communist affiliations and proud of them, enlisted early. However her former lover and close friend Dashiell Hammett never agreed. "I love him as much as you do, but you simply can't make a politician of him," he warned her in early 1946,

Even some members of the Party and Hollywood tried to warn him. Budd Schulberg, a former communist, told Wallace at a fundraiser he was in the hands of the party. He was sloughed off. "He was naïve and trusting and didn't want to believe a word of it," Schulberg concluded. The man he chose as Vice President Glen Taylor had himself been  a low-level stage performer and entertainer before being elected to the Senate in Idaho in 1944.

Announcing his run for Vice President he uttered the words: "I have not left the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. Wall street and the military have taken over."

By the time of the Progressive Party Convention in Philadelphia (held their so it could be televised like those of the Republican and Democratic one) Wallace's campaign was essentially in ruins before the convention was gaveled to order.  Hollywood screenwriters and actors have sympathy for it, but because HUAC was in session and weary of being blacklisted, they steered clear. Several people in the arts did not, among them such writers as Dorothy Parker, Donald Odgen Stewart and Broadway's Sam Wannamaker.

One attendee Howard Fast, a novelist who one day write Spartacus met with his idol H.L. Mencken. Mencken warned him of being with these people. "You don't put politics aside, you taste it, listen to it and write it. You don't join it. If you do, these clowns will destroy you as surely as the sun rises and sets." It was good advice. Fast didn't want to hear it.

It's worth noting that when Mencken wrote about the convention while he didn't see many Kremlin maneuver he noted neither "were there many dark faces spotted in the crowd…Jewish faces were scarce…I saw no Indians, Chinese, Malays or Eskimos." Critically Mencken was pointed out for all the arguments for civil rights, this party was just as lily-white as the Dixiecrats.

So naturally when they heard this the Progressives demanded Mencken be thrown out of the convention. It was only stopped when it was clear they didn't want Mencken to become a martyr. (That was to be reserved for Wallace and Taylor. Critically Wallace and Taylor spent the entire convention dealing primarily with foreign policy and not the domestic issues that Truman was making the clarion call of his campaign.

Paul Robeson was a critical part of the convention both as entertainment and designing the platform. So were Fast and the artist Rockwell Kent. This would probably rank as the highpoint of entertainment role in designing a political platform at any convention. They would have been better served sticking to their profession. (Kent for instance advocated for a cabinet-level Department of Culture.)

During the campaign the most prominent supporters remained entertainers. They included future Oscar winners Walter Huston and Judy Holliday, playwrights Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets and composers Marc Blitztein, Aaron Copland and young Leonard Bernstein. Many of these men and women had sympathies to the Communist: Copland had even campaigned for the Communist candidate for President in 1936. Hellman publicly was fine with all this saying: "There is no difference between the two parties and Wallace is the greatest political progressive in the field." Hammett was as much a Communist as Hellman was, told her to 'stop playing around with that Iowa yogi and his fringe imperials."

Eventually Hellman and Wallace met for lunch. After leaving his usual nickel tip -distressing Hellman and everyone there – Wallace asked Hellman if his party's core was Communist. When she laughingly told him it was, she said he thought he must have known this and "I don't think they mean any harm, they're stubborn men."

Eventually Hellman tried to convince both Wallace and the CPUSA to build more of a grass roots level. She would eventually complain to members of the Communist Party that they were barking up the wrong tree. "You have a party of your own. Why do you want to interfere with another political party? It's plain willful meddling and it should stop." Hellman's either was unaware that this was how Communists worked across the globe in so many other places or she actually thought that if the Communists stayed out Wallace and the Progressive Party had a future in America. Either way, she was more of a useful idiot then she thought.

Eventually Hellman left the campaign in October to go to the Balkans to attend the premiere of the Belgrade debut of The Little Foxes and to interview Stalin's latest nemesis Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito. He wanted to ask her about Henry Wallace.

By the time of the final months the campaign was known for its musical endeavors which were writing campaign songs by the boatload. In addition to Robson and Seeger, they included Yip Harburg and Woody Guthrie. In the final campaign rally held in Madison Square Garden of New York City Pete Seeger sang and Norman Mailer proudly said he was joining the Communist Party tomorrow.

When the ballots came in November 4^th Henry Wallace carried 1,156,103 votes, just 2.38 percent of the total.  8 percent of the vote came from New York State; 4.73 percent came from California. Those were the only states he carried more than 4 percent of the vote.

Pete Seeger's sister-in-law told him: "I know Wallace is a wonderful man but I didn't want to see Dewey become President, so I voted for Truman." This was a trend throughout the country. In the final ten days of the campaign a full third of Wallace's supporters shifted to Truman.

It's worth noting the major way this would affect Hollywood in the next decade. Harry Truman, resistant to the idea of being labeled soft on Communism, had counterattacked with loyalty-security programs, attorney general lists and the reopening of HUACA as a political weapon. The McCarthy era was about to erupt and for those entertainers who would support the Wallace campaign, while ignoring the clear Communist influence within it, they must be held at least partially to blame for what happened in the decade to come.

In the next article in this series I will deal with how the Red Scare affected Hollywood and helped lead to the first major California junior senator's ascension to power – though Hollywood will deny that they played any part in that as well.