Henry A. Wallace - Political Career - The 1948 Presidential Election

The 1948 Presidential Election

Wallace left his editorship position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. With Idaho Democratic U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor as his running mate, his platform advocated friendly relations with the Soviet Union, an end to the nascent Cold War, an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American South, and that during the campaign he refused to appear before segregated audiences or eat or stay in segregated establishments.

As a further sign of the times, he was noted by Time as ostentatiously riding through various cities and towns in the South "with his Negro secretary beside him". Many eggs and tomatoes were hurled at and struck him and his campaign members during the tour, while at the same time President Truman referred to such behavior towards Wallace as very un-American. Wallace commented that "there is a long chain that links unknown young hoodlums in North Carolina or Alabama with men in finely tailored business suits in the great financial centers of New York or Boston, men who make a dollars-&-cents profit by setting race against race in the far away South." State authorities in Virginia sidestepped enforcing its own segregation laws by declaring Wallace's campaign gatherings as private parties.

Wallace's campaign to advance progressive causes inspired several activists and organizations. One short-lived effort was an attempt by Harry Hay, an active Communist teacher in Southern California, to create an organization of homosexuals, to be called Bachelors for Wallace, which would lobby for the inclusion in Wallace's platform of a call for the reform of sodomy and other laws that were the basis of widespread anti-gay discrimination and persecution. Hay was unsuccessful in his efforts to find other homosexual men willing to join such a risky venture, and the idea was never realized. Two years later, however, Hay and other leftists successfully founded the Mattachine Society, now recognized as the first significant grassroots organization for LGBT rights in the United States. Wallace had not made any official statements in support of gay rights and it is unclear how much support this group gave to the campaign. Yet, in the tenor of the times, such an organization would have been highly controversial. The fact that group generated almost no notice by the press or even the campaign itself, may be because of other controversies facing the campaign.

The "Dear Guru" letters reappeared now and were published, seriously hampering his campaign. Even more damage was done to Wallace's campaign when several prominent journalists, including H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Thompson, publicly charged that Wallace and the Progressives were under the covert control of Communists. Wallace was endorsed by the Communist Party (USA), and his subsequent refusal to publicly disavow any Communist support cost him the backing of many anti-Communist liberals and socialists, such as Norman Thomas. Christopher Andrew, a University of Cambridge historian working with evidence in the famed Mitrokhin Archive, has stated publicly that he believed Wallace was a confirmed KGB agent, though evidence for this was never produced.

Wallace suffered a decisive defeat in the election to the Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman. He finished in fourth place with 2.4% of the popular vote. Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond outstripped Wallace in the popular vote. Thurmond managed to carry several states in the Deep South, gaining 39 electoral votes to Wallace's electoral total of zero.