A Heartbeat Away from a Communist White House

This week, the New Yorker reviews Thomas Devine's new book about Henry Wallace's third-party campaign for the White House in 1948. The big surprise is that the reviewer, Alex Ross, endorses Devine's book as a rigorous and devastating account of just how thoroughly the Wallace campaign was dominated by Communists.  Literal, pro-Moscow, pro-Stalin Communists -- not just well-meaning liberals branded as Communists by McCarthyites and Republican spin doctors.

Wallace in 1948

Arguably, this is old news, since Emory historian Harvey Klehr reviwed Devine's book four months ago for the Weekly Standard and said exactly the same thing.  Or, you might say this is very old news, since UT-Austin historian Robert Divine wrote in 1974 that

By the end of 1947, Wallace had lost the support of much of the liberal constituency and himself surrounded more and more by Communists and fellow travelers who were out to use him for their own purposes. (Divine, Foreign Policy and US Presidential Elections, 1940-1948, p.171)

On the other hand, as Ronald Radosh points out, also in the Standard, there continues to be an active cadre of Wallace hagiographers who believe that his pacific intentions could've prevented the Cold War.

In the past decade, scores of books have celebrated [Wallace's] life and record, all in the same mold. They include leftist journalist Richard J. Walton’s Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War, Communist historian Norman D. Markowitz’s The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948, a biography by Edward and Frederick Schapsmeier, Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years, Allen Yarnell’s Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Presidential Election as a Test of Postwar Liberalism, and John C. Culver and John Hyde’s American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace.

Of course, one of the great hypotheticals of history will remain, "What if Wallace had kept his place on the Democratic ticket in 1944, instead of yielding it to Harry Truman?" As David McCullough documents in his Pulitzer-winning biography of Truman, the ailing Roosevelt pursued a vacillating and byzantine approach to the selection of his running mate (pp.292-320). Had the anti-Wallace faction been less astute, it might have been Wallace sitting next to Stalin at Potsdam.