I was trying to turn the title of this post into another play on what "is" is, but much to the relief of President Clinton, it didn't seem to want to stretch that far, so I'll proceed to the subject at hand.
Henry Wallace of Iowa, who was vice president during Franklin Roosevelt's third term, and also served in the Cabinet under both Roosevelt and Truman, ran for president in 1948 as the Progressive candidate.
That was the same third-party label under which Theodore Roosevelt ran in 1912 (and Sen. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin in 1924, a candidacy that I'm not including in this series of posts), but it meant something different.
The Progressive movement that Roosevelt led was a center-right faction that wanted to maintain free enterprise and relatively small government, while expanding the federal role in some areas. The Henry Wallace candidacy in 1948 was significantly further to the left.
Wallace's candidacy, as was the case with Thurmond's candidacy that same year, reflected an ideological split within the Democratic Party. In this case, the split mainly involved foreign policy. The Progressives wanted to maintain the close relationship with the Soviet Union that grew out of our alliance with that regime during World War II. Truman had, by contrast, begun waging the Cold War that characterized, in different stages, with greater or lesser intensity, the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union until the latter's demise in 1991. The Cold War faction among the Democrats saw the wartime alliance as a marriage of convenience that the U.S. no longer had any interest in maintaining, once the Soviets had made clear their belligerence toward American interests after 1945.
In the meantime, the word "progressive" has generally been used more in the Wallace sense than the Roosevelt sense.
In what is considered a political miracle, Harry Truman won a full term as president in 1948. As I alluded to earlier, 1948 was expected to be a Republican year. Republicans had, in the mid-term election of 1946, regained majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928. A mid-term gain by the "out-party" is often said to predict a similar change in the White House two years later. I plan later to write about how this has been shown to be an unreliable indicator.
Truman won with 303 electoral votes. His Republican opponent, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, received 189 electoral votes. Thurmond and Wallace garnered relatively few votes, receiving 2.41% and 2.37% of the popular vote, respectively. Because Thurmond's votes were concentrated geographically in the southeast, he received 39 electoral votes. By contrast, Wallace's support was dispersed among more states, so he was shut out in the electoral college. (Closer to this year's November election, I will write more about the "winner-take-all" aspect of electoral votes within most of the states.)
In contrast to the Republicans' problem in 1912, the Democratic vote in 1948 was not sufficiently split up to bring defeat. The combined votes of Wallace and Thurmond were far less on a percentage basis, and significantly less on an absolute basis, than Roosevelt's in 1912. Truman almost won an absolute majority of the popular vote; he got 49.55% to Dewey's 45.07%.
There were other leftist third-party challenges in later elections, led by such figures as Eugene McCarthy and Ralph Nader. While Nader's 2000 candidacy may have had a decisive effect on the outcome, no subsequent leftist challenge was considered as significant as Wallace's in 1948. But, as we shall see in the next post in this series, another Wallace ran as a third-party candidate 20 years later, but that was another southern-based candidacy.
Truman savored his 1948 victory, taunting those who said it couldn't be done (not to mention those who said it hadn't been done; the Chicago Tribune infamously proclaimed Truman's defeat in a banner headline the morning after the election). But his full term did not go well. He plunged to what are still record-law poll ratings, in the midst of an unpopular war, in which he was thought by many to have made major mistakes. (Sound familiar?)
Truman was constitutionally eligible to seek another full term in 1952, because the presidential term limit amendment that had been ratified in 1951 did not apply to him. However, it would have been politically impossible. Truman waited until early 1952 to announce a decision that he had apparently made long before: that he would not run in 1952.
Truman became such a folk hero by the time of his death in 1972 (and that sentiment has continued to this day) that many people have either forgotten, or never knew, how reviled he was during his presidency. What that means for certain of his successors remains to be seen.
Photo: Library of Congress
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