Neither Progressive Nor a Party:
SHANNON, DAVID
WRITERS and WRITING Neither Progressive Nor a Party Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948. By Karl M. Schmidt. Syracuse University. 362 pp. $5.50. Reviewed by David Shannon Author, "The...
...I wish I could say that this volume by Karl Schmidt is a definitive and illuminating study of Wallace and the Progressives that deepens our understanding of American politics...
...He also fails to examine the implications for American domestic politics of Communist international developments such as the nine-party conference in Poland in the fall of 1947...
...Simultaneously, for reasons of their own, American Communists wanted a new party...
...But the Communists' role in the Wallace movement, the changed direction of Truman's and the Democrats' domestic program and the Soviets' actions in Czechoslovakia, Berlin and Yugoslavia created quite a different political situation from what had existed in early 1947...
...Their commitment to a third ticket, as opposed to a new party that might endorse Democratic candidates in the manner of the Liberal party, did not come until October 1947, after Truman had begun to allay discontent within the normally Democratic fold...
...Henry A. "Wallace announced his presidential candidacy in the last days of 1947, and the following months brought the establishment of the Progressive party, a combination of Communists, fellowtravelers, pacifists and amateurish, disgruntled leftist Democrats...
...Schmidt submitted an earlier version of this study as a PhD dissertation at The Johns Hopkins University...
...For example, although Schmidt writes at some length about fund-raising at Wallace rallies, he fails to point out that the technique of snatching currency being waved by the customers derived from the Communist "hootenanny...
...Thousands and thousands of small-p progressives shunned the capital-P Progressives precisely because they would not touch the Communists with a long pole and had little desire to get involved in still another fight with them over control of an organization, especially when the most prominent non-Communist Progressive, Wallace himself, would not repudiate Communist support, despite appeals (not mentioned in this volume) from Rexford Guy Tugwell and others...
...Oddly enough, although the book is so like a dissertation, citation footnotes are too few...
...And if by political party we mean a coalition of various regional organizations with their own economic and political interests, the Progressives were little like a party...
...There is far too much detail about party organization and mechanics and not enough interpretation of why the Progressives employed these organizational forms...
...His argument that if more non-Communists had gone into the Wallace camp and been active in it then Communists would have been without influence, strikes me as valid but irrelevant...
...The reader gets the feeling that precious few research notes went into the discard file...
...The Communist line toward a third party changed again after the 1952 elections, and the Progressive party disappeared...
...People always disagree about definitions, but within the terms of what progressivism has meant in the United States for the last two or three generations, the Progressives had more progressive facade than substance...
...The present volume is still more a dissertation than a book...
...His popular vote in November was only a little over one million, 2.37 per cent of the total ballot...
...Reviewed by David Shannon Author, "The Socialist Party of America' Before June 1947, the month Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the Marshall Plan and President Truman vetoed the TaftHartley Act, the Truman Administration enjoyed little popularity among the liberal and labor elements that had been part of the Roosevelt coalition...
...Sentiment among these FDR supporters for an organized group to wrest power from Truman within the Democratic party or to form a third party became strong...
...the reader frequently wishes he knew the author's source...
...There are two basic questions about the Progressive party that apparently never crossed Schmidt's mind: Was it progressive, and was it a party...
...The rest of the story is familiar to most of us...
...The author's responsibility to cut loose from his footnotes and tell the reader what it's all about is exercised too seldom...
...Wallace steadily lost ground...
...Communists, he says, did not affect basic Progressive policy although they did control some state and local organizations, and "Wallace's failure to intervene organizationally left his New York headquarters subject to overly strong "party-liner' influences...
...The author concludes that the Wallace movement in 1948 was "Communist-influenced but not Communist-dominated...
...The author, a political scientist at Syracuse University, occasionally offers us a new and useful piece of information and, more rarely, an observation with insight, but the work as a whole is disappointing in both its basic conception and in its execution...
...Schmidt, like Wallace before him, uses such euphemisms as "New York City extremists" or "Peekskill boys" to refer to Communists and their close followers...
...Wallace split with the Progressives in 1950 over the Korean War, leaving the organization almost wholly in the hands of Communists and their sympathizers...
...Most of Schmidt's substantive inadequacies arise from his lack of knowledge of the Communists, a reluctance to label them and a tendency to minimize their impact on the Wallace movement...
...Schmidt's technique of introducing a new subject by a series of questions becomes repetitious...
...Unfortunately, it is not...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 14
