THE DEAL IS DEALT
Mayer, Milton
The Deal Is Dealt By MILTON MAYER Chicago BACK in 1940, Sanitary Ed Kelly of Chicago gave the signal for his mob to emerge from the Stadium basement, and the mob emerged with signs reading...
...Why did the great god abandon morality and expediency both...
...The politician had already pronounced him dead, and the ear-to-ear grin was not his mouth at all, but his slit and bleeding throat...
...He was the bosses' candidate against the people's...
...Kelly didn't want Lucas las' week any more than he wanteil Humanity in 1940...
...The father-complex crowd of the Nation-New Republic-Marshall Field variety will continue to assure the naked king, like the subject in the fable, that his new uniform becomes him...
...Truman's o.k...
...Thus the visionary, proclaiming, as the flames leaped up to his belt-buckle, "The poll tax must go," to a Party whose sole proprietor had consecrated it to silence on the poll tax...
...We can lock arms, close ranks, shut our eyes tight, proclaim ourselves the liberals, and squeal with delight at the new uniform of the naked king...
...If Wallace was the symbol of something greater than he is—of the man who might save the world, so Truman is the symbol of something much less than he is—of the watchdog, who will keep things in order at home while the Commander-in-Chief hurls lightning through the universe...
...Both times hi wanted whatever Roosevelt want ed...
...Don't ask whether he's going upstream or downstream, or what's on the other side...
...He has done magnificent work, or at least enabled Hugh Fulton, the counsel of the Truman Committee, to do magnificent work...
...back home to Southern racism and Northern corruption, back to its historic purpose of preserving those two great American traditions against the Republican tradition of feeding the rich...
...It gave him the world to play with...
...Lucas was simply one of the 13 favorite-son dummies set up to draw first-ballot votes from Wallace...
...Henry Wallace—he will get a super-ambassador's job next January—is dead...
...His short speech seconding the nomination of Roosevelt— almost nobody bothered to print it in full—was the speech of a hero...
...He asked the people not merely to forgive Pilate but to crown him king...
...Roosevelt, the politician, was a reformer as long as reform was good politics...
...Blame the bosses' boss...
...I submit that he abandoned them both—and all his "liberal" idolators—for immorality...
...You have nothing to lose but your jobs...
...Here, after all the boloney about Roosevelt's personal loyalty to his friends, was the pay-off...
...We can stay with him through very, very thin, and get to work now for a fifth term or a 10th...
...Roosevelt's 'Dutch' stubbornness.___I can report that the President feels that only with Wallace as Vice President can he be sure that his great objectives at home and abroad will be pursued...
...We can all go forward together—or is it, by any chance, backward?—with Roosevelt...
...Don't blame Kelly, Hannegan, Hague, and Flynn, or the frock-coat Tories from darkest Dixie...
...ROOSEVELT AND HUMANITY had given way to ROOSEVELT AND LU CAS...
...The New Deal was, for a while, the game for a playboy to play...
...Standing straight on the sacrificial altar, with his pants already aflame from the fire lit at Hyde Park, the incurable reformer proved himself the incurable friend...
...Forward with Roosevelt...
...By November they will be telling themselves that only the great king could have been wise enough to pick Truman...
...Thus the visionary, proclaiming, as the fire licked at his chin-whiskers, that the war at home was being lost and had to be fought and won...
...Wallace is not so great a man as his speech of Thurs day, July 20...
...With the country gorging and at war, there are not many votes in insisting, as Wallace insists, that reform is the only way to lasting victory...
...Don't blame the Party, or let Wallace tell you, as he told the convention, that the Democratic Party has to be liberal in order to survive...
...Their efforts broke on the rock of Mr...
...If he were that great a man he would break with Roosevelt and lead what is left of reform to probable and glorious defeat...
...Last week Sanitary Ed gave the signal again, and the mob emerged...
...Why did he do it...
...So ends the excursion of the Democratic Party into the vineyard of the Lord...
...Of only one disease is he still uncured—the blind, tragic devotion of the reformer to the politician who plays him for fish...
...Henry "Wallace Is Dead He did it—and the reactionaries like Col...
...It was the last and most fateful of all the death-blows that Roosevelt has struck at progressivism...
...They made him their desperate symbol, their animated idol, and he spoke their hope that injustice everywhere —which is the cause of war always—could -be grappled with here and now...
...On Thursday, July 20, standing before the politicians in the Chicago Stadium, and grinning the silly grin of a reformer trying to look like a politician, the reformed gave up polities...
...Roosevelt wants Henry A. Wallace of Iowa," I. F. Stone wrote in the Nation as the convention opened...
...As a reformer Roosevelt failed...
...And down with the cynics who stand on the bank we left behind us and tell us it's time to quit playing horseback, and change the course of the stream...
...as he was the first New Dealer in the Administration, was he the last...
...Where shall we turn...
...Hang on, boys...
...Yes, from inarticulate working stiffs, in fields as well as in factories, and from men, in Asia and America, whose color or creed is their curse...
...They will forget Wallace—their indispensable man until the king dispensed with him— and proceed to tell themselves that Truman is better than Byrnes or Barkley, and ever so much better than Pappy O'Daniel...
...But Henry Wallace was playing for keeps...
...He's a border man from a border state, an organization man, a far-better-than-average Senator, mildly liberal, and, above all, non-controversial...
...Blame The Bosses' Boss Don't blame the bosses...
...Described so truly, and so long ago, as the left wing of the bird of prey, it had its little 10-year fling at being the party of the people...
...In 1940, already facing homeward himself, but uncertain as to how much profit there might still be in reform, he gulled the reformers with Wallace...
...As a politician Wallace failed...
...And it leaves small-p progressives with a hard choice...
...It was the belief in him of people starving for someone to believe in that made him great enough to write that speech...
...While the country was starving and at peace, there were votes in insisting, as Roosevelt insisted, that reform was the only way to lasting recovery...
...McCormick called the turn on him from the beginning—because he is still Jim Farley's playboy, coming home from the New Deal debauch...
...It didn't help Wallace—he knew he was dead the day he got back from China—but it didn't help Roosevelt either...
...proclaiming this heresy to a Party which, like the Republicans, never wanted to fight the war at home, and to a nation which is no longer interested...
...By last week he was so far to the right of Wallace that he had to knock him off with a harpoon instead of a stiletto...
...When the ROOSEVELT AND LUCAS signs were turned insid«-out, they read ROOSEVELT and TRUMAN...
...But if we have to love Wallace for the enemies he's made, we have to take a gander at Truman's friends...
...In 1940 Roosevelt wanted Wallace run...
...Keep your eyes shut, your ears shut, and, above all, your mouths shut...
...The war gave Roosevelt something new to play with...
...The reformer in him ruined his sordid efforts—such as jumping aboard the war-wagon and waving the one-world banner of Willkie—to be a good politician...
...The politician in him ruined his lofty efforts to be a good reformer...
...Wallace, the reformer, was a politician as long as politics was good reform...
...He knew he was gaining no votes and losing the Negroes when he threw the harpoon into Wallace...
...The 'practical' politicians were there to reinforce them...
...In 1932 and 1936 Roosevelt led the Democratic Party down the profitable by-path of reform...
...The peerless leader was ready, last week, to lead the Party back home, and he did...
...Wallace it will be...
...It had to happen, in the nature of the_ case...
...He can change horses, but we can't...
...But the signs had been changed...
...Mr...
...As Sanitary Ed Kelly said, in nominating Lucas, "The eyes of the world is upon us...
...They had to want what Roosevelt wanted...
...The Deal Is Dealt By MILTON MAYER Chicago BACK in 1940, Sanitary Ed Kelly of Chicago gave the signal for his mob to emerge from the Stadium basement, and the mob emerged with signs reading ROOSEVELT AND HUMANITY...
...All mixed up these last few years—back in 1935 he said that war would be the end of the New Deal—he came home to die a reformer...
...And Truman is not at all bad, as it happens...
...Roosevelt's victory over Wallace was a victory for reaction...
...He has become the symbol of economy, a sort of liberal Byrd...
...Now he stepped to the microphone and the klieg lights to display the corpse and haunt the house with the moan of the Common Man...
...You see who survived the convention and who didn't...
...Postmasters of the world, arise...
...In 1940 they choked to do his bidding ; this time they cheered...
...Thus the visionary, who, four years too late, proclaimed to an audience which did not want to believe him that war is not the work, as Roosevelt proclaims it, of "criminals and outlaws," of "aggressor nations," of Hitler and Hirohito and whoever else happens to be on the other side, but of gross inequality in educational, political, and economic opportunity, gross inequalities in Charleston and New York and North Dakota as well as in Tokyo and Berlin...
...In that speech, so ironically dedicated to the re-election of Roosevelt, Henry Wallace told the convention exactly what they were taking if they took him: a cured politician and an incurable reformer...
...His support," said the Chicago Tribune, quoting a non-existent "political leader," "comes from the Negroes and the CIO...
...We have no second choice, Phil Murray said...
...In 1944 Roosevelt wanted Wallace run out...
...Morality and expediency both point in the same direction," said the prayerful New Republic in its pre-convention prayer to the great god in behalf of Wallace...
...The big interests of this country do not want Wallace...
...He is acceptable to labor, Phil Murray says...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 31
