Coke Stevenson and labels
Leafing through the published diary of Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice-president most famous for running a third party presidential bid as a Communist dupe…
… Wallace is an interesting figure in American history. I get the feeling that the anger and animosity he garnered from conservative (Southern) Democrats in the first half of the 1940s was the overt display of sublimated disapproval they had over FDR and the New Deal, unexpressable directly due to political and personality reasons. But, as I can figure it, the first vice president of John Garner was in place to assuage conservative Democrats that Roosevelt wasn’t going to dip too far to the left, Wallace ended up assuring liberals Roosevelt wasn’t going to head too far to the right at a time he was moving rightward. Wallace’s disposal as vice-president can be seen as one in a series of the fracturing of the Democratic Party as the party assuaged the separation of the South as the bulwark of the party, to an extent continuing to this day where the political consensus has been a Democratic presidential candidate needs to somehow steal a state south of the Mason-Dixie line.
Anyways, catching me off-guard was a reference to Wallace keeping Franklin Roosevelt abreast of political events in Texas, as concerning the political fortune of one Coke Stevenson to the governship. A footnote leads me to the odd explanation that Stevenson was considered from the liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, thus favored by the national party.
Having read Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the second volume with concerns to the 1948 Senate campaign, “liberal” is a description that is hard to conture. Coke Stevenson appealed to Texas’s mythological conception of itself, an austere frontiersman, the rugged individual who got by on grit and self-determination. Stevenson was described as uneasy about FDR’s “New Deal” expansions of government, considering them hopefully a begrudging stop-gap measure. His view on the proper role of governance were as rigidly narrow as one can get, just short of Ron Paul’s. Perhaps there is a bit of sour grapes working here, a shot toward Lyndon Johnson — who famously stole the Senate election from him — but in 1964 when asked, Coke Stevenson said he was for Goldwater, and had been waiting forever for the country to turn rightward. Nonetheless, for the purposes of national Democratic Party politics in the first half of the 1940, Stevenson was fit for the label “Liberal”. Such is the peculiar case of how politics aligns and realigns itself, and how individuals fit into the scheme of these things as political contures and issues shift about — sometimes dramatically. See also the travels of Lyndon Johnson, who was the national candidate against Stevenson and an assertment of control for Truman against Strom Thurmond in the South, then the Dixie-granted Majority Leader of the Senate, then the Civil Rights politician with his “Great Society”. Or the travels of Harry Truman. Or, for that matter, figure out how much Henry Wallace moved versus how much the country moved in putting him out of the pale of the national political discourse.