Alliances of Convenience
2-23-1950: Asked if he saw no danger to the two party system in a sweeping Democratic victory, Mr. Truman replied he did not like a one-party system but that anyway, we did not have two parties, but about four. […]
It is the President’s overriding aim to wrest domination of the Democratic Party’s program from Southern Democrats by increasing Northern and Western Democratic strength. […] Later, Mr. Truman enumerated the four parties as follows: the Dixiecrats, who he said were one-half Republican; the Republicans; what was left of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party; and the real national party — the Democrats.
About as perceptive as can be, that Mr. Truman, but then again he just came out triumphant from a victory over all three of those parties, and had to map out throughout all of 1948 how the heck to pull off that hat-trick. For the Wallacites, it is believed that by so utterly defeating Wallace, the cause of McCarthyism was helped immensely and the Liberals were able to be attacked as Commies because the Liberals no longer had the Wallacites to pass the attacks onto. For the Southern Dixiecrats, it remains so (look at the record of the Southern Contingency of Southern Democrats in the past decade), and is instructive to ponder how we go from 1938 when the plan was to replace them in the South with “New Dealers”, to 1950 when the plan was to swamp them with new people from the North and West, and on to the situation today when we dare only elect Democratic Presidents from South of the Mason-Dixon Land (and for the most part Republicans as well), and fret over how to win over the quote-in-quote “Half-Republicans” to maintain some strength for an organization called the “Democratic National Committee” within that which we call the National Government.
11-2-1951: The Virginian [Senator Harry Byrd] said the South might be called upon to adopt a political remedy requiring “very firm and forthright measures” […] He characterized the National Administration as “a heterogenous crowd of Trumanites, which, if it could be called a party is one of questionable ancestory, irresponsible directory, and predatory purposes.” The Senator then departed from his prepared text to describe how he and other Southern political leaders at the Democratic National Convention in 1944 had agreed to vote for the nomination of Mr. Truman as running mate with Roosevelt . “We wanted only to prevent the renomination of Henry A Wallace. Sometimes you have to make a choice between two evils, and I don’t want to be held to the responsibility of Truman because we only did it to block Henry Wallace.”
He charged that President Truman had formed “an unholy alliance” with “tin-horn political incompetents and socialistic do-gooders”. The Civil Rights legislation on July 25 by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Byrd declared, represents a “mass invasion of States’ Rights without historical precedent, What about Lincoln, and the “Emancipation Proclamation”? Is that a good historical precedent for a “mass invasion” of “States’ Rights”? and they represent the President’s feelings on the matter also.” The South has been “slugged with a civil rights club,” Senator Byrd said, and it was only through effecting a coalition between Southern Democrats and some Republicans in Congress that these proposals and other “socialistic legislation” were defeated temporarily.
If Mr. Truman and his ideological adherents are re-elected, Senator Byrd warned, it will be regarded by them as a mandate to push through their “wholly unconstitutional socialistic program.” Consequently, he said, the South must consider that “there are ways to register opposition when we vote in November 1952.” The South must take “courageous action, even if this means reformation and reorganization of the national Democratic Party.” […] Demand at the next Democratic National Convention that civil rights be withdrawn from the platform and the two-thirds nominating rule be restored.
In the whole “Senator Trent Lott hearts Strom Thurmond” controversy, we had Pat Buchanan defend Lott by saying that “the Democrats nominated a segregationist in Adlai Stevenson”, which makes you ponder what the point of that would be. But even there, Senator Harry Byrd threw his chips behind Eisenhower, who gingerly advanced the cause of civil rights… sort of… at behest of the Supreme Court and a Bus Boycott. So it was the 1950s– both parties walked through the cavern of trying to appease both Racists and Blacks with somewhat enlightened Whites — and What is that that Happens to a Dream Deferred, again?
As for Henry Wallace… First recall that the Soviet press wrote him up again and again during 1948. Now, I proceed to inform you that he split with the Progressive Party and came out, more or less and with some caveats, for US involvement with the Korean War and against the Soviet Union’s “act of aggression”. And so, we get from the Pravdas…
10-3-1950: The press Soviet peace campagin was coupled by writers of the newspaper Literary Gazette with a strongly worded attack among American and other “war-mongers”, among whom were listed “the political business-man Henry Wallace”. Mr. Wallace’s name was mentioned in an editorial titled “Enemies of Mankind.” The editorial proposed the establishment of “The Book of Death” in which would be listed “names of all those monsters and cannibals who openly preach destruction of millions of human lives and of the greatest value of world culture.” […]
“The special favor of the warmongers is won by those politicians, literateurs, and scientists who in their day committed the sins of radicalism and who occasionally allowed themselves to criticize individual points of imperialist policy and then at the moment most convenient and profitable have dropped the mask, as has done the political businessman Henry Wallace.”