First Name:
Christopher
Last Name:
Smith
Major Department:
History
Thesis Director:
Michael Krenn
Date of Thesis:
May 2013
The Progressive Party campaign of 1948 was launched in response to African-American’s lack of civil rights, governmental persecution of the Communist Party, and America’s militaristic, interventionist foreign policy following World War II. The Progressive Party called for peace and understanding with the Soviet Union, the strengthening of the United Nations and international law, universal health care, and federal laws banning discrimination and Jim Crow. They were led by Henry Wallace, who had been Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1941, Vice President from 1941 to 1945, and Secretary of Commerce from 1945 to 1946. Wallace had been a strong ally of Franklin Roosevelt’s and an outspoken supporter of New Deal policies; after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Wallace found himself at loggerheads with Harry Truman, and was eventually forced out of Cabinet in September 1946.
The Progressive Party was extremely controversial in its time. Their refusal to reject Communist Party support led to criticisms that they were merely puppets of Joseph Stalin. As recently as 2008, TIME criticized the Progressives as being “the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.” However, the Progressives were also extremely prescient in their views on race relations, nominating dozens of African-Americans for office and publicly defying segregation years before Brown v. Board of Education.