National Affairs: Old Lochinvar

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The tumult and the shouting had died, and, after his cross-country political safari, Henry Wallace was resting at his son's home in Des Moines. He could afford to rest. His swing through the West had surprised a lot of people, but few could have been more surprised than Henry Wallace. Almost everywhere he had packed the crowds in: 3,000 in Cleveland, 6,000 in Minneapolis, 8,000 in Detroit, a record 25,000 in Los Angeles' Gilmore Stadium. The people who came paid good prices to hear him: from 60¢ to $2.40 apiece in Chicago, a $3.60 top in Los Angeles.

The enthusiasm matched the numbers. In San Francisco, 2,500 stood in the streets outside the packed Opera House to listen to the sound trucks. When University of California officials refused to let Wallace speak in any university building, 10,000 students left their classes to hear him talk from a Berkeley curbstone near the campus gates. In Chicago his audience chanted: "We want Wallace! Wallace in '48!" In Los Angeles he was introduced, to wild applause, as "the man for '48."

Only after he left Seattle did his crowds begin to fall off. In Portland, Ore., he drew less than half capacity at the civic auditorium. In Bismarck, N.Dak., only 2,500 busy farmers showed up out of an expected 5,000.

Third Party. But Henry was jubilant, and his statement of intentions soared with the upcurve of his jubilation. When he started out, Wallace was cautiously insisting that his sole aim was to scare the Democratic Party leftward. By the time he reached Denver, he was threatening: "If we can't make the Democratic Party liberal, we'll have to take what action is appropriate." In Bismarck he hinted with boyish glee that he might take "a Democratic vacation" in 1948, i.e., form a third party.

The professional politicos, who had largely ignored the Wallace junket, tried to laugh the whole thing off. They said it was all just a stunt to boost the circulation of Editor Wallace's New Republic (circ. 80,000), and that his audiences, promoted by the Communists, were chiefly a confused jumble of comrades, fellow wanderers, crackpots and wild-eyed college kids.

It was true that the hard core of Wallace's listeners consisted largely of the vociferous intellectual and professional Left. But around it were clustered thousands of ordinary, bewildered citizens. Some of them sought to hear in Wallace's alternately flat and strident voice the bland tones of Franklin Roosevelt, to recover, in Wallace's fumbling gestures, the touch of a vanished hand. Most of them were vaguely troubled about such timely problems as the Bomb, World War III, Russia, economic collapse. All were groping for answers and willing to listen to anybody who could offer one and Henry seemed to have an answer—of a sort—ready for anything.