Iowa Hybrid

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They rushed Wallace around the country on peace rallies. They surrounded him adoringly with an apparatus called the Progressive Citizens of America. Closer & closer became their embrace. Phil Murray and other labor leaders, who had once been more than sympathetic to Wallace, deserted him. His close friend Frank Kingdon, co-chairman of P.C.A., saw what was happening and resigned, stating publicly that the P.C.A. was Communist controlled.

Abandoned by old friends, flattered by new ones, a lonely, sour Wallace went on his erratic way. In July 1946, he had ridiculed formation of a third party as a useless political gesture. But in December 1947, when the P.C.A. made him the formal proposition, he accepted the Third Party candidacy.

Rank & File. Third party movements are a political tradition in the U.S. They were there long before Moscow began to pull its worldwide political strings. They have sprung from countless inspirations. They have been against Masons, against Catholics, against trusts, against the drinking of alcohol. They have been for free soil, for easy money, for government ownership of railroads and communications. They have also championed solid measures which later passed into law: woman suffrage, the graduated income tax, conservation of natural resources, direct election of Senators, minimum wage standards. Sometimes the parties are minuscule, sometimes very sizable.

The Progressives of 1924 polled 4,800,000 votes for "Fighting Bob" La Follette and ran ahead of the Democrats in eleven Western states.

The strength of the Progressive Party of 1948 springs from the same authentic and perennial source. Its rank & file followers are not members of the Communist Party, who at the outside number less than 75,000 in the U.S. Its rank & file are teachers, students, veterans, working men. They are mostly young, with a smattering of Townsendite elders. They are not only the disgruntled and discontented; they are the wistful, the wishful, the hopeful.

They are not necessarily the havenots. But many of them feel that their country somehow owes them something more than they have. They are the wives of veterans who believe that Henry Wallace somehow will provide them with a better house. They are the people who mistrust all successful politicians because they feel that a successful politician must always sacrifice principle. In general, they mistrust success itself.

They are very much a part of the U.S.—which would not be the U.S. if every boy & girl were born either a little Republican or a little Democrat. Some of them, when they are older, will vote a straight party ticket. Some of them never will. They like to think of themselves as independents—independent as a hog on ice. Some of them really are. Some of them think the world is not good enough for them. Some are too good for this world.

The U.S. would be a different and a poorer place without them.

The Figurehead. Henry Wallace is for peace and abundance. So is everyone else. And both peace and abundance are observable phenomena in the U.S. today. Everybody would like to see an improvement in the quality of both peace and abundance. But the Progressives believe that Wallace alone really wants them improved—and wants it badly enough to do something radical about it.