Thomas W. Devine. Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism

The year 1948 was a dramatic one in American political history. It marked the first explicit civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform; the Deep South's resultant break from the party to follow a “Dixiecrat” racist revolt led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond; the launch of the Marshall Plan to reconstruct postwar Europe; and the surprise victory of Harry S. Truman in the presidential election that November, suggesting that the New Deal order created during the Depression still had legs in the postwar era. All this took place as the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union grew ever more frigid, a fact that prompted former vice-president Henry Wallace to launch his quixotic and ultimately futile bid for the White House at the start of the year. There are a number of books on Wallace, and scores—many of them cited in the bibliography to this book—on the politics of the Truman period. Thomas W. Devine promises a fresh “post–Cold War” reassessment that “paints a far more complicated picture of ‘Gideon's Army’ than historians, both sympathetic and critical, have painted heretofore” (p. xiv). Exhaustively researched and elegantly argued, the book places the Wallace campaign into a larger context of late 1940s post–Popular Front politics that sheds new light on the tortuous road of American leftist political activism in these years while leaving familiar historical problems about this period only partially resolved.

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