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henry wallace
In 2020, Reviving the Spirit of FDR
As his new book, attests, Nichols, national correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of many provocative works on American history, politics, and media, knows progressive politics past and present, inside and out. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should make it clear that John and I--fellow Wisconsinites--have been friends for years. We share an admiration for both Roosevelt and Thomas Paine, and he graciously praises my work in this new book. With that explained, I write this not for comradely but for historical and political reasons.
Whether my friend intended it or not, this deftly told history compels us to recognize that the repeated progressive failure to prevail in the now 75-year-long-struggle to take back the Democratic Party is owed not merely to the strength of the opposition, but also in good part to tragic decisions made, ironically enough, by our own champions Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Bernie Sanders.
Nichols' telling of the Democratic Party's declension from FDR-liberalism to neoliberalism begins neither in the 1970s with Jimmy Carter's presidency, nor in the tumultuous 1960s with LBJ's decision to prioritize the war in Southeast Asia over the War on Poverty in America (both of which he addresses). Rather, Nichols takes us back to Roosevelt's surprising and fateful decision to bow to the demands of conservative-pro-business and reactionary-Southern Democratic Party elites that he place the centrist Senator Harry Truman on the 1944 presidential ticket instead of his outspokenly progressive wartime vice president Henry Wallace--outspoken to the point of unabashedly calling out anti-labor corporate bosses and pro-segregationist politicians as "fascists."
Recognizing the President's deteriorating health, those conservatives and reactionaries did not want a President-in-Waiting who they feared would aggressively revive the New Deal and seriously try to bring an end to white supremacy in Dixie.
FDR's decision remains puzzling today. Roosevelt had firmly insisted on having his two-term New Deal Secretary of Agriculture Wallace on the 1940 presidential ticket. Wallace as vice president not only had ably overseen critical aspects of the war effort, but also enthusiastically promoted FDR's vision of the Four Freedoms: "Freedom of speech and worship, Freedom from want and fear."
In fact, encouraged by polls showing the great majority of Americans wanted to revive the New Deal and make the Four Freedoms all the more real at war's end, Roosevelt launched his campaign that January in his Annual Message to Congress. He proposed an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans and that very October told the nation, "The right to vote must be open to our citizens irrespective of race, color, or creed--without tax or artificial restriction of any kind."
Moreover, we now know he was secretly exploring the possibility of joining with progressive Republicans (there were quite a few back then!) to turn the Democratic Party into a united liberal party purged of conservatives and reactionaries.
The decision to remove Wallace, as Nichols details, was fateful. On Roosevelt's passing in April 1945, Truman became president. Predictably, he was no FDR or Wallace. He brought hacks and cronies into the White House, drove New Dealers out of his administration (including the now Secretary of Commerce Wallace), mishandled the immediate transition from a wartime to peacetime economy, alienated both labor and liberals, and in 1946 essentially handed Congress to the Republicans, who quickly passed the Taft-Hartley Act and effectively forever after stymied labor organizing down South.
Yes, he proposed progressive legislation, but, with the GOP controlling Congress and able to count on southern Democratic votes in a pinch, he accomplished little of significance other than to bolster the Republicans' anti-New Deal "Red Scare" initiatives by subjecting all federal employees to a "loyalty review" and to lead the United States into a dangerous Cold War (which given Stalin's ambitions may have been unavoidable) and a hot war in Korea.
Nichols' primary protagonist Wallace himself made the next dreadful decision. Outraged by Truman's handling of both domestic and foreign policy, instead of fighting to win back the party in 1948, Wallace bolted from the Democrats to pursue a futile campaign as the presidential candidate of a new Progressive Party. Backed by left-led labor unions, militant liberals and progressives, and cohorts of American Communists, he campaigned courageously, even going down into the deep South to speak before racially integrated audiences.
"This deftly told history compels us to recognize that the repeated progressive failure to prevail in the now 75-year-long-struggle to take back the Democratic Party is owed not merely to the strength of the opposition, but also in good part to tragic decisions made, ironically enough, by our own champions Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Bernie Sanders."
It was not without consequence, for Truman may well only have beaten the Republican Thomas Dewey that year because Wallace compelled Truman to move left to avoid losing significant numbers of labor and liberal voters. But as Nichols makes painfully clear, Wallace himself didn't just lose, he lost miserably. It finished off his political career and cost the Democratic Party its most progressive voice. A generation was to pass before progressives would again become a force in the party.
For all that, Nichols cites reasons to feel hopeful, if not optimistic, that progressives can finally prevail in the fight for the party's soul. Pointing to both the 2018 congressional victories by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and "the Squad" and the presidential candidacies of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, he sees a revival of the Democratic Party left. He even recounts a conversation he had with Sanders at Wallace's Iowa home in which Bernie signaled his determination if elected to pursue FDR's Four Freedoms and projected Economic Bill of Rights.
Which brings us to the third tragic decision.
Sanders was not to win the nomination. But to his credit, he once again did not, in contrast to Wallace, abandon the Democrats. And yet, he might actually have won the nomination had he not done what he also did in 2016. Despite his professed aspirations and his campaign website echoing FDR's New Deal (New Deal/Green New Deal; Social Security/Medicare for All; industrial democracy/workers democracy; Economic Bill of Rights/21C Economic Bill of Rights), he essentially turned his back on Roosevelt. He neither joined the Democratic Party, nor even ran as the FDR Democrat he clearly is.
Instead, he once again ran as a "democratic socialist" and wasted precious time trying to explain what that meant. Even worse, he never once mentioned FDR in the nationally televised primary debates to remind Americans of how President Roosevelt and the generation we revere beat the Great Depression and fascism by radically enhancing American democratic life. Nor did he chastise his neoliberal opponents for betraying FDR's and their grandparents' struggles, achievements, and the promise of the Four Freedoms. So Bernie lost, and we lost.
Nonetheless, Nichols' book gives us good reason to hope and to act. On entering Congress, AOC, the brightest and possibly most popular figure in the Democratic and progressive caucuses, linked herself to the tradition of FDR's politics and party. Indeed, she told Nichols, "I want us to be that party again!"
Meanwhile, we should not ignore or simply scoff at Joe Biden's statement that in view of the crises of Trump and the pandemic he plans to launch an FDR-style administration. We should push Joe on it, remember it, and hold him accountable to it.
Evolution or Death
President Donald Trump keeps signaling his determination to remake the Republican Party in the image of Steve Bannon and his circle of wild-eyed racists and xenophobes. Because the media in the United States tend to focus on personality clashes and electoral strategies rather than ideologies and the evolution of political parties, Trump's political project is still too little-noted by the pundits and politicians, who have consistently underestimated the threat he poses. Yet, for those who are paying attention, the President's extreme messaging sends a clear signal."The dog whistles get louder," says anti-racism activist and author Tim Wise.
'Yes, We Can' Progressivism
"Whatever the outcome of the contest between Clinton and Sanders, the key to real change is the people."
Progressivism emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century as a movement to roll back the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism. Progressives believed in a positive role for government in taming the market. They believed in the principle of social change. They valued science. They affirmed the intrinsic worth and dignity of human beings.
But as David Thelen, past editor of the Journal of American History and a leading historian of progressivism, argued in his essay "Two Traditions of Progressive Reform" and other works, beyond these general agreements were two different tendencies. One was oriented toward bureaucracy and expert decision-making; the other was more populist, focused on grassroots democracy and participation.
Donna Shalala -- longtime Hillary Clinton confidant, secretary of health and human services during President Bill Clinton's administration and now president of the Clinton Foundation -- expressed clearly the tenets of the expert tradition back in 1989, in "Mandate for a New Century," a now-famous speech she delivered as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shalala called upon higher education to engage with the problems of the world, from racism and sexism to environmental degradation, war and poverty. She also voiced the view that scientifically trained experts -- "a disinterested technocratic elite" -- should be at the center of decision-making. As Shalala put it:
The idea of society's best and brightest in service to its most needy, irrespective of any particular political philosophy ... is an idea of such great elegance... We all need to see our gifted researchers set about the work that will eliminate the cripplers we face now as thoroughly, if not as swiftly, as our research eliminated juvenile rickets in the past.
Hillary Clinton's "fighting for you" channels these expert-driven ideas. It places Clinton in the role of savior of the disadvantaged and marginalized -- Shalala's "best and brightest in service to its most needy." Clinton's calls for collective effort also suggest expert consultation. "We've got to get our heads together to come up with the best answers to solve the problems so that people can have real differences in their lives," Clinton said in her concluding remarks in a debate with Sanders on February 4, 2016.
However, the democratic tradition of progressivism has long been animated by populist movements: labor union organizing, civil rights, educational reform, the struggles of farmers to keep their farms and other such crusades. Progressive intellectuals with a grassroots democratic bent like Jane Addams, John Dewey, A. Philip Randolph and Alain Locke all had strong ties to these movements. So too did Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture and then-vice president, who in 1942 delivered a speech entitled "Century of the Common Man." Wallace's speech explicitly challenged Life publisher Henry Luce's "American Century" essay of 1941, which claimed warrant for America as global policeman. Wallace's tenure as secretary of agriculture also encompassed a little-remembered but enormous effort to democratize decision-making around how American farmland is used, from 1938 to 1941. Detailed in Jess Gilbert's 2015 book Planning Democracy, this movement showed how participatory democracy could take place with government acting as an empowering partner to its citizens -- neither savior nor enemy.
If we are to reverse the deepening mood of discouragement and powerlessness in the nation, we need wide civic involvement, amounting to a democratic awakening.
This populist, small-D democratic tradition of progressivism was revived in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It surfaced again in the community-organizing movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which fundamentally shaped a young Barack Obama in Chicago.
Obama took the message of grassroots democracy which he had learned from community organizing to the nation in the 2008 campaign, amplifying its themes and engaging millions of people. "I'm asking you not only to believe in my ability to make change," read the campaign website. "I'm asking you to believe in yours." The message was expressed in such memorable campaign slogans as, "We are the ones we've been waiting for," drawn from a song of the freedom movement of the 1960s. And it infused Obama's field operation. As Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson noted, the goal was "not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance."
"We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers," Obama field director Temo Figueroa explained to Dickinson. "We want to train organizers -- folks who can fend for themselves."
After Obama took office, the democratic promise of his campaign remained largely unrealized. Indeed, after becoming president, Obama's language began to shift from "we" to "I." At the news conference marking the first 100 days of his administration, Obama was asked what he intended to do as chief shareholder of some of America's largest companies. "I've got two wars I've got to run already," he laughed. "I've got more than enough to do." This shift in pronouns paralleled the deactivation of the grassroots base of Obama for America (OFA), which had powered the campaign.
As of election night 2008, OFA included some 2.5 million activists in the My.BarackObama social network, four million donors and 13 million email supporters. After the election, the organization's name shifted to "Organizing for America," at which point a fierce argument erupted among campaign leaders. Deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand argued that the new OFA should become an independent nonprofit. Joe Trippi, campaign manager for 2004 Howard Dean race, observed that OFA and its supporters had many independents and some Republicans and shouldn't lose its cross-partisan qualities. Finally, David Plouffe, a key architect of the 2008 campaign was put in charge of OFA. He decided to incorporate the organization as part of the Democratic National Committee.
"The move meant that the machinery of an insurgent candidate, one who had vowed to upend the Washington establishment, would now become part of that establishment, subject to the entrenched, partisan interests of the Democratic Party," observed Rolling Stone's Dickinson. "It made about as much sense as moving Greenpeace into the headquarters of ExxonMobil."
Flash forward to 2016, and we find the Democratic campaign tapping into growing activism on many fronts -- from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to action on climate change and local development. Bernie Sanders's core argument, that a grassroots movement will be necessary for real change, echoes the Obama 2008 message, both in its stress on participatory democracy and in its integration of a range of issues into a larger call for change -- "we" language, not "I" language. In his speech after the Iowa caucuses, Sanders said: "The powers that be... are so powerful that no president can do what has to be done alone... When millions of people come together... to stand up and say loudly and clearly, 'Enough is enough'... when that happens, we will transform this country." Should Sanders become president, he would pursue a broad activation of citizens. "Bernie Sanders has always identified with the populist side of progressivism," Huck Gutman, Sanders's chief of staff in the Senate from 2008 to 2012, told me.
It is still possible that Hillary Clinton could pick up themes from the Reinventing Citizenship project I coordinated with Bill Galston, deputy assistant for domestic policy to President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1995, now of the Brookings Institution. Reinventing Citizenship proposed a number of measures to strengthen government as a partner of citizens in public problem-solving and the work of democracy.
Whatever the outcome of the contest between Clinton and Sanders, the key to real change is the people. The issues that the campaign has raised -- the power of Wall Street, economic inequality and stagnant wages, college debt, mass incarceration, universal health care, campaign finance reform, climate change and others -- will require citizen power on a large scale if fundamental change is to occur. There are also many other, large-scale issues, crucial to the fate of the nation, that scramble partisan lines: revitalization of the democratic purpose of education; local economic development in the face of radical technological change; the drug epidemic; and reweaving the social fabric in a time of eroding community ties, to name just a few. These are enormous challenges. If the Democratic debate continues and deepens the call for citizen activation, it could well catalyze civic efforts beyond the issues of the campaign.
It is also clear that the idea of "we" has found a resonant audience especially among young people. "Sanders gives young people a place in his campaign," wrote Elisabeth Bott, one of my students from the University of Minnesota. "For so many people, politics is tainted. Sanders's campaign restores the idea that politics can be a source of change. He understands that we live in a time of change and extreme injustice and wants to change that with the help of us all."
This idea is not Sanders's alone. Politics -- by the definition of the term dating from the Greeks until the modern era -- has long involved citizens of diverse views and interests learning to work together to solve common problems, create common good and negotiate a democratic way of life. If we are to reverse the deepening mood of discouragement and powerlessness in the nation, we need wide civic involvement, amounting to a democratic awakening.
In this election, perhaps we see its beginnings.
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