Shout-out to Harold Ford from the Harold Ford Party!
Shout-out to Harold Ford from the Harold Ford Party!
I really like the wikibox, and also think that Wallace would likely lose re-election to Dewey, though I don’t fully agree with your analysis of a Wallace presidency (at least on foreign policy). It is true that his campaign was dominated by communists, and he basically acted like a proto-tankie, but a lot of it came from his disagreement with Truman’s policy towards the USSR and communism in general, with Truman often going out of his way to piss off communists and leftists, even when it had no clear upside. Wallace also shifted pretty quickly towards an anti-USSR stance after his 1948 campaign, so I could see relations between him and Stalin have cooled significantly by 1948, though there would not be a ‘Cold War’ yet, which would likely lead to a Communist Party-led France and Italy, as well as Czechoslovakia still being nominally democratic.The 1948 United States presidential election was the 51st quadrennial presidential election and was held on Tuesday, November 2nd, 1948. Incumbent Democratic President Henry Wallace was soundly defeated by Republican Thomas Dewey, the Governor of New York and 1944 Republican presidential nominee.
Wallace had ascended to the presidency after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Defeating an attempt to replace him on the ticket at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Wallace's firm commitment to civil rights for African-Americans, including his desegregation of the United States military by executive order, led to a walk-out of many conservative southern Democrats, who launched the States' Rights ("Dixiecrat") third-party campaign led by Governor Benjamin T. Laney of Arkansas. The Dixiecrats hoped to win enough electoral votes to force a contingent election in the House of Representatives, in order to extract concessions from either Wallace or Dewey in exchange for their support.
Dewey, the leader of the Republican Party's liberal eastern establishment wing, defeated challenges from Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, leader of the party's conservative wing, and former Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota to win the party's nomination at the 1948 Republican National Convention.
Foreign policy, particularly the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union, was the defining policy issue that separated both major party candidates. While Dewey was a member of the growing bipartisan consensus that advocated opposing the Soviet Union internationally, Wallace, who had overseen the end of World War II, had consistently attempted to preserve good relations with the USSR and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin even as the position became increasingly unpopular following Soviet reneging on wartime promises in Eastern Europe and Iran. Although Wallace began to hew closer to the foreign policy consensus after the fall of Greece to communism in early 1948, his administration continued to be dogged by House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations into several high-ranking members accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union.
With low approval ratings and a split in the New Deal coalition that had re-elected Roosevelt in the previous four elections, Wallace trailed Dewey by large margins throughout the campaign.
Dewey won a substantial victory in the Electoral College and a bare majority in the popular vote to become the first Republican to win a presidential election since Herbert Hoover twenty years earlier. While the Dixiecrat ticket won only five percent of the nationwide popular vote, its concentration in the former Confederacy meant that Laney won eight southern states and a total of 81 electoral votes, the best showing by a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Dewey's victory marked the only time the Republican Party won a presidential election during nearly three-decade span from 1932 to 1960, commonly referred to as the Fifth Party System, dominated by the Democratic Party. This election also marked the first in a series of mid-century southern revolts from the Democratic Party presidential ticket that would culminate in the eventual realignment of white southern voters into the Republican Party fold.
This was the final presidential election held before the ratification of the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1951, which limits any person from being elected president more than twice.
- Henry Wallace is one of those AH figures that, the more you read about him, the more frustrating he becomes. He was ahead of his time on things like civil rights, gender equality, recognizing the potential world-ending implications of the Cold War and even in his old age opposed the escalation of the Vietnam War. (He also foresaw smartwatches before most Americans even had television). He seems to have been genuinely principled--very few people, much less a former Vice President of the United States, would put up with the kind of harassment and awful treatment he and his campaign experienced during his campaign tour through the Jim Crow South to prove some kind of moral point and not because they genuinely opposed segregation and treating African-Americans as second-class citizens.
But he was also a fundamentally weird guy (his interests included politics, farming, mysticism and dabbling in sports like tennis and boomerang-throwing) who was absolutely terrible at several important aspects of politics (antagonizing multiple Cabinet secretaries while running the wartime BEW resulted in Roosevelt siding against him and shuttering the whole thing, not realizing just how quickly communists infiltrated the Progressive Party that was founded as a vehicle for his campaign, failing to ingratiate himself to enough Democratic powerbrokers to prevent him from being dumped from the ticket in 1944), showed himself to be very temperamental (he switched parties four times during his adult life even excluding his support for the first Progressives in 1912) and whose remarkable prescience was matched by his ability to ignore things he didn't want to believe (it took him years to recognize how badly he'd misjudged the Soviet Union despite it being obvious by the time he ran for president in 1948 that the Soviets had absolutely no intention of living up to the promises they'd made at Yalta & Potsdam and had been actively committing espionage on their wartime allies to boot) that I can't see how he could possibly have performed as president in any way except that he would get clobbered in 1948 like everyone expected Truman to be.
- For the results:
- I gave Wallace approximately the same share of the two-party vote as Truman had IOTL September 1948 (approximately seven-eighths of what Truman ended up getting IOTL).
- Outside of the south, I gave Wallace a slight bonus west of the Mississippi to account for his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture & switched the home-state bonus Truman received in Missouri to Iowa.
- IOTL, Thurmond only won states where he was the official Democratic nominee. It's not mentioned in the write-up, but ITTL, Wallace challenged Jim Crow harder and earlier than Truman (not being raised by family that sympathized with the Confederacy helps), including an earlier desegregation of the military, engendering a stronger reaction. As a result, the number of states where Laney is the official Democratic nominee grows to the OTL Confederacy. I averaged Thurmond's OTL performance in the four states he was the Democratic nominee IOTL, compared them to the average of his best performance in four states where he wasn't the official Democratic nominee and increased Laney's vote by that factor in the non-OTL Thurmond states.
- Finally, Wallace got all of his OTL voters.
- The faithless Tennessee elector is kept from OTL.
- The Wallace & Laney photos are edited (and/or colorized, in Laney's case).
- The write-up implies the aftermath: Dewey is tossed out after one term (he spends his presidency bogged down both by fights with his own party's conservative leadership and an unpopular ATL Korean War) and Democrats win the next three elections (Adlai "Merkin Muffley" Stevenson welds the New Deal coalition back together for two terms, LBJ wins a narrow victory in 1960 in spite of the aforementioned southern revolts) before the New Deal coalition violently implodes four years earlier than OTL.
In my mind, a Republican Party with just one presidential term from 1933 to 1965 means the southern white voters are less ready to switch to the Grand Old Party and the process is prolonged, with a southern regional party (with the ironic name of the National Party) emerging that briefly appears to be poised to vacuum up conservative voters from both of the major parties before instead fading away after its last serious presidential ticket in 1972 when Republicans finally start turning the "racism" dial high enough.
I really like the wikibox, and also think that Wallace would likely lose re-election to Dewey, though I don’t fully agree with your analysis of a Wallace presidency (at least on foreign policy). It is true that his campaign was dominated by communists, and he basically acted like a proto-tankie, but a lot of it came from his disagreement with Truman’s policy towards the USSR and communism in general, with Truman often going out of his way to piss off communists and leftists, even when it had no clear upside. Wallace also shifted pretty quickly towards an anti-USSR stance after his 1948 campaign, so I could see relations between him and Stalin have cooled significantly by 1948, though there would not be a ‘Cold War’ yet, which would likely lead to a Communist Party-led France and Italy, as well as Czechoslovakia still being nominally democratic.
That’s why I don’t see him being clobbered to the extent you have him here. Colorado, Washington, Arizona(, and maybe even Virginia) he’d likely still keep, while IMO Dewey would go for a more conservative VP, as a result of stronger conservative reaction to Wallace’s support for the strike wave. Either a repeat of Dewey/Bricker or Dewey/Halleck seems much more likely IMO.
That doesn’t surprise me, Anti-Communist, Pro-New Deal but would probably play to the Conservative core of the party better than Dewey would.I honestly think Stassen is more like likely to be the GOP nominee instead of Dewey.
Colorado I see probably going Republican, but I do agree with Washington going Democratic. Idaho I could see being a toss up depending on how hard Glen Taylor campaigns for Wallace.Colorado, Washington, Arizona(, and maybe even Virginia)
While it is kind of funny to imagine the impetus for Berlin Airlift or the creation of NATO being Harry Truman's goal to trigger the left, I somehow don't think that was the reasoning behind the Truman Doctrine.I really like the wikibox, and also think that Wallace would likely lose re-election to Dewey, though I don’t fully agree with your analysis of a Wallace presidency (at least on foreign policy). It is true that his campaign was dominated by communists, and he basically acted like a proto-tankie, but a lot of it came from his disagreement with Truman’s policy towards the USSR and communism in general, with Truman often going out of his way to piss off communists and leftists, even when it had no clear upside.
I think you significantly underestimate how difficult it would be to avert the Cold War with a POD in July 1944 (the time of the Democratic convention).Wallace also shifted pretty quickly towards an anti-USSR stance after his 1948 campaign, so I could see relations between him and Stalin have cooled significantly by 1948, though there would not be a ‘Cold War’ yet, which would likely lead to a Communist Party-led France and Italy, as well as Czechoslovakia still being nominally democratic.
That’s why I don’t see him being clobbered to the extent you have him here.
His lack of a background in electoral politics prior to becoming the Democratic nominee for vice president certainly didn't help.I'll admit I've not read much on Wallace, but nothing I have read has ever suggested to me that the man was good at retail politics.
IMO Dewey would go for a more conservative VP, as a result of stronger conservative reaction to Wallace’s support for the strike wave. Either a repeat of Dewey/Bricker or Dewey/Halleck seems much more likely IMO.
I honestly think Stassen is more like likely to be the GOP nominee instead of Dewey.
That doesn’t surprise me, Anti-Communist, Pro-New Deal but would probably play to the Conservative core of the party better than Dewey would.
Colorado, Washington, Arizona(, and maybe even Virginia) he’d likely still keep
Colorado I see probably going Republican, but I do agree with Washington going Democratic. Idaho I could see being a toss up depending on how hard Glen Taylor campaigns for Wallace.
Never argued that was the reason, but the Berlin Airlift didn’t happen until 1948, which was preceded with two years where Truman concluded that anything that even rhymed with ‘red’ was the enemy, and literally purged communists from governments in France, Italy, and Belgium.While it is kind of funny to imagine the impetus for Berlin Airlift or the creation of NATO being Harry Truman's goal to trigger the left, I somehow don't think that was the reasoning behind the Truman Doctrine.
Not saying that the Cold War wasn’t bound to happen, but it wouldn’t have escalated as quickly without the Truman doctrine, and as a result there wouldn’t be a Red Scare, or at least it wouldn’t have as much popular support, as communism wouldn’t be seen as negatively.I think you significantly underestimate how difficult it would be to avert the Cold War with a POD in July 1944 (the time of the Democratic convention).
Also, I can't say I see any scenario where a Wallace administration that does little or nothing to stop what would be viewed (from the perspective of westerners observing the gradual removal of even the fig-leaf of democracy in the nations the USSR occupied after the war) as the first steps to establishing a one-party communist state in France and Italy results in Wallace being nominated by the Democratic Party for a term of his own, much less him somehow performing better than the scenario I posted.
I just don’t really get the math. How did Wallace lose Arizona, yet win a state like Utah, where Truman+Wallace did worse OTL? Same could be said about the state of Washington.Weirdly, I somehow knew people would quibble with the results of Wallace doing poorly in the Electoral College.
Good thing I still had my notes from when I made this box lying around so I can reconstruct the margin of victory in each state:
Vermont: 33.47%
Maine: 25.09%
Kansas: 21.84%
Nebraska: 20.11%
South Dakota: 17.72%
New Hampshire: 17.40%
Pennsylvania: 15.10%
New Jersey: 14.52%
North Dakota: 14.45%
Delaware: 13.60%
Indiana: 13.29%
Oregon: 12.96%
Connecticut: 12.93%
Illinois: 12.57%
Michigan: 12.21%
Ohio: 11.74%
Maryland: 9.91%
Missouri: 9.34%
Colorado: 8.78%
Wyoming: 8.56%
Nevada: 8.03%
California: 7.57%
Wisconsin: 7.19%
New York: 4.79%
Idaho: 4.47%
Virginia: 2.51%
Massachusetts: 1.34%
Washington: 0.74%
Arizona: 0.47%
----
Utah: 0.63%
New Mexico: 1.24%
Rhode Island: 1.52%
Iowa: 1.96%
Montana: 1.99%
Tennessee: 2.48%
Minnesota: 3.16%
West Virginia: 3.63%
Kentucky: 3.74%
Rhode Island: 5.28%
Oklahoma: 8.49%
Texas: 15.08%Mississippi: 78.99%*
Alabama: 60.75%
South Carolina: 52.57%*
Georgia: 50.31%
Arkansas: 41.12%
Florida: 23.95%
Louisiana: 22.04%
North Carolina: 2.38%
*-Wallace was the second-place candidate
I think this is an ideologically-driven interpretation of the origins of the Cold War that doesn't reflect the actual historical record, and leave it at that.Never argued that was the reason, but the Berlin Airlift didn’t happen until 1948, which was preceded with two years where Truman concluded that anything that even rhymed with ‘red’ was the enemy, and literally purged communists from governments in France, Italy, and Belgium.
Not saying that the Cold War wasn’t bound to happen, but it wouldn’t have escalated as quickly without the Truman doctrine, and as a result there wouldn’t be a Red Scare, or at least it wouldn’t have as much popular support, as communism wouldn’t be seen as negatively.
I'm going to re-do the math, because I was getting tired towards the end there, but the gist is that in the west, the baseline was derived from the average of the Democratic (plus Progressive in 1948) vote in 1944 & 1948 rather than just 1948.I just don’t really get the math. How did Wallace lose Arizona, yet win a state like Utah, where Truman+Wallace did worse OTL? Same could be said about the state of Washington.
I feel called out.>Remember comments the last time I made a box about him
>Don't feel like relitigating the Cold War or post-war farm politics
>Better put a bunch of notes in the spoiler so people read them
>Who am I kidding, people don't read notes
I feel called out.
No, but in all seriousness; this is an excellent post, and one that will be used as a framework for future Wallace discussions. I do however wonder if Wallace would really pull off such a 180, and replace Duggan with someone like Marshall, who he had no real relationship with, and was a bit of random appointment OTL anyway. I could see Duggan convince Wallace to nominate a close friend like Archibald MacLeish instead, or maybe Stettinius (who’d probably still be Ambassador to the UN with no Truman accusing everyone of insufficient anti-communism) could also make a return to his former office. Or maybe Acheson comes in earlier?
There are obviously a few more possible events that could radically alter a Wallace presidency, like Hoover being fired from the FBI, or with two of his most important cabinet members being outed as USSR spies he might be primaried by a coalition of Roosevelt liberals and conservatives, and be replaced with say Eisenhower on the ticket. Speaking of the Roosevelts, do you think Eleanor could be given a more significant role in the Wallace administration, considering more of her friends serve in his cabinet, and there is less of an ideological distance than with Truman?
Byrnes is a pretty obvious name as a strong inner-party standard bearer for the more anti-Wallace factions in the party, though I don’t think he’d ever be able to defeat an incumbent Wallace on a 1v1, but if his efforts would be enough to deny Wallace the nomination after the first few ballots, I’m sure a moderate consensus pick would appear. Alben Barkley is a pretty obvious shout, though it could also be Truman himself, or even a non-Southerner like Lucas or McFarland.Indeed. It's very plausible that Wallace, even in a TL where he remained on the ticket in 1944 and succeeded FDR, could be ousted at the 1948 Democratic convention. This was before the modern era of primaries began with the McGovern-Fraser Commission, and someone like Wallace, who did not impress Democratic powerbrokers and politicos with his political skills once he was plucked from the Department of Agriculture, would almost certainly rely on the fact that he's the incumbent president and undeniable heir apparent to Roosevelt (unlike Truman IOTL) than anything else.
The real issue would be could a coalition of conservatives (sans the Dixiecrats who would have bolted over Wallace's earlier push for civil rights compared to Truman IOTL) and anti-Wallace forces find someone else who could unite the party in those circumstances? And who would want to in effect be a sacrificial lamb, since everyone IOTL 1948 (except apparently Truman himself) believed that the Republicans would sweep into the White House?
This is arguably the biggest shift of a Wallace presidency compared to Truman IMO, at least domestically. Fights over whether cabinet secretaries are communists or not, would not just make future Cold War liberals less likely to go in bed with anti-communists from the reactionary right, but would also butterfly away the split of the centre-left between pro- and anti-communist factions, with the former not dying off as quickly, and the latter not becoming as dominant in the Democratic Party’s ideology.As for his Cabinet, as the write-up says, during Wallace's administration (and indeed his lifetime), Duggan and White were just accused of spying. Granted, the fact that two of the top Cabinet secretaries are being accused by the FBI itself of being spies is pretty explosive, but like Truman IOTL, Wallace and anyone left-of-center in the 1940s/1950s would have likely viewed them as a political attack rather than an actual indication of guilt.
Hoover being fired by Wallace is probably unlikely (a President Duggan after Wallace’s death would probably do it, but that’s a whole other scenario). Nevertheless, with both more people in his administration interested in weakening Hoover, as well as the likes of William J. Donovan and Cord Meyer not being pushed aside, I do think that Hoover could not amass the same amount of power as he had OTL at that point.Would Wallace have fired Hoover? I'd lean towards "no." Truman IOTL disliked Hoover (in contrast to FDR) and his tactics and yet felt the political costs of firing him were too great (as did Kennedy later)--Wallace ITTL would be in an even worse political situation, since by the time he would have felt keen to fire Hoover, it would have been seen as some sort of retaliation for accusing his Cabinet picks of being Soviet agents.
Stettinius sticking around longer has all kinds of interesting consequences for Palestine and the Jews.I'm not sure about what role Eleanor Roosevelt would play in a Wallace administration. Probably more behind-the-scenes influence, but I think she would probably be given a similar role at the UN as to what she got IOTL (I would imagine Stettinius would be given the post of first US Ambassador to the UN like OTL & with Wallace taking longer to be confrontative with the Soviets, would stick around until Dewey is sworn in).
Yeah, that would probably end up being the case if Wallace gets dumped in 1948.Byrnes is a pretty obvious name as a strong inner-party standard bearer for the more anti-Wallace factions in the party, though I don’t think he’d ever be able to defeat an incumbent Wallace on a 1v1, but if his efforts would be enough to deny Wallace the nomination after the first few ballots, I’m sure a moderate consensus pick would appear. Alben Barkley is a pretty obvious shout, though it could also be Truman himself, or even a non-Southerner like Lucas or McFarland.
Possibly.Someone like Barkley would be a lot more willing to act as a sacrificial lamb if he were to believe that Wallace would get crushed so badly that it would have devastating consequences down ballot as well.
A big takeaway from Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism was that although the Progressive Party discredited the idea of a Popular Front-style movement in the postwar US, an end to the agreement between mainstream American liberals/progressives/etc. and communists was bound to happen without the specter of a fascist threat keeping the two together.This is arguably the biggest shift of a Wallace presidency compared to Truman IMO, at least domestically. Fights over whether cabinet secretaries are communists or not, would not just make future Cold War liberals less likely to go in bed with anti-communists from the reactionary right, but would also butterfly away the split of the centre-left between pro- and anti-communist factions, with the former not dying off as quickly, and the latter not becoming as dominant in the Democratic Party’s ideology.
Meyer didn't join the CIA until 1950. Perhaps you were thinking of someone else?Hoover being fired by Wallace is probably unlikely (a President Duggan after Wallace’s death would probably do it, but that’s a whole other scenario). Nevertheless, with both more people in his administration interested in weakening Hoover, as well as the likes of William J. Donovan and Cord Meyer not being pushed aside, I do think that Hoover could not amass the same amount of power as he had OTL at that point.
Good for you.Still maintain he'd be succeeded by Harold Stassen.
Remembered this and now I can do a sequel since Chuck's mom died.I'm reading a book about 19th century Britain and the repeated mention of the (now obsolete) custom of calling a general election whenever the monarch died made me think what would have happened if that custom not been changed.
Taking the popular vote swings from polling listed on the Wikipedia page for opinion polling for the OTL UK general election of 1955 and applying it to the 1951 results, here's what a snap election would have looked like if Parliament had been dissolved with the death of George VI:
Kind of wondering who the lucky Republican that gets elected in ‘64 is. I doubt it’s someone like Goldwater since you mentioned that there was a far right party until 1972, so it doesn’t seem likely the GOP would nominate someone from that side of the party, but I also don’t think it’s someone like Rockefeller since he’s very similar to Dewey, who is likely viewed as a failure. It could be Nixon but Johnson followed by Nixon is pretty derivative of OTL. There’s some other potential names but I’m not sure if they are right either.The write-up implies the aftermath: Dewey is tossed out after one term (he spends his presidency bogged down both by fights with his own party's conservative leadership and an unpopular ATL Korean War) and Democrats win the next three elections (Adlai "Merkin Muffley" Stevenson welds the New Deal coalition back together for two terms, LBJ wins a narrow victory in 1960 in spite of the aforementioned southern revolts) before the New Deal coalition violently implodes four years earlier than OTL.