>>13791772
Lok into FDR's "vice president":
Why I Stood With Henry Wallace
ack in 1948, I was a member of Communist Party (CP) and an active participant in the Young Progressive organization in Boston.
When the former vice president and still popular national figure Henry Wallace decided to run for president under the Progressive Party banner, the CP was an important participant. But far from being a postwar sectarian swing from the Earl Browder Popular Front years, the effort that I was involved with seemed to me motivated by an attempt to build meaningful alliances with non-Communist progressives in a last-ditch effort to save the once powerful left-wing movement of the 1930s and early 1940s…
I might add one anecdote: at Wallace’s last pre-election rally at a big Boston hotel, when supporters still had hopes of making at least some electoral gains, Paul Robeson (1952 STALIN Peace prize) also made an appearance. As was customary with him, he spoke and said a few words before and between his songs. All I can recall some seventy years later is one sentence he said to the large crowd, a majority of whom were certainly not Communist Party members: “But don’t we all dream, someday, of a socialist America?”
Suddenly, there was a gasp of total silence. We Communists had always carefully avoided just such a topic so as to get along with the non-Communists in a common campaign. But the silence was brief: the whole auditorium broke into loud, enthusiastic applause.
This was in part, no doubt, because “Big Paul’s” magnetic charisma and speaking voice alone could almost win over trees and stones. But it also indicated that quite a few of the non-Communists in the Progressive Party also shared such dreams, a phenomenon which appears to be present once again in the feelings of many millions of young Americans today. https://archive.is/wip/8UJML
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/henry-wallace-1948-progressive-party-campaign-communist/
On foreign policy, Wallace opposed the so-called Truman Doctrine, which aimed to contain communism through military intervention if necessary. He refused to support the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, considering it an instrument of the cold war. He preferred a multilateral aid program that would be administered through the United Nations. https://truthout.org/articles/henry-wallace-americas-forgotten-visionary/