POLITICAL NOTES: Gideon’s Army?

Rarely in history had a man set his sights for the presidency of the U.S. with so little evidence of popular support. Ever since Henry Wallace made his first tentative gestures toward a third party, organized labor and many of his own liberal friends had been deserting in droves (TIME, Dec. 29). Only the Communist Party and the regrouped P.C.A. united behind him. Nevertheless, this week Henry Wallace made his bid.

Over a nationwide radio hookup from Chicago, in a speech tinged with purple rhetoric and well-laced with party-line doctrine, Wallace said: “I shall run as an independent candidate for President of the U.S. in 1948.”*

“There is no real fight between a Truman and a Republican,” he cried. “The bigger the peace vote in 1948, the more definitely the world will know that the U.S. is not behind the bipartisan reactionary war policy which is dividing the world into two armed camps and making inevitable the day when American soldiers will be lying in their arctic suits in the Russian snow.”

Then Candidate Wallace sounded his own call to arms: “We have assembled a Gideon’s army,† small in number, powerful in conviction, ready for action. . . . We face the future unfettered by any principle but the general welfare. … By God’s grace, the people’s peace will usher in the century of the common man.”

*For other news of Wallace plans, see PRESS. † Gideon with an army of 300 freed Israel from the Midianites.