THIRD PARTIES: Among the Ruins

It was an angry, spiteful Gideon who watched his army melt away. On election night, Henry Wallace listened to the returns in his office, while party workers stamped and whirled in a square dance downstairs. When the networks gave him time for a three-minute talk (which listeners expected to be his admission of defeat), Wallace cried: “The cup of iniquity of both the old parties will overflow and one or the other of the old parties will disappear.” He exhorted his workers: “This crusade is going ahead with renewed vigor.”

His party had polled a meager 1,116,390 votes—far short of the 20 million he had predicted last April, still far short of the 4,000,000 he had originally set as his goal. He had run badly in industrial states like Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan; his 184,714 votes in California amounted to less than half of what had been expected.

Wallace could draw some consolation from the fact that his 508,542 votes in New York had cost Truman the state’s 47 electoral votes. If he had been on the ballot in Illinois, and had received the 48 to 64,000 votes cast for Progressive candidates for local offices, he would have given Dewey that state too. But his loud & noisy campaign had struck no roots. He had managed to convince the voters that he had only one major policy—Russia was always right, the U.S. always wrong. Obviously, the future of Gideon’s army—if it had a future—was parlous.

In the South, the Dixiecrats were scrambling for cover. Over the flat cotton lands rose the wail of countless Dixiecrats protesting that they had considered themselves Democrats all along. Candidate J. Strom Thurmond wired Truman: “You are entitled to the united support of a united people,” then quickly explained to newsmen that “the fight was within our own family.”

Southern politicos flooded the wires with calls to Washington, inquiring whether there was some way the 38 Dixiecrat votes could be shifted to the Truman column. The future of the Dixiecrats looked parlous, too.