Communist Party of the United States of America

The Communist Party of the United States of America enters the account chiefly as a political presence within and around the 1948 Progressive Party campaign: its supporters were conspicuous at the party’s convention, and its platform closely resembled the Progressives’ on several defining foreign-policy questions. The evidence presents an influential association and a source of political controversy, but does not establish that the Progressive candidates or most of their delegates belonged to the Communist Party.

Position in the 1948 Political Landscape

The party’s most visible role in this account is as part of the contested political setting of Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign. In Philadelphia, the Progressive convention drew more than three thousand delegates, exceeding the attendance at either major-party convention. The gathering was notably diverse in its composition: Black delegates were present in substantial numbers, nearly a third of the delegates were women, and young people predominated. The account describes a convention organized differently from the familiar party gatherings, with relatively little alcohol and no smoke-filled rooms, but also with limited political experience among many participants.

That broad coalition did not mean that the Communist Party and the Progressive Party were identical, or that all Progressives were Communists. The account explicitly distinguishes the candidates and most delegates from the Communists whose presence became a source of concern. It identifies celebrated pro-Communists, including Paul Robeson and New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, and describes Communists as visibly influential throughout the new Progressive organization. The distinction matters: the evidence shows a political movement whose public identity was affected by Communist participation, not a convention composed uniformly of party members.

The Convention and Its Platform

The Progressive platform sharpened that association. On major issues, it was described as virtually indistinguishable from the Communist Party platform: it denounced the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the new draft law, and called for the destruction of the United States’ nuclear weapons, which were then the only nuclear weapons known to exist. This overlap gave the Communist Party’s positions a conspicuous place in the Progressive campaign’s public program, even though the account does not say that the Communist Party formally controlled the convention.

A dispute over the platform exposed the limits of the convention’s willingness to distance itself from other governments. Vermont farmer James Hayford proposed an amendment clarifying that the Progressive Party did not intend to endorse any other country’s foreign policy. The proposal was denounced as outside pressure and voted down. Wallace understood that rejecting it was a mistake but did not stop the vote. The episode left the party’s foreign-policy alignment open to interpretation and made the convention’s refusal to adopt a separating statement politically consequential.

Wallace also declined to repudiate Communist support. He maintained that he would not reject support offered in the name of peace. Senator Glen H. Taylor, his running mate, tried to draw a distinction between Communists who sought change through gradual evolution and those who sought revolution, arguing that the former could support the Progressive cause. That distinction was Taylor’s account of the political spectrum; the evidence does not establish that it represented the Communist Party’s own formal categories or that the party as a whole fit either description.

Campaign, Message, and Public Perception

Wallace carried the Progressive message into the 1948 campaign as a peace appeal. He traveled extensively, including through the South, where he condemned segregation and refused to stay in hotels that discriminated. In North Carolina, angry crowds pelted him with eggs and rotten tomatoes. His central argument was that the Progressive Party was the peace party and could end the Cold War through direct negotiations with the Soviet Union. These positions placed the campaign’s foreign-policy orientation, and its relationship to Communist support, in the foreground.

At the same time, the campaign’s reception changed. Wallace drew a larger crowd than Harry S. Truman had at the same Los Angeles stadium, and that audience paid to attend. Yet attendance at Progressive rallies and speeches declined overall, and the initial excitement of Wallace’s crusade ebbed. Increasingly, the press portrayed him as playing Moscow’s game. Wallace attacked both major parties as being under the influence of Wall Street and the Pentagon, but that charge did not dissolve the public concern generated by the Communist presence in his movement. The account presents a tension between the campaign’s peace message and the growing perception that its alignment on international questions favored the Soviet Union.

Anticommunism and the Limits of the Record

The Communist Party also appears in the domestic political atmosphere surrounding Truman’s Federal Employee Loyalty Program. Addressing the Federal Bar Association, Truman assured his audience that every known instance of Communist subversion had been investigated by the FBI or through his loyalty program. He asserted that the Communist Party was making no headway in American life, except perhaps in the minds of some people. The statement records Truman’s public position, not an independent measure of the party’s actual influence.

The account notes an unresolved irony in that position: Truman apparently did not then consider whether his own loyalty program had helped produce the broader atmosphere in which Joseph McCarthy gained prominence. That observation connects the party’s limited, visible role in the Progressive movement with a much larger politics of suspicion. The evidence thus depicts the Communist Party both as a presence that shaped the 1948 campaign’s reputation and as a target invoked in national security debate, while leaving its internal organization, membership, and direct control over the Progressive Party unspecified.