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This chapter focuses on Henry A. Wallace's weeklong, seven-state southern tour that would provide his third party crusade with many of its most dramatic moments. Wallace's decision to challenge segregation in the heart of the Jim Crow South grabbed frontpage headlines throughout the country, winning the Progressive Party the most sustained media coverage it would receive during the campaign. Had it not been for President Truman's dramatic comeback, one veteran reporter later recalled, the Wallace tour would have been the biggest political story of the year. Expectant Progressives' hopes ran high. Many believed that Wallace's trip would focus nationwide attention on the injustice of segregation, and, more important, unite southern working-class blacks and whites against those who exploited racial divisions to preserve their own special privilege.

This chapter details Mencken's role at the first televised national political convention, his views of politicians, and his view on the detrimental power of television over print. In 1948, Mencken experienced a resurgence of interest in his work and his glory. He became an American institution; his publisher Alfred Knopf labeled him a force in the Republic. In the midst of all these, Mencken suffered from a cerebral stroke.

The aftermath of World War I sees the granting of suffrage to women (by the narrowest of margins). The Great Depression makes these deficiencies dramatically clear. The New Deal is an attempt by non- or semi-socialist forces in America to deal with the weaknesses of the American state, now that America had grown into the major industrial power. The forces behind Roosevelt soon split into two main factions. Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Message lays out a new bill of rights that is strongly of the Wallace vision. Wallace is Vice-President until 1944 when he is replaced by Harry Truman. Truman is much less open to co-existence with the Soviets. The USSR is increasingly aggressive in Western Europe – the Cold War is on the doorstep and enters with the publication of George Kennan’s famous ‘Long Telegram’ advocating a policy of containment. Containment is in turn made cheaper by the development of atomic weapons and delivery systems that would have to be in flying range of the USSR. Domestically the fear of Communism leads to a vast shrinking of the political spectrum deemed legitimate.

This chapter illustrates the deafening cheers and shouts from the throng of nearly fifty thousand people that struck a stark contrast to the less welcoming salutations Henry Wallace had received throughout most of Dixie. If nowhere else, the Progressive Party's standardbearer could still get a standing ovation in the Bronx. His devoted disciples, at least two-thirds of them teenagers and young men and women in their early twenties, had turned out in great force and full voice to welcome their hero returned. As with most large Progressive rallies, the atmosphere at this gathering on September 10 was one of an openair revival meeting, complete with singing, “pass the hat” fundraising, and an audience seemingly borne along on its own fervor. With the bright floodlights beating down on him, Wallace stood for ten minutes in the misty night air, smiling broadly and waving his arms to quiet the crowd.

This chapter describes how the origins of Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party occasioned heated debate among political partisans throughout the presidential campaign. They remain a topic of some controversy. Beginning in 1948, critics of the Progressive Party contended that the Communists, on orders from Moscow, had conceived the idea, organized the party according to a “detailed time-table,” chosen Wallace as the candidate, and pressured him relentlessly until he accepted his predetermined role. In their view, the Wallace candidacy was an entirely synthetic, top-down venture that the Communists had created with the sole purpose of serving Soviet foreign policy. Accordingly, they portrayed non-Communist Progressives—including Wallace himself—as a motley collection of innocent dupes consciously or unconsciously doing the Kremlin's bidding by dividing and discrediting American liberalism and thus paving the way for the victory of “reaction.”

This chapter discusses Henry Wallace's arrival by day coach at Philadelphia's Broad Street Station. Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho, his intended running mate, and a crowd of some fifteen hundred ardent supporters welcomed their standardbearer with songs, cheers, and waving banners. Acknowledging their adulation, a beaming Wallace declared, “I'm mighty glad to be here in Philadelphia. This convention is going to mark a great turning point not only in the history of the New Party, but also in the history of the world.” Wallace came to Philadelphia convinced that the independent liberals who had heretofore withheld their support were now ready to join his crusade. Likewise, he believed that liberal Democrats, having failed to block President Truman's nomination, were now ready to back him and the New Party. The convention, he predicted, would produce a flood of converts and “unleash liberal forces all over the country.”

This chapter outlines the collective biography of six agrarian intellectuals who were behind the New Deal: Henry A. Wallace, M. L. Wilson, Howard R. Tolley, L. C. Gray, Carl C. Taylor, and Bushrod W. Allin. Growing up in the Midwest in the late nineteenth century, all six were raised as farm boys with deep-seated faith in Protestantism. Years later, they pursued formal education in the University of Wisconsin under the instructorship of Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons, two of the reigning scholars in the fields of radical-reformism and institutional economics. The chapter describes their careers in the agricultural sector, highlighting the formation of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This bureau became a pivotal cog in establishing the New Deal as it laid down the foundations of the policy.

This chapter describes how Frederick Schuman thought positively of the convention. He wrote to Beanie Baldwin three days after leaving Philadelphia: “You did a magnificent job. It's a good platform. The extent of the smear campaign encourages me. The boys are afraid we are going places. Let's go!” Henry Wallace shared Schuman's unbridled optimism. Referring to the third party's previous high point—the Isacson victory in February—Wallace told supporters, “I was going on faith in those days. But since this convention I'm not going on faith. I know we've just begun to roll. . . . We're getting rolling now and they simply can't stop us.” “If the people's movement continues to spread as rapidly as it is at present,” one exuberant North Carolina delegate predicted, “Wallace will carry at least forty states in the November elections.”

Chapter 3 explores the dynamics of intergovernmental competition and conflict. President Roosevelt approached postwar schemes with uncertainty during America’s first years in World War II. Other US government agencies contested the US Army’s claim that it should handle postwar governance primarily or exclusively. As a result, clashes occurred at the highest levels of the Roosevelt administration that were exacerbated by the frictions in FDR’s cabinet that predated the entry of the United States into World War II. In particular, New Dealers such as Vice President Henry Wallace and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes played key roles in the disputes. In interagency disputes over the fate of Wallace’s Board of Economic Warfare, the imposition of martial law in Hawaii, the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the Western Defense Zone, and the army’s establishment of the School of Military Government, civilian New Dealers lost in every case to the army. As a result the army emerged the organization that would eventually plan and implement postwar occupation.

This chapter examines the place of foreign policy issues in national debates on the eve of the 1948 election. It profiles the four candidates (Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Strom Thurmond), considers the role of foreign affairs during the campaign and their significance in determining the election result, and analyses the impact of Truman’s victory on US foreign policy. It argues that international affairs and their domestic consequences (anxieties about Communist influence especially) were very important in 1948. During the campaign, Truman effectively exploited his leadership in foreign policy. His resolute position on the Berlin blockade was part of a bipartisan foreign policy. So Dewey could hardly criticize the policy and gained little from its popularity. The main impact of the election was the consolidation of Truman’s policy of containment.

At the end of World War II, Louis Adamic joined other antifascists in arguing that although the Axis Powers would be defeated, its fascist ethic would live on. A true democratic victory included committing to racial and ethnic justice at home and abroad, expanding workers’ rights, and establishing the right of nations to self-determination. Adamic attempted to advance his beliefs by working on former vice president Henry Wallace’s 1948 bid for president on the Progressive party ticket, going on lecture tours with Paul Robeson, and battling anticommunists, especially Catholics. Adamic’s ties to Josip Broz Tito and W. E. B. DuBois as well as his broader anticolonialist outlook, which included his view that white supremacy threatened the world, are key features of this chapter.

This chapter briefly describes early encounters between the United States and Mongolia, starting in 1862 when possibly the first American citizen to ever visit Mongolia was granted a travel pass to travel from China to Siberia via “Outer Mongolia.” Other early connections are also brought to life, including an early account by the American journalist Thomas Knox (1835–1896); a description by future president Herbert Hoover of his unlikely meeting with the Bogd Khan at Gandaan Monastery; reflections by the American diplomat and Tibetan specialist William Rockhill on the Mongolian quest for independence; the adventures of the Swedish-American missionary and entrepreneur Frans Larson; the explorations of Roy Chapman Andrews in search of dinosaur bones in the Gobi; and the historic visit to Ulaanbaatar by US Vice President Henry Wallace in 1944.

This chapter examines the ways in which the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) incorporated continuing education innovations to the New Deal policy. USDA's agrarian intellectuals Henry A. Wallace and M. L. Wilson established a Program Study and Discussion Section within the Program Planning Division of the USDA's Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), hiring Harvard philosopher Carl F. Taeusch as the head of the educational unit. Taeusch, together with Wallace and Wilson, managed two nationwide projects: local discussion groups for farm people and schools of philosophy for extension workers and citizen planners. Local discussion groups cover issues of freedom of expression, minority rights, political authority, the distribution of power, and the place of an individual in the state, while schools of philosophy delved more into complex problems of the modern world, the need for collective action, expanding role of social sciences, and importance of philosophy, public planning, and questioning government policies.

This chapter considers Blitzstein’s few years of co-habitation with Bill Hewitt; his continued leftist activities, including his involvement with the American-Soviet Music Society and his support for Henry Wallace; the growing censuring of him and his activities by anti-communists, including his inclusion in Red Channels; and his heightened championing of the amalgamation of popular and serious traditions as found in American, including Broadway musicals, and in the Soviet Union, including Prokofiev. This chapter also surveys his work from the immediate postwar years, including an unproduced show about Soviet-American friendship, Goloopchik; his incidental scores for Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest and G. B. Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion; and his ballet for Lincoln Kirstein and the New York City Ballet, The Guests, choreographed by Jerome Robbins.

In this chapter, the political theorist Tracy B. Strong revisits intellectual debates over the origins of the Cold War. Strong sketches out the political and conceptual dimensions of the main domestic and international factors that are deemed to have led to the emergence of the Cold War, providing a fresh account of how the different pieces interact with one another, and emphasising the key moments of indeterminacy and uncertainty that are often ignored in the mainstream literature. Through a close analysis of debates and developments within the American Left during the early to mid 1940s, he shows that the dynamics in American society during this tumultuous period were much more complex than is usually assumed; it was also sufficiently diverse to have made other geopolitical outcomes highly conceivable. In the end, the policy path chosen by the United States was determined in great part by the ideational frameworks that were on offer at the time to make sense of an otherwise highly confusing set of events. Herein lies the historical importance of ‘strategist-intellectuals’ like Henry Luce, Henry Wallace, George Kennan and Paul Nitze.

After meeting Jay Landesman, Gershon Legman, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg—all of whom would profoundly change his life—on the Fourth of July weekend in 1948, John Clellon Holmes admitted that he felt like a different person. In August of that year he encountered Kerouac a second time at Alan Harrington’s home, along with Edward Stringham. Kerouac and Holmes became close friends almost immediately. Kerouac let Holmes read the manuscript of the novel he was writing, The Town and the City. Meanwhile, Holmes again found himself in trouble with his novel. He also found himself disillusioned with Communism as a political system, and supported the campaign of Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party in the presidential election against Harry Truman. However, Wallace lost the support of the labor unions, leading to his defeat in the polls. Throughout the fall of 1948 Holmes persisted with the writing of his almost-finished novel and his poetry. One night, he cajoled Kerouac into finding some term that would define their group. Kerouac replied, half seriously, that they were a “Beat Generation.”

During the harsh 1947–1948 winter, Ruth Krauss came up with a 123-page manuscript that provided a glimpse into her and Crockett Johnson’s daily lives, their relationship, and her aspirations. The piece, entitled “Where Am I Going?” also reflected Krauss’s uncertainty about where her professional life was heading. She was not earning a living from writing children’s books, and her most recent ideas had been rejected by Ursula Nordstrom. On winter Fridays, she and her husband would take the train into New York City for the weekend. In late February 1948, Johnson and Krauss signed a petition supporting Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid. Also in the political arena, Krauss worked on behalf of social justice while Johnson opposed U.S. policy toward communism at home and abroad. Meanwhile, another stage adaptation of Barnaby premiered at Indiana’s Terre Haute Children’s Theatre. Johnson’s comic strip also made its way to radio in 1948. That same year, however, the color Sunday Barnaby strip, which had begun in 1946, came to an end due to the financial woes of its distributor, PM.

During the postwar decade leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Austin played a central role in increasing black voter registration, working with the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs, leading to the election of the first black member of the Durham city council in 1953. He also made important efforts to integrate public facilities. He organized an integrated football game in Durham, between a white team and a black team, which was hailed as the first racially integrated football game in the South. Austin continued to prioritize the fight for equitable public education for African Americans in the postwar years. Austin pursued a dual strategy, pressing for integration, particularly in higher education, while fighting for equal funding for black schools and equal salaries for black teachers.

Most historians of the Sino-US relationship have focused on such issues as the Stilwell Incident, the Dixie Mission, and Lend-Lease. Liu Xiaoyuan demonstrates that in US foreign policy to China, China’s ethnic frontiers was an important issue, just as much as the future of China’s former dependencies or tributary states. He also shows that the future of China as a multinational and unified country was important US State Department concern. He thus shows that US strategy was far more sophisticated and comprehensive than earlier analyses have allowed us to conclude.