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Creating a splinter party for an election cycle or two is a risky move factions occasionally make in hopes of changing their party’s preferences and shifting its reputation to the left or the right. This chapter discusses factions that believed that by creating their own party they could re-fight the battle they lost at the nomination stage. It threats the Liberal Republican Party of 1872, the Progressive Party of 1912, the Dixiecrat Party of 1948, and the Independence Party of 1968. Looking at the cases treated here, splinter parties are rarely able to affect the left-right shift of their party of origin that they seek.

This chapter describes how the national leaders of the Progressive Party focused primarily on mobilizing two core constituencies—youth and organized labor—as they prepared for the fall campaign. From the outset, the Wallace crusade had demonstrated a special appeal to young people. Not surprisingly, the candidate's outspoken plea for peace resonated with those who would be called on to fight the next war. College campuses provided fertile ground for recruiting supporters and often served as the launching point for establishing new local Wallace organizations. By late spring, “Students for Wallace” claimed five hundred members at the University of Chicago, six hundred at the University of California, Berkeley, and active chapters at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina.

Recounts the climax in the House of Representatives over constitutional revision. (In Japan's new democratic dispensation, the popularly elected lower house had controlling power.) Ch. 18 tells how the two major parties in the conservative governing coalition (Liberals and Progressive Democrats) became actively involved in negotiations over the exact terms of Article 9, renouncing war and armed forces, and the disposition of imperial property. It also recounts how Colonel Kades, somewhat reluctantly, brought forward several amendments demanded by the Allied member‐nations on the Far Eastern Commission, including one providing that only “civilians” could serve in the cabinet. Finally, it summarizes the proceedings of Saturday, August 24, a time for soaring eloquence and the final vote in the House of Representatives.

The vision Esther and Jack had for the postwar years did not materialize, and they found themselves navigating increasingly intense anti-Communist trends in US politics. The Cold War inaugurated a period of fear and anxiety that intersected with the black freedom movement in the South. No longer able to sustain a movement that fused leftist economic reform and racial equality, the Southern Negro Youth Congress folded in 1949. Jack worked briefly for the Louisiana Communist Party, and the family then moved to Detroit, Michigan. There, Jack worked with the Communist Party to organize autoworkers, and Esther was an activist with the Civil Rights Congress and the Progressive Party. In 1951, the couple moved to New York City, where Jack was indicted under the Smith Act.

This chapter examines the wayward path of Progressivism from Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign to the Obama presidency. Committed to “pure democracy,” many early-twentieth-century reformers hoped to sweep away intermediary organizations like political parties. In their disdain for partisan politics and their enthusiasm for good government, they sought to fashion the Progressive Party as a party to end parties. However, the Progressives failed in that ambition, and their shortfall has had profound effects on contemporary government and politics. By transforming rather than transcending parties, they fostered a kindred, though bastardized, alternative: executive-centered partisanship. The transformation of parties set in motion by the Progressives has subjected both Progressivism and conservatism to an executive-centered democracy that subordinates “collective responsibility” to the needs of presidential candidates and incumbents.

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 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 discusses the major transformations that took place in Haiti between 1902 and 1915, focusing on Anténor Firmin's National Progressive Party—which, in the main, consisted of exiles living in Kingston. As the party struggled in vain to gain power, Haiti spiraled into political turmoil, giving way to U.S. intervention. The chapter discusses the events that led to military occupation, not from the familiar perspective of U.S.-Haitian relations but through the unique lens of the Jamaican press, British diplomats, and Haitians living outside the country.

How did the first female voters use their ballots? Focusing on the presidential election of 1924—in which Progressive Robert M. La Follette secured 17% of the vote—this chapter examines the expectation that women would be particularly likely to support candidates associated with the Progressive movement. Employing new strategies to estimate women’s vote choice using aggregate data, the findings show that female voters were not uniquely likely to support the Progressive candidate. Rather, in a small number of Republican-dominated midwestern states, female voters were more Republican than men, and men were more Progressive than women, in their voting choices. As a result, the presence of female voters actually stabilized the electorate, reinforcing the Republican advantage in most states and dampening the Progressive surge in the Midwest in particular. The conclusion places these findings in the broader perspective of the nearly one hundred years of female electoral participation that has followed.

This chapter illustrates how Cheddi Jagan had lost the election the previous December and how the politics of race had played the principal role in the voting. Writing in the World Marxism Review in October 1965, Jagan admitted there was a “tendency of anti-African racism” in the People's Progressive Party that he led. This racism, he said, had emerged “almost as a reflex action” to “the racist anti-Indian putsches engineered since 1962 by the People's National Congress and the Imperialists.” The PPP was “forthrightly combating racism in the party since it realized that racism is not only reactionary, but a device of the imperialists to divide the working class and thus maintain colonial rule and exploitation.” His party's “first objective” was “the achievement of national unity and racial harmony.”

This book concludes by describing how the final election results proved a devastating blow to the Progressive Party and all those associated with it. The presidential ticket finished an embarrassing fourth behind the Dixiecrats, polling only 1.1 million votes, 2.37 percent of those cast. The narrowness of Wallace's appeal was equally striking. Thirty-seven percent of his nationwide total came from New York City. In California, his second strongest state, 53 percent of the votes came from Los Angeles County. Few had anticipated such a poor showing. The last preelection Roper survey had put Wallace at 3.6 percent, a figure the Progressives fiercely disputed, charging that the pollster had “suppressed” the real numbers because he knew there was a huge “hidden vote” for the third party. The polls notwithstanding, on election eve, many Progressives remained convinced that Wallace would garner between 5 and 10 million votes.

This chapter discusses how the slight thawing of Cold War tensions included discussion of a permanent test-ban treaty, raising the hopes of many former Progressive Party activists that the conservative political tide was turning. People increasingly came to believe that the easing of political repression created an opportunity to reconstitute Popular Front organizing and fully realize the potential of such organizations as the Progressive Party, Congress of American Women, and Sojourners for Truth and Justice. Toward that end, small covert leftist networks now made their way into larger national organizations that shared their commitment to “peace, freedom, and abundance.” Although they had not achieved their vision of positive peace, Popular Front organizations had provided a training ground for leftist women who later helped shape the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter talks about how Progressive women faced a number of challenges as they headed out on the campaign trail in 1948. Not only did Women for Wallace activists have to contend with Cold War politics, including debates about the role of Communists in the Progressive Party (PP), they also had to negotiate the competing rationales members claimed for women's political engagement. The feminisms that took root in the PP were most often shaped by debates about the grounds on which Progressive women should demand their right to political participation. Divisions within the Congress of American Women and Women for Wallace organizations were determined by the degree to which members relied upon notions of “difference” between men and women to claim their rights.

This chapter demonstrates how a host of social justice causes remain at the core of U.S. leftist women's postwar activism, including civil rights and women's equality, and more importantly, peace. Response to their attempts to push the boundaries of good mothering to include such endeavors as political organizing and peace activism suggests the difficulties they would face balancing the personal and the political in the immediate postwar era. The experiences of a group of Progressive Party organizers working across the nation at both national and local levels shows how their determination to continue working for leftist causes, while also performing their social roles as mothers, wives, daughters, and waged workers, was increasingly complicated by domestic reaction to international events.

This chapter explores how the founding of the Progressive Party (PP) in 1948 was a significant milestone in the lives of Eslanda Goode Robeson, Shirley Graham, and Charlotta Bass, helping to mark their evolution from social activists to public intellectuals. Their success in uniting race and gender emancipation ideologies and connecting them to world peace with the support of mixed-sex, racially integrated organizations complicates critiques that nationalist movements have historically discouraged women's attempts to address feminist concerns. Furthermore, the work of these women in the PP, and in organizations like the Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, demonstrates a comprehensive strategy to operate within both political and social movements in an attack against the dehumanizing effects of white supremacy and for the promise of global peace.

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.

The U.S. Embassy did not expect “ideal democratic” conditions, but the forthcoming national elections were “infinitely better than a violent overthrow of Batista and far better than no elections at all.” Not even Ambassador Smith anticipated the national elections to end the revolutionary war because the atmosphere for an honest election that Batista pledged could not have been more dreary. A full-blown civil upheaval was plaguing Cuba. Batista's bet, Andres Rivero Aguero, running under the ticket of the Progressive Action Party, defended the administration. Moreover, the rebels persuaded voters to boycott the elections.

This chapter illustrates how African American women remained active at both the highest levels of the Progressive Party (PP) and its base, where interracial grassroots networks attempted to bring the ideals of national figures like Eslanda Goode Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Charlotta Bass to life. The American Labor Party (ALP)—which served as the PP organization of New York in 1948—was an important vehicle for women fighting racism and U.S. militarism in their local communities. Historians who have documented the ALP's important contributions to New York's early civil rights campaigns often overlook the significance of the party's linkage between peace, racial justice, and women's rights. An examination of the ALP, therefore, offers the opportunity to consider the challenges progressive women's networks encountered in the struggle to keep the hope of positive peace alive.

Hoping to regain control of the Republican Party and, with it, the progressive moment, Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would challenge William Howard Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912. He won 278 delegates through the party primaries, more than three-quarters of the total available, but Taft captured the great majority of the 700 votes chosen in districts and state party conventions. Roosevelt accused Taft of stealing the nomination and decided to form his own party, which he called the Progressive Party. In contrast to Roosevelt's republican, nationalist agenda, Woodrow Wilson, another candidate for the presidential election of 1912, was elaborating an alternative, distinctly liberal rationale for activist government. Wilson questioned the viability of Roosevelt's politics that endorsed a corporate morality as intrinsic to corporate freedom. Wilson would go on to win the election.