Last night, I ran across View of Native Fascism: Evansville’s 1948 Wallace Riot by Denise Lynn (Indiana Magazine of History; Vol. 119 No. 3 (2023): September 2023). It might want to give us pause in our thinking.
I read some political writers saying that the consensus formed during the Cold War has ended, that we are returning the fragmentation predating December 7, 1941, and this explains Trumpism as the resurgence of an older type of American politics.
No asks how we reached the Cold War consensus, the actual mechanics in reaching that consensus. View of Native Fascism exposes an ugliness I was never aware of.
What happened in Evansville on April 6, 1948, was reminiscent of the populist fascist actions in the interwar years, and it served to solidify the fascist commitment to silencing dissent and to criminalizing demands for equality and advocacy of progressive political change. While history has often conflated anti-communist legal harassment with Mccarthyism and national politics, populist fascism—characterized by red-baiting cam-paigns, harassment, and vigilante violence—was often deployed by local organizations and individuals encouraged by anti-communist hysteria. The Evansville riot demonstrates that anti-communism operated on the local level to suppress political expression and that local veterans’ groups engaged in populist fascism to prevent progressive organization, undermine progressive gains, and, in the process, violate the rights of fellow citizens.
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...The Progressive Party’s showing was abysmal. At least one historian, Thomas Devine, argues that it was not just anti-communism that doomed the Wallace campaign, but racism within unions, particularly in the South, which lost the labor vote. Many black voters and union voters turned to Truman as the safe vote, allowing him to pull off an upset against Republican Thomas Dewey. More troubling for progressives was that Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, running on a commitment to segregation, won four states in the electoral college. The Wallace campaign was an early casualty of cold War red-baiting; more than that, the Progressive Party’s message of the dangers to peace from the wedding of the war and civilian economies went unheeded, as the nation continued its march toward a state of permanent war, a path it continues to follow today.
Out of those Dixiecrats came George Wallace, and from George Wallace came the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and the rise of white supremacy that has permeated the Republican Party for generations.
I cannot recall when I first learned of Henry Wallace's run for president in 1948. I may have been in my forties, and it may have come from a Gore Vidal essay. Wallace presents a large question for alternate history. I think this article taught me more of what Wallace and the Progressive Party was about:
The Progressive Party billed itself as a “return to and continuation of” Roosevelt’s New Deal. As christina Pérez Jiménez argues, the party’s platform was progressive even by modern standards: it called for an end to Jim crow segregation, anti-lynching laws, partnership with labor unions, national health care, a more expansive welfare state, and demilitarization. It also counseled a “nonadversarial” relationship with the USSR. Wallace’s policy statement on “Militarization in the US” argued that the nation’s growing militarization at the end of the war was a “disease,” caused in part by “military fascism” in service to “monopoly capitalism.” Wallace argued that with Roosevelt’s death, the military had moved to wed its interests to the national government, best seen in the National Security Act of 1947. The bill created the National Security council and the central Intelligence gency, and merged the War and Navy Departments into the Department of Defense. The bill essentially fortified the U.S. military establishment, and, for Wallace, wedded the “civilian economy” to “military requirements.”
Yes, they allowed Communist fellow travelers and even CP members to attach themselves.
A little more than a decade later, and Eisenhower would warn the country of the military-industrial complex. No one (except maybe the John Birchers?) accused him of being a Communist. It seems Wallace was making the same argument in 1948.
I find in what is described below, Wallace made arguments justified by Eisenhower, by the Vietnam War, by Nixon's policy of detente, of the failure of trickle down economics, by Trump rejecting alternate energy in favor of oil and coal (which advocacy has always made me wonder in what century is he living). I also see the failure of the peace dividend from the Cold War and the subsizing of Big Tech that has led us into the deserts of disunion and AI.
Wallace told his Evansville supporters that to ensure freedom and justice, defense industries had to be prevented from profiteering. He noted that the oil industry, to ensure their profits, supported reaction-ary leaders in other countries “under the wings of US Army bombers.” The aircraft industry depended on government contracts for profit, and thus it was no wonder, Wallace claimed, that it was helping to “foment the war hysteria” during the cold War. Aircraft companies had profited handsomely during World War II: the Republic Aviation corporation that operated out of Evansville producing the Thunderbolt had seen a 150 percent increase in profit during the war because, Wallace noted, Americans had subsidized the company through “war bonds and taxes.” but the civilian aviation industry was nowhere near as profitable in post-war 1948—Republic Aviation had ceased producing civilian aircraft—and thus industry leaders were some of the loudest in calling for war. None were concerned that “air bombardment” led to the “murder of millions of civilians” nor that their profits depended on “capital supplied by the American taxpayer.” Even those who supported an increased budget for military air power, Wallace continued, admitted that there were no weapons in existence that would make the United States vulnerable to attack. The cold War “policy of militarization” was not a good defense but instead a “provocation to war.”42
Wallace argued that few cities had given as much to the war effort as Evansville and thus Evansville had a right to enjoy the peace. He noted that the facilities that had built the Thunderbolt were now refitted for refrigerator manufacturing. What Evansville needed was a federal housing program to help deal with the housing crisis; more houses meant greater need for refrigerators. The people of Evansville wanted, and deserved, higher wages and lower prices. Another war would threaten all of this. Wallace advocated a “peace program”: the U.S. would conclude all of its interventionist policies and programs and instead create an “international aid program through the UN.” but, he added, to ensure peace “we must draw the fangs of the warmakers” and stop subsidizing war profiteers with taxpayer funds. Wallace advocated government ownership of war-time aircraft plants that would be turned over to civilian production, estimated to provide millions of new jobs as part of a full-employment program. The cost, he argued, would be minimal given the cost of war. The veterans’ groups clamoring outside the coliseum were, as Minton had divined, too caught up in anti-communist hysteria to be interested in Wallace’s message of peace. At the end of the candidate’s speech, Parker returned to the stage and “dismissed the audience.” by this point the mob had dispersed.43
But more chilling to me came from Evansville but up the Ohio River in Pittsburgh:
That same year, historian and Pittsburgh Courier columnist Joel Augustus Rogers wrote an editorial arguing that the “spirit of the American people” was more inclined toward fascism than communism. After a handful of years watching anti-communist hysteria grow, Rogers noted that while there might be 70,000 communists in the United States, there were potentially 70,000,000 fascists, and observed that the South was already “largely fascistic.” Anti-communist purges, he wrote, were just a “smoke screen for fascism.” Rogers concluded that, while he did not align with communists and would reject communism as a way of life, if the American communist Party were simply an “anti-negro” group it would have been left alone.57Rogers articulated a point that others were expressing more quietly at the height of American anti-communism. The U.S. showed definite fascist tendencies, especially in its silencing of progressive voices. Its anti-com-munist foreign policy preferred right-wing dictatorships that shored up corporate profits and secured American military expansion. Long after Wallace left Evansville and lost in that year’s election, populist fascism continued, as veterans’ groups and mainstream conservative unions ousted radicals and supported the larger censure of progressives. In Indiana, the American Legion made headlines again in 1953 when it denied the AcLU the right to use its Indianapolis War Memorial as a meeting place. The Legion’s state commander, Roy Amos, argued that the organization was communist and he did not want to provide it “sanctuary.” Historian Erin Kemper has demonstrated that in Indiana, fears about communist conspiracy would continue well into the late twentieth century. The American Legion and other veterans’ groups continued to work with far-right reactionaries, including ProAmerica and the John birch Society, which was founded in Indianapolis. As Kemper argues, in Indiana change is “evolutionary not revolutionary.”
What was clear in 1949 was consternation when Trump won in 2016 and 2024.
I think fascists are cowards. This has been a long-standing opinion of mine. Today, I have another, that there are those who prefer slavery to freedom. That this country has always had a population of cowards who would want to be slaves.
sch 4/18
