A Campaign Address By Henry Wallace – July 29, 1948
– Henry Wallace Campaign address – July 29, 1948 – NBC Radio – Gordon Skene Sound Collection. –
67 years ago. We were in the middle of one of the more hotly anticipated Presidential Elections in recent memory.
Former Secretary of Agriculture and Democratic vice-President under FDR, Henry Wallace broke with his party and formed his own; the Progressive Party and ran for President on a third party ticket.
Despite a groundswell of popularity, winning the White House on a Third-Party ticket would be next to impossible. But Wallace had, at the time, radical ideas – and he was also lambasted by critics for being soft on Communism, at the very least Socialist.
But to get an idea of where Wallace was coming from – to get an idea of the climate of the U.S. at the time -in the grips of a Red Scare, where everyone was at least a little suspect of being subversive – listening to a Henry Wallace campaign talk is a reminder that, most things that make up our political life in America haven’t really changed very much – the ideologies have changed, but the widening gap between haves and have-nots hasn’t. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
And in the age of Bernie Sanders, it’s instructive to listen to someone like Henry Wallace, to get a feel for the fact that some issues just won’t go away – and maybe are destined never to do so.
So as a reminder and a continuation of addresses by Henry Wallace during the 1948 Presidential campaign, here is a campaign address given by Progressive Party Candidate for 1948, Henry Wallace, as given on this July 29th in 1948.
