"Pretend I'm Henry"

Up at the microphone the chairman was preparing the ovation for Senator Pepper's radio address. "Clap fast," he ordered, "not slow. Scream & whistle. Pretend I'm Orson Welles." Perfunctorily and apathetically, the 300 delegates in the ornate Boulevard Room of Chicago's Hotel Continental responded. "Pretend I'm Joan Crawford," cried the chairman. The applause was better, but still not good enough. "Pretend I'm Henry Wallace." The delegates to the "Conference of Progressives" tore the roof off.

It had been that way all day long. The meeting had been called by the National Citizen's P.A.C., the C.I.O.'s P.A.C, and the Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions to draft a plan of political action. Though Henry Wallace did not appear, it was his show.

The words of the Wallace foreign policy argument echoed and re-echoed. Onetime Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau went down the line: outlaw the atom bomb, reduce armaments, stick to the Four Freedoms of F.D.R. Said Harold Ickes: "We must spare no effort to get along with Russia."

By the time the conference met in secret session to hammer out its program there was little doubt what it would be. The main points, as expected: 1) a Wallace-inspired foreign policy (withdraw U.S. troops from China; combat "imperialism" wherever found; extend economic aid to war-devastated countries; eliminate the step-by-step proposal of the Baruch atom control plan); a New Dealing domestic policy (price & rent controls; a federal civil rights bill; extended social security; minimum wages; soak-the-rich taxation); 3) a resolution applauding Henry Wallace. A permanent committee of 50 would be appointed after the November elections to keep the ball rolling.

Thus the conference ducked its most immediate problem: what to do in the 1946 elections. It vetoed a third party, for the time being, at least; it refused to endorse the Democrats specifically. But whether they liked it or not, the progressives would find it hard to abandon the party of the convention heroes: Henry Wallace and Franklin Roosevelt.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.