WS: In the book you tell the story of the 1944 convention in lush detail, and it’s a great story. In short, Wallace gives this powerful, uncompromising speech—and the place goes wild. And then, when Roosevelt is re-nominated, there’s this huge groundswell of support for Wallace from the floor of the convention, and everyone realizes that if there were a vote for the vice presidential nomination at that moment, Wallace would win. So some of his supporters try to get to the podium and motion for a vote, and the party bosses shut the thing down.
JN: There was pandemonium at this point. One of the key big-city bosses yelled to the person who’s chairing the convention, “Shut it down!” And the chair says, “I don’t think I can! It’s out of control!” So it’s this chaotic situation, and the bosses are shouting “Shut it down!”—and one of them yells, “Motion to adjourn!” So the chair says, “There’s a motion to adjourn.” And the crowd overwhelmingly says, “No!” But the chair says, “I hear substantial support for it,” and gavels the convention adjourned.
At that key moment, 10:55 p.m. on July 20, the groundswell was stopped. In the next twenty-four hours, the bosses, the Southern segregationists, the bankers, all the powerful players, pulled out every stop, basically pulled every trick you could. They even changed the ticketing for the convention so that the people who got in the day before couldn’t enter on the last day of the convention. They changed the whole dynamic of the thing. And when the vote came, initially Wallace led, and it looked like there was a possibility he could still make it, despite all the tricks, but as the afternoon wore on, he was defeated.
And that, to my mind, was the moment at which the Democratic Party chose compromise, and a pulled punch, rather than an aggressive, forward-looking progressive approach.
WS: So the question is, how might history have been different if Wallace and his allies had won? Could he have been a successful president? And could he have won in his own right in 1948? Ira Katznelson’s history of the New Deal era, Fear Itself, makes a pretty persuasive argument that without the support of the Southern Democrats, the segregationist bloc, there wouldn’t have been a New Deal, and that FDR had to make this kind of Faustian bargain to hold the coalition together. Would Wallace have had to make the same kind of deal with the devil that FDR made?
JN: Great question. Roosevelt did build an incredible coalition. The New Deal coalition extended from bankers to socialists, from civil rights campaigners to racists, and it was very big. It was big enough to deliver landslide victories again and again, and big enough to hold those victories through midterm elections. But one of the things we have to recognize is that the coalition was so big it was never going to hold together once Roosevelt was gone. So the question was, what would be the next winning coalition? How do you assemble it, how do you make it work?