Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: II

Fresh from its first national convention in Philadelphia last weekend with a politically significant leadership embracing U. S. labor's bulk strength, Americans for Democratic Action discovers that it stands in a necessarily frustrated position for a year of electioneering. In 1948 the "third force" has little choice but to support Harry Truman.

Crucial to ADA's stance is the officially-pronounced attitude toward the candidacy of Henry A. Wallace. Wallace followers are patriotic enough, in ADA's view, but both inspiration and string-pulling for the third party are based upon the international Soviet goal of destroying Continental economies in the service of Communist ascendancy to power. Recognizing the emotional lure of the Wallace symbol on issues of civil liberties and domestic reaction, ADA bases its appeal to liberals on opposition to Wallace's anti-Marshall Plan stand. Sacrificing the democracy of Western Europe, it claims, is "too high a price to pay for the luxury of a 'protest vote'."

Few could express surprise over the convention-end revelation that the Truman alternative alone could come near to satisfying ADA. What did crop into the open without warning was the overwhelming general unrest about the Administration drift toward a conservative orientation. Two viewpoints concerning strategy clashed: one holding that explicit platform-wise recognition of Truman's shortness on liberalism would gather votes for Wallace, another insisting that a whitewash inevitably spelled further Presidential slaps to the face of the Left. The issue was fought out in sessions of the political policy drafting committee. Careerist Democrats Paul Porter (ex-OPA chief) and Hubert Humphrey (upcoming Minneapolis Mayor) held that the wording must go easy; they blistered committee opponents such as writer Robert Bendiner of The Nation. On the floor Harvard Liberal Union delegates touched off a successful campaign to attack specifically, through amendment to the committee report, "weak appointments" by Truman and his failure to "mobilize full strength" behind the enactment of enunciated progressive measures.

One sweeping inference from it all was unavoidable: the U. S. non-Communist Left would support Truman this fall, holding its nose, and would not be likely to continue within a Democratic Party increasingly controlled by city bosses or respectable cronies--and jostled by ominous rumblings from the South. Whispers of a new party in January, or in 1952, built around the British Trade Union Congress model so strikingly duplicated in ADA, crackled through the convention before adjournment. There was substantial feeling that in the long run only one course could whip the devil and escape the rushing waters of the deep blue sea.