Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year that Transformed America by David Pietrusza

Author:David Pietrusza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Union Square Press
Published: 2011-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

Wallace’s new party had received use of Philadelphia’s convention hall rent-free—on condition that they waive any fee for admission. Invariably, any national convention agreed to this. Progressives, however, normally employed Wallace’s public appearances as major fund-raising events. It seemed a shame to waste the opportunity presented by his acceptance speech.

So, they didn’t.

For $30,000 they rented Shibe Park, home to the city’s usually woeful Athletics and Phillies, hosting a rally as exciting and professionally stage-managed as the remainder of their convention had been repetitiously dull. Approximately thirty thousand Progressives paid from twenty-five cents for students in bleacher seats to two dollars sixty cents for prime seating. Admissions, however, provided only a segment of the evening’s fund-raising. Former Upper West Side rabbi, auto thief, and WJZ radio commentator William S. Gailmor—supported, as H. L. Mencken approvingly noted, “by a troupe of cuties”—worked the crowd like a combination revivalist, carnival barker, and auctioneer. First, Gailmor solicited one-thousand-dollar donations, and received ten of them, including those from Elinor Gimbel, Lillian Hellman, and sixty-four-year-old York Gazette and Daily publisher Josiah “Jess” Gitt. Descending to the five-hundred-dollar level, he secured four more donors, before asking for two hundred dollars, then one hundred (thirty donors), and then ten dollars, eventually hectoring his audience for mere loose change—the entire process netting Wallace between sixty and seventy thousand dollars. “Never mind what they say about us starting in the red,” Gailmor laughed, “we’re finishing in the black.”

Shibe Park remained half-empty at the event’s scheduled 8:00 PM starting time. Outside, however, a massive stream of latecomers struggled to get in. Inside, a band and a choir struggled to be heard. “The convention banjo player (not Taylor himself, but Comrade [Pete] Seeger, a very superior artist) fared much better,” judged Mencken. “Having had plenty of radio experience, he hugged the mike on the stand, and as a result his plucking of the strings had the effect of a series of blows with an ax.”

At 8:40 PM actor Sam Wanamaker introduced Vito Marcantonio. It was Marcantonio’s third speech of the convention, and it was not only fiery and frenetic (delivered, as Time noted, “with violent arm-flailings, like a drowning man”), but also, thanks to a combination of his own booming style and the park’s reverberating sound system, largely unintelligible.

Paul Robeson (“Absentee ownership still rules supreme”) provided renditions of “Ol’ Man River,” “The House I Live In,” “Los Cuatros Generales” (a Spanish loyalist anthem), and a “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” parody that started out “Marching on With Henry Wallace.”

At 10:30 PM Glen Taylor, not in his best form, announced he was “proud to be associated with Henry Wallace in the founding of this new party.” He promised a fight against the “forces that would bankrupt America by spending billions in a futile effort to bribe whole nations into becoming our mercenaries in a senseless struggle for world domination,” recalled Norman Thomas, recoiling at Taylor’s “repudiation of the Marshall Plan.… I have not heard such jingoistic indifference to the plight of the needy peoples of

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