J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson by Darwin Porter

Author:Darwin Porter [Porter, Darwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781936003266
Publisher: Blood Moon Productions
Published: 2012-02-18T14:54:19+00:00

Although he had promised otherwise, and although his GOP backers urged him to, Dewey refused to indulge in J. Edgar’s “Red baiting.” J. Edgar wanted to outlaw the Communist Party in America, but in response, Dewey said, “You can’t shoot an idea with a gun. Unlike Hoover, I don’t go around looking under beds.”

***

Henry Wallace was the campaign’s most liberal candidate, running on the Progressive Party ticket beside his vice-presidential candidate, Idaho’s Democratic Senator Glen H. Taylor, Wallace called for an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, universal government health insurance, an end to the nascent Cold War, and friendly relations with the Soviet Union. He was a candidate far ahead of his time, and he campaigned with African American office seekers.

In the South he refused to appear before segregated audiences or stay in restricted hotels in such states as Georgia and South Carolina. He was often greeted with raw eggs and rotten tomatoes hurled at him, “with his Negro secretary beside him,” wrote a newspaper in Columbia.

J. Edgar couldn’t be absolutely sure that Truman would be defeated, so he decided to hedge his bets. To be on the safe side, he also supplied damaging information to Truman’s campaign manager on Wallace, FDR’s former Vice President. He secretly spread the word that Wallace was a homosexual, a technique he perfected in the 1948 election and would use more forcefully in the 1952 and 1956 campaigns against Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson.

Like all good rumors, there was a nugget of truth in this accusation, and it does appear that Wallace might have engaged in two, possibly three, rather harmless affairs in the 1930s with young men when he was Secretary of Agriculture.

One man from Wallace’s native Idaho, James Whiting, was willing to sign an FBI affidavit that he and Wallace had engaged in homosexual trysts during the 1930s when he traveled with Wallace on a very controversial tour where farmers were ordered to slaughter pigs and destroy cotton fields in rural America to drive the price of these commodities back up to improve the financial plight of America’s farmers.

What made the homosexual rumors stick to Wallace was a controversial group of his supporters who called themselves “Bachelors for Wallace.”

This was the first time a group of gay or bisexual men had ever organized as a group, much less supported a candidate for political office.

Privately Wallace had a number of campaign meetings, rather secretly, with Harry Hay, who in 1950 would go on to found the Mattachine Society, giving rise to the modern gay and lesbian movement of today.

Wallace welcomed Hay and his bachelors in both California and New York. “We didn’t find any in Alabama,” he recalled. But he told them it would not be possible to come out for homosexual rights at this time. “But your day will come. Maybe not in the 1950s but surely by the 1960s. If I’m still around, I will be your chief advocate.”

Although he could not come out publicly and endorse homosexual rights,

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