THE WALLACE CRUSADE
we tend to take shelter behind the complexities of psychology. We tend
to say: millions of Americans (who are most of them certainly not
Communists) are following Wallace because they are fed up with the
two old parties, because they dislike the Taft-Hartley Bill, because they
are suffering under inflation, because they are discontented with in–
equities of our social structure, afraid that a new war will destroy man–
kind, concerned over civil rights and racial discrimination, dismayed
at the low stature of Trumans and Deweys and Tafts ... and so on.
One or another of these observations may apply truly enough to the
subjective motivation of most individuals who wear the Wallace button.
But they are all without political significance. The Wallace movement is
the mass extension in the United States of the political arm of the Krem–
lin. That, and that only, is the political fact.
This conclusion does not have to rest on an abstruse deduction.
It is expressed, inadvertently but plainly enough, by
Toward World
Peace.
Wallace is constantly protesting about "over-emphasis of the
Russian question." He is going to stick to domestic and "American"
problems-inflation, civil rights, economic justice. But his whole book
is, in substance, about nothing but "the Russian .question." Two long
chapters out of eight are explicitly about Russia and Communism; in
the other six, Russia crops up on every other page. Nor could it be other–
wise: the political content of the movement is not defined by Wallace's
private wishes.
There are, of course, pious disavowals of Communism-"!" believe
in God, "don't like slave labor,"
think
Russia as well as the United
States must "compromise," etc. But the scoldings of the Soviet Union
are always coy, like the No's of a woman who has decided in advance
to yield, and always empty of concrete reference. When it comes to
anything specific, whether in the interpretation of the past, or the pro–
posals for the present and the future, the account is always in accord
with Communist policy. Is it not the same in Wallace's day-by-day
declarations on specific crises that arise: Czechoslovakia, the Marshall
Plan, China, Italy, Palestine, or for that matter any important internal
problem? When, on what namable occasion, does he offer a
specific
analysis or proposal at variance with
Pravda?
It is a fact that the Communist Party provides the organizational
backbone of the Wallace movement. It is a fact that the Wallace Party
would not have come into existence without the prior decision of the
Communist Party (that is, of the Kremlin). It is a fact that,
if
the Com–
munist Party withdrew tomorrow, the Wallace Party would dissolve the
day after.
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