Rebirth of a Realist

Rebirth of a Realist
The night after the 1948 presidential elections, I played basketball in the adult YMCA league in Passaic New Jersey. I remember it because after the game we all went to our favorite bar to have a few beers and play some shuffleboard. I did not want to go home. While none of us expected Wallace to win, we wanted to make a statement to the world that Realists were still here and unafraid. We wanted to say that we are building a new concept in American politics that would lead to a new America. It was an emotional ride, and we still had the great acceptance speech ringing in our ears. When I re-read it now I feel a sense of guilt. Why didn’t I, and all Realists work harder to make that great man our president and save the world from the insanity of today
On the day Wallace accepted the nomination he said,“ Franklin Roosevelt looked beyond the horizon and gave us a vision of peace, an economic bill of rights; the right to work, for every man willing. The right of every family to a decent home. The right to protection from the fears of old age and sickness. The right to a good education. All the rights which spell security for every man, woman and child, from the cradle to the grave.
It was the dream that all of us had, and Roosevelt put it into words, and we loved him for it. Two years later, the war was over, and Franklin Roosevelt was dead. What followed was the great betrayal. Instead of the dream, we have inherited disillusion. Instead of the promised years of harvest, the years of the locust are upon us. In Hyde Park, they buried our President and in Washington, they buried our dreams. One day after Roosevelt died Harry Truman entered the White House. And forty-six days later Herbert Hoover was there. It was a time of comings and goings. Into the Government came the ghosts of the great depression, the banking houseboys and the oil-well diplomats. In marched the generals-and out went the men who had built the TVA and the Grand Coulee, the men who had planned social security and built Federal housing, the men who had dug the farmer out of the dust bowl and the workman out of the sweatshop. A time of comings and goings … the shadows of the past coming in fast-and the lights going out slowly-the exodus of the torchbearers of the New Deal.”
We did not generate enough votes to make any statement at all. The gloom that permeated my home was coated with fear. We all knew that Dewey or Truman would bring back the kind of war hysteria that put Japanese Americans in concentration camps in the forties. Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor polled 1,157,326 votes, an unexpectedly low 2.3 percent of the total. The young women that I was with that night came from the same kind of a family as mine. We sat up until morning trying to find a positive note to play before we said good night. There was none.
We felt that the felons and the thugs of the “House Un-American Activities Committee” were the winners and the old robber barons were once again let lose upon the world. When we said good night, she cried. I knew that her tears were not due to our parting. Almost all of our friends that played in the WMCA league that night were WWII veterans. In the bar, the main topic was war. We were certain that the re-election of Truman meant that we were heading for military confrontation and her tears were for all the men who would die in the coming wars.
We expected labor to turn out a significant vote for Wallace, but the fear of wasting a vote and turning the country over to Dewey, and the people that he represented, frightened most blue-collar workers who were influenced by the new breed of so-called union leaders protecting their turf with anti-Wallace Communist smears. We expected Northern Blacks to vote for Wallace, (We knew that Strom Thurman would take at least three or four racist states where Blacks could not vote) but we were still young enough and naive enough not to realize that millions of Blacks still did not have the franchise or the motivation, but more than anything else, we were saddened and disappointed by the fact that it was fear that beat us. The unrelenting terror and intimidation of the red-baiters drove so many who agreed with us into looking for a safe circle, as the Women’s Strike for peace did many years later. In 1948, there was no safe circle