The eminent historian Richard Hofstadter once observed, “Third parties are like bees; once they have stung, they die.”Footnote ¹ According to Hofstadter, a third party could influence the political order when one or both of the two major parties absorbed at least some of its ideas. This excellent book demonstrates that the 1948 effort by the Progressive Party, and its presidential nominee Henry Wallace, to remake American foreign policy and challenge the South's racial caste system barely left any sting at all. Its moment in the sun proved brief indeed, and it exerted little, if any, influence on that year's election or in policy decisions over the decades to come.

At a moment when studies of conservatism remain in vogue, Thomas Devine pulls readers' attention back to an older debate over the split between liberals and leftists in the late 1940s. In doing so, he makes an important contribution to the broader narrative regarding American politics since World War II. Delving more deeply into the inner workings of the Progressive Party than any previous scholar, Devine offers a spirited, persuasive challenge to those who portray this period as a lost opportunity to build social democracy in the United States and a more peaceful international order. He joins other historians and political scientists who maintain that during the late 1940s the alternative to the New Deal lay on the right, not the left.

Devine skillfully chronicles the hopes and dreams of Wallace and his followers. According to Wallace, “militarists and monopolists” had created and then exploited Cold War fears among the American public to further their economic interests (65). The world was headed toward another conflagration unless Americans used the ballot to oust Harry Truman, whom Wallace accused of leading the “great betrayal” of the domestic and international policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt (168). The Soviet Union, Wallace stressed, was much more benign than Truman and other American policymakers believed. Likewise, Wallace remained convinced that elites in the South used racism to maintain solidarity with poor whites and thus cement their economic and political power. Supremely confident in their personal virtue and in their analysis of national and world problems, Wallace and his supporters insisted that voters would rally to them once a clear alternative to the corporate-led establishment had been presented.

It was not to be. Wallace won just 2·37 percent of the vote on Election Day. Most of his support lay in New York City and Los Angeles. The chief reasons for the abysmal showing, Devine vividly demonstrates, was not “red-baiting” by elites who opposed the Progressive Party, but rather substantial internal flaws and the fact that the vast majority of voters fundamentally disagreed with the party's agenda. Wallace was “unable to face squarely the disturbing realities of the postwar world,” Devine notes (118). He was often wrong (sometimes grossly so) about important facts regarding events in Europe and elsewhere, prone to a simplistic, Manichaean worldview, and a poor judge of public opinion.

Devine also presents a detailed, nuanced examination of the stormy relationship between the Progressive Party and the Communist Party. This issue, of course, has long been a subject of heated debate among scholars and political activists. Using recently declassified materials unavailable to many earlier scholars of the Progressive Party, such as the Venona cables, as well as other items from archives in the United States and the former Soviet Union, Devine shows that the Wallace movement was not directed from Moscow, nor was it under the control of the Communist Party in the United States. The latter, however, usually produced “endless anguish” for the Progressives, undermined the party's broader appeal, “and cost them their credibility” (199).

Devine is to be commended for the prodigious amount of research that undergirds this book. He displays a firm grasp of the secondary literature and has mined dozens of manuscript collections scattered across the United States, newspapers, and other primary sources. This will surely remain the definitive work on the Wallace movement for many years to come.