Editorial: Roosevelt and Truman
Unable to prevent the renomination of President Roosevelt, the South ganged up on Vice President Wallace Friday night in Chicago so that the 1944 ticket is Roosevelt and Truman.
In the interest of party harmony, Mr. Roosevelt, who cast Garner aside in 1940, fed Wallace to the wolves in 1944.
To the credit of the liberal Mr. Wallace, it can be said that he went down fighting.
His dramatic challenge, “The future belongs to those who go down the line unswervingly for the liberal principles of both political democracy and economic democracy regardless of race, color or religion. In a political, educational and economic sense, there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Equal educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work regardless of sex or race,” electrified the convention and stunned the white-supremacy Southern delegates.
The answer of the South, led by Maryland, Delaware, Alabama and South Carolina, was to switch their votes from their favorite sons to Truman. In this, they had the help of machine bosses of Chicago, New York and Jersey City who opposed Wallace for his tie-up with the CIO labor unions.
Altogether the South had a couple of field days in Chicago last week. So far as the convention itself was concerned, the New Deal was held in check. The South had one foot in the saddle.