Progressive Party

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Iowan Henry Wallace as secretary of agriculture. Because of his support of cash payments to farmers under the New Deal, Wallace was very popular among voters in the Midwest, and Roosevelt chose him as his running mate when he sought a third term in 1940.

In the 1944 presidential campaign, pressure from southern conservatives led Roosevelt to drop Wallace from the ticket in favor of Harry Truman, but Wallace was appointed secretary of commerce as a consolation prize after Roosevelt's reelection to an unprecedented fourth term. When Truman took over the Oval Office upon Roosevelt's death in April 1945, he and Wallace began to clash over Truman's approach to foreign policy. After publicly criticizing Truman for not pursuing greater cooperation with the Soviet Union, Wallace was forced to resign in September 1946.

Two years later, a revitalized Progressive Party made its third and final attempt to capture the White House and nominated Henry Wallace as its standard-bearer. Although his platform contained calls for legislation protecting the rights of workers and African Americans, Wallace focused principally on foreign policy. He strongly denounced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and advocated disarmament

With the Cold War just getting under way, it is not surprising that Wallace's views resonated with only a minority of the American electorate. In the 1948 election, Wallace received more than 1.1 million votes, but he failed to carry a single state and was trounced by both President Truman and the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, who garnered more than 46 million votes between them. Following this defeat, both Wallace and the Progressive Party retired from electoral politics.