Cold War Progressives

Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom

Jacqueline Castledine

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780252094439
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Historian Jacqueline Castledine tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. Postwar progressive women and their allies often saw themselves as members of a popular front promoting the rights of workers, women, and African Americans under the banner of peace. However, the Cold War indelibly shaped the contours of their activism. Following the Progressive Party's demise in the 1950s, these activists reentered social and political movements in the early 1960s and met the inescapable reality that their agenda was a casualty of the left-liberal political division of the early Cold War era. Many Americans now viewed peace as a leftist concern associated with Soviet sympathizers and civil rights as the favored cause of liberals. Faced with the dilemma of working to reunite these movements or choosing between them, some progressive women chose to lead such New Left organizations as the Jeannette Rankin Brigade while others became leaders of liberal "second wave" feminist movements. Whether they committed to affiliating with groups that emphasized one issue over others or attempted to found groups with broad popular-front type agendas, Progressive women brought to their later work an understanding of how race, class, and gender intersect in women's organizing. These women's stories demonstrate that the ultimate result of Cold War-era McCarthyism was not the defeat of women's activism, but rather its reconfiguration.

Chapter 1

Gender, Politics, and the Emerging Cold War

Until recently “nice” women just didn’t
mingle much with party politics.

—Susan B. Anthony II, 1946

In mid-July 1948, members of the Progressive Party met at their founding convention in Philadelphia to write a blueprint for postwar America. The delegates had already chosen their presidential contender; the party was formed to run Henry Wallace as a “peace candidate.” In Philadelphia they turned their attention to introducing voters to the party’s strain of leftist peace politics. The resulting platform, “Peace, Freedom, and Abundance,” vowed to return America to “the purpose of Franklin Roosevelt,” namely, overseeing a redistribution of the nation’s wealth through “progressive capitalism,” guaranteeing civil liberties and civil rights to all Americans, and “seek[ing] areas of international agreement rather than disagreement” in foreign policy. It also included a promise of full citizenship for women, while incorporating such concepts as equal pay for equal work.

Less than four months later, the 1948 election became forever associated with the classic photo of Harry Truman smiling broadly while holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune emblazoned with the (as it turned out erroneous) headline “Dewey Beats Truman.” Understandably, election results disheartened the party faithful, as Wallace garnered less than 3 percent of the presidential popular vote and not a single electoral vote. Yet despite the New York Times’s description of Wallace’s defeat as so convincing that his supporters’ “chances of achieving any importance in the foreseeable future are extremely small,” Progressive women of the party continued to press their peace agenda.¹

Intersections of Gender and Politics

Even before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Americans debated how women might vote if given the opportunity. Would a “woman’s bloc” develop, or would they merely vote as their fathers and husbands directed? By the presidential election of 1936, most agreed that the issue was settled; women had failed to organize in numbers large enough to provide them an effective voice in the political system. World War II, however, would create opportunities for women’s political activism not available in the interwar period.² As men joined the service, women replaced them not only in the industrial workplace but also in political organizing, where “much of the hard grueling work of Party organization fell upon women.”³

Following the war, their participation in the labor force and the political system came under intense scrutiny. Jo Freeman writes that in these years, “Political women were displaced by political wives, and the concerns of working women . . . by the concerns of housewives.”⁴ The role of women in postwar politics was more contested than Freeman implies. The relationship between gender and politics in the nascent Cold War years would raise significant challenges for Progressive Party women who saw in Henry Wallace a champion to lead their efforts to protect families across the globe from the threat of nuclear annihilation and the neglect of social welfare posed by Cold War saber rattling. Wallace’s claim that “too much of the American housewife’s dollar is buying guns,” and the argument that peace with the Soviets was possible without appeasement and without abandoning the hope of expanding the New Deal, appealed to war-weary leftists.⁵ Early Cold War history, however, suggests the magnitude of the challenge Progressive women faced entering gendered political spaces.

Americans concerned with dramatic shifts in gender roles brought on by women entering the workforce and party politics, according to historian K. A. Cuordileone, engaged in a concerted effort to remasculinize U.S. culture after the war.⁶ Long-standing bias against women in politics and a history of skepticism surrounding leftist movements were now compounded by a perceived crisis in masculinity, feeding fears that the feminization of America during the war had put the nation at risk both culturally and militarily. Progressive women making their way into the gendered arena of party politics by campaigning for world peace and women’s equality were doubly menacing. They not only refused to relinquish wartime gains that gave them increased visibility within parties, but were also “soft” on communism. In need of strategies to lessen their apparent threat to American masculinity and to national security, in 1948 Progressive women led by Women for Wallace chair Elinor Gimbel introduced a number of tactics to calm fears about the supposed dangers of leftist women. These included enlisting the talents of well-known celebrities, employing maternalist rhetoric, and, perhaps the most interesting strategy of all, an emphasis on women’s fashion in both fund-raising and campaigning.

In the immediate postwar period, the benchmark for progressive leadership remained Franklin Roosevelt, and many Progressive women credited his New Deal for inspiring their political activism. Wallace’s association with Roosevelt placed him in good stead with PP women. A Roosevelt-Wallace alliance was formed during FDR’s first run for president in 1932, when Wallace served as the candidate’s chief adviser on farm issues. When Roosevelt was elected, he appointed Wallace secretary of agriculture, and in 1940 he was elected FDR’s vice president. His role in implementing New Deal policy meant that by the mid-1940s, Wallace was, in the words of historian Mark Kleinman, “identified more in the public mind with the reforms of the New Deal than anyone save Roosevelt himself.”⁷

Like many in the post–World War II Progressive Party, Wallace was a product of the late nineteenth century, a period that experienced the short-lived, farmer-led, populist movement as well as the ascendancy of the reformist progressive movement, both meant to ameliorate the injustices of industrial capitalism. Born in 1888 into a prominent Iowa farm family, after his graduation from Iowa State College, Wallace became one of the nation’s best-known agricultural economists, gaining recognition for his development of hybrid strains of high-yielding corn. His lifelong sympathy for the plight of the American farmer, and his belief that science and moral rectitude could solve nearly any problem confronting a democratic nation, suggests the influence of earlier political movements. Representing the left wing of the Democratic Party, Wallace enjoyed the support of such important liberal constituencies as organized labor, especially the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The more moderate and conservative elements of the party, including southern Democrats and urban political bosses, opposed Wallace’s labor-friendly policies, which they viewed as socialistic. Following Roosevelt’s decision to pursue an unprecedented fourth term, Wallace’s opponents saw the 1944 election as an opportunity to replace him with a more centrist vice presidential candidate. Surveying the political landscape, FDR offered lukewarm support for his vice president’s renomination and did not actively campaign for it. The signal was clear; for the sake of party unity, Wallace would be replaced. Following his win on a second ballot, Missouri senator Harry Truman was Roosevelt’s running mate.⁸ In return for faithfully campaigning for the ticket, Wallace took the post of secretary of commerce.⁹

After assuming the presidency following FDR’s death in 1944, Truman’s anticommunist foreign and domestic policies led to a clash with Wallace, who continued on at Commerce. Differences came to a head in September 1946 when Truman demanded Wallace resign following a Madison Square Garden speech given by the commerce secretary, which many saw as a call for significant change in U.S. foreign policy. Wallace called for “peaceful competition” between Russia and the United States, claiming, “We should close our ears to those among us who would have us believe that Russian Communism and our free enterprise system cannot live, one with another, in a profitable and productive peace.”¹⁰ Although Truman had read and endorsed Wallace’s speech days before it was delivered, upon questioning from the press, the president became aware of contradictions between Wallace’s proposals and the policy laid out by his secretary of state, James Byrnes. Byrnes’s threat to resign if Wallace was not replaced forced Truman to ask for Wallace’s resignation. Differences between Truman and Wallace in late 1946 would help set the stage for the dramatic presidential election two years later.

Wallace’s departure from the Truman administration made foreign policy, and in particular U.S.-Soviet relations, a key issue in 1948. His insistence that true peace was measured not only by peaceful relations among nations but also and just as importantly by social justice within them had its roots in the Popular Front movement’s founding the decade before. In a radio address announcing his candidacy in December 1947, Wallace stressed that “a new party must stand for a positive peace program of abundance and security, not scarcity and war.” In a reference to the biblical story of Gideon, who with only a small army freed the people of Israel from the Midianites, Wallace claimed his campaign had “assembled a Gideon’s army” to battle for peace.¹¹ Thus, at the creation of the Progressive Party, Wallace argued for a peace that pushed beyond the bounds of physical nonviolence to include the issues of civil rights and liberties as well as economic justice. Progressive women took seriously their charge to hold in equipoise these social justice causes and to serve as a counterbalance to the social injustice they experienced or witnessed in postwar America.

In her response to Wallace’s campaign announcement, Eleanor Roosevelt claimed that he had “oversimplified the problems” that Americans faced and was especially dismissive of his notion of “positive peace.”¹² Progressive women embraced it nonetheless. The relationship between domestic structural violence (or social injustice) and international state-sanctioned violence (or war) was best explained by Eslanda Robeson, author, activist, and wife of entertainer Paul Robeson, who wrote that Cold War U.S. policy resulted in “a white supremacy civil war at home” and “an American superiority world war” abroad.¹³ In Progressive thinking, Jim Crow and European colonization, institutional racism and international imperialism each grew from the same seed and represented a form of violence. Only a positive peace would reverse the damage resulting from U.S. national and international policies. Yet given the nature of world events in 1948, it soon became clear to Elinor Gimbel that Progressive women would need to carefully balance their demands for political rights with an anxious American public’s desire for a return to the security of traditional gender roles.

Like many of the women of the PP, Gimbel was first politicized by President Roosevelt’s New Deal, claiming that the Depression had “awakened her social conscience.” Yet her wealth set Gimbel apart from most Progressive Party women, making her, she joked, a “traitor to her class.”¹⁴ Born in 1896, the first of two children of Sam and Sadie (Liebmann) Steiner, Elinor enjoyed the privileges that came with membership in two prominent, wealthy families. Both were involved in the brewing industry; her father’s produced hops, while her mother’s operated the Liebmann Breweries. As a result, she accompanied her younger brother and parents on frequent trips to Europe, where her German-born father conducted business. In 1914 she graduated from the progressive Calhoun School in New York City and, like other young women of her class, married shortly thereafter.¹⁵

Although her marriage produced a son, it did not last, and by the late 1910s, Gimbel was a divorced single mother. In 1924 she married Louis Gimbel Jr., whose family owned and operated the Gimbels and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores. By 1931 they had added two more sons to their family. Still, despite her obligations as a wife and mother, Elinor Gimbel was closely involved in family businesses, eventually becoming a director of both S. S. Steiner and the Liebmann Breweries. When in 1942 her husband, Louis, was killed while serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps, she found herself once again a single working mother.

Perhaps a result of her own concerns about balancing work and motherhood, Gimbel founded the Committee for the Care of Children in Wartime at the start of World War II. Commenting on the number of children left unattended while mothers worked in war industries, she denounced the inadequate measures taken by both state and municipal governments to provide for “door key children,” who wore their house keys around their necks and returned to empty homes after school. Lack of response by both New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Governor Thomas Dewey drew Gimbel’s ire when she demanded they establish child-care programs as a “war necessity.”¹⁶ Gimbel’s expectation that the government take on the responsibility of child care for women workers was a reflection of her commitment to not only children of working mothers, but also to the principle of government activism established by the New Deal.

Gimbel’s support for an activist government committed to family issues was shared by fellow PP members. Whether first politicized during the Depression years or earlier, their views on Roosevelt’s family-friendly policies as codified in his 1944 proposal the “Economic Bill of Rights” made him their political patron.¹⁷ Before Roosevelt’s death in the spring of 1945, Susie Stageberg, a party organizer from rural Minnesota, wrote of him, “No one can deny that he is a constant and sincere seeker after truth. And some of us believe that he has the courage and honesty to follow wherever truth leads.” Eslanda Goode Robeson believed so deeply in Roosevelt that she headed a 1944 committee to reelect the president in her “rock-bound Republican state of Connecticut.” And decades after his death, Susan B. Anthony II, great-niece of the suffrage activist, recalled giving “30 talks in 30 days” in support of his reelection.¹⁸

Understandably, given their ardor, the death of Roosevelt stunned many of his supporters, who quickly came to believe that his successor, Harry Truman, lacked the will or the ability, or possibly both, to continue the course charted by FDR. Playwright Lillian Hellman, a PP cofounder, probably best summed up the sentiments of Progressive women when she told an audience of Wallace supporters, “These have been two black years since Mr. Roosevelt’s death and the end of the war.”¹⁹ Despite Hellman’s lament, however, Roosevelt lived on—first through the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) and then through the Progressive Party.

The Progressive Citizens of America

The PCA’s founding grew out of efforts to keep the Popular Front movement alive during the war years. In 1940 Elinor Gimbel established the Non-Partisan Committee to support Roosevelt’s third campaign for president.²⁰ Her Non-Partisan Roosevelt clubs soon folded into the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NC-PAC), which was itself an arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations—Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC). A year after FDR’s death, in late 1946, the NC-PAC agreed to merge with the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP) to form the Progressive Citizens of America.²¹ This merger came about largely because the two organizations competed with each other in their fund-raising efforts, but shared a commitment to extending the New Deal into the postwar era while promoting world peace. Democrat Henry Wallace and progressive Republican Fiorello La Guardia spoke at the PCA’s founding convention held in December 1946. Laying the groundwork for his future campaign, Wallace told those attending that at the center of the “progressive faith” was a belief that “freedom is the first article in our credo and we shall f...