Introduction: a socialist magazine in the American century - 'Monthly Review'

Monthly Review, May, 1999 by Christopher Phelps

While he was not much of a radical or a particularly sharp political thinker, Wallace ran decidedly to the left of Truman on civil rights and opposed the escalating Cold War. His public support, relatively substantial at first, was an extension of the militant left wing of labor and the New Deal, the sort who had supported Roosevelt's reforms and hoped to deepen them. Instead, the campaign marked the break-up of "progressivism." Truman usurped much of Wallace's domestic program while becoming an ever more strident cold warrior, typifying the midcentury embrace of redbaiting by mainstream liberalism. In the end, Wallace got only one million votes, rather than the five or ten million some predicted he would receive.

The group that launched Monthly Review did not think the problem had been that Wallace had run as an independent. The deplorable drift of the Democratic establishment only confirmed to them the value of exploring alternatives to the two-party system. Huberman even called for "the creation by labor of a political party of its own to advance its interests."(9) The real problem, the editors thought, was that the Popular Front against fascism had been replaced by an intensified crusade against Communism, often designed and executed by liberals. The left-liberal alliance of the Depression and Second World War was being severed in the Cold War atmosphere.

Wallace's poor showing was doubly tragic to the founders of Monthly Review because he had not focused attention upon genuine political alternatives to capitalist society. Sweezy and Huberman had served together on the Progressive Party's national platform committee. They thought he had been mistaken to refrain from a genuinely radical program, which had allowed Truman to appropriate his domestic policies and meant that supporters of the Progressive Party were not drawn toward any larger understanding of the need for changes in the social system. Wallace had simply stood as a third and better candidate.(10)

On the left, many were thinking along the same lines as the editors of Monthly Review. Their hopes for change had been fired by the great movements of the 1930s and rekindled after the Second World War with the demise of the fascist powers and the great strike waves at home. Most radicals had not expected reaction to be nearly so fierce and quick in coming. Some capitulated, but many were far from ready to give up the ghost. Their memories were still fresh with marches of the unemployed, sit-down strikes by industrial workers, campaigns against racial segregation, and student rallies against fascism and war. Many of them drew a similar balance sheet of disappointment regarding the 1948 election. The National Guardian, launched in 1948, was the journalistic expression of this milieu, which had its more cerebral and analytical offshoot in Monthly Review.

6.

The existence of this sort of opinion - socialist but independent, unrestricted by party position - would hardly have been thinkable ten years before, which is another way of saying that the difference between the 1930s and the late 1940s was not merely in the disintegration of the New Deal coalition but in the weakening of Communist Party influence on the left.