American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace.

• Author: Nichols, John

Maybe fifty years from now, someone will write as fine a book about Ralph Nader as John C. Culver and John Hyde's American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (Norton, 2000). If so, the much-maligned 2000 Presidential candidate will be a lucky man indeed.

Wallace was the last American progressive to mount a serious third party Presidential campaign, and he came away from that candidacy every bit as battered and officially marginalized as the 2000 Green Party candidate. An internationally respected agriculturalist, economist, and author, a former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, Wallace left the Democratic Party to mount his 1948 campaign for the Presidency because, he argued, the Democratic and Republican parties had both fallen under the influence of Wall Street. Condemned as a threat to the reelection of Democrat Harry Truman, Wallace told his Progressive Party followers: "We must make it clear to the Administration that we, as progressives, would prefer the election of an out-and-out reactionary like [Republican Robert] Taft in 1948 to a lukewarm liberal. We want this to be a genuine two-party country and not a country operated by a fake one-party system under the guise of a bipartisan bloc."

The Progressive Party campaign of 1948 was a visionary journey: Wallace warned that the Cold War would empty the national treasury and leave little money for eliminating poverty and uplifting society; he saw the threat of a yet-unnamed McCarthyism as a greater danger to American democracy than the communism it sought to confront; he spoke before integrated audiences in the segregated South and challenged every aspect of Jim Crow; and he gave fresh voice to a radical sense of American democracy. "When the old parties rot, the people have a right to be heard through a new party. They asserted that right when the Democratic Party was founded under Jefferson in the struggle against the Federalist Party of war and privilege of his day. They won it again when the Republican party was organized in Lincoln's time. The people must again have a right to speak out with their vote in 1948.... The lukewarm liberals sitting on their chairs say, `Why throw away your vote?' I say a vote for a new party in 1948 will be the most valuable vote you have ever cast or ever will cast."

Much of Wallace's campaign foreshadowed this year's Nader candidacy--including the final vote count: about 2.4 percent of...