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If you don't like their ideology, they'll
just change its name
April 09,2005
From about 1920 until 1932 the American socialists called themselves progressives. They formed a political party named as you might guess, "The Progressive Party" under the leadership of Robert M. La Follette, Sr. of Wisconsin. La Follette's was an unabashed socialist. He favored public ownership of railroads, airlines, and most means of production...except farming. His run for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket garnered 17% of the popular vote in 1924. However he carried just one state ...his native Wisconsin.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well aware that the Progressive party's name had earned a very bad reputation. When FDR proposed much of the progressive party platform he realized he could not refer to it as the Progressive agenda. So FDR substituted the word Liberal to describe the government program ideas he had taken from the Progressive Party. Roosevelt also hired a large number of former Progressive party officials in his a administration.
As Roosevelt adopted and pushed for many of the Progressive parties goals, the progressive party became inactive. Its members were welcomed into the Democratic party. Soon they all refereed to themselves as liberals.. The word progressive was not used for a dozen years.
In 1940 Roosevelt selected a pro socialist, pro communist as his running mate. His name was Henry A. Wallace. Wallace openly supported nearly everything socialist and communist. Wallace was an admirer of Joseph Stalin and an apologist for the Soviet Union.
By 1944, Southern Democrats did not think that FDR was likely to live to complete his 4th term. They did not want a communist president. They are believed to have forced FDR to dump Wallace from the ticket. Wallace was replaced on the ticket with Harry S. Truman as the Vice Presidential nominee. Roosevelt died just weeks after starting his 4th term in office. Had Wallace not been dumped as Roosevelt's VP, we would have faced the challenge of the Soviet Union with a Communist Sympathizer as President of the USA from 1944 until at least 1948.
In 1948, another Progressive Party (known in some states as the Independent Progressive Party) was formed. You guessed it the former Democratic Vice President Henry A. Wallace ran on the progressive ticket.. Wallace ran for president in 1948 with the support of the American Communist party and several other fringe leftist parties such as the Labor party of New York.
It is frightening to recall that the Vice president of the USA from 1940 until 1944 was Henry Wallace who became the Communist parties choice for USA president in 1948.
After Wallace did poorly in the 1948 election, the term Liberal totally replaced the term Progressive. But it cannot be disputed that liberals supported the leftist and socialist ideology of the European and East European Socialists. The Progressives had become Liberals.. but only the name had changed.
Progressive as a term to describe leftists was not used from 1949 until after the Democrats started to take major losses in national and state elections in the late 1990s. Now that the term Liberal has taken on a negative connotation, the socialists are returning to their former label of Progressives.
As a firmly anti communist Democrat named Harry Truman once said: