The Progressive Party Platform, 1948

Preamble

Three years after the end of the second world war, the drums are beating for a third. Civil liberties are being destroyed. Millions cry out for relief from unbearably high prices. The American way of life is in danger. The root cause of this crisis is Big Business control of our economy and government. With toil and enterprise the American people have created from their rich resources the world's greatest productive machine. This machine no longer belongs to the people. Its ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few and its product used for their enrichment. Never before have so few owned so much at the expense of so many. Ten years ago Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state. That, in its essence, is fascism." Today that private power has constituted itself an invisible government which pulls the strings of its puppet Republican and Democratic parties. Two sets of candidates compete for votes under the outworn emblems of the old parties. But both represent a single program-a program of monopoly profits through war preparations, lower living standards, and suppression of dissent. For generations the common man of America has resisted this concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few. The greatest of America's political leaders have, led the people into battle against the money power, the railroads, the trusts, the economic royalists. We of the Progressive Party are the present-day descendants of these people's movements and fighting leaders. We are the political heirs of Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoin, of Frederick Douglass, Altgeld, and Debs, of "Fighting Bob" La Follette, George Norris, and Franklin Roosevelt. Throughout our history new parties have arisen when the old parties have betrayed the people. As Jefferson headed a new party to defeat the reactionaries of his day, and as Lincoln led a new party to victory over the slaveowners, so today the people, inspired and led by Henry Wallace, have created a new party to secure peace, freedom, and abundance.

Betrayal by the Old Parties

The American people want peace. But the old parties, obedient to the dictates of monopoly and the military, prepare for war in the name of peace. They refuse to negotiate a settlement of differences with the Soviet Union. They reject the United Nations as an instrument for promoting world peace and reconstruction. They use the Marshall Plan to rebuild Nazi Germany as a war base and to subjugate the economies of other European countries to American Big Business. They finance and arm corrupt, fascist governments in China, Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere, through the Truman Doctrine, wasting billions in American resources and squandering America's heritage as the enemy of despotism. They encircle the globe with military bases which other peoples cannot but view as -threats to their freedom and security. They protect the war-making industrial and financial barons of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, to restore them to power. They stockpile atomic bombs. They pass legislation to admit displaced persons, discriminating against Catholics, Jews, and other victims of Hitler. They impose a peacetime draft and move toward Universal Military Training. They fill policy-making positions in government with generals and Wall Street bankers. Peace cannot be won-but profits can-by spending ever-increasing billions of the people's money in war preparations. Yet these are the policies of the two old parties-policies profaning the name of peace. The American people cherish freedom. But the old parties, acting for the forces of special privilege, conspire to destroy traditional American freedoms. They deny the Negro people the rights of citizenship. They impose a universal policy of Jim Crow and enforce it with every weapon of terror. They refuse to outlaw its most bestial expression-the crime of lynching. They refuse to abolish the poll tax, and year after year they deny the right to vote to Negroes and millions of white people in the South. They aim to reduce nationality groups to a position of social, economic, and political inferiority. They connive to bar the Progressive Party from the ballot. They move to outlaw the Communist Party as a decisive step in their assault on the democratic rights of labor, of national, racial, and political minorities, and of all those who oppose their drive to war. In this they repeat the history of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Franco Spain. They support the House Committee on Un-American Activities in its vilification and persecution of citizens in total disregard of the Bill of Rights. They build the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a political police with secret dossiers on millions of Americans. They seek to regiment the thinking of the American people. and to suppress political dissent. They strive to enact such measures as the Mundt-Nixon Bill which are as destructive of democracy as were the Alien and Sedition Laws against which Jefferson fought. They concoct a spurious "loyalty" program to create an atmosphere of fear and hysteria in government and industry. They shackle American labor with the 'Taft-Hartley Act at the express command of Big Business, while encouraging exorbitant profits through uncontrolled inflation. They restore the labor injunction as a weapon for breaking strikes and smashing Unions. This is the record of the two old parties-a record profaning the American ideal of freedom. The American people want abundance. But the old parties refuse to enact effective price and rent controls, making the people victims of a disastrous inflation which dissipates the savings of millions of families and depresses their living standards. They ignore the housing problem, although more than half the nation's families including millions of veterans, are homeless or living in rural and urban slums.

They refuse social security protection to millions and allow only meager benefits to the rest. They block national health legislation even though millions of men, women, and children are without adequate medical care. They foster the concentration of private economic power. They replace progressive government officials, the supporters of Franklin Roosevelt, with spokesmen of Big Business. They pass tax legislation for the greedy, giving only insignificant reductions to the needy. These are the acts of the old parties-acts profaning the American dream of abundance. No glittering party platforms or election promises of the Democratic and Republican parties can hide their betrayal of the needs of the American people. Nor can they act otherwise. For both parties, as the record of the 80th Congress makes clear, are the champions of Big Business.

The Republican platform admits it.

The Democratic platform attempts to conceal it. But the very composition of the Democratic leadership exposes the demogogy of its platform. It is a party of machine politicians and Southern Bourbons who veto in Congress the liberal planks "won" in convention. Such platforms, conceived in hypocrisy and lack of principle, deserve nothing but contempt.

Principles of the Progressive Party

The Progressive Party is born in the deep conviction that the national wealth and natural resources of our country belong to the people who inhabit it and must be employed in their behalf; that freedom and opportunity must be secured equally to all; that the brotherhood of man can be achieved and scourge of war ended. The Progressive Party holds that basic to the organization of world peace is a return to the purposes of Franklin Roosevelt to seek areas of international agreement rather than disagreement. It was his conviction that within the framework of the United Nations different social and economic systems can and must live together. If peace is to be achieved capitalist United States and Communist Russia must establish good relations and work together. The Progressive Party holds that it is the first duty of just government to secure for all the people, regardless of race, creed, color, sex, national background, political belief, or station in life, the inalienable rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The government must actively protect these rights against the encroachments of public and private agencies. The Progressive Party holds that a just government must use its powers to promote an abundant life for its people. This is the basic idea of Franklin Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights. Heretofore every attempt to give effect to this principle has failed because Big Business dominates the key sectors of the economy. Antitrust laws and government regulation cannot break this domination. Therefore the people, through their democratically elected representatives, must take control of the main levers of the economic system. Public ownership of these levers will enable the people to plan the use of their productive resources so as to develop the limitless potential of modem technology and to create a true American Commonwealth free from poverty and insecurity. The Progressive Party believes that only through peaceful understanding can the world make progress toward reconstruction and higher standards of living; that peace is the essential condition for safe-guarding and extending our traditional freedoms; that only by preserving liberty and by planning an abundant life for all can we eliminate the sources of world conflict. Peace, freedom, and abundance - the goals of the Progressive Party - are indivisible. Only the Progressive Party can destroy the power of private monopoly and restore the government to the American people. For ours is a party uncorrupted by privilege, committed to no special interests, free from machine control, and open to all Americans of all races, colors, and creeds. The Progressive Party is a party of action. We seek through the democratic process and through day-by-day activity to lead the American people toward the fulfillment of these principles.

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Communists and their close allies wrote most of the Progressive Party platform of 1948. These individuals were not a majority of the platform committee, but enough non-Communists agreed with some parts of the party line to allow the Communists to dominate the proceedings. Lee Pressman, who earlier in 1948 had been eased from his position in the CIO national office because of his Communist sympathies, directed the writing of the first or "New York" draft of the platform. University of Chicago's Rexford G. Tugwell, chairman of the platform committee, quietly withdrew from party activity before the election as he came to realize that the Progressive movement was Communist-controlled.

Kirk H. Porter and Donald B. Johnson, compilers, National Party Platforms, 1840-1956 (Urbana, Ill., 1956) pp. 436437.