Glen Hearst Taylor

Glen Hearst Taylor, April 12, 1904 (Portland, Ore.) – April 28, 1984 (Burlingame, Calif.)

VP candidate for Progressive Party (aka New Party aka Independent Progressive Party) (1948)

Running mate with nominee: Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965)

Popular vote: 1,157,328 (2.37%)
Electoral vote: 0/531

The campaign:

Just one of the many sideshows in the crazy 1948 election year included the battle of two FDR Vice-Presidents, Harry Truman (Democrat) and Henry Wallace (now in the newly created Progressive Party), with each claiming they were the true torch-bearer of Roosevelt's legacy.

The Progressive Party's 1948 platform mentions FDR several times in a positive light, linking the late President in what they saw as part of their political lineage:

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 Lincoln— of Frederick Douglass, Altgeld and Debs— of "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, George Norris, and Franklin Roosevelt.

The platform did have one important difference from the other political parties of the Left in 1948-- they all but embraced Stalin's Soviet regime as they condemned the Cold War. It didn't help that rather than run their own candidate in this election year, the Communist Party USA (now in the hands of the Stalinists) openly endorsed the Progressive Party. The fact that the CPUSA had influence in the Wallace/Taylor campaign is beyond dispute, but to what extent is still a matter of historical debate.

Wallace and Taylor, although not Communist themselves, refused to eschew CPUSA support on the grounds of that they did not wish to participate in the growing hysteria over "Reds" and be on the wrong side of what they called a freedom of speech and thought issue.

Wallace selected US Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho as his running mate. Taylor, a Democrat, was the very first pure Pacific Northwest third party Vice-Presidential candidate, having been born in Portland and raised in Idaho. Until he was elected to the US Senate in 1944, he had never been east of Chicago.

Taylor, who had considerable experience as an actor and musician, possessed a flair for publicity and fully understood how politics is frequently like theater. Known as the "Singing Cowboy" he has been noted for the distinction as one of the most Leftists members of the Senate since the 1930s. He had very mixed feelings about joining the Progressive Party and took several weeks in making his decision to be part of the ticket. In May, 1948 he told a reporter, "I knew I would probably kill my chances of being re-elected [to the Senate] in 1950 if I threw in with Henry. I'm not a lawyer. I've been in show business all my life, living hand to mouth, often in debt. I can't leave the Senate and practice law, like most of these fellows do. It was a tough decision ... I am running because I feel that the question of peace or war is more important than any other consideration."

During the campaign, in May, Taylor was convicted of disorderly conduct in Birmingham, Ala. for using a door reserved for African Americans as he took an action to protest the policy of segregation. Henry Wallace observed, "This dramatizes the hypocrisy of spending billions for arms in the name of defending freedom abroad, while freedom is trampled on here at home."

With votes recorded in 45 states, Wallace/Taylor finished strongest in New York (8.25%), California (4.73%), North Dakota (3.80%), Washington (3.50%), Montana (3.26%), Oregon (2.86%), Nevada (2.36%), and Taylor's Idaho (2.31%). It could be argued that the Progressive Party gave New York and Michigan to Dewey.

Election history:
1938 - Democratic primary for US House of Representatives (Id.) - defeated
1940 - US Senate (Id.) (Democratic) - defeated
1942 - US Senate (Id.) (Democratic) - defeated
1944-1951 - US Senate (Id.) (Democratic)
1950 - Democratic primary for US Senate (Id.) - defeated
1954 - US Senate (Id.) (Democratic) - defeated
1956 - Democratic primary for US Senate (Id.) - defeated
1956 - US Senate (Id.) (Independent write-in) - defeated

Other occupations: actor, country-Western singer known as "The Singing Cowboy," movie theater manager, President of Coryell Construction Co. 1950-1952, inventor and producer of custom toupees called Taylor Toppers (now Taylormade), painter's assistant,  sheet metal worker, shipyard worker during WWII, sheepherder, carpenter

Buried: Skylawn Memorial Park (San Mateo, Calif.)

Notes:
Winner of the 1956 US Senate race was Frank Church, a result hotly disputed by Taylor.
Brother of Jazz singer Lee Morse (1897-1954)
12th of 13 children.
Family moved to Kooskia, Idaho when Taylor was very young.
Divorced and remarried.
Died of Alzheimer's Disease.
Lost his hair early in life and invented his own toupee which turned into a successful business still
 run by a family member.
In an effort to publicize his need for housing in Washington, DC in 1945, he sang "Oh give us a
 home, near the Capitol dome, and a yard where the children can play..." to the tune of "Home on the
 Range" on the Capitol steps.
Attempted to organize a Farmer-Labor Party in Montana and Nevada, 1935.
Engaged in a fistfight with Republican Ray McKaig, breaking McKaig's jaw, on Election Day 1946
 in Boise.
"Even if it is only a psychological phenomenon, it is a sign of what the world is coming to. If we don't ease the tensions, the whole world will be full of psychological cases and eventually turn into a global nuthouse."--Sen. Taylor on the UFO claims regarding Roswell, NM, July 1947.
He rode his horse, Nugget, up the Capitol steps.
Taylor's brother Paul ran for US Congress in California as a Progressive Party candidate.
Returned to the Democratic Party in 1949.

Tucker Powell Smith

 Smith and Thomas (and Hoopes?)

Tucker Powell Smith, January 29, 1898 (Missouri) – June 25, 1970 (Ventura, Calif.)

VP candidate for Socialist Party of America (aka Socialist Party of the United States) (1948)

Running mate with nominee: Norman M. Thomas (1884-1968)
Popular vote: 139,569 (0.29%)

Electoral vote: 0/531

The campaign:

In his sixth and final run for the presidency, Norman Thomas found himself as the head of just another of the increasing and fragmented political parties on the Left. The days of the Socialist Party of America acting as the country's premier third party were over.

1948 running mate Tucker Powell Smith was long active in pacifist political activity. At the time of the campaign he was a resident of Highland Park, Mich.

Smith was rumored to have been a ghost-writer for an anti-Truman speech by his VP rival, Progressive Party running mate Sen. Glen Hearst Taylor.

The 1948 SPA platform slammed communists (and Henry Wallace's Progressive Party by association):

Three forces today are competing for the loyalty of men. And in this race, the stakes are the survival of mankind.

On the one hand, an economic system calling itself "free enterprise" asserts that it can lead to the salvation of humanity. It has brought us repeatedly to depressions and wars, yet its spokesmen in the Democratic and Republican Parties still pretend they
have solutions.

They have, in fact, betrayed the promises with which they woo the American people every four years. They offered prosperity and delivered depression. They pledged peace and delivered war. They promised to increase our standard of living and are now raising the cost of living. They promised freedom to organized labor and hobbled it with new bonds.

They have sought partisan advantage and jeopardized national welfare. The dominant wings in their parties have combined to destroy price control and give us inflation, to undermine restraints on greed and give us shortage, to favor the rich and deny the poor, to cut the taxes of the wealthy and insult the common man with a crumb.

There is a second force in the world—which promises security and speaks of freedom but delivers only economic bondage and dictatorship. It is the force of totalitarianism. Yesterday its most sinister front was Fascism; today it is Communism.

In the United States, it marches under masked banners. It calls itself a "new party" and has pushed into the forefront well-meaning liberals who do not know the purposes of their Communist allies. And this alliance, though speaking for civil liberties at home, defends the most powerful tyranny in the modern world. It speaks of peace but is blind to the most aggressive imperialism of the present day. It speaks of one world but works for two spheres of influence. It urges the brotherhood of man but sanctifies the divisive principle of national sovereignty.

As against these forces, the Socialist Party of the United States speaks for the Third Force—democratic socialism, the principles of democratic planning and international order.

With votes recorded in 34 states the Thomas/Smith ticket finished in a very distant 5th place. In Wisconsin they tallied 0.98%, in Oregon 0.96% and the percentages dramatically plummet after that. Georgia gave them three votes and in South Carolina they earned one single lonely vote.

Election history:
1929 - Alderman, New York, NY (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1930 - US House of Representatives (NY) (Socialist Party of America) - defeated

Other occupations: college teacher, Director of Brookwood Labor College 1933-1937

Buried: Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park (Westlake Village, Calif.)

Notes:
Shortly after the election he was dismissed from Olivet College in Jan. 1949 for union agitation.
Buried in the same cemetery as Karen Carpenter, Ronald Goldman, Jack Kirby, Virginia Mayo, Harry
 Nilsson, and Artie Shaw.
Future Pulitizer Prize winning author Carleton Mabee resigned his teaching job at Olivet in protest of
 Smith's firing.