| From the Award-Winning Author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents |
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follow the path of peace or war, democracy or fascism?
vain.
Remember the promises:
Fascism would be wiped out. The great-power unity that brought war victory would bring
enduring peace.
An economic bill of rights would provide every American with security.
These promises have been broken.
Instead of peace, there is war—in Greece, in China, in Israel.
Instead of peace, we witness feverish preparations for a new world war.
Instead of peace, American boys are being regimented for war with the enactment of the
peacetime draft.
Instead of security and abundance, we have sky-rocketing prices, lowered living standards and
the shadow of an impending economic crash with mass unemployment. Farmers fear the
inevitable collapse of farm prices. After three years our veterans are still denied housing. Our
youth face a future of insecurity and new wars.
Instead of greater democracy, we have lynch law, mounting Jim-Crowism and anti-Semitism, and
a conspiracy to undermine our sacred democratic heritage. We have anti-Communist witch-
hunts, the arrest and conviction of anti-fascist leaders, the harassment and intimidation of writers,
artists and intellectuals. We have phony spy scares, the hounding of government employees and
former Roosevelt associates, the persecution of foreign-born workers, and the adoption of anti-
labor legislation, attempts to outlaw the Communist Party through Mundt-Nixon Bills, and now
the indictment of the twelve Communist leaders on the trumped-up charge of "force and
violence." These are the methods by which the American people are step by step being driven
down the road to a police state and fascism.
These are the chief issues of the 1948 elections.
America is a great and beautiful land, endowed with immense natural resources and a people
skilled in producing abundance. Why then the fear of insecurity?
We are today threatened by no outside force. We are in no danger of attack from any nation.
Why then the war hysteria?
The answer lies in this simple fact—250 giant corporations, operating through a handful of banks,
control the economic life of the United States. These in turn are largely owned by a few
plutocratic families—Morgan, Rockefeller, Mellon, du Pont and Ford.
The nation's industries are not operated for the public welfare, but for the private gain and power
of the multi-millionaire ruling class. Prices continue to rise because of vast military expenditures
and because the monopolies, through price-fixing agreements and other devious devices, extract
exorbitant profits.
They make huge profits from war and from armaments. They extract super-profits abroad by
forcing other nations into economic dependence upon Wall Street. This drive for foreign markets,
for Wall Street domination of the world, is at the bottom of the war hysteria and war
preparations. Big Business strives to crush the growth and advance of democracy and socialism
throughout the world, in order to protect and swell its profits.
Big Business seeks to re-establish the old Nazi cartels and to use Germany and Japan as military
bases for new aggression. But the failures of the bipartisan policy to achieve its main aim of world
conquest have increased the frenzy with which Wall Street seeks to plunge the nation into fascism
and World War III.
WAR AND PEACE ...
Neither the American people nor the Soviet Union is responsible for the sharpening tension in
international relations. The responsibility rests squarely on Wall Street and the bipartisan Truman-
Dewey atomic diplomacy. Only the capitalists trusts want war. The Soviet Union is a socialist
country. It has no trusts, no I. G. Farben or du Pont cartels to profit from wars. That is why the
Soviet Union is the most powerful force for peace in the world.
The Communist Party calls upon the labor movement and all progressive, peace-loving
Americans to struggle for the realization of the following peace program:
End the "cold war," the draft, and the huge military budget.
Restore American-Soviet friendship, the key to world peace and the fulfillment of the people's
hope in the United Nations.
Conclude a peace settlement for a united, democratic Germany and Japan based on the Yalta
and Potsdam agreements. Guarantee the complete democratization and demilitarization of these
Countries.
Stop military aid and intervention in China, Korea and Greece.
Break diplomatic and economic ties with Franco Spain.
Scrap the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. Furnish large-scale economic assistance to the
war-ravaged victims of fascist attack. Give this aid through the United Nations without political
strings.
Lift the embargo on, and extend full recognition to Israel.
Give immediate, unconditional independence to Puerto Rico.
Aid the economic development of the colonial and semi-colonial countries of Asia, Africa and
Latin America on the basis of full support to their fight for their national independence.
Defeat the Truman Arms Standardization Plan.
Abandon economic, political and military pressures on the countries of Latin America.
THE ATTACK ON LABOR AND OUR LIVING STANDARDS
The trusts have inflated prices and battered down the real wages of American workers to 16 per
cent below 1944.
Huge war expenditures amount to 15 billion dollars this year—one-third of the entire national
budget. The American people are already paying dearly for this "cold war economy," through a
heavy tax burden, speed-up and reduction in real wages. We will pay still more heavily as the
inflationary boom speeds the day of the oncoming economic bust.
Big Business has decreed that labor's hands be tied and its rights destroyed. The Taft-Hartley
Law and strike-breaking injunctions are weapons against the people's resistance to the monopoly
drive towards war and fascism.
To defend the labor movement and the vital economic interests of the overwhelming majority of
the American people, labor and all progressives should unite in stubborn and militant struggle for
the following demands:
Repeal the Taft-Hartley Law and end strike-breaking injunctions. Adopt a code of Federal labor
legislation including the best features of the Wagner Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-
Injunction Law.
Restore price control and roll back prices, without any wage freeze.
Enact an extensive program for Federally-financed low-rent public housing, minimum wage
legislation, old-age pensions, adequate health insurance, and increased aid to education.
Provide increased security for the working farmers through up-to-date parity price and in¬come
guarantees, based on unlimited farm production. Such income guarantees require farm subsidies,
effective crop insurance and sharp curbs on the giant food trusts and their marketing agencies.
Carry out a program of planned conservation and River Valley projects. Extend the Federal
minimum wage and social security laws to agricultural workers, including seasonal and migratory
labor.
We call for heavier taxation on high incomes and excess profits, with increased exemption for the
low brackets. We demand a capital levy on big fortunes and corporations to finance essential
social legislation.
We support all steps to curb the power of the trusts, the source of reaction, fascism and war. The
American people can make gains, even under capitalism, by mass resistance to the monopolies.
We support measures to nationalize the basic industries, banks and insurance companies, but
point out that such measures can only be useful as part of the fight to realize a people's
democratic government in the United States. Democratic nationalization of trustified industries
re¬quires guarantees of democratic controls and the right of labor to organize, bargain collectively
and strike. This can only be accomplished by a people's government dedicated to curbing the
power of the trusts.
We point out that capitalism cannot become "progressive" even by curbing the excesses of the
monopolies. The basic causes of unemployment, economic crisis, fascism and war can only be
removed by the establishment of Socialism through the democratic will of the majority of the
American people.
CIVIL RIGHTS . . .
The destruction of the rights of the Communists is the classical first step down the road to
fascism. The tragedy of Germany and Italy proves this. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the
working class and all Americans who hate fascism to defend the rights of the Communists, and to
help explode the myth that Communists are foreign agents or advocate force and violence.
We Communists are no more foreign agents than was Jefferson who was also accused of being a
foreign agent by the Tories of his day. We follow in the best traditions of the spokesmen of labor,
science and culture whose contributions to human progress knew no national boundaries. We
follow in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, who said: "The strongest bond of human sympathy,
outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations and tongues,
and kindreds."
It is the monopolists who advocate and practice force and violence, not the Communists.
Reaction has always resorted to force and violence to thwart the democratic aspirations of the
people.
In 1776, force and violence were the weapons of King George against the American colonists
seeking national independence. In 1861, force and violence were used by the Southern slave
owners in an attempt to overthrow the democratic republic headed by Lincoln. Today, the people
suffer the violence of the K.K.K., the lynch mobs, the fascist hoodlum gangs and the police
brutality.
We are Marxists, not adventurers or conspirators. We condemn and reject the policy and
practice of terror and assassination and repudiate the advocates of force and violence. We
Communists insist upon our right to compete freely in the battle of ideas. We Communists insist
upon our right to organize and bring our program to the people. Let the people judge our views
and activities on their merits.
We call upon the American people to fight with all their strength against the danger of fascism to
resist every fascist measure, to defend every democratic right.
End the witch-hunts, loyalty orders and phony spy scares.
Abolish the Un-American Committee. Withdraw the indictments against the twelve Communist
leaders and the contempt citations against the anti-fascist victims of Congressional inquisitions.
Stop the campaign of terror and intimidation against labor leaders, intellectuals and people of the
professions.
End persecution and deportation of the foreign born and lift the undemocratic bars to citizenship.
Outlaw all forms of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and every other expression of racial and
religious bigotry.
End all discrimination against the Mexican-American people in the Southwest.
The Communist party calls for an end to any and all political, social, and economic inequalities
practiced against women and demands the maintenance and extension of existing protective
legislation.
Extend the suffrage. Remove the bars directed against minority parties. Lower the voting age to
18 years in every state.
NEGRO RIGHTS . . .
The hypocrisy of the democratic pretensions of Wall Street and the Administration are shattered
by the reality of the Jim-Crow system in America. The most shameful aspect of American life is
the Jim-Crowism, the terror and violence imposed upon the Negro people, especially in the
South. Discrimination in employment, only slightly relaxed during the war, is once again
widespread.
The Communist Party, which has pioneered in fighting for full political, economic and social
equality for the Negro people, calls for an end to the policies of the Federal and state
governments which give official sanction to the Jim-Crow system in the United States.
We call upon all progressives, especially white progressives, to carry on an unceasing day-to-day
struggle to outlaw the poll tax, lynchings, segregation, job discrimination and all other forms of
Jim-Crowism, official and unofficial, and to give their full support to the rising national liberation
movement of the Negro people. This is vital to the Negro people, to the white workers, and to
the whole fight for democracy in America.
We demand a national F.E.P.C. law, to be vigorously and fully enforced.
We demand that the Ingram family be freed and adequately compensated for the ordeals to
which they have been subjected.
We demand that the Ku Klux Klan and all other hate-and-terror organizations be outlawed.
We condemn President Truman's cynical evasion of the issue of segregation in the armed forces.
We demand that he immediately issue an Executive Order ending every form of segregation and
discrimination in the armed forces and the government services.
We defend the right of the Negro people to full representation in government, and demand
Federal enforcement of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, so that the Negro people, North
and South, may participate freely and fully in the 1948 elections and all elections thereafter.
We call for a democratic agricultural program which will give land and other forms of assistance
to millions of Negro and white tenants and sharecroppers in the South, and thereby help put an
end to the semi-feudal plantation system.
Such reforms will help provide the material basis for the Negro people's advance towards full
liberation from their national oppression, towards their full political, economic and social equality.
Millions of American working people have come to realize the futility of any further support for
the bankrupt two-party system of Big Business. Both major parties arc committed to the
bipartisan war program, reflected in both the Truman Doctrine and its New Look version, the
Marshall Plan. Both major parties are united in this program of fattening the billionaires and
bleeding the people.
Both major parties are responsible for runaway inflation. Both the Democratic Administration and
the Republican Congress have done nothing to curb the powers of the trusts to hoard food, rig
markets, boost prices and gouge consumers.
Both major parties are responsible for the atrocities committed against the Bill of Rights. Both
helped pass the Taft-Hartley Law. Both the Democratic Congressional leaders and the cynical
Dewey-Warren-Taft Republican leadership are responsible for the failure to enact civil rights
legislation. Neither the Democratic platform nor President Truman's demagogy will fool any
enlightened American. The President's deeds belie his words. He has refused to end segregation
in the armed forces and the government and fire from his cabinet those who maintain it.
Both major parties are responsible for the Hitler-like hysteria expressed in spy scares, loyalty
probes, government witch-hunts and the arrest and indictment of Americans whose "crime" it is to
oppose the Wall Street war plans. The Democratic-controlled Department of Justice and the
Republican-controlled Un-American Committee are equally guilty of subverting the Bill of Rights.
Chief allies of the twin parties of Big Business in the ranks of labor and the progressive
organizations of the people are those who pretend to criticize the corruption and decay of the two
old parties while, in fact, keeping the people tied hand and foot to the two-party system. These
include the top officialdom of the A.F.L., C.I.O. and R.R. Brotherhoods and groups like the
Americans for Democratic Action and such Social-Democrats as Norman Thomas and David
Dubinsky.
THE NEW PARTY . . .
Millions of Americans, disillusioned with the two-party system, have joined to found a new
people's party.
The new Progressive Party is an inescapable historic necessity for millions who want a real choice
now between peace and war, democracy and fascism, security and poverty.
The Communists, who support every popular progressive movement, naturally welcome this new
people's party. We supported the progressive features of Roosevelt's policies, domestic and
foreign. We helped organize the C.I.O. in the 1930's. We have supported every democratic
movement since the Communists of Lincoln's generation fought in the Union cause during the Civil
War.
On most immediate questions before the people of the country the Progressive Party has offered
detailed platform planks around which all forward-looking people can unite. Our support of the
Progressive Party policies and campaign does not alter the fact that we have fundamental as well
as some tactical differences with Henry Wallace and related third-party forces.
The Communist Party is not nominating a Presidential ticket in the 1948 elections. In 1944 we
Communists supported Roosevelt to help win the anti-Axis war. Similarly, in 1948 we
Communists join with millions of other Americans to support the Progressive Party ticket to help
win the peace. The Communist Party will enter its own candidates only in those districts where
the people are offered no progressive alternatives to the twin parties of Wall Street.
The Progressive Party is by its very nature a great coalition of labor, farmers, the Negro people,
youth, and professional and small business people. It is anti-monopoly, anti-fascist, anti-war. By
its very nature it is not an anti-capitalist party. It is not a Socialist or a Communist Party and we
are not seeking to make it one. It is and should develop as a united front, broad, mass people's
party.
There is only one Marxist Party in America, one party dedicated to replacing the capitalist system
with Socialism—and that is the Communist Party.
Our firm conviction that only a Socialist reorganization of society will bring permanent peace,
security and prosperity is no barrier to co-operation with all other progressive Americans, in
helping create a great new coalition in order to save our people from the twin horrors of war and
fascism.
We seek no special position in this movement and will, of course, oppose any attempt to
discriminate against us because of our Socialist aims.
We Communists are dedicated to the proposition that the great American dream of life, liberty
and pursuit of happiness, will be realized only under Socialism, a society in which the means of
production will be collectively owned and operated under a government led by the working class.
Only such a society can forever banish war, poverty and race hatred. Only in such a society can
there be the full realization of the dignity of man and the full development of the individual. Only
such a society can permanently protect the integrity of the home and family. Only a Socialist
society can realize in life the vision of the brotherhood of man.
Fellow Americans:
We live in times of great danger. Fascism and war now threaten our country. But the common
people of America, and in the first place the working people, can defeat these dangers. They can
turn our country to the path of democracy and peace, to the path of social progress.
The 1948 elections will help decide which way America will go.
Your united action in this election, your determined defense of your rights, can become powerful
forces for peace and progress.
vain.
Remember the promises:
Fascism would be wiped out. The great-power unity that brought war victory would bring
enduring peace.
An economic bill of rights would provide every American with security.
These promises have been broken.
Instead of peace, there is war—in Greece, in China, in Israel.
Instead of peace, we witness feverish preparations for a new world war.
Instead of peace, American boys are being regimented for war with the enactment of the
peacetime draft.
Instead of security and abundance, we have sky-rocketing prices, lowered living standards and
the shadow of an impending economic crash with mass unemployment. Farmers fear the
inevitable collapse of farm prices. After three years our veterans are still denied housing. Our
youth face a future of insecurity and new wars.
Instead of greater democracy, we have lynch law, mounting Jim-Crowism and anti-Semitism, and
a conspiracy to undermine our sacred democratic heritage. We have anti-Communist witch-
hunts, the arrest and conviction of anti-fascist leaders, the harassment and intimidation of writers,
artists and intellectuals. We have phony spy scares, the hounding of government employees and
former Roosevelt associates, the persecution of foreign-born workers, and the adoption of anti-
labor legislation, attempts to outlaw the Communist Party through Mundt-Nixon Bills, and now
the indictment of the twelve Communist leaders on the trumped-up charge of "force and
violence." These are the methods by which the American people are step by step being driven
down the road to a police state and fascism.
These are the chief issues of the 1948 elections.
America is a great and beautiful land, endowed with immense natural resources and a people
skilled in producing abundance. Why then the fear of insecurity?
We are today threatened by no outside force. We are in no danger of attack from any nation.
Why then the war hysteria?
The answer lies in this simple fact—250 giant corporations, operating through a handful of banks,
control the economic life of the United States. These in turn are largely owned by a few
plutocratic families—Morgan, Rockefeller, Mellon, du Pont and Ford.
The nation's industries are not operated for the public welfare, but for the private gain and power
of the multi-millionaire ruling class. Prices continue to rise because of vast military expenditures
and because the monopolies, through price-fixing agreements and other devious devices, extract
exorbitant profits.
They make huge profits from war and from armaments. They extract super-profits abroad by
forcing other nations into economic dependence upon Wall Street. This drive for foreign markets,
for Wall Street domination of the world, is at the bottom of the war hysteria and war
preparations. Big Business strives to crush the growth and advance of democracy and socialism
throughout the world, in order to protect and swell its profits.
Big Business seeks to re-establish the old Nazi cartels and to use Germany and Japan as military
bases for new aggression. But the failures of the bipartisan policy to achieve its main aim of world
conquest have increased the frenzy with which Wall Street seeks to plunge the nation into fascism
and World War III.
WAR AND PEACE ...
Neither the American people nor the Soviet Union is responsible for the sharpening tension in
international relations. The responsibility rests squarely on Wall Street and the bipartisan Truman-
Dewey atomic diplomacy. Only the capitalists trusts want war. The Soviet Union is a socialist
country. It has no trusts, no I. G. Farben or du Pont cartels to profit from wars. That is why the
Soviet Union is the most powerful force for peace in the world.
The Communist Party calls upon the labor movement and all progressive, peace-loving
Americans to struggle for the realization of the following peace program:
End the "cold war," the draft, and the huge military budget.
Restore American-Soviet friendship, the key to world peace and the fulfillment of the people's
hope in the United Nations.
Conclude a peace settlement for a united, democratic Germany and Japan based on the Yalta
and Potsdam agreements. Guarantee the complete democratization and demilitarization of these
Countries.
Stop military aid and intervention in China, Korea and Greece.
Break diplomatic and economic ties with Franco Spain.
Scrap the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. Furnish large-scale economic assistance to the
war-ravaged victims of fascist attack. Give this aid through the United Nations without political
strings.
Lift the embargo on, and extend full recognition to Israel.
Give immediate, unconditional independence to Puerto Rico.
Aid the economic development of the colonial and semi-colonial countries of Asia, Africa and
Latin America on the basis of full support to their fight for their national independence.
Defeat the Truman Arms Standardization Plan.
Abandon economic, political and military pressures on the countries of Latin America.
THE ATTACK ON LABOR AND OUR LIVING STANDARDS
The trusts have inflated prices and battered down the real wages of American workers to 16 per
cent below 1944.
Huge war expenditures amount to 15 billion dollars this year—one-third of the entire national
budget. The American people are already paying dearly for this "cold war economy," through a
heavy tax burden, speed-up and reduction in real wages. We will pay still more heavily as the
inflationary boom speeds the day of the oncoming economic bust.
Big Business has decreed that labor's hands be tied and its rights destroyed. The Taft-Hartley
Law and strike-breaking injunctions are weapons against the people's resistance to the monopoly
drive towards war and fascism.
To defend the labor movement and the vital economic interests of the overwhelming majority of
the American people, labor and all progressives should unite in stubborn and militant struggle for
the following demands:
Repeal the Taft-Hartley Law and end strike-breaking injunctions. Adopt a code of Federal labor
legislation including the best features of the Wagner Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-
Injunction Law.
Restore price control and roll back prices, without any wage freeze.
Enact an extensive program for Federally-financed low-rent public housing, minimum wage
legislation, old-age pensions, adequate health insurance, and increased aid to education.
Provide increased security for the working farmers through up-to-date parity price and in¬come
guarantees, based on unlimited farm production. Such income guarantees require farm subsidies,
effective crop insurance and sharp curbs on the giant food trusts and their marketing agencies.
Carry out a program of planned conservation and River Valley projects. Extend the Federal
minimum wage and social security laws to agricultural workers, including seasonal and migratory
labor.
We call for heavier taxation on high incomes and excess profits, with increased exemption for the
low brackets. We demand a capital levy on big fortunes and corporations to finance essential
social legislation.
We support all steps to curb the power of the trusts, the source of reaction, fascism and war. The
American people can make gains, even under capitalism, by mass resistance to the monopolies.
We support measures to nationalize the basic industries, banks and insurance companies, but
point out that such measures can only be useful as part of the fight to realize a people's
democratic government in the United States. Democratic nationalization of trustified industries
re¬quires guarantees of democratic controls and the right of labor to organize, bargain collectively
and strike. This can only be accomplished by a people's government dedicated to curbing the
power of the trusts.
We point out that capitalism cannot become "progressive" even by curbing the excesses of the
monopolies. The basic causes of unemployment, economic crisis, fascism and war can only be
removed by the establishment of Socialism through the democratic will of the majority of the
American people.
CIVIL RIGHTS . . .
The destruction of the rights of the Communists is the classical first step down the road to
fascism. The tragedy of Germany and Italy proves this. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the
working class and all Americans who hate fascism to defend the rights of the Communists, and to
help explode the myth that Communists are foreign agents or advocate force and violence.
We Communists are no more foreign agents than was Jefferson who was also accused of being a
foreign agent by the Tories of his day. We follow in the best traditions of the spokesmen of labor,
science and culture whose contributions to human progress knew no national boundaries. We
follow in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, who said: "The strongest bond of human sympathy,
outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations and tongues,
and kindreds."
It is the monopolists who advocate and practice force and violence, not the Communists.
Reaction has always resorted to force and violence to thwart the democratic aspirations of the
people.
In 1776, force and violence were the weapons of King George against the American colonists
seeking national independence. In 1861, force and violence were used by the Southern slave
owners in an attempt to overthrow the democratic republic headed by Lincoln. Today, the people
suffer the violence of the K.K.K., the lynch mobs, the fascist hoodlum gangs and the police
brutality.
We are Marxists, not adventurers or conspirators. We condemn and reject the policy and
practice of terror and assassination and repudiate the advocates of force and violence. We
Communists insist upon our right to compete freely in the battle of ideas. We Communists insist
upon our right to organize and bring our program to the people. Let the people judge our views
and activities on their merits.
We call upon the American people to fight with all their strength against the danger of fascism to
resist every fascist measure, to defend every democratic right.
End the witch-hunts, loyalty orders and phony spy scares.
Abolish the Un-American Committee. Withdraw the indictments against the twelve Communist
leaders and the contempt citations against the anti-fascist victims of Congressional inquisitions.
Stop the campaign of terror and intimidation against labor leaders, intellectuals and people of the
professions.
End persecution and deportation of the foreign born and lift the undemocratic bars to citizenship.
Outlaw all forms of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and every other expression of racial and
religious bigotry.
End all discrimination against the Mexican-American people in the Southwest.
The Communist party calls for an end to any and all political, social, and economic inequalities
practiced against women and demands the maintenance and extension of existing protective
legislation.
Extend the suffrage. Remove the bars directed against minority parties. Lower the voting age to
18 years in every state.
NEGRO RIGHTS . . .
The hypocrisy of the democratic pretensions of Wall Street and the Administration are shattered
by the reality of the Jim-Crow system in America. The most shameful aspect of American life is
the Jim-Crowism, the terror and violence imposed upon the Negro people, especially in the
South. Discrimination in employment, only slightly relaxed during the war, is once again
widespread.
The Communist Party, which has pioneered in fighting for full political, economic and social
equality for the Negro people, calls for an end to the policies of the Federal and state
governments which give official sanction to the Jim-Crow system in the United States.
We call upon all progressives, especially white progressives, to carry on an unceasing day-to-day
struggle to outlaw the poll tax, lynchings, segregation, job discrimination and all other forms of
Jim-Crowism, official and unofficial, and to give their full support to the rising national liberation
movement of the Negro people. This is vital to the Negro people, to the white workers, and to
the whole fight for democracy in America.
We demand a national F.E.P.C. law, to be vigorously and fully enforced.
We demand that the Ingram family be freed and adequately compensated for the ordeals to
which they have been subjected.
We demand that the Ku Klux Klan and all other hate-and-terror organizations be outlawed.
We condemn President Truman's cynical evasion of the issue of segregation in the armed forces.
We demand that he immediately issue an Executive Order ending every form of segregation and
discrimination in the armed forces and the government services.
We defend the right of the Negro people to full representation in government, and demand
Federal enforcement of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, so that the Negro people, North
and South, may participate freely and fully in the 1948 elections and all elections thereafter.
We call for a democratic agricultural program which will give land and other forms of assistance
to millions of Negro and white tenants and sharecroppers in the South, and thereby help put an
end to the semi-feudal plantation system.
Such reforms will help provide the material basis for the Negro people's advance towards full
liberation from their national oppression, towards their full political, economic and social equality.
Millions of American working people have come to realize the futility of any further support for
the bankrupt two-party system of Big Business. Both major parties arc committed to the
bipartisan war program, reflected in both the Truman Doctrine and its New Look version, the
Marshall Plan. Both major parties are united in this program of fattening the billionaires and
bleeding the people.
Both major parties are responsible for runaway inflation. Both the Democratic Administration and
the Republican Congress have done nothing to curb the powers of the trusts to hoard food, rig
markets, boost prices and gouge consumers.
Both major parties are responsible for the atrocities committed against the Bill of Rights. Both
helped pass the Taft-Hartley Law. Both the Democratic Congressional leaders and the cynical
Dewey-Warren-Taft Republican leadership are responsible for the failure to enact civil rights
legislation. Neither the Democratic platform nor President Truman's demagogy will fool any
enlightened American. The President's deeds belie his words. He has refused to end segregation
in the armed forces and the government and fire from his cabinet those who maintain it.
Both major parties are responsible for the Hitler-like hysteria expressed in spy scares, loyalty
probes, government witch-hunts and the arrest and indictment of Americans whose "crime" it is to
oppose the Wall Street war plans. The Democratic-controlled Department of Justice and the
Republican-controlled Un-American Committee are equally guilty of subverting the Bill of Rights.
Chief allies of the twin parties of Big Business in the ranks of labor and the progressive
organizations of the people are those who pretend to criticize the corruption and decay of the two
old parties while, in fact, keeping the people tied hand and foot to the two-party system. These
include the top officialdom of the A.F.L., C.I.O. and R.R. Brotherhoods and groups like the
Americans for Democratic Action and such Social-Democrats as Norman Thomas and David
Dubinsky.
THE NEW PARTY . . .
Millions of Americans, disillusioned with the two-party system, have joined to found a new
people's party.
The new Progressive Party is an inescapable historic necessity for millions who want a real choice
now between peace and war, democracy and fascism, security and poverty.
The Communists, who support every popular progressive movement, naturally welcome this new
people's party. We supported the progressive features of Roosevelt's policies, domestic and
foreign. We helped organize the C.I.O. in the 1930's. We have supported every democratic
movement since the Communists of Lincoln's generation fought in the Union cause during the Civil
War.
On most immediate questions before the people of the country the Progressive Party has offered
detailed platform planks around which all forward-looking people can unite. Our support of the
Progressive Party policies and campaign does not alter the fact that we have fundamental as well
as some tactical differences with Henry Wallace and related third-party forces.
The Communist Party is not nominating a Presidential ticket in the 1948 elections. In 1944 we
Communists supported Roosevelt to help win the anti-Axis war. Similarly, in 1948 we
Communists join with millions of other Americans to support the Progressive Party ticket to help
win the peace. The Communist Party will enter its own candidates only in those districts where
the people are offered no progressive alternatives to the twin parties of Wall Street.
The Progressive Party is by its very nature a great coalition of labor, farmers, the Negro people,
youth, and professional and small business people. It is anti-monopoly, anti-fascist, anti-war. By
its very nature it is not an anti-capitalist party. It is not a Socialist or a Communist Party and we
are not seeking to make it one. It is and should develop as a united front, broad, mass people's
party.
There is only one Marxist Party in America, one party dedicated to replacing the capitalist system
with Socialism—and that is the Communist Party.
Our firm conviction that only a Socialist reorganization of society will bring permanent peace,
security and prosperity is no barrier to co-operation with all other progressive Americans, in
helping create a great new coalition in order to save our people from the twin horrors of war and
fascism.
We seek no special position in this movement and will, of course, oppose any attempt to
discriminate against us because of our Socialist aims.
We Communists are dedicated to the proposition that the great American dream of life, liberty
and pursuit of happiness, will be realized only under Socialism, a society in which the means of
production will be collectively owned and operated under a government led by the working class.
Only such a society can forever banish war, poverty and race hatred. Only in such a society can
there be the full realization of the dignity of man and the full development of the individual. Only
such a society can permanently protect the integrity of the home and family. Only a Socialist
society can realize in life the vision of the brotherhood of man.
Fellow Americans:
We live in times of great danger. Fascism and war now threaten our country. But the common
people of America, and in the first place the working people, can defeat these dangers. They can
turn our country to the path of democracy and peace, to the path of social progress.
The 1948 elections will help decide which way America will go.
Your united action in this election, your determined defense of your rights, can become powerful
forces for peace and progress.
