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would draw the votes of the left wing of the Democratic Party away from Truman and make all but certain the election of Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, the Republican candidate. The Wallace people were talking about their party polling some six or seven million votes, a percentage of the popular vote vastly greater than had ever gone to any American third party.
    "Your man is only going to deny the Democrats the White House," my father told me. "And if we get the Republicans, that will mean the suffering in this country that it has always meant. You weren't around for Hoover and Harding and Coolidge. You don't know firsthand about the heartlessness of the Republican Party. You despise big business, Nathan? You despise what you and Henry Wallace call 'the Big Boys from Wall Street'? Well, you don't know what it is when the party of big business has its foot in the face of ordinary people. I do. I know poverty and I know hardship in ways you and your brother have been spared, thank God."
    My father had been born in the Newark slums and become a chiropodist only by going to school at night while working by day on a bakery truck; and all his life, even after he had made a few bucks and we had moved into a house of our own, he continued to identify with the interests of what he called ordinary people and what I had taken to calling—along with Henry Wallace—"the common man." I was terrifically disappointed to hear my father flatly refuse to vote for the candidate who, as I tried to convince him, supported his own New Deal principles. Wallace wanted a national health program, protection for unions, benefits for workers; he was opposed to Taft-Hartley and the persecution of labor; he was opposed to the Mundt-Nixon bill and the persecution of political radicals. The Mundt-Nixon bill, if passed, would require the registration with the government of all Communists and "Communist-front" organizations. Wallace had said that Mundt-Nixon was the first step to a police state, an effort to frighten the American people into silence; he called it "the most subversive" bill ever introduced in Congress. The Progressive Party supported the freedom of ideas to compete in what Wallace called "the marketplace of thoughts." Most impressive to me was that, campaigning in the South, Wallace had refused to address any audience that was segregated—the first presidential candidate ever to have that degree of courage and integrity.
    "The Democrats," I told my father, "will never do anything to end segregation. They will never outlaw lynching and the poll tax and Jim Crow. They never have and they never will."
    "I do not agree with you, Nathan," he told me. "You watch Harry Truman. Harry Truman has got a civil rights plank in his platform, and you watch and see what he does now that he's rid of those southern bigots."
    Not only had Wallace bolted from the Democratic Party that year, but so had the "bigots" my father spoke of, the southern Democrats, who had formed their own party, the States Rights Party—the "Dixiecrats." They were running for president Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a rabid segregationist. The Dixiecrats were also going to draw away votes, southern votes, that routinely went to the Democratic Party, which was another reason Dewey was favored to defeat Truman in a landslide.
    Every night over dinner in the kitchen, I did everything I could to persuade my father to vote for Henry Wallace and the restoration of the New Deal, and every night he tried to get me to understand the necessity for compromise in an election like this one. But as I had taken as my hero Thomas Paine, the most uncompromising patriot in American history, at the mere sound of the first
syllable
of the word "compromise," I jumped up from my chair and told him and my mother and my ten-year-old brother (who, whenever I got going, liked to repeat to me, in an exaggeratedly exasperated voice, "A vote for Wallace is a vote for
Dewey
") that I