On August 7, Sen. Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, tweeted, “So I hear Kamala had chosen SHAPIRO last week – but the lefty Dems had a meltdown. So she caved and went with Gov. Angry Old Man instead. Great decision making skills there, Kamala.”
Does Hawley know something about the inner workings of the Harris campaign—how the Democratic presidential candidate came to choose Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, and not Governor Josh Shapiro? Or is he just stirring the pot?
Whatever the genesis of the Hawley volley, here’s a prediction: Within a week, the newspapers and magazines (oops, the author is showing his age here, as he is too, with the Sergeant Pepper–inspired title of this piece) will be full of tick-tock accounts (that’s timeline journalism, as opposed to videos in your timeline) of the Harris selection process.
So to update and restate the prophecy: Right now, many websites, and even more X accounts, are buzzing with hot takes on the Harris deliberations.
Even by Internet standards, it all happened so fast. It was on July 21 that Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run again, and, as late as August 5, online prediction markets were favoring Shapiro.
Yet then came Walzmentum. On the morning of August 6, just hours before the veep announcement, POLITICO’s “Playbook” reported that 22 of the 24 Democratic insiders it was canvassing were predicting Walz. (Score one for instant conventional wisdom.)
Punchbowl News, an inside-inside the Beltway portal, included this clutch tidbit: “A number of key progressives are pushing for Walz, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Both lawmakers joined a ‘Progressives for Harris’ Zoom call Monday night that attracted more than 100,000 listeners.”
The next day, POLITICO published a behind-the-scenes account of Walz-pushing, giving credit to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Did Sanders, Jayapal, and Pelosi wield enough power to kibosh Josh? To exalt Walz?
We are in the midst of the first draft of journalism, even as we await the second draft of history. Eventually, all will be revealed.
Yet in the meantime, we can think back to another era, when a left-winger could have changed the course of national politics—and American history. That rhyming moment came almost exactly 80 years ago, in July 1944, when the Democrats were holding their national convention in… Chicago.
The incumbent president that year was the mighty Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was not physically present in the Windy City, and yet his presence was overpowering, as it was in every aspect of American life after 11 eventful years in the White House. Moreover, FDR was gearing up to run for an unprecedented fourth term (his third term, too, had been unprecedented).
Yet with his declining physical health visible to all, the vice presidency became salient. Most Democratic Party bosses believed that the incumbent VP, Henry Wallace, had to go. Wallace was handsome and well-spoken—the First Lady adored him—and had been a New Deal hero as secretary of agriculture in the 30s, and yet as a regular correspondent with an exotic guru, Wallace was, as we say today, weird.
Worse, he was suspected of being a communist, or at least a com-symp—and to many, that made him scary. (In 1948, after leaving the vice presidency, Wallace did, in fact, run for president as the nominee of the pro-Soviet American Labor Party; he received a mere 2.37 percent of the national vote.)
So in 1944, it was ixnay on Wallace. But who instead? Roosevelt was preoccupied with winning the Second World War—and, he hoped, winning the peace with the new United Nations. In fact, even in more placid times, the 32nd president was notoriously hard to pin down; critics called him “a chameleon on plaid.”
According to historian David M. Jordan’s FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944, the president seemed to indicate that his choice for a running mate was James Byrnes, a former senator and Supreme Court justice who held various top posts during the war, such that he was often called “assistant president.” Byrnes believed that FDR had, in fact, offered the post to him. But saying it to Byrnes was not the same as saying it to party chieftains, starting with the Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Hannegan.
For their part, the bosses were leery of Byrnes, a South Carolinian who was seen as hostile to the emerging issue of civil rights. While the Democrats were the favorites in ’44, the contest was not foreseen as a cakewalk; as historian Jordan points out, after the 1943 elections, Republicans held the governorships of 26 of the 48 states, boasting 339 electoral votes.
So if Democrats wanted to hold their presidential victory coalition together, they needed a unifying running mate for their paladin Roosevelt. If Wallace was too left, and Byrnes was too right—who could it be?
The answer: Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, a Democratic middle-of-the roader from Middle America. Truman was acceptable to Roosevelt with one stipulation. As he said to an aide, “Clear it with Sidney.”
That would be Sidney Hillman, president of the quarter-million-strong Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—and a major player in Democratic politics. This at a time when a third of the national workforce was in a labor union.
The implication being that if Hillman had said “no” to the choice of Truman, the Democrats would have had to go back to the drawing board for another pick, perhaps even sticking with the Hillman-friendly Wallace. One way or another, history could have been much different.
Yet Hillman acquiesced; the Truman pick went forward. And it all could have been just another backroom deal, cloaked in hack omertà. Except that four days after the convention ended, on July 25, 1944, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, then the dean of newspaper pundits, printed those fateful words, “Clear it with Sidney.”
It can’t be said for sure that FDR actually said what he was said to have said, and yet, as wiseguy journos are wont to say about something juicy: Too good to check!
So the Sidney Story erupted. Were the Democrats now taking orders from a left-wing labor leader, based in New York City? Born in Russia, and long linked to Bolsheviks? Hillman himself was not a communist, and yet some around him were, including Earl Browder, the literal head of the Communist Party USA.
As Hillman biographer Steve Fraser records, Republicans went after FDR’s supposed words “with unalloyed enthusiasm.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee declared, “Hillman and Browder want to rule America and enslave the American people.” The GOP ran billboards blaring, “It’s Your Country—Why Let Sidney Hillman Run It?”
Why, the Hearst newspaper chain even ran a limerick contest. A sample:
Clear everything with Sidney the Czar,
Yes, your job, and your family, your car.
When he ruins the nation,
Frank’ll take a vacation—
And Browder will eat caviar.
Despite all the ruckus, the Roosevelt-Truman ticket won the ’44 election. It was, after all, the middle of a great war; the Democrats deployed a winning meta-message, Don’t change horses in midstream.
Nevertheless, the Hillman incident helped to cinch an oppositional tone for the Loyal Opposition. Republicans would campaign against Big Labor, and, yes, suspected Reds.
In fact, just three years later, in 1947, ascendant Republicans enacted the Taft-Hartley Act, allowing state-by-state decisions on mandatory unionism, so-called “right to work.” That legislation, still in place today, dealt a blow to private-sector unions from which they have never recovered. (So the center of gravity within the labor movement has shifted to the public sector, with vast consequences.)
For now, Hawley and the rest of us can mostly only speculate on the power of the left as it affected Harris’s VP-selection process. But the rhyming of 2024 and 1944 should be audible. Indeed, down the road, we shouldn’t be surprised if someone plucks out a quote such as, “Clear it with Bernie, Pramila, and Nancy.” That’ll sell some extra newspapers. Oops, I mean, get a lotta clicks.
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