ticket as an almost-certain winner over the Democrats. Progressive Party nomination Meanwhile, the Democratic Party fragmented. A new Progressive Party (the name had been used earlier by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Robert M. La Follette in 1924) was created afresh in 1948, with the nomination of Henry A. Wallace, who had served as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President of the United States, and Secretary of Commerce under Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1946, President Truman fired Wallace as Secretary of Commerce when Wallace publicly opposed Truman's firm moves to counter the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Wallace's 1948 platform opposed the Cold War, including the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine. The Progressives proposed stronger government regulation and control of Big Business. They also campaigned to end discrimination against blacks and women, backed a minimum wage, and called for the elimination of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating the issue of communist spies within the government and labor unions. Wallace and his supporters charged that the Committee was violating the civil liberties of government workers and labor unions. The Progressives also generated a great deal of controversy because of the widespread belief that they were secretly controlled by Communists who were more loyal to the Soviet Union than the United States. Wallace himself denied being a Communist, but he repeatedly refused to disavow their support and, at one point, was quoted as saying that the "Communists are the closest thing to the early Christian martyrs." Walter Reuther, the president of the influential United Auto Workers union, strongly opposed Wallace's candidacy, stating that "people who are not sympathetic with democracy in America are influencing him." Philip Murray, the president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), stated in April 1948 that "the Communist Party is directly responsible for the creation of the third party [Progressive Party] in the United States." Wallace was also hurt when Westbrook Pegler, a prominent conservative newspaper columnist, revealed that Wallace as vice president had written coded letters discussing prominent leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to his controversial Russian New Age spiritual guru Nicholas Roerich; the letters were nicknamed the "Guru letters." In his book Out of the Jaws of Victory, the journalist Jules Abels wrote: "Personalities were referred to by symbolic titles—Roosevelt was 'The Flaming One', Churchill 'The Roaring Lion', and Cordell Hull 'The Sour One'... some of the letters were