WALLACE, HENRY A. 1888-1965

Vice president of the united states, 1941-1945,
progressive party presidential candidate,
1948

Spokesman for the Common Man

Henry A. Wallace began his political career as secretary of agriculture under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and served as Roosevelt's vice-president from 1941 to 1945, only to be replaced by Harry S Truman in Roosevelt's reelection bid due to his increasing belief that compromise and cooperation could be achieved with the Soviet Union. Perhaps more than any other Democrat of his day, with the exception of Roosevelt, Wallace represented the socially conscious and compassionate wing of the New Deal. Had he remained vicepresident he would have been president upon Roosevelt's death in 1945; though he would have been pressured by the same advisers as Truman, his approach to the issues of postwar global reconstruction would undoubtedly have been different. Wallace hoped to make government responsive to the needs of America's weakest, its farmers and laborers, by committing it to the goal of rational economic planning and the regulation of industry. He looked forward to a "century of the common man." Possessing a religious faith in the inherent goodness of humanity, he believed that a global New Deal might be effected after World War II, with the United States as its leader. Though his faith in the capacity of Soviet leaders to accept such a vision now seems naive, his critique of the "get tough" policies of Truman toward Stalin as inherently destabilizing and dangerous to the national security and economic well-being of the United States proved prophetic.

Editor and Secretary

Wallace was born on 7 October 1888 in rural Iowa and raised in the conservative, Protestant, Republican agricultural tradition of the late nineteenth century. After graduating from Iowa State College with a degree in agricultural science, he began to edit Wallace's Farmer, one of the most important agricultural periodicals of his day, which had been founded by his father. The young Wallace was also an agricultural scientist and developed significant advances in plant genetics, especially in hybrid corn, which made him independently wealthy. Yet he never lost touch with his roots. The human tragedy associated with the Depression actually hit farmers earlier in the 1920s, and his sense of the human and economic waste involved in unfettered capitalism led him to join the Democratic Party. Through his editorials he was greatly responsible for winning conservative Iowa to the New Deal and was rewarded by President Roosevelt with the post of secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1941, where he was charged with implementing the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act. Wallace raised farm prices by limiting production and subsidized farmers not to grow certain crops. This benefited large corporate farmers much more than small growers, with the result that small landholders were often forced to sell their land to richer neighbors and become laborers or sharecroppers themselves. This led Wallace to support sharecroppers' unions, a move which embittered agricultural businesses and landholding interests. To increase demand for food products and to help overcome malnutrition among the urban poor, Wallace implemented food stamps. Sometimes credited with successfully saving agriculture from disaster, his reform measures helped to lighten the burden, but American agriculture was also helped substantially by the same event that renewed industrial production—World War II.

Vice President

When Roosevelt chose Wallace as his vice-presidential candidate in 1940 he told Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins that he "would be a good man if something happened to the President." Political virtues, however, dictated Roosevelt's choice. Wallace came from the most famous farm family in the nation and was vital to winning the farm vote; also, he was no isolationist. After winning office again Roosevelt appointed Wallace to the secret policy group to study the possibility of developing an atomic bomb. Wallace argued then that civilization could be defended "by the power of the atom bomb." Yet after Hiroshima and Nagasaki he changed his mind, and bucking prevailing ideology he condemned atomicweapons production for the dangerous arms race it created.

Secretary and Editor

Many Democratic Party stalwarts had deeply opposed Wallace's nomination in 1940, but Roosevelt threatened to withdraw his own name if the convention failed to endorse him, In 1944, however, the party threatened open revolt if Wallace were not bumped from the Democratic ticket in favor of a more conservative candidate. Despite personal reservations, Roosevelt caved in for the sake of party unity and accepted the nomination of Harry S Truman. Wallace was deeply disappointed but remained loyal to Roosevelt, accepting the post of secretary of commerce, where he performed ably until early 1946. When Truman became president upon Roosevelt's death in 1945, Wallace became unhappy with the growing rift between the United States and the Soviet Union, worrying that antagonisms might result in conflict. He publicly criticized Truman's hard-line policies toward the Soviets, and the president demanded his resignation. From 1946 to 1947 he served as the editor of the liberal periodical The New Republic, a position he used to promote his ideas about U.S. cooperation with the Soviets.

Candidate

In 1948 Wallace announced his Progressive Party candidacy for president. Mocked as a "communist dupe" and "Stalinoid" by some fellow liberals and noncommunist leftists and as a "Stalinist stooge" by the Right, he faced an uphill battle. He nevertheless represented a potentially huge constituency which feared the consequences of Cold War, the atomic arms race, and their effect upon American democracy. In a gesture reminiscent of the wartime Popular Front, Wallace allowed Communists to participate in his campaign, and the press declared him coopted by Stalin. He received nearly a million popular votes but not a single electoral vote. In hindsight, it seems politically blind for Wallace to have so misread the public's rising anticommunist mood. On the other hand, he knew that the minuscule American Communist Party had not the remotest chance of subverting the government. Nor did he believe that the threat to democracy came from the Left. Instead, he continued to believe that the greatest threat to American democracy came from right-wing conservatives who used anticommunist rhetoric to cover their own attack on American society.

Later Observations

Wallace later regretted his 1948 campaign, especially as he saw how ruthless and mendacious the Soviets could be. Yet he had predicted that very behavior as the logical outcome of confrontational policies. He broke with the Progressive Party he had created because it refused to support the Korean War. As if to prove his anticommunist credentials, he began to condemn the Soviets and Chinese in speeches and in print. He endorsed the rhetoric of the Eisenhower years, even publicly supporting the president against Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, who had once worked for Wallace in the Agriculture Department. As he aged he seemed to return to verities he had promoted in his youth, arguing that labor had become too selfish and bemoaning the mechanized society that had lost the values of a rural civilization. Before his death on 18 November 1965 he demonstrated his knack for prophecy had not been lost. Noting that President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was in trouble, he foresaw the Republican victory ofl968.

Sources:

Dwight MacDonald, Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (New York: Vanguard, 1948);

Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-48 (New York: Free Press, 1973).

Henry Agard Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace (1888-1965), a secretary of agriculture and of commerce and vice president of the United States, was one of the most controversial Federal officials for 13 years. Wallace became almost the official ideologist of the New Deal.

Henry A. Wallace was born on a farm in Adair County, Iowa, on Oct. 7, 1888. In 1895 his grandfather founded a weekly agricultural newspaper called Wallaces' Farmer. Henry became its editor in 1916. Meanwhile he had earned his bachelor's degree from Iowa State University and had married Ilo Browne. Involved in plant research and agricultural economics, he eventually developed a species of hybrid corn and founded a company to exploit the discovery. Moreover, he worked out detailed studies of weather cycles in the Midwestern farming region and a corn-hog ratio chart that proved effective for predicting market variations.

During the 1920s, while his father served as U.S. secretary of agriculture, Wallace became increasingly prominent among agricultural leaders. The total collapse of American agriculture during the Great Depression convinced him of the necessity for curtailing agricultural production under a federally administered acreage allotment program. Although his family had been traditionally Republican, Wallace fervently embraced the presidential candidacy of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and after his election Roosevelt named Wallace secretary of agriculture.

Wallace proved an extraordinarily effective administrator. But also, as the implementer of the New Deal's strategy of paying farmers to cut back on crop production and as an advocate of massive Federal efforts to promote social welfare, he was bitterly criticized. It was only by threatening to refuse renomination himself that Roosevelt secured Wallace's nomination for the vice presidency in 1940. Wallace's strength in the farm states contributed significantly to Roosevelt's reelection.

Roosevelt made Wallace the most active vice president in the nation's history. During World War II he headed the powerful Board of Economic Warfare and other economic coordinating agencies. More importantly, he became the foremost articulator of American ideals and objectives. He called for international cooperation to achieve the "century of the common man" and for "60,000,000 jobs" in the postwar period at home. By 1944, however, anti-Wallace feeling within the Democratic party was so powerful that Roosevelt dropped Wallace for the vice-presidential nomination. Yet as soon as he was reelected, Roosevelt appointed Wallace secretary of commerce.

After Roosevelt's death Wallace openly attacked Harry Truman's uncompromising stance regarding the Soviet Union; the President asked for and received Wallace's resignation. In 1948 he accepted the presidential nomination of the Progressive party, a broad leftist coalition. Losing the bitter 1948 presidential campaign, Wallace retired from public life. He spent most of his time at his farm at South Salem, N.Y., working on improving egg yields and strawberries and gladiolus. He died in Danbury, Conn., on Nov. 18, 1965.

Further Reading

The best study of Wallace is Russell Lord, The Wallace of Iowa (1947), which extends only through the period of World War II. Also helpful are Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeir's Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: The Agrarian Years, 1910-1940 (1968), which focuses on Wallace's role in the New Deal, and their Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years, 1940-1965 (1971). See also Dwight Macdonald, Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948). Wallace figures centrally in two excellent monographs on New Deal farm policy: Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1966), and Van L. Perkins, Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the New Deal, 1933 (1969). A detailed account of the Progressive party and Wallace's presidential candidacy is Curtis D. MacDougall, Gideon's Army (3 vols., 1965).

Additional Sources

Macdonald, Dwight, Henry Wallace, the man and the myth, New York: Garland Pub., 1979, 1948.

White, Graham J., Henry A. Wallace: his search for a new world order, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. □

Henry Agard Wallace 1888-1965, vice president of the United States (1941-45), b. Adair co., Iowa. He was (1910-24) associate editor of Wallaces' Farmer, an influential agricultural periodical run by his family, and when his father, Henry Cantwell Wallace , died in 1924, he became editor. Henry A. Wallace had developed several strains of hybrid corn that were to be used extensively by farmers of the American Corn Belt, and his writings on farm economics and plant genetics quickly won him recognition as an agrarian authority. A Republican until 1928, Wallace helped swing Iowa to the Democratic party in the 1932 election. In 1933 he was appointed secretary of agriculture by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and soon led in the reorganization of the Dept. of Agriculture and in the supervision of the Agricultural Adjustment Agency. He became a highly regarded leader in the New Deal, and in 1940 he was elected vice president of the United States. He went on several missions to Latin America and Asia and served (1942-43) as head of the Board of Economic Warfare. In 1944, Wallace failed to receive the vice presidential nomination again. In 1945, shortly before Roosevelt's death, he became secretary of commerce. He held that position until Sept., 1946, when he was forced to resign because of his open opposition to President Truman's foreign policy. He then edited (1946-48) the New Republic. In 1948, Wallace helped launch a new Progressive party, which charged the Truman administration with primary responsibility for the cold war. As its presidential candidate that year he polled slightly over 1,150,000 votes (mostly in New York state), but won no electoral votes. Wallace left the party in 1950 after it had repudiated his endorsement of the U.S.-UN intervention in Korea. Wallace's numerous books on agricultural problems and politics include Agricultural Prices (1920), New Frontiers (1934), The Century of the Common Man (1943), Toward World Peace (1948), and The Long Look Ahead (1960). With E. N. Bressman he wrote Corn and Corn Growing (1923), and with W. L. Brown he wrote Corn and Its Early Fathers (1956).

Bibliography: See biographies by D. Macdonald (1948), E. L. Schapsmeier (2 vol., 1968-70), and J. C. Culver and J. Hyde (2000); R. Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (1947); K. M. Schmidt, Henry Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 (1960); J. S. Walker, Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy (1976).

Wallace, Henry Agard (1888–1965) US staesman, vice president (1941–45). As vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt he worked to promote goodwill in Latin America. From 1945–46 he was secretary of commerce under Truman. In 1948 he was the unsuccessful Progressive Party candidate for president.

Wallace, Henry A. See Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Progressive Party of 1948.