by Michael Liss
If you don’t like people, you hadn’t ought to be in politics at all, and Henry talked about the common people but I don’t think he liked them… —Harry S. Truman to Merle Miller, in Plain Speaking.
Truman wasn’t the most diplomatic of men, particularly when he’d had a couple of bourbons, but as harsh as the above might sound, it was probably a pretty accurate evaluation of the man who was his immediate predecessor as Vice President and wanted to be his replacement as President. Henry Wallace wasn’t a cold-blooded stuffed shirt, like Truman’s 1948 opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. Instead, his warmth was limited to his passions, and people, at least individuals, generally weren’t among those.
This strange man—and he was strange—part visionary, part brilliant scientist, part fantasist, part organizer and administrator, part orator, alternatively inspiring and exasperating, competent and a little crazy, came very close to being President. The question of “what if he had” may be the biggest “what if” since Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson succeeded him. Had a Wallace butterfly been given enough time to flap his wings, we would probably be living in a very different world.
How different? At home, one that reflected his passions: a re-invigoration of the New Deal after the loss of velocity during World War II, and an entirely different approach toward domestic “security” with a scaled-back role for those agencies doing the “domestic securing.” Abroad, no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no Berlin Airlift, no support for a continuation of colonialism, including America’s. An altered alignment with Mao and the Chinese Communists, and, perhaps most fatefully, an entirely different approach to the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Finally, the Bear in the Room—a different, less confrontational way of engaging Joe Stalin and Russia.
Henry Wallace is a footnote right now—the butterfly never got to flap his wings—but, for much of the 1930s and 40s, he one of the most impactful men in America. It was because of his gifts that he rose to a level of prominence where a Presidency was even a possibility. FDR had chosen him to be Agriculture Secretary in 1933, when the farm sector was on its knees. Even before the stock market crashed, crop prices fell, land values fell, farms that had been in families for generations fell under the auctioneer’s gavels. There were scattered acts of violence, and ad hoc withholding of farm produce, milk, and meat from the market. Herbert Hoover was unsympathetic (Hoover was often unsympathetic). FDR and his hand-picked man, Henry Wallace, were not. They knew how critical the sector was: farming, and farming-related activities and businesses, touched nearly 50% of households.
Many families picked up and left. Some headed West with virtually nothing—John Steinbeck was effectively writing non-fiction. Wallace had a ton of ideas, an enormous amount of energy, and a greenlight from a President who was willing to experiment. Experiment they did—the Wallace-designed Agricultural Adjustment Act and its progeny birthed a whole series of regulations on crop and livestock management and storage, price supports, and cash assistance. An ultra-conservative Supreme Court struck down some of these measures (on the grounds that agriculture was “local” and the federal government had no authority to regulate), but Wallace showed finesse in creating workarounds. In a time of extraordinary stress, with the public grasping for answers, Wallace became one of the most popular men in America.
When FDR decided to run for an unprecedented third term, in the process infuriating his then VP, John Nance Gardner, who expected the Democratic nomination, he needed a new VP. FDR the Party chief decided to shore up the Left side of his coalition and chose one of the most effective advocates of the New Deal, Henry Wallace. Wallace did not sail through the Convention nominating process without a hitch—even in 1940, he was a bit too liberal on many issues for the tastes of Democratic conservatives, but FDR’s preference was honored, and Wallace got the job.
You can make an argument that, in the summer of 1940, FDR was, in fact, picking a political “heir” and not just a running mate. Eleanor Roosevelt, a big Wallace fan and always a lot more liberal than her husband, certainly thought that, and Democratic conservatives fretted over it. It is more of a stretch to assume that mortality calculations came into play. FDR himself was only 58, and seemingly quite vigorous. The ticket overwhelmed the GOP’s Wendell Willke-Charles McNary team.
FDR then did something that either was a surprise, or an affirmation of his anointing touch. Gardner himself had said that being Vice President “wasn’t worth a warm bucket of piss,” but FDR deployed Wallace in an unconventional way. In addition to the mostly ceremonial role in the Senate, FDR tapped Wallace to take charge of economic planning when America’s entry into World War II was becoming more likely. It was in this capacity he was picked to be chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB). He was also named to the Top Policy Group, which presented to FDR scientists’ recommendations to begin developing nuclear weapons. It’s an extraordinary irony of American history that Wallace had intimate knowledge of the Manhattan Project when Harry Truman, the man who replaced him as Vice President, had none until after assuming the Presidency.
A Wallace further empowered was not necessarily an unbridled good. He could be argumentative and didactic, and, facing off against some very powerful people who could also be argumentative, he made some enemies, especially but not entirely from the conservative ranks. FDR the Party chief took note of the intra-party personal disputes. FDR the President recognized the policy ones.
FDR the wartime President had greater concerns, including his declining health. In 1940, despite his disability, he seemed the same old FDR. But by 1943, he was clearly wearing down. He’d been sick returning from the Tehran Conference in late 1943—less than a year before the 1944 election. When he failed to rebound by March 1944, his daughter Anna pressed Roosevelt’s “Physician to the President” Ross McIntire (an ENT specialist) to bring in someone for a fuller evaluation. The new examining physician, Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, found serious conditions he thought merited immediate treatment and a substantial reduction in FDR’s work hours. For several days, there was a lot of second-guessing, but eventually everyone signed on.
Roosevelt responded, seemed a little improved, but the signs of decline were obvious. His color was bad, his strength was ebbing, his hands shook, and he sometimes nodded off or searched for a word. Through the spring, he continued to deteriorate, but it seemed that no one was prepared to say no to him, and, on July 11, 1944, he announced he would run for a fourth term.
How much did FDR know about his own health, and how much was he in denial? He certainly couldn’t have missed all the signs, and his more conservative advisors definitely didn’t. The specter of a wild-card Wallace Presidency could not be ignored.
The insiders would have to cope with present risk—that FDR could die before his third term ended on January 20, 1945. Then, Wallace would assume the Presidency, and hopefully not “break things” in whatever time was left. The bigger risk was that Wallace would remain on the ticket, FDR would win and then pass away, and, instead of months of Wallace, perhaps constrained by his caretaker status, they would get years of him. A Wallace with three-plus years on his (inherited) term, and armed with unlimited self-confidence, would be a disruptive force.
The problem for Democratic conservatives was that they knew Wallace was very popular with a wing of the Party that included essential-to-Democrats Big Labor. He wasn’t going to be easy to dislodge. FDR was being coy as well, variously encouraging other candidates and signing letters indicating preferences, including one for Wallace. If Roosevelt had pushed harder for someone else—as he had pushed for Wallace to be added as running mate in 1940—then perhaps one of the other candidates would have emerged early as a consensus alternate. If he had pushed harder against Wallace, perhaps (just perhaps, Wallace could be stubborn as a mule), maybe Wallace would have stood aside. But FDR didn’t—he didn’t want to be tagged with showing Wallace the door, and we weren’t in an era where a pol like Wallace could be relied upon to be deferential. Wallace was going to fight for the VP nomination at the Convention, and he was going to get very close to the prize—a lead after the first ballot backed by a cascade of “We Want Wallace” chants that almost blew the roof off. What followed was a ripe stew of arm-wrestling, dealing, sweating, cursing, and drinking to excess. It came to a climax in the spectacle of Wallace-supporter Florida Senator Claude “Red” Pepper’s trying desperately to get to the lectern to nominate him and create a Wallace stampede, and the Chair’s suddenly realizing the Convention must adjourn—too much heat and booze of course. Gavel down, Pepper silenced, Wallace momentum stopped.
Harry Truman, no one’s idea of a star, got the nod, and Democratic conservatives, southerners, business types (and even some moderates) exhaled. Truman had friends (later called cronies) and a reputation for being level-headed, hard-working, amiable, and decidedly uncontroversial—a perfectly acceptable placeholder. He was also not Wallace.
The conservatives, and Truman, have saved the day, but what have they saved the day from? First, a little about more about Wallace himself. The man had legitimate chops. A third-generation farmer himself who published a widely read farm almanac begun by his grandfather, the son of a former Secretary of Agriculture, he was intensely interested in plant genetics and crossbreeding for superior resistance to disease and greater yields. He co-founded a company that became Pioneer Hi-Bred International, which still exists today as a subsidiary of DuPont. His heirs received close to $1 billion for their stakes in the late 1990s. For a man accused (both somewhat accurately and a bit unfairly) of being surrounded by Communists, that’s quite a capitalist haul.
All that said, the Wallace baggage was substantial, and not just in his occasionally fractious relations with other powerful politicians. On a personal level, he experimented with strange diets, embraced Russian guru Nicholas Roerich, edited the Wallace Almanac to include religious and spiritual tips, dabbled in Theosophy, was notoriously bad at small-talk, and seemed to lack a sense of appropriateness at times.
Truman’s take on Wallace was essentially correct. Wallace disdained something that virtually every successful politician sees as essential—you need friends, you have to play the game, scratch backs, horse trade. You have to know the difference between high-flown rhetoric and what’s possible on the ground. You have to accept that sometimes it’s wiser not to let everyone know you are the smartest man in the room—and especially when the room is filled with smart men. Wallace couldn’t do any of those things consistently, some he couldn’t do at all. Because of that, he could only campaign as a visionary, messianic figure.
The problem with Wallace’s messianic vision, the thing that would inspire his legion of admirers, was that, on many issues, he was just too controversial for the times. It’s possible that his views were too controversial for any times.
First, he touched the true third rail, at least inside the Democratic Party—that of Civil Rights. Southern Democrats were already more conservative than the rest of the Party, and in no way, shape, or form did they want to see a Civil Rights agenda advanced. They had tolerated FDR’s tepid efforts in part because of his electoral success. If you want to be the powerful chairman of an important committee, you need the majority. Wallace’s full-throated advocacy was anathema to them.
Second, Wallace was for a continuation and expansion of the New Deal, injecting energy to replace that which was dissipated as the country pivoted toward war. The fact that business generally preferred Republicans didn’t mean there wasn’t a sizable pro-business component to the Democratic Party, and those folks were more than happy to see the grip of government be loosened just a bit. Wallace’s tight connection to Labor didn’t thrill them either.
Third, Wallace was “liberal” in a way that would still be thought of as liberal today on things like women’s rights, national health insurance, and aid to industrial workers and the working poor.
All these might not have been disqualifying—liberal, but tolerable—except for Wallace’s next step, which began to emerge while he was still Vice President and which he carried into his next role, as both FDR’s and Truman’s Commerce Secretary. Wallace was a true internationalist, a man who, after a highly staged (by Stalin) visit to Russia in 1944, embraced cooperation with it, and sustained that call well past time when Stalin showed more of his true self to the less starry-eyed . We don’t know how FDR would have interacted with Russia had he lived, but Stalin’s lunge at territories both in Europe and Asia tells us that the Russians were, perhaps, less than potential complete allies and friends.
We also don’t know whether Wallace would have dropped the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Truman did. We do know that Wallace advocated for turning over control of nuclear weapons to the United Nations. We also know he was against the Berlin Airlift, against NATO, and against the Marshall Plan. Optimists still assert that a Wallace, instead of a Truman, Presidency might have prevented the Cold War, saving lives and uncounted billions in arms purchases. That’s one you either believe or don’t believe, but relying on the good wishes of Joe Stalin seems to be an iffy bet.
Some answers we will never have because of the thing Wallace most disdained—politics. He was angry after losing the VP nomination to Truman. He would get even angrier during the Senate fight over FDR’s nomination of him to become Commerce Secretary. In Roosevelt’s desire to console Wallace (and perhaps make amends toward the liberal wing of the Party), he had tried to ease out Jessie Jones, a conservative Texas Democrat who was a fierce Wallace critic and an even fiercer defender of his domain, which included the powerful Reconstruction Finance Corporation. FDR dangled plum ambassadorships, but Jones liked the view from where he was and dug in, calling on his friends in Congress to support him. They did, in a series of votes where they (barely) gave Commerce to Wallace, but stripped the RFC from the agency and left it in Jones’s hands.
What Wallace had not realized, or perhaps what Wallace had refused to accept, was that he was no longer an insider and no longer had the bully pulpit on matters involving foreign policy. Especially after FDR’s death, he continued to speak out, often critiquing his new boss, President Truman. In July 1946, he sent Truman a long memo critiquing the military’s preparations against Russia as being provocative. He seemed to be operating in a bubble of entitlement.
In September 1946, Wallace prepared to make a major speech at Madison Square Garden sponsored by two leftist groups. He knew he was playing with fire, ignored the procedure of submitting it to the State Department for vetting, and went straight to Truman. The two men differed about what they discussed, Truman claiming Wallace cherry-picked lines to get his approval, Wallace insisting Truman approved it all. Whatever the truth, the content was a flamethrower aimed at existing American foreign policy, and, by extension, Truman. Not only did Wallace oppose Truman’s “get tough with Russia” approach, but he added lines like these: “We can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the Near East with the lives of American soldiers….”
The Madison Square Garden speech was a turning point. Wallace’s policy proposals were both too much for Truman (and much of mainstream America) and not enough for the more rabid “One World” leftists in the crowd, who disliked Wallace’s suggestion that there would be two spheres of influence in the world, Russian and United States. Truman took hits from all sides for both the content and the amateurism that he had demonstrated in handling it. He met with Wallace, urging him to lower his profile on foreign policy issues. Wallace balked, then seemed to agree in a statement issued by both, then flipped back. At the insistence of James Byrnes, the “real” Secretary of State, Wallace was sacked.
Wallace out of office might have been a Wallace unbound, but it was also a Wallace diminished. He continued to barnstorm the country; he inspired, outraged, frightened, and exasperated many; but over time, he began to lose his audience. Since most of his anger was directed at Truman, many Democrats, even those on the left, began to tune him out.
In late 1947, Time, which had been hostile to him, led with this:
Rarely in history had a man set his sights for the presidency of the U.S. with so little evidence of popular support. Ever since Henry Wallace made his first tentative gestures toward a third party, organized labor and many of his own liberal friends had been deserting in droves (TIME, Dec. 29). Only the Communist Party and the regrouped P.C.A. united behind him. Nevertheless, this week Henry Wallace made his bid.
The bid failed. The Wallace ticket got just 1,157,328 votes out of 48,793,535. Nearly half his votes came from New York, probably flipping the state from Truman to Dewey, but, in most states, he was shockingly inconsequential. His time as a national figure was coming to an end.
What did we miss by losing the Wallace Butterfly Flap? To his credit, he opposed the Red Scare, opposed the massive expansion of the security state, and opposed Truman’s moves to ensure that Communists were identified in government and cast out. That was brave. He traveled through the South carrying a message of racial equality that was even more brave. And he espoused ideas that were ahead of their time, like women’s rights and national health insurance.
On his death, the New York Times led his obituary with this headline: “Henry A. Wallace Is Dead at 77; Henry A. Wallace, Vice President in New Deal and Plant Geneticist, Is Dead at 77 LED PROGRESSIVES IN 1948 ELECTION Ex-Secretary of Agriculture and Commerce Retired to Westchester Farm”
That’s actually quite a lot.