Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 –
November 18, 1965) was the thirty-third Vice President of the United States (1941–45), the eleventh Secretary of Agriculture (1933–40), and the tenth Secretary of Commerce (1945–46). In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the
Progressive Party.
Early life
Wallace was born on a farm near Orient, Adair
County, Iowa, and graduated from Iowa State College at Ames in 1910, where he was a brother in the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. His father was Henry Cantwell
Wallace. He worked on the editorial staff of Wallace's Farmer in Des Moines,
Iowa, from 1910 to 1924 and edited the publication from 1924
to 1929. He experimented with breeding high-yielding strains of corn
(maize), and authored many publications on agriculture. In 1915 he devised the first
corn-hog ratio charts indicating the probable course of markets. With a small inheritance that had
been left to his wife, the former Ilo Browne, whom he married in 1914, Wallace founded Hi-Bred Corn, which later became
Pioneer Hi-Bred, a major agriculture corporation.
Wallace was raised as a Presbyterian, but left that denomination early in life. He
spent most of his early life exploring other religious faiths and traditions. He eventually settled on Episcopalianism and converted to the Episcopal Church USA.
Political career
Secretary of Agriculture
In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Wallace United States Secretary of Agriculture in his Cabinet. (Wallace's father, Henry Cantwell
Wallace, had served as Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1924.) Wallace had been a liberal Republican, but he supported Roosevelt's New Deal and
soon switched to the Democratic Party. Wallace served as Secretary of
Agriculture until September 1940, when he resigned, having been nominated for Vice President as Roosevelt's running mate in the 1940 presidential election.
Vice President
During the 1940 presidential election, a series of letters
that Wallace had written in the 1930s to Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich was uncovered
by the Republicans. Wallace signed all of the letters as "G" for Galahad, the name Roerich had assigned him in the faith. Wallace
assured Roerich that he awaited "the breaking of the New Day" when the people of "Northern Shambhalla" -a Buddhist term roughly
equivalent to the kingdom of heaven- would create an era of peace and plenty. When asked about the letters, Wallace lied and
dismissed them as forgeries. When the Republicans threatened to reveal his beliefs, the Democrats threatened to release
information about Republican candidate Wendell Willkie's extramarital affair. [1]
Wallace was elected in November 1940 as Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His inauguration took place on January
20, 1941, for the term ending January 20
1945.
Roosevelt named Wallace chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and
of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) in 1941. Both positions became important
with the U.S. entry into World War II. As he began to flex his newfound political muscle in
his position with SPAB, Wallace came up against the conservative wing of the Democratic party in the form of Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce.
The two differed on how to handle wartime supplies.
On May 8, 1942, Wallace delivered his most famous speech, which
became known by the phrase "Century of the Common Man", to the Free World Association in
New York City. This speech, grounded in Christian references, laid out a positive vision
for the war beyond the simple defeat of the Nazis. The speech, and the book of the same name
which appeared the following year, proved quite popular, but it earned him enemies among the Democratic leadership, among
important allied leaders like Winston Churchill, and among business leaders and
conservatives.
Wallace spoke out during race riots in Detroit in 1943, declaring that the nation could not "fight to crush Nazi brutality
abroad and condone race riots at home."
In 1943, Wallace made a goodwill tour of Latin America, shoring up support among
important allies. His trip proved a success and helped persuade 12 Latin American countries to declare war on Germany.
Regarding trade relationships with Latin America, he convinced the BEW to add "labor clauses" to contracts with Latin American
producers. These clauses required producers to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for their employees and
committed the United States to paying for up to half of the required improvements. This met opposition from the U.S. Department
of Commerce.
After Wallace feuded publicly with Jesse Jones and other high officials, Roosevelt stripped him of all responsibilities and
made it clear Wallace would not be on the ticket again. The Democratic Party, with concern being expressed privately about FDR
being able to make it through another term, chose Harry S. Truman as FDR's running mate
at the convention, after New Deal partisans failed to promote William O. Douglas.
Secretary of Commerce
Portrait of Henry Wallace
Roosevelt placated Wallace by appointing him Secretary of
Commerce. Wallace served in this post from March 1945 to September 1946, when he was fired by President Harry S. Truman
because Wallace disagreed with Truman's hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union.
The New Republic and the 1948 Presidential Race
See Progressive Party (United States, 1948) and
United States presidential election, 1948
Following his term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace became the editor of The New Republic magazine, using his position to criticize vociferously Truman's hawkish foreign
policy. On the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, he predicted it would mark
the beginning of "a century of fear." He left his editorship position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. His platform advocated an end to segregation,
full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it
included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the
American South, and during the campaign he refused to appear before segregated
audiences or eat or stay in segregated establishments.
Historians Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier argue (1970 p 181)
- "The Progressive party stood for one thing and Wallace another. Actually the party organization was controlled from the
outset by those representing the radical left and not liberalism per se. This made it extremely easy for Communists and fellow
travelers to infiltrate into important positions within the party machinery. Once this happened, party stands began to resemble a
party line. Campaign literature, speech materials, and campaign slogans sounded strangely like echoes of what Moscow wanted to
hear. As if wearing moral blinkers, Wallace increasingly became an imperceptive ideologue. Words were uttered by Wallace that did
not sound like him, and his performance took on a strange Jekyll and Hyde quality—one moment he was a peace protagonist and the
next a propaganda parrot for the Kremlin."
However, Wallace repeatedly made clear that neither he nor the Progressive party endorsed Communism, and that he allowed
Communists to participate because he did not want to engage in the same kind of "red-baiting" tactics many of his opponents
used.
Later career
Wallace resumed his farming interests, and resided in South Salem, New York. In
1952, Wallace published Where I Was Wrong, in which he explained that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet
Union and Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin's excesses and that he,
too, now considered himself an anti-Communist. During his later years he made a number of
advances in the field of agricultural science. His many accomplishments included a
breed of chicken that at one point accounted for the overwhelming majority of all egg-laying
chickens sold across the globe. He died in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965. His
remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the
ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa.
Wallace for many years had been closely associated with an Eastern religious mystic whom he called Guru. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. explains, "Wallace's search for inner light took him to strange
prophets.... It was in this search that he encountered Nicholas Roerich, a Russian
emigre, painter, theosophist and con man. Wallace did Roerich a number of favors, including sending him on an expedition to
Central Asia presumably to collect drought-resistant grasses. In due course, H.A. [Wallace] became disillusioned with Roerich and
turned almost viciously against him." [2]
Wallace famously said, "The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public
information." [3]
The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural
Research Center, the largest agricultural research complex in the world, is named for him.
References
Secondary sources
- "The Prince of Wallace's: Chickens, Communists and Henry Wallace," Times Literary Supplement, 24 November, 2000.
- Culver, John C. and John Hyde. American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (2002)
- Markowitz, Norman D. The
Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (1973)
- John Maze and Graham White, Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order. University of North Carolina Press.
1995
- Schapsmeier, Frederick H.
Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: the Agrarian Years, 1910-1940 (1968)
- Schapsmeier, Edward L. and
Frederick H. Schapsmeier. Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years, 1940-1965 (1970)
- Schmidt, Karl M. Henry A.
Wallace, Quixotic Crusade 1948 (1960)
- White, Graham, and John
Maze. Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order (1995)
- Walker, J. Samuel Walker.
Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy (1976)
Primary sources
- Blum, John Morton, ed. The Price of Vision - The Diary of Henry A. Wallace 1942-1946 (1973)
Wallace's books
- Agricultural Prices (1920)
- New Frontiers (1934)
- America Must Choose (1934)
- Statesmanship and Religion (1934)
- Technology, Corporations, and the General Welfare (1937)
- The Century of the Common Man (1943)
- Democracy Reborn (1944) [4]
- Sixty Million Jobs (1945)
- Toward World Peace (1948).
External links
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