Henry A. Wallace

Vice president of the United States (1941-1945)

• Born: October 7, 1888
• Birthplace: Adair County, Iowa
• Died: November 18, 1965
• Place of death: Danbury, Connecticut

Wallace was an outspoken critic of post-World War II American foreign policy. He was also one of the principal architects of American farm policy and an eloquent spokesperson for some of the most important ideas of twentieth century American liberalism.

Early Life

Henry A. Wallace was born on a farm in Adair County, Iowa. His father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, was of Scotch-Irish origin; his mother, May Brodhead, was of English, Dutch, and French Huguenot background. Henry Agard’s father, a farmer at the time of his birth, became, in 1893, a professor of agriculture at Iowa State College, his alma mater. Henry’s paternal grandfather, “Uncle Henry” Wallace, a minister of the Gospel turned farmer and founder of the influential weekly newspaper Wallace’s Farmer in 1895, was the greatest influence on young Henry Agard’s intellectual development. Grandfather instilled in grandson a lively intellectual curiosity and a peculiar mixture of practicality and high idealism.

The young Wallace labored for many years in the shadow of his father and his grandfather, both well-known figures in rural journalism and in Iowa Republican politics; only after the two of them had died would he really begin to make his mark. Although Henry Agard’s father was by no means wealthy, family circumstances were comfortable enough to permit Henry to attend Iowa State College, where he studied agricultural science. After he was graduated in 1910, Wallace conducted pioneering research in agricultural economics, producing the first charts of corn-hog ratios. He also continued his studies on the breeding of corn; the fruit of this research was the founding, in 1926, of a company for developing and selling hybrid corn seeds.

When Wallace’s father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, became secretary of agriculture under Calvin Coolidge, Wallace became editor of Wallace’s Farmer (now Wallaces Farmer). As an editor, Wallace, a nominal Republican, became well-known during the 1920’s for his relentless attacks on the ruling Republican Party’s alleged indifference to the problems facing the American farmer. In 1932, he strongly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt’s successful campaign for the presidency against Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover. In that election, the traditionally Republican state of Iowa, hard hit by the fall in agricultural prices that accompanied the Great Depression, voted for Roosevelt. As a reward for his help, Wallace received a high position in the new administration. Not until 1936, however, would he formally join the Democratic Party.

Life’s Work

When Wallace went to Washington, D.C., in March, 1933, at the age of forty-four, as Roosevelt’s new secretary of agriculture, he was a most atypical cabinet member. About five feet ten inches tall, he kept his weight to a trim 160 pounds through vigorous exercise. Although middle-aged, Wallace looked much younger; his boyish appearance was accentuated by his full head of still reddish-brown hair, which was often unkempt in appearance. He had gray eyes, a long, lantern-jawed face, a long nose, and a sensitive mouth. His voice was high-pitched, but he was often able to make up with his earnestness for any deficiencies of oratorical delivery. Wallace lacked the gift for small talk so prized at Washington social gatherings of the time. His strong religiosity, and his avoidance of smoking, drinking, or swearing, set him apart from many people in Washington political circles.

Wallace, despite his lack of previous experience in government, proved to be an effective administrator. He was aided by the large numbers of trained social scientists whom he brought with him into the department. Working together with such intellectuals not only enabled Wallace to carry out policy more efficiently; it also seems to have speeded his transition from a mere spokesperson for agrarian interests to a proponent of a broader liberal economic philosophy. The New Deal farm policy devised by Wallace, embodied in the somewhat hastily prepared Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, tried to restore farm prosperity by getting American farmers to cooperate in cutting back on agricultural production, thereby raising prices. As an emergency measure to further this goal, millions of pigs were slaughtered; this action, coupled with the practice of paying farmers to grow less, caused many to criticize the policy as wasteful.

The reduction of crop surpluses through production cutbacks, although at first the most important part of Wallace’s program, was by no means Wallace’s only contribution to agricultural policy. Through the rural electrification program, electric power was brought to many farm families who had never before enjoyed its blessings. In the latter half of the 1930’s, Wallace won the enactment of his plan for the so-called ever-normal granary, in which the federal government would store the surpluses from good years to help in times of poor harvests. It was in the latter half of the decade, too, that emphasis began to be placed on encouraging farmers to practice techniques of soil conservation; dust storms of the era had shown how necessary such techniques were. The food stamp program was devised by Wallace’s subordinate Milo Perkins in 1938 to rebut accusations of wastefulness aimed at New Deal farm policy. Stamps would be issued enabling the poor to receive surplus food, thus at once combating crop surpluses on the land and relieving hunger in the Depression-stricken cities.

Wallace came to realize that the problem of agricultural overproduction could be resolved only by tackling the problem of underconsumption, both at home and abroad. Although he had briefly supported high tariffs in the 1920’s, he had come to oppose protectionism by 1930, criticizing the high Smoot-Hawley Tariff enacted in that year. Convinced that a mutual lowering of tariff barriers by the nations of the world was necessary both to open new markets for American agriculture and to increase the chances of lasting peace in the world, Agriculture Secretary Wallace staunchly supported the efforts of Secretary of State Cordell Hull to negotiate reciprocal trade treaties with various nations. To increase consumption at home, Wallace came to advocate social security, minimum wage legislation, and better conditions for workers.

In February, 1935, Wallace abruptly dismissed various key officials of the department who had aroused resentment among white southern landowners by trying to improve conditions for southern black sharecroppers. It was not until the latter half of the 1930’s that a conscience-stricken Wallace made some effort to help tenants and sharecroppers displaced by farm production cutbacks. At Wallace’s urging, the Resettlement Administration and, later on, the Farm Security Administration were set up to aid the poorer segments of the farming community.

Although Wallace’s record as agricultural secretary had thus not been particularly radical, he had, by 1940, gained a reputation within the Democratic Party as an extreme liberal ideologue. This reputation arose from Wallace’s ceaseless attempts, from 1933 onward, to articulate through books, pamphlets, and speeches a coherent philosophy of New Deal liberalism, and to defend this philosophy against its enemies in the uncompromisingly biblical rhetorical style inherited from his preacher grandfather. Wallace’s words were more doctrinaire than his acts; nevertheless, he aroused such suspicion in conservative Democratic Party circles that it took Roosevelt’s emphatic personal insistence to secure Wallace’s nomination for vice president in 1940.

As vice president from 1941 to 1945, Wallace was neither as busy nor as blessed with success as he had been as agricultural secretary. As head of the Board of Economic Warfare from 1941 to 1943, Wallace quarreled so heatedly with conservative Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones that President Roosevelt, determined to soft-pedal ideological New Dealism for the sake of wartime unity, felt compelled to relieve the Iowan of that position. Wallace had insisted on decent conditions for workers in Latin American lands that were producing for the American war effort; the State and Commerce departments regarded such insistence as an unwarranted interference in other countries’ internal affairs.

Unsuccessful in the bureaucratic wars, Wallace put more time than ever before into playing the role of spokesperson for New Deal liberalism, a philosophy that he wished to see expanded from the domestic to the international arena. During World War II, Wallace advocated, as prerequisites for a lasting peace, both the creation of a strong world organization and the raising of living standards in Asia and Latin America through massive American aid. For Wallace, material well-being was a necessity if democracy was to thrive; democratic government, in turn, was necessary for peace among nations. Wallace’s advocacy of massive foreign aid was widely ridiculed at the time, but his advocacy of a world organization did pay off: on July 28, 1945, the United States Senate ratified the United Nations Charter.

In 1944, a presidential election year, Roosevelt, in the interests of party unity, dropped Wallace from the ticket and accepted as his vice presidential running mate the Democratic senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman. Appointed secretary of commerce by an ailing President Roosevelt in 1945, Wallace retained that position after Roosevelt’s death in April of that year.

As secretary of commerce, Wallace championed the cause of government planning for full employment, and he stated this belief vigorously in the book Sixty Million Jobs (1945). The Full Employment Act of 1946, embodying Wallace’s ideas in a somewhat watered-down form, established a Council of Economic Advisers to aid the federal government in its pursuit of the goal of full employment.

By 1945, Wallace had come to symbolize, within the Democratic Party, the aspirations of liberal intellectuals, blacks, and trade union members, as distinguished from the interests of the northern big-city machine bosses and southern conservative political chieftains who had so long dominated the party. Wallace squandered this vast reservoir of support, however, by his disastrous decision to oppose President Harry S. Truman on issues of foreign policy.

By September, 1946, Wallace was troubled by the friction between the United States and its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. On September 12, 1946, in a speech in Madison Square Garden, Wallace publicly criticized the notion that the United States should take a tough line toward Soviet Russia. Truman, preoccupied by both foreign and domestic problems and unsure how to deal with the Soviets, had approved Wallace’s speech beforehand without realizing the impact it might have. Faced with the indignation of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who saw Wallace as undercutting his own negotiations with the Soviets, Truman was forced, on September 20, to dismiss Wallace from office.

After his resignation, Wallace served for about a year as editor of the liberal periodical The New Republic; from there he continued to criticize Truman’s foreign policy. Wallace strongly condemned the Truman Doctrine, proclaimed in March, 1947. Despite his general approval of American aid to foreign countries, Wallace also opposed Marshall Plan aid to war-ravaged Western Europe. Because the Soviet Union was excluded and because it was not under the auspices of the United Nations, Wallace argued that such a program would only make Soviet-American relations worse and endanger world peace.

In 1948, Wallace ran for president of the United States on a third-party ticket, that of the Progressive Party. In the course of his presidential campaign, Wallace resolutely refused to criticize Soviet foreign policy. The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February, toppling a genuinely democratic regime, and the Russian imposition of the Berlin blockade in July both undermined the credibility of Wallace’s approach to foreign policy, causing even liberal opinion to desert his candidacy. When the returns were counted in November, Truman had been reelected over his Republican opponent; Wallace had finished a poor fourth in the popular vote, slightly behind even Strom Thurmond, the candidate of the States’ Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party. The very elements to whom Wallace had hoped to appeal liberal intellectuals, labor union members, black voters in the Northern states had, by and large, resisted the Iowan’s blandishments and remained loyal to Truman. Wallace’s political career, ruined by his own lack of realism, was over.

In June, 1950, Wallace broke with the Progressive Party over the Korean War: He supported Truman’s decision to send American troops to aid the South Koreans against the North Korean Communist invaders. Wallace had never really sympathized with Marxism as an ideology or with the authoritarian aspects of the Soviet system; his misguided defense of Soviet foreign policy had been inspired by a sincere love of peace, coupled with a serious misunderstanding of the true nature of Joseph Stalin’s tyranny.

After 1950, Wallace devoted himself to nonpolitical pursuits, carrying out, at his country home just north of were chosen, crossbreeding experiments on strawberries, chickens, and gladioli. On November 18, 1965, after prolonged suffering, he died of a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

Significance

Although Wallace was a failure as a politician, he did leave behind a considerable legacy in the world of ideas. Wallace, through his preachings as country editor and through his actions as agriculture secretary, popularized the notion of intervention by the federal government to stabilize prices; the wisdom and value of such intervention has been upheld by later administrations, including some conservative Republican ones. The food stamp program, dropped with the coming of World War II, was ultimately revived under the John F. Kennedy administration, and was continued and expanded under succeeding administrations. The attempts made under the Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations (1961-1969) to fine-tune the national economy were inspired by the kind of Keynesianism popularized by Wallace in the 1940’s. The creation of the Peace Corps and the Agency for International Development under the Kennedy administration, and the pursuit of international tariff reduction by both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations reflect the enduring influence of Wallace’s ideas; the Iowan had long stressed the need for both freer trade and expanded foreign aid if world peace and American economic well-being were to be furthered.

Wallace is especially significant as an early critic of post-World War II American foreign policy. America’s involvement in a costly and losing conflict in Vietnam, from 1961 through 1975, has caused some scholars to reassess Wallace’s criticism, for which he was so vilified in his lifetime. Such reassessment by no means redeems Wallace from the charge of naïveté; until 1950 he was as blind to Stalin’s faults as he was acutely aware of his own country’s errors.

In Wallace’s career, one sees the peculiar difficulties faced by an American meliorist liberal when he tries to apply the lessons derived from his domestic political experience to the far different environment of international relations; this particular dilemma has reappeared in different forms in the careers of later American liberal leaders.

Bibliography

Culver, John C., and John Hyde. American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace. New York: Norton, 2000. Comprehensive and informative chronicle of Wallace’s life and political career.

Hamby, Alonzo L.“Sixty Million Jobs and the People’s Revolution: The Liberals, the New Deal, and World War II.” Historian 30 (August, 1968): 578-598. Hamby ably explains how Wallace became the leading spokesman of American liberalism during the war years. The author sees, as one motive for the shift of liberals such as Wallace toward Keynesianism, a fear that mass unemployment after the war might provide the seedbed for a strong American fascist movement.

Kelley, John L. “An Insurgent in the Truman Cabinet: Henry A. Wallace’s Effort to Redirect Foreign Policy.” Missouri Historical Review 77 (October, 1982): 64-93. Making full use of the recently opened diaries of President Truman and of Truman’s press secretary, Charles G. Ross, Kelley provides a fresh look at the cabinet crisis that arose over Wallace’s Madison Square Garden speech of September 12, 1946.

Kirkendall, Richard S. “Commentary on the Thought of Henry A. Wallace.” Agricultural History 41 (April, 1967): 139-142. Sees Wallace as having evolved, during his years as secretary of agriculture, from a purely agrarian viewpoint to a broader liberal philosophy embracing urban as well as rural concerns. Asserts that the Iowan had lost the support of conservative farm organizations by 1940. Sees the influence of adviser Mordecai Ezekiel as of crucial importance in Wallace’s turn toward Keynesianism.

Kleinman, Mark L. A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Examines the intellectual and professional lives of Wallace and Niebuhr both during and after World War II to chronicle the growing division within the American liberal community.

Lord, Russell. The Wallaces of Iowa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. This contemporary study of Wallace is extremely detailed on the New Deal period but rather skimpy thereafter; it does, however, provide valuable information on Wallace’s early life and family background.

Markowitz, Norman D. The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948. New York: Free Press, 1973. Markowitz offers a revisionist scholarly view of Wallace, one apparently rooted in neo-Marxian socialism. Markowitz sees Wallace’s view of Soviet-American relations as courageous and realistic; the Iowan’s naïveté, the author believes, lay rather in thinking that capitalism could be transformed from within into a new type of society. Despite its somewhat questionable interpretation, Markowitz’s book provides an excellent factual account of Wallace’s activities during the Truman years, especially his dismissal from office in 1946 and his presidential bid of 1948.

Schapsmeier, Edward L., and Frederick H. Schapsmeier. Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: The Agrarian Years, 1910-1940. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1969. Strongly sympathetic to Wallace. Although it provides many interesting factual details on Wallace’s early years, it falls short as a work of analysis. Thus it fails to provide any satisfactory explanation of that peculiar mixture of idealism and pragmatism shown by Wallace during his years as secretary of agriculture.

Walker, J. Samuel. Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976. Walker traces Wallace’s views on foreign policy from 1920 to the late 1940’s. The material on the Iowan’s early views on international trade is particularly interesting. Its treatment of Wallace’s later political career, however, is flawed by the absence of a coherent argument.