28.04.2002
Portrait of a Diarist
In The Price of Vision
The Diary of Henry A.
Wallace 1942-1946 (*)
By John Morton Blum
Henry Agard Wallace wanted to be Vice
President of the United States, mounted no campaign to secure or retain that
office, disliked many of its duties and limitations, and yet desired
renomination and resented those who prevented it. Those attitudes reflected
predictable responses by the kind of man Wallace was to the nature of the
vice-presidency, especially under the conditions that Franklin D. Roosevelt
imposed upon the conduct of business during his administrations. The President
could prescribe political snake oil even to so practical an intelligence as
Wallace’s. At his ebullient best, Roosevelt could engage Wallace’s
transcendental faith in progress and brotherhood. Within the privacy of his
person, as his diary disclosed, Wallace recognized with bemused skepticism his
own accepting vulnerability to the combination of guile and greatness that characterized
his chief. In that privacy he also conceded nothing, though officially he had
continually to yield, to those decisions of Roosevelt’s that bore adversely on
policies to which Wallace attached some personal and larger public importance.
During the portentous years of World War
II, the relationship of the President and the Vice President of the United
States, their common objectives and their intermittent disagreements, deeply
affected their party, their country, even the world. In considerable measure
those relationships also forecast the more bitter and ominous conflicts that
were later, at a critical time, to force Wallace out of public life and deprive
American government of his humane sensibilities.
Wallace’s path into and out of the
vice-presidency began in the Middle Border, in the Iowa of the late nineteenth
century, where the determining roots of his being grew out of his family, the
soil it nurtured, and the culture it both shaped and absorbed. Always a man of
that west, Wallace brought to Washington the perspectives and commitments that
his western experience fostered continuously from his childhood to his middle
life.
He was the third Henry Wallace, the son
of Henry Cantwell Wallace and grandson of the first Henry Wallace, “Uncle
Henry,” who had grown up on the farm of his Ulster-Scot father near West
Newton, Pennsylvania. The first Henry Wallace began his westering in search of
a seminary that offered a liberal Calvinist training. After ordination he
continued west to Iowa to find a parish comfortable with his own reformist
views. Soon he had to escape the tensions of his over-conscientious pastorate
by turning to work the good ground of Winterset, Iowa, where he taught his
neighbors about the scientific farming he practiced. Believing, as did
thousands of Americans – all spiritual heirs of Thomas Jefferson – that farmers
were the special agents of the Lord on earth, Wallace believed, too, that they
had a duty to preserve the bounty of the earth. Christian faith, agrarian
pride, and a conservationist practicality provided the foundations for the
secular sermons that Uncle Henry contributed to his local newspaper during the
1880s. Those doctrines made him, too, a devoted Granger whose editorials
attacked industry and the railroads – “the trusts” – that seemed to arrogate
hard-won earnings of Iowa husbandmen to monopolistic profits of remote eastern
capitalists.
Those messages were the texts also of
the ablest farm leaders of his generation, Wallace’s friends Seaman Knapp of
Iowa State College and James Wilson (“Tama Jim”), another Iowan who was in time
to serve the longest term (1897-1913) as Secretary of Agriculture in American
history. Together, in sundry ways, they promoted scientific agriculture, sound
farm management, and government policies favorable to their constituents. Uncle
Henry counseled his constituents primarily through the newspaper he edited, Wallaces’
Farmer, a farm weekly purchased in 1895 by his eldest son and published
first in Cedar Rapids and later in Des Moines. He and his two friends, with
others of similar mind, took their texts to the entire nation in their “Report
of the Commission on Country Life,” prepared in 1908-09 at the instigation of
President Theodore Roosevelt. A persuasive summation of the program of agrarian
progressives, the report called for redressing the grievances of rural America
so as to preserve a “scientifically and economically sound country life.” For
Uncle Henry, that objective would ensure the future of the nation. “Good
farming,” he believed, “is simply obedience to natural law, just as good living
is obedience to moral law.” In 1916 his last will and testament encapsulated
his creed: “Religion is not a philosophy but a life.“[1]
No one influenced Henry A. Wallace more
than did Uncle Henry. Born in 1888, Wallace as a small child lived in Ames,
where his father was teaching at the state agricultural college. In 1895 the
family moved to Des Moines where the boy began to spend hours almost daily with
his devoted grandfather. From Uncle Henry, who delighted in his grandson’s
quick mind and serious manner, young Henry learned about his family, about
pioneering, about the land and plants and beasts. He learned, too, to recognize
God in nature and man, and to serve him through work – work at the chores that sustained
the land and its tillers, and work at the services that profited mankind. “Be
sure,” his mother often told her sons, “that you have clean hands. And remember
that you are a Wallace and a gentleman.”
Those lessons reached young Wallace from
every point of his boyhood compass. His mother, a dedicated gardener, showed
him the satisfactions of cultivating flowers, which he always loved. “Become
gardeners,” he recommended to his associates many years later. “Then you will
never die, because you have to live to see what happens next year.“[2] His father guided him through the laboratories at the college and
introduced him to a student he had befriended, a lonely, young black genius,
George Washington Carver. The boy, habitually a solitary individual, eschewed
his contemporaries to follow Carver, always an encouraging tutor, on botanical
excursions. Carver “made so much of it,” Wallace recalled, “...that, out of the
goodness of his heart, he greatly exaggerated my botanical ability. But his
faith aroused my natural instinct to excel... [and] deepened my appreciation of
plants in a way I can never forget.“[3] And like Uncle Henry, Carver saw a divine force in all living things.
The boy’s father encouraged his son’s
emerging interests. Henry C. Wallace, “H.C.” or Harry to his friends, eldest of
Uncle Henry’s children, had a professional competence in breeding livestock and
improving grains. From one of his friends, his teen-age son received some seed
corn to test for productivity. With the seed, in 1904, Henry A. Wallace proved
that the contours of an ear of corn did not correlate with its propensity to
yield. The shape of the ear did not matter; what did was the genetic quality of
the kernel.
At sixteen Wallace had discovered that
the symmetry of a plant in no way assured its utility; indeed that in all life
appearances could deceive. His characteristically tousled hair and rumpled
clothes attested to his own indifference to appearance, as did his vigorous but
conspicuously inelegant tennis. More important, he had learned from Carver as
well as from genetics the lesson that he was later to label “genetic
democracy,” a doctrine by no means prevalent in the Middle Border or elsewhere
in the United States in 1904.
His other lessons, some yet fully to be
absorbed, had similar vectors. The experience of westering, for Uncle Henry and
through him for his grandson, was an experience of cooperation, of a mingling
of strangers in a common land where essential collective efforts gave
individuality a chance to thrive and permitted groups of individuals to bargain
with aggregates of distant economic power. The brotherhood of man, an article
of Christian faith, was a palpable necessity as a means for surviving the
rigors of the receding frontier and for controlling the threatening circumstances
of contemporary life. So, too, the application of intelligence to environment,
the employment of science to improve the products of nature, the utilization of
economic data to manage the otherwise uncertain fluctuations of the market –
those acts of mind and will guaranteed an abundance ample for the comfort of
all men, truly a land of milk and honey, a new Jerusalem.
At Iowa State College and then on the
family newspaper, Wallace refined his understanding of those conclusions.
Sober, diligent, ascetic, he made few friends, studied hard, and conducted his
experiments with genetics and with techniques for hybridizing corn. His
Bachelor’s essay demonstrated the importance of soil-building, one form of
conservation, for raising livestock. Problems of land utilization were to
interest him for the rest of his life. Though uninvolved in politics, he was,
like his father and grandfather, an enthusiastic supporter of Theodore
Roosevelt and the Progressive Party in 1912. The regulatory state that Roosevelt
advocated, Wallace believed, would ultimately prevail even though the Bull
Moose failed. Indeed for the sake of a prosperous agriculture, it had to
prevail.
Wallace’s studies in economics and
mathematics convinced him of that. After college he undertook to educate
himself in those subjects, as well as to exploit the other resources of the Des
Moines Public Library. His children remember him arriving home at night always
with a stack of books in his arms. Soon an expert on statistical correlations,
Wallace used that method to derive accurate indices of the cost of production
of hogs. He began publishing those indices in the family newspaper in 1915. On
the basis of other data, he suggested in 1919 that productivity cycles in
livestock had a seven-year pattern – higher productivity followed rising prices
until the saturation of the market led to falling prices that induced lower
productivity. Further study, now of census figures, persuaded Wallace that with
industrialization and urbanization, the average size of families diminished.
With the domestic market consequently curtailed, farmers would need larger
markets abroad for their crops. His book summarizing his work, Agricultural
Prices (1920), was, in the judgment of one leading economist, “perhaps the
first realistic econometric study ever published.”[4] Later Wallace mastered even newer techniques for computing multiple
correlations and regressions. With a mathematician as his collaborator, in 1925
he published Correlation and Machine Calculation, an early venture in
the creative march toward computer technology. Statistics, mathematics,
genetics, scientific husbandry, economics, demography, all those skills
impinged upon the future of his Iowa neighbors, the men and women throughout
the state who lived on the farms they worked.
Those men and women could control some
of the variables that affected them. Wallace proved as much by putting into
commercial use his knowledge about hybridization. With some business
associates, he founded in 1926 the Hi-Bred Corn Company (later the Pioneer
Hi-Bred Corn Company) to produce and sell hybrid corn. Characteristically, he
also realized that the establishment of two competing concerns would help to
supply the market, which would need all they could furnish. That act of faith
in science, abundance, and competitive capitalism refiected no lack of business
acumen. Wallace intended his company to make a legitimate profit. More, he
intended his customers to profit from the use of his superior product, and in
profiting to improve the quality and reduce the price of corn, to the advantage
of all who purchased it. During years of agricultural depression the company
shrewdly built the market for its seed by offering it to customers without
demanding payment in cash on the condition that they plant half their acreage
in hybrid, half in ordinary corn, and then repay a portion of the value of the
higher yield on the acres growing the hybrid variety. By 1966, the higher yield
from hybrid seed accounted for one quarter of the total national corn crop.
That innovative method for selling seed
drew upon the example of Wallace’s grandfather’s friend, Seaman Knapp, who had
devised the system of demonstration farming to persuade cotton growers to
improve their methods of cultivation. Wallace’s readiness to promote hybrid
corn by inducing others also to enter the business revealed in some measure his
intellectual debt to Thorstein Veblen, the powerful critic of American
capitalism whose books Wallace read with enthusiastic reward. Veblen provided a
systematic analysis to support the suspicions of monopoly that Wallace had
absorbed from his family and their adherence to the old Granger program. In
industries dominated by a few large firms, Veblen argued, management could
adjust production to demand in order to sustain prices and profits. That
process, administered pricing in the vocabulary of a later generation, held
production below capacity. In Veblen’s words, it involved the sabotage by
managers of the abundance which engineers were capable of creating. It
inhibited productive potentialities which, if realized, would assure plenty for
all Americans. Veblen imagined a solution in a revolution that would transfer
industrial authority to a soviet of technicians, men committed to maximum
production and equitable distribution.
Wallace, educated also by other
economists, was moving toward a less dramatic formulation, but one from which
he expected similar results. Like other western progressives, he advocated a
vigorous application of the antitrust laws and other federal controls to limit
the size and power of industrial concentrations, and to prevent them from
restricting production or retarding technological advances that increased
productivity. Like Veblen, he envisaged a technologically dynamic society dedicated
to the efficient making and sharing of industrial and agricultural commodities,
a society that would need scientists and managers to fashion an abundant life
for the common man. In its agricultural sector, that society – capitalistic but
not beholden to laissez-faire doctrines – would function according to the model
he had created for marketing hybrid corn. Through management, science and
technology would overcome poverty and hunger, “Science,” Wallace later wrote,
“...cannot be overproduced. It does not come under the law of diminishing
utility... It is perishable and must be constantly renewed.“[5] It was for him the continuing frontier, the limitless source of new
plenty and leaping hope.
The selfishness of industrial practices,
in Wallace’s view, had its political equivalent in the selfishness of economic
nationalism, of protective tariffs and other artificial restraints on
international trade. That trade, he believed, if unfettered, would provide the
avenue to sharing abundance throughout the world. Wallace had grown up with the
“Iowa Idea,” a plan that called for removing or reducing the protection
afforded products manufactured by larger corporations, including many products
farmers bought, like barbed wire and harvesters. Confronted by European competition,
American manufacturers would have to reduce their prices or lose some of their
market. In either case, farmers would benefit. Just as important, as Europeans
gained access to the American market, they would earn dollars which they could
then spend to purchase American agricultural commodities.
Reduction of tariffs, as Wallace saw it,
also related to the preservation of peace. In the absence of restraints on
trade, nations would become more dependent upon each other and therefore less
able to embark upon war. To that issue Veblen also spoke. Imperial Germany, he
believed, constituted the greatest threat to peace, for the Prussian autocracy
and the military elite formed a combination of purpose and power committed to
domination and conquest. For Wallace, that grim potentiality could mark the
United States if an industrial plutocracy and an ambitious military combined to
direct national policy.
Accordingly Wallace anguished over the
future of his country when he observed during the years of World War II that
Standard Oil of New Jersey, part of a cartel controlled by I. G. Farben, had
manipulated patents to prevent the American development of synthetic rubber;
that oil companies in general came to foster that development but to oppose
increasing natural sources of rubber in Latin America, sources on which the
United States would be partially dependent; that industry and the military
combined to dampen, almost to eliminate, federal prosecution of firms violating
the antitrust laws; that the American cornucopia, sufficient to feed a
devastated world, was to be confined, according to the preferences of the same
men of money and of arms, to helping only those peoples, whatever their need,
whose politics followed American prescriptions; and that the findings of
American science were to be similarly contained. Those developments made
profits and even plenty the handmaidens of politics. Yet for Wallace politics
was only a necessary means for setting policies that would put both profits and
plenty within the reach of every man.
Wallace disliked politics in all its
aspects. Never gregarious, he was uncomfortable alike in smoke-filled rooms and
noisy halls. Shy but candid and sometimes blunt, he lacked small talk. He
detested both the manipulation of men and the prolonged conniving it demanded.
He learned to campaign, but his speeches, while often effective, made only
clumsy concessions to the harmless blarney that ordinarily punctuated political
oratory. “Farmer Wallace,” he was called by Alice Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s
daughter and Washington’s social doyenne. She did not mean it as a compliment,
but as usual her description had some substance. In her salon, in her world of
genial conspiracies, Wallace was never wholly at ease.
Yet Wallace entered politics, first as
an editor supporting compatible candidates, later as a holder of high office,
ultimately as a candidate himself, because he had no alternative except to
abandon the public policies he urged upon the nation. Like his Iowa neighbors,
as a private citizen he could control only some of the variables affecting his
life and theirs. The others fell to the control or misdirection or indifference
of the government.
Both major political parties continually
disappointed the Wallaces. The Republicans during the Taft years did nothing to
help agriculture. The Democrats under Woodrow Wilson proved to be rather stingy
benefactors. Congress did reduce the tariff and ease conditions for
agricultural credit. Further, the Food Administration under Herbert Hoover
during World War I stimulated the production of corn and hogs. But, as
Wallace’s father continually demonstrated, Hoover – Iowa-born but otherwise
bred – paid Iowans meanly for their efforts.
In 1921 Henry C. Wallace accepted
appointment as President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of Agriculture. His son,
now editor of the newspaper, had also a close view of the operations of his
father’s department. H.C. recruited a staff of experts who brought
unprecedented technical talents to their tasks. He was able, too, with
Harding’s support, to persuade Congress to enact legislation to assist
agricultural marketing and to curb speculation in commodities. But the senior
Wallace failed in his program to reach markets overseas. His successful
antagonist was again Herbert Hoover, now Secretary of Commerce, whose
relentless opposition to promoting agriculture contrasted with his vigorous
efforts in behalf of industry. Hoover, so Henry A. Wallace believed,
contributed inadvertently to the frustration and fatigue that taxed his
father’s strength and reduced his resistance to the operation from which he was
unable to recover in 1924.
Before his death, H. C. Wallace had
endorsed a plan for agriculture for which his son helped thereafter to organize
increasing support. Incorporated in a succession of bills sponsored by Senator
Charles L. McNary of Oregon and Representative Gilbert N. Haugen of Iowa, that
plan proposed a two-price system for commodities. Government purchases were to
sustain the domestic price at the level of “parity” – the ratio between
agricultural and industrial prices that had prevailed during the years 1910-14,
good years for farmers. The government would sell its purchases abroad at a
lower price while taxing farmer-beneficiaries to cover any losses. There were
shortcomings to the plan. European tariffs, rising to compete with American
protection, would impede the necessary sales. Europeans were in any case short
of dollars because of the drain of repaying the United States for debts
incurred during the war. More important, the McNary-Haugen plan placed no
limits on production, which would increase to unmanageable proportions if the
government guaranteed farmers a high price on all their crops. President Calvin
Coolidge and Herbert Hoover both opposed the plan, which Congress twice passed
and Coolidge twice vetoed, primarily on other grounds. They contended that it
would destroy individualism, establish artificial prices, and create a
dangerous federal bureaucracy to administer it. Those objections ignored the
artificial prices, large bureaucracies, and collective rather than
individualistic nature of American corporate enterprise.
A registered Republican, Wallace
condemned the GOP for its callousness toward the farmer, whose share of
national income was steadily falling, and for its acceptance of the business
creed. He urged his readers in 1924 to vote for Robert M. La Follette and his
new Progressive Party, and in 1928 to vote for Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic
nominee who had endorsed the latest McNary-Haugen bill. Yet so unpolitical was
Wallace that he neglected to change his party registration until 1936.
From 1924 forward, he consulted
continually with some of the economists his father had employed in the
Department of Agriculture, in particular Henry C. Taylor, at one time chief of
the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and two younger men, Mordecai Ezekiel and
Louis H. Bean, who were to continue fruitfully to advise the department and its
head throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He also came to know the two leading
academic experts on agricultural economics, John D. Black of the University of
Minnesota and later Harvard, and M. L. Wilson of the University of Montana.
After the onset of the Great Depression, with its devastating consequences for
markets at home and abroad, Black and Wilson worked out the Domestic Allotment
Plan, the program that Wallace and like-minded farm leaders endorsed in 1932 as
a preferred substitute for the defeated McNary-Haugen proposals. The new plan,
the basis for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration of the New Deal,
looked to the federal government to pay farmers to withdraw acreage from
cultivation and thus curtail their production of crops. The withdrawal of
marginal land and the rotation of cultivation of fertile soil applied the
principles of conservation. More immediately, reduction in supply to the
domestic market would lift commodity prices, while government payments would
enlarge farm income, with parity in purchasing power again the goaL
Especially after the crash of 1929,
farmers had other crushing problems. Land values had fallen during the 1920s
and now shrank further, while the interest payments on mortgage debts incurred
during the prosperous war years remained cruelly high. The deflation in
commodity prices made the weight of debt intolerable, led to more and more
foreclosures, and embittered the countryside. Wallace came to advocate federal
action for mortgage relief and controlled inflation. Influenced by Irving
Fisher, the foremost American economist of his generation, Wallace served as
vice president of Fisher’s Stable Money League. It demanded a commodity dollar,
a dollar valued not on a fixed ratio to gold but by a constant relationship to
purchasing power, in itself elastic. Wallaces’ Farmer educated its readers
in those ideas, while Wallace became a familiar figure at conferences concerned
with preserving a healthy rural America.
Like his father and grandfather, Wallace
became a reformer without becoming a radical. He saw the need for strong
federal action and for a large federal establishment to protect the existence
of the independent farmer. Price supports, mortgage relief, and managed money
were adventurous departures from past policy. As their advocate, Wallace
contemplated major institutional change. But he did not approve farmer strikes
to withhold crops from market, or the sudden liquidation of mortgages, or an
undisciplined recourse to printing paper or coining silver money. Those more
radical measures had their many champions by 1932, for an angry impatience
naturally flowed from the desperation of American farmers. But Franklin D.
Roosevelt, ihe successful aspirant for the Democratic nomination that year, by
temperament a moderate, found the reforms with which Wallace was identified
compatible with his own sense of proper remedy. Wallace, one of the experts
whose advice Roosevelt solicited, supported him both before and after his
nomination. Once elected, Roosevelt decided, after reviewing several other
possibilities, that Wallace had the confidence of the farm leaders and the
qualities of mind and purpose that he wanted in his Secretary of Agriculture.
Wallace accepted the position. Now, in spite of himself, his commitment to
agricultural reform had drawn him into politics, both the politics of decision-making
within the federal government and the politics of competition between the
parties.
There was a part of Henry Wallace that
Franklin Roosevelt recognized but never criticized, Some of his less
sympathetic associates worried about what they considered Wallace’s mysticism,
a quality they considered disturbing and unpredictable in its consequences. Yet
Wallace was not a mystic, unless that description, as he once said, applied to
any man of Christian faith. What made him seem a mystic to those who called him
one was primarily his indomitable curiosity, a curiosity that led him to
explore everything that caught his interest, religion not the least.[6]
Essentially Wallace’s religion was the
Christianity common in the Middle Border. It had its foundation in faith rather
than theology. Like Uncle Henry, Wallace concluded that the rigid tenets of
orthodox Calvinism clashed with his generous belief in the pervasive goodness
of God. Those tenets were at variance, too, with his sense of the presence of
God in nature and life. He did not use the vocabulary of transcendentalism, but
he shared the convictions of that creed about the immanence of God in man.
Still he also tried continually to find God, not palpably but spiritually,
whether in the beauty of growing things, in the symmetry of genetic patterns,
or in the evocations of religious rituals. Consequently he experimented with
religion, just as he experimented with corn, seeking the most satisfying yield.
Wallace tested his responses to various
churches. He was conscious of the spiritual excitement that Methodism could
stir but too private a man to find continuing fulfillment in collective
rhapsody. The gorgeous rituals of Catholicism also moved him, but Catholic
dogma and hierarchy put him off. He tried to feel what the saints had felt by
practicing one kind of ascetism or another, but for him deprivation of the
flesh or spiritual removal from the world divorced religion too much from life,
which he was resolved to serve. He was at times fascinated by the occult and he
studied oriental faiths, but they, too, faded to answer his needs, though his
reading led him to a concept of Confucius, a “constantly normal granary,” a
phrase he adapted for his own use. He settled in the end for membership in the
Episcopal church, which he attended regularly during his years in Washington.
Here, particularly in the communion service, he received as much as formal
religion could offer him. He interpreted the Lord’s Supper his own way. “It is
the function of the church,” Wallace said at one communion breakfast, “to
emphasize the ties which draw men together no matter how much finite
differences may appear to separate them ... Weak as is the church ... it is a
synthesizing, centripetal force ... on behalf of the sacredness of the individual
and the unity of humanity.“[7] It was the symbol and the agency of the brotherhood of man.
That brotherhood had a special
psychological importance for Wallace. Just as he was not a hail-fellow, so,
outside of his immediate family, he was not an intimate man. His aloneness in
life fostered his need for brotherhood in spirit, a need he recognized in other
men, particularly those who lived on the soil. He put it best, perhaps, in
discussing the people of Soviet Asia: “All of them ... were people of plain living
and robust minds, not unlike our farming people in the United States. Much that
is interpreted ... as ‘Russian distrust’ can be written off as the natural
cautiousness of farm-bred people... Beneath the ... new urban culture, one
catches glimpses of the sound, wary, rural mind.“[8] Those wary men and women Wallace discovered everywhere he went, in
Siberia, China, throughout Latin America, as well as in the countryside of the
United States and beneath the skins of Americans in labor unions or military regalia
or governmental suites. Not their spiritual comfort only, but also, in the
shadows of an awful war, the prospects for a genuine peace depended upon a
centripetal force that would assure the sacredness of every one of them and the
unity of mankind.
Essential though it was, the church was
not enough. Always a Calvinist in part, Wallace had a sense of duty, even of
mission, to accomplish the work of the Lord. His continual recourse to biblical
metaphor was more than the rhetorical habit of a minister’s grandson. He was an
austere moralist, impatient less with impiety than with sloth, deceit,
selfishness, and materialism. More, he cast himself often as prophet or
witness, now in the role of Joseph husbanding his people’s resources, now as
Micah beating swords into ploughshares, now as Gideon attacking a wicked
citadel. That last role he assumed in 1948, in his predictably futile campaign
for the Presidency as the candidate of a disorganized new party, against the
advice of his family and his loyal friends, indeed against his better judgment.
He had, he felt, to bear witness against the policies he had attacked and for
the beliefs he had broadcast.
Yet the compulsions of mission that
inhered in Wallace’s religion were balanced by a contemplative gentleness. It
was not just that he loved his family, which he did, deeply though
undemonstratively. It was also that when he crossbred corn or strawberries, he
had more at stake than productivity. He loved the plants, just as he loved
grasses – grasses, as he described them, growing quietly taller, silently
dropping their seeds onto the earth and into the winds, full fields of grasses
bending with the prevailing breeze, full fields observed from the air in huge
patterns of contrasting greens and browns. He loved the soil, the way it felt
between the fingers, its pungent darkness. Without direct contact with growing
things, he lost touch with the universe and its creator. His Washington victory
garden, planted in his sister’s yard, provided a useful crop, but more important,
gave him when he worked in it a serenity he could capture no other way. In the
soil he found his ultimate communion. His was strongly a Social Gospel, but he
tempered that gospel with a tenderness that displayed his natural charity.
Joseph he could emulate, or Gideon, but at the core he was more akin to Paul.
To the secular mind, Wallace’s faith
seemed outmoded, his witnessing quaint, his spirituality incomprehensible. To
the urban mind, his affinity with nature appeared irrelevant and distracting.
As for his inquiries into the occult, secular and urban Americans took them for
an eccentricity. Washington was filled with the polished, the urbane, and the
fashionable, so in Washington Farmer Wallace, spiritually as well as culturally
uncomfortable, felt often bored and out of place. As Roosevelt realized, that
did not matter. He needed Wallace to manage the Department of Agriculture and
its programs, and for that task, Wallace, practical scientist and progressive
reformer, was admirably equipped.
During his eight years as Secretary of
Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace accomplished more than did any one else who has
ever held that office. Each of the many programs the department initiated, as
one of its officers later attested, “had Wallace’s close attention and
support.“[9] Each profited, too, from the support Wallace solicited from the
President and from the skills of the administrators, lawyers, economists, and
agronomists to whom the Secretary delegated responsibilities for the detailed
supervision and the technical research without which the department could not
have functioned. They were impressive men, several of whom became Wallace’s
lifelong friends. Among the most effective were Rexford G. Tugwell, Wallace’s
first Under Secretary, one of Roosevelt’s original brain-trusters, who, like
Wallace, had studied Veblen; Mordeeai Ezekiel, senior economic adviser, and his
talented associate, Louis Bean; Paul Appleby, chief administrative officer, and
Milo Perkins who ran various special programs like the Food Stamp Plan for the
distribution of surplus commodities to impoverished Americans; Chester Davis,
who for some years managed the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; and, for
a brief period, Jerome N. Frank, a brilliant young New York lawyer.[10]
The Agricultural Act of 1933, a keystone
in Roosevelt’s recovery program, made national policy of the various proposals
with which Wallace had been identified before the election. Among the
provisions of the act, one founded the Agricultural Adjustment Administration
within the Department of Agriculture to manage the Domestic Allotment Plan. In
developing policy under that plan, Wallace confronted two major crises which he
resolved with a practical opportunism that revealed both a disciplined
toughness and a political sensitivity surprising to his critics.
The earlier episode arose because the
Domestic Allotment program was established too late to affect planting or
husbandry in the spring of 1933. Farmers in the south had already started their
cotton, farmers in the west had already bred their hogs, before the
Agricultural Adjustment Administration could begin to make payments for the
withdrawal of acreage or the limitation of production. Yet cotton and hogs,
glutting the market, were selling at historically low prices. To remove the
glut, to prevent it from carrying over to 1934, to raise prices and to increase
farm income, Wallace deliberately violated his own profound belief in abundance
and its distribution. He mobilized the Extension Service of the department to
enlist cotton farmers, in return for bountiful payments ($100 million in all),
to plough up a quarter of their crop. Less drastic measures assisted grain
farmers. As for hogs, on the advice of local committees throughout the west and
of the Farm Bureau Federation, the department purchased and slaughtered six
million little pigs. Much of the baby pork was given to the hungry on relief,
but Wallace deeply regretted the conditions that had forced his hand. “The
plowing under ... of cotton ... and the slaughter of ... pigs,” he said, “were
not acts of idealism in any sane society. They were emergency acts made
necessary by the almost insane lack of world statesmanship ... from 1920 to
I932. He had to play, he explained, the cards that were dealt him; industry had
limited production artificially for many years, and “agriculture cannot survive
in a capitalistic society as a philanthropic enterprise.“[11]
The unavoidable destruction of crops in
1933 prepared the stage for the successful operation of AAA and in later years
for new directions of policy, but a second crisis intruded before Wallace could
embark on those new directions. Recourse to the Extension Service, as Wallace
knew, reinforced the position within the department of one of its most
conservative sections, for the Service had long fostered the interests of the
Farm Bureau Federation, an organization dominated by large commercial farmers,
whose needs often conflicted with those of small, independent farmers, tenants,
and farm laborers. Further, Wallace had had temporarily to accept as head of
the AAA George N. Peek, a father of the McNary-Haugen scheme, who remained
committed to dumping surpluses abroad rather than controlling production at
home. Soon able to get rid of Peek, Wallace replaced him with Chester Davis who,
like his predecessor, had the confidence of the Farm Bureau Federation. Wallace
felt he needed that group’s large infiuence in Congress, but the price proved
high. In 1935 Davis and Jerome Frank clashed over AAA contracts which Frank and
his young associates had written to protect farm tenants and sharecroppers in
the South. Either he or Frank, Davis told Wallace, would have to go.
Wallace regretfully fired Frank and most
of his group in the General Counsel’s office. Frank was shocked, as was Rex
Tugwell, for they believed they had been following the Secretary’s wishes.
Years later, others believed Wallace had acted to purge the department of
communists, of whom a few were in Frank’s office. The latter issue simply did
not occur to Wallace. The former pained him, for, as with the little pigs, he
realized that he had departed from principle in order to preserve his ability
to move ahead, albeit with reduced speed, toward larger goals. He had already
concluded that the habit of dissent, typical in his experience of the western
Democrats who had jointed La Follette in 1924, obstructed a practical approach
to solving urgent problems.
“It seems,” Wallace wrote in 1935, “as
though ... Progressives are splendid critics but very poor builders.“[12]
The episode of the purge, perhaps
especially Tugwell’s angry disappointment with the Secretary’s expediency, had
a double impact on Wallace. It persuaded him, under the tutelage of Will
Alexander of his staff, more thoroughly to examine the wretched circumstances
of southern croppers, white and black, and of the displaced and miserable
migrant farm laborers of the west. He proceeded then more aggressively to seek
effective remedies for their problems. He added his own support to the efforts
to create the Resettlement Administration (under Tugwell and later Alexander)
and the Farm Security Administration (under Alexander, Milo Perkins, and C. B.
Baldwin). Those agencies began, though belatedly, to help the downtrodden in
American agriculture. Wallace had earlier sponsored the Rural Electrification
Administration that carried inexpensive electricity to farm homes, an objective
first dered by the Country Life Commission. As Ezekiel wrote, REA
“revolutionized the face of rural America.” Further, Wallace’s growing concern
for eradicating rural poverty and his growing suspicions of the Farm Bureau
Federation sensitized him to the problems of urban poverty and of American
blacks, and rekindled his apprehensions about big business and its privileges.
By the time of World War II, he had become the champion of the common man alike
on the streets and on the land. He had become, too, an opponent of the demands
not only of arrogant industrialists but also of the equally arrogant Farm
Bureau.
The episode of the purge had also a more
personal effect on Wallace. Because he had to decide between Davis and Frank,
he had no escape from the politics of allocating power. Because he accepted a
short-run loss in order to try to win long-run gains, he had to bend principle
to expediency. In so doing, he had to wound an able and trusting subordinate.
Later, during World War II, Wallace may have recalled the pains of 1935 when
Roosevelt in effect fired him first from the chairmanship of the Board of
Economic Warfare and later from the vicepresidency. In both cases the President
sacrificed some principle to more expediency; in both he sacrificed a valued
colleague to his own assessment of political exigencies. In both instances,
Wallace, though gravely wounded, remained loyal to Roosevelt, whom he still preferred
to any other chief. The problem, Wallace realized even in 1935, grew out of the
New Deal’s style of administration. “In this administration,” he wrote, “the
objectives are experimental and not clearly stated; therefore, there is certain
to be, from the White House down, a certain amount of what seems to be
intrigue. I do not think this situation will be remedied until the President
abandons ... his experimental and somewhat concealed approach. There are ...
many advantages to this approach but it does not lead to the happiest personal
relationships and the best administration.“[13] Roosevelt never abandoned his approach. In the politics of the New
Deal, as Wallace discovered, one had on occasion to dish it out, and on other
occasions to take it.
The game was worth the anguish if the
stakes were high enough. For Wallace they were, for during the middle 1930s he
succeeded in advancing his most cherished objectives. The Supreme Court’s
invalidation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 forced the department
to devise a constitutionally acceptable alternative. The Soil Conservation and
Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938
preserved the practice of managing production. „Those measures also put a new
emphasis on conservation, on withdrawing acreage not only to reduce crops but
also to follow a rational system of land utilization. From 1936 forward, as
Wallace said, “the Department launched a positive attack on the dual problem of
soil destruction and unbalanced cropping.“[14]
The dreadful dust storms of the years
immediately preceding had attested to the indispensability of protecting the
“voiceless land.” Those disasters also reminded Americans of the vulnerability
of agriculture to nature and of the possibility of shortages in food stuffs.
The act of 1938 gave Wallace the opportunity he had long sought to create an
„ever-normal granary,” to employ government purchases, storage, and sales so as
to assure adequate supplies without future gluts or shortages. The resulting
program provided food for Americans and their allies during the extraordinary
years of World War II and the early postwar period. As Wallace admitted, he had
not foreseen the war when he formulated his program, but his success led him to
hope, as he wrote in 1942, for the establishment of an ever normal granary on a
world-wide scale. That concept underlay the plans recommended in 1946 by Sir
John Boyd Orr, Director-General of the Food and Agricultural Organization of
the United Nations, plans Wallace energetically endorsed. He had earlier
adopted comparable policies to build up American strategic reserves through the
Board of Economic Warfare.
Just as the accumulation of reserves
depended upon sources abroad, so, as Wallace saw it, did the efficient
functioning of the American economy. Contending during the 1930s, as he long
had, that “America must choose,” he related the choice to national prosperity.
The option lay between domestic self-sufficiency, which would inhibit and
distort economic growth, and open international trade, which would encourage
the United States to produce and export what it did best and to import goods
produced more efficiently elsewhere. Wallace took the side of maximum growth,
for it would provide employment for men and capital and permit the elimination
of want. The New Deal’s reciprocal trade treaties took a limited step toward
freer trade, hut Wallace envisaged much more dramatic changes that would open
all markets and all shipping and air routes. The war spurred him to urge even
more insistently interrelated policies to promote free trade, economic growth,
and full employment.
Wallace’s objectives, accomplishments,
and expanding sympathies marked him by 1940 as one of the country’s outstanding
statesmen. He had demonstrated the personal loyalty to the President that John
N. Garner, Vice President since 1933, so stubbornly withheld. Wallace had, too,
the liberal credentials that Roosevelt wanted for his running mate in 1940. And
during the first six months of that year Wallace had taken a position on the
war in Europe that answered Roosevelt’s political needs.
The President, in the view of his
isolationist critics, was leading the nation too close to the conflict abroad.
ln the view of those, still a minority, who wanted at once to join the
endangered British cause, the President had delayed too long in taking steps to
supply Great Britain and to develop American armed forces for employment
overseas. Privately Roosevelt may have shared the latter assessment but
politically, he believed, he could not afford either to increase his pace or to
give the isolationists further cause for complaint. Wallace stood about where
the majority of Americans did after the Germans had overrun most of western
Europe. He detested Nazism, which he continually attacked, as he always had. He
saw potential danger to the Americas in Germany’s advance. He therefore
preached hemispheric solidarity and national preparedness – the mobilization of
the economy and of a strong and balanced military force. “We must,” he told
Roosevelt, “be in a position to command fear and respect.“[15] Yet Wallace also opposed American entry into the war and resisted the
thought that it was inevitable. Further, he believed that mobilization need not
entail a surrender of policy to generals and financiers, and that a good
neighbor should sponsor democratization along with friendship in Latin America.
Indeed with the spread of fascism in Europe, the new world more than ever
before had to provide a persuasive example of effective democracy.
Wallace, as Roosevelt insisted, suited
his needs, but few of the President’s counselors or of the party leaders
agreed. Wallace had always ignored the powerful captains of the great
Democratic city machines. He disliked and distrusted, perhaps even despised,
men like Kelly of Chicago and Hague of Jersey City, who felt the same way about
him. His increasing zeal for civil rights for black Americans and for relieving
the poverty of the sharecrpppers of the South, many of them black, offended
most of the influential senior southern Democrats in the Senate. Like many of
their northern colleagues, they considered his ideas radical, his religion
puzzling, and his manner remote.
Wallace also lacked the confidence of
Roosevelt’s circle of immediate advisers, particularly those whom Felix
Frankfurter had recruited. They knew he was learned, but he was not one of
them, and by their standards he had none of the polish the White House
required. For his part, Wallace did not quite trust them. He called them
“connivers” and considered them preoccupied with power, though he knew they had
made significant contributions to reform. Even Ben Cohen, perhaps the gentlest
and ablest man in the group, operated too guardedly for Wallace’s taste. Cohen,
along with some others, feared for a time in 1939 that Paul McNutt, a handsome
but vacuous Indiana Democrat, might be Roosevelt’s choice for the
vice-presidency. Against that chance, Wallace observed that “the New Dealers” –
he used the phrase pejoratively – resisted taking a “position of too great an
opposition against McNutt... The New Dealers... don’t like the McNutt
possibility but feel they must prepare for it as a contingency.” Wallace did
not feel that way, nor did he have any enthusiasm for a Vice President selected
from the inner circle of the White House or from its outer fringe, perhaps
Harry Hopkins, the President’s eminence grise, or William O. Douglas. They were
little to be preferred, he felt, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a favorite
of conservative Southerners, or National Chairman James A. Farley, whom the
city bosses liked.
Farley, an active candidate, felt that
Roosevelt was blocking his ambitions. Always on pleasant terms with Wallace,
Farley early in 1940 complained to him about the President. “Farley was
incorrect,” Wallace judged, “in calling the President a sadist although there
is a certain amount of that element in his nature. The predominant element,
however, is the desire to be the dominating figure, to demonstrate on all
occasions his superiority. He changes his standards of superiority many times
during the day. But having set for himself a particular standard for the
moment, he then glories in being the dominating figure along that particular
line. In that way he fills out his artistic sense of the fitness of things.“[16]
In spite of that insight, in spite of
the opposition he knew he provoked, Wallace was a completely receptive, though
never an active, candidate for nomination. He organized no movement on his own
behalf because, as he told a cabinet colleague, “I did not look on myself as
very much of a politician.“[17] He did not think that nomination as Vice President would lead to the
Presidency, for unlike Farley, he expected Roosevelt to live out a third term.
“The President,” Wallace observed, “is more likely to maintain his vitality by
being President than by retiring.“[18] Nor did he expect Roosevelt to retire. One of Wallace’s Iowa friends
asked him if he “was interested in having my name presented to the national
convention in case the President did not run. I told him that it was scarcely
worth thinking about because I was so certain the President was going to run. I
said, of course, if the President did not run, I would be interested.” As for
the vice-presidency, “I said that would depend altogether on what the powers
that might be might think would best insure victory.“[19]
Roosevelt was the power that was. To a
reluctant convention he dictated the choice of Wallace as his running mate. He
even contemplated withdrawing himself if the convention should reject his
selection. It almost did, but Roosevelt’s adamancy, the energetic politicking
of Harry Hopkins, the President’s emissary on the floor, and the timely
appearance of Eleanor Roosevelt as her husband’s special ambassador for Wallace
brought the unhappy delegates around.
Roosevelt made Wallace Vice President in
1940. Four years later, when Wallace had far more support within the party,
Roosevelt dumped him. He announced his personal preference for Wallace but he
also expressed his satisfaction with several other possible candidates and then
let the party leaders move the convention to a decision he had previously
approved. That change in Roosevelt’s tactics, as Wallace realized, constituted
a complete reversal. The President again had been the dominating figure,
filling out, now to Wallace’s disadvantage, “his artistic sense of the fitness
of things.”
Receptive though he had been to
nomination as Vice President, Wallace discovered little satisfaction in that
office when he entered it in January 1941. Usefully busy almost every day for
the eight preceding years, he now had almost nothing to do. Presiding over the
Senate’s meandering debates bored him. Often he appeared to doze in the chair.
More often he turned the chair over to a colleague. The democratic Majority
Leader, Alben Barkley, an engaging Kentuckian, ran the business of the Senate.
Most of the members of that body respected Wallace but few welcomed him to the
informal gatherings, the Senate’s club, which by temperament he had no desire
to join. He had, Wallace said, more time for tennis than ever before in his
life, but seldom had the nation faced more urgent issues. For their resolution
Roosevelt intended to harness Wallace’s talents, but he was slow in finding an
appropriate role for him, for he was slow in establishing offices properly
geared first for mobilization and then for war. While the President
procrastinated, Wallace educated himself in the problems of national defense
and of the defense economy by discussing them regularly with experts on the
staffs of the White House, the departments, and the defense agencies. At
Roosevelt’s initiative, he was among the few originally to learn about S–1, the
then infant project to develop an atomic bomb. In July 1941 the President gave
him a first assignment as chairman of the Economic Defense Board, established
at that time as a “policy and advisory agency” to deal with “international
economic activities” including exports, imports, preclusive buying, shipping,
foreign exchange, and similar matters.[20]
That mandate, as it turned out, was as
broad as the agency’s actual authority was narrow. Power over its supposed
functions remained dispersed among the executive departments, and decisions,
when they were made, remained the prerogative of the White House. So, too, with
the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board that the President created in
August 1941 with Wallace as chairman. In characteristically Rooseveltian
fashion, it was superimposed upon the Office of Production Management, which
had been crippled by friction within its staff and by its rivalry with the War
and Navy departments. SPAB was to serve as the coordinaung center for defense
mobilization. It failed for the reasons that had vitiated the Economic Defense
Board and OPM.
Even before the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, those responsible for mobilization chafed at Roosevelt’s reluctance to
delegate and centralize authority. The advent of war forced the President to
act. At least in theory, real authority over the domestic economy was granted
in January 1942 to the new War Production Board under Donald Nelson, a former
vice president of Sears, Roebuck who had been executive director of SPAB.
Wallace was to sit as chairman, along with various Cabinet officers as members,
of WPB’s governing committee. He liked and admired Nelson, but he did not, as
one friend observed, “find it congenial to work with the big businessmen who
dominated that organization, nor with the admirals and generals who were their
military counterparts.“[21]
Far more satisfying to the Vice
President, Roosevelt had also made him chairman of another new agency,
established by executive order on December 17, 1941, the Board of Economic
Warfare. It was to assume the responsibilities of the Economic Defense Board
but with strengthened authority – as it turned out, less than enough – to deal
directly with foreign governments in the procurement of strategic materials and
related functions. Wallace now had a mandate, one he believed he could use both
to abet the war effort and to influence postwar policy.
As he had in the Department of
Agriculture, Wallace in the Board of Economic Warfare devoted himself to
questions of policy and delegated responsibility for daily administrative and
technical decisions. The major weight of that responsibility he assigned to his
executive director, Milo Perkins, an old friend and associate and an energetic
promoter of Wallace’s own purposes. Under Perkins were the three sections of
BEW: the Office of Imports, charged with procuring strategic materials and with
preclusive buying all over the world, but especially in Latin America where
neither the Germans nor the Japanese had become a military threat; the Office
of Exports, which was to use its licensing authority to prevent goods from
reaching Axis nations; and the Office of Warfare Analysis, which selected
targets of economic importance for strategic bombing. The first of those
sections commanded most of Perkins’s and Wallace’s attention, and its
operations were the bases for the controversies that were to mark the history
of the agency.
About two months after the establishment
of BEW, with those controversies in their first stages, Wallace resumed keeping
a diary. Twice before he had initiated and abandoned that practice, on both
occasions initiating it when political events in Washington especially involved
him. He had kept a diary briefly during the Davis-Frank episode, and he had
again for the months preceding his nomination for Vice President. Now he began
once more, with few lapses until he left public office. The content of the
diary revealed his continual engagement in political developments within
government and in the policies that politics affected. More than an outlet for
reflection, it served, as its author intended, as a record of his activities.
Such was also the case with the diaries of so many of Roosevelt’s Cabinet,
Henry Stimson, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Harold Ickes, and James Forrestal in
particular. With varying degrees of self-consciousness, they recorded an
account of what they had said and heard and done, an account to which they
could refer should some colleague challenge their consistency or veracity. Such
challenges emerged from the personal frictions engendered by Roosevelt’s style
of administration. As Morgenthau, speaking from experience, warned Wallace,
relationships with Jesse H. Jones especially imposed on a prudential man the
self-protective task of keeping a full record. Like the diaries of his
colleagues, Wallace’s diary, while incidentally convenient for history, had a
more contemporary and expedient use.
While he kept the diary for himself,
Wallace in 1942 also took his thoughts to the American people with greater
frequency and moment than ever before. No member of the administration except
the President made more public speeches or attracted more continual attention.
Roosevelt probably planned it that way. In the interests of national unity and
of harmony within the Grand Alliance, the President during the war years moved
with more than his customary caution. But Roosevelt typically was less cautious
privately than he appeared to be in public. By no means averse to examining
bold policies for adoption once the war had been won, he needed a scout to test
the responses of both national and international audiences, a semiofficial
spokesman whose proposals he could embrace if they were well received or
repudiate if they were not.
The President did not have to cast
Wallace in that role, for the Vice President without prompting seized every
occasion he could to publicize his hopes for the postwar world. Indeed Wallace
was restless with the failure of the American government to set forth in clear
detail a plan for the future that would lift the spirits and galvanize the
wills of men everywhere. He fretted not the least because the relative silence
from the White House permitted other voices to seem louder and more persuasive
than in his opinion they should have. So, for one example, though he shared
many of the sentiments of Wendell Willkie’s One World, he distrusted Willkie’s
instincts in domestic policy. So, for another, he detested the confident
chauvinism of Henry Luce’s “American Century.” Like Archibald MacLeish, the
eminent poet who served for a short and unhappy season as the head of the
Office of Facts and Figures, Wallace believed that Roosevelt was forgoing a
commanding opportunity to define the war as a vehicle for practical idealism.
The President, preoccupied with military problems and the conflicts among the
nation’s major allies, emphasized victory above all other considerations. After
victory, he told MacLeish, he would speak more concretely about the nature of
the peace. Wallace, for his part, while always committed to the eradication of
Nazism as a first priority, was determined, too, to stir the blood of democrats
everywhere, to prophesy, as he did, the coming century of the common man.
His rhetoric in that cause gave a
testamental cast to the sundry objectives that engrossed him. As his diary
disclosed, his activities on the Board of Economic Warfare aroused the quick
opposition of two of the most powerful conservatives within the administration,
both noted for their irifluence on the Hill, Secretary of State Cordell Hull
and Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, who was also head of the federal lending
agencies. Both men had a long record of defending any apparent invasion of what
they jealously considered their personal domains. Now Hull resented any
independence from State Department supervision of BKW representatives negotiating
with foreign governments. Jones was even more indignant over Milo Perkins’
efforts to arrange loans for the development abroad of sources of strategic
materials without proceeding through the dilatory, sometimes obstructionist,
lending agencies. Enlisted by Perkins, Wallace tried to persuade Roosevelt to
grant BEW independence from Hull and Jones, but the President, under pressure
also from Wallace’s antagonists, gave BEW more the semblance than the sinew of
what it sought.
The bureaucratic struggle merely clothed
fundamental disagreements about policy, particularly in Latin America. There
Wallace and Perkins had two large goals. “International trade,” Wallace had
earlier written, “has always been closer to economic warfare than the American
people have been trained to think.“[22] Through international trade he endeavored in Latin America to develop
sources for essential materials of war – rubber and quinine for two – which the
United States had previously obtained from areas the Japanese had conquered.
Preclusive buying also denied those and other materials to the Germans. The
procurement of adequate supplies, Wallace believed, depended upon increasing
the productivity of Latin American workers, whose physical strength and morale
suffered from malnutrition, disease, miserable sanitation and housing, and
skimpy wages. Efficiency demanded social reform, as did the first step toward a
decent future for the laborers. BEW tried to take that step by writing into
procurement contracts abligations on the part of Latin American governments or
entrepreneurs “to furnish adequate shelter, water, safety appliances, etc.,” to
consult with BEW “as to whether the wage scale is such as to maximize
production,” and to cooperate “in a plan to improve conditions of health and sanitation,”
a plan for which the United States would pay half the costs.[23]
Hull attacked that policy indirectly.
The State Department endorsed some of BEW’s conditions for contracts, but it
also complained that the conditions as a whole constituted interference in the
domestic affairs of a foreign nation, a course the department claimed to
eschew. Noninterference, as practiced by the State Department, had special
connotations. The doctrine served for several years as Hull’s excuse for
protecting pe pro-Nazi but officially neutral government of Argentina from the
disciplinary measures of economic warfare recommended continually by Army
Intelligence and the Treasury Department. Too, the State Department helped to
arrange shipments of Lend-Lease arms to Latin American governments,
non-fighting allies against the Axis, that were openly repressive toward
workers and peasants. Hull knew that Wallace welcomed social change in Latin
America. Indeed Wallace had identified that change with peaceful revolution.
The Board of Economic Warfare did not demand that Latin American states alter
their laws; it attempted only to write contracts to help Latin American
markers. But that was too much revolution for Hull, and therefore by his
standards too much interference.
Like Wallace, Hull was a dogged
proponent of freeing international trade from artificial restraints. Like
Wallace, he was eager to enlarge American markets abroad in the postwar period,
temporarily by advancing generous credits. But the Secretary of State and most
of his colleagues equated that objective with the spread of American
institutions, political and economic. They expected their trading partners to
be or to become capitalistic republics in the model of the United States. When
the war ended, they attached political conditions to commercial negotiations.
Wallace did not. He sought postwar trade with any nation, whatever its system
of government or pattern of property ownership. And, during the war, he wanted
American credits, trade, and eonuacts to turn the calendar toward the century
of the common man. He lost.
As much as Hull, Jesse Jones contributed
to that defeat. The delays and the parsimony of Jones’ lending agencies
retarded procurement, as Wallace and others demonstrated and Jones
self-righteously denied. Wallace found just as aggravating the political
objections to BEW contracts, which Jones claimed were needlessly costly.
Preoccupied with prices and interest rates, Jones never grasped the greater
importance, during the crisis of war, of productivity, one of Wallace’s goals.
He did understand and reject Wallace’s long-range social concerns, which he
scoffed at as an international WPA. He scoffed, too, at Wallace’s worries about
the postwar implications of American policy on synthetic rubber. Wallace feared
that federal assistance for the synthetic rubber industry, which he knew was
essential for wartime supply, would lead to postwar tariff protection for that
industry, and consequently inhibit postwar natural rubber developments which
BEW was nurturing in Brazil and elsewhere. As ever, Wallace argued that without
a market in the United States, those natural rubber producers would be unable
to survive, and unable, too, to purchase American products. Jones fixed his
interest on the postwar profits of the domestic rubber industry.
Jones had the sympathy and support of
like-minded senators, including senior southern Democrats like Kenneth McKellar
and Harry Byrd, who chaired powerful committees. They gave him a platform from
which to attack BEW, its policies, and the concessions to it that Roosevelt had
made. Where Hull ordinarily expressed his negative opinions in colorful but
private invective, Jones habitually broadcast his vitriol. He both offended and
infuriated Milo Perkins, who regrettably struck back in kind. Provoked largely
by Perkins, so did Wallace, with little more circumspection. After several
public skirmishes, the open warfare between two of his subordinates, a
circumstance Roosevelt would not tolerate, led to the President’s decision in
June 1943 to abolish BEW. He transferred its functions to a new superagency,
the Office of Economic Warfare, and appointed to the chairmanship of the body
Leo Crowley, whose ability to flatter the President and to placate Congress
considerably exceeded his taste for reform or his personal probity. Perkins
left the government. Wallace remained, his authority and status severely
diminished, his spirit undeterred.
Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man,” a
major address he delivered in May 1942, set forth themes which he repeated and
elaborated for the next several years. They grew out of his previous ideas,
some partially formed even in his youth, and they foreshadowed the
disagreements between him and others in government during his last year in
office. Yet his speeches, book, and articles said less about his precise
objectives than did his diary, and his written words communicated his purpose
only in the context of the actual issues to which he adverted daily. Each theme
he associated with the century of the common man had hard correlatives in the
questions that occupied wartime Washington.
Peace, the essential first condition for
the future of mankind, meant different things to different Americans during
World War II. For Wallace, the establishment and preservation of peace demanded
a true internationalism, a world community of nations and peoples linked
economically and politically through the agency of a United Nations. His vision
included his familiar convictions about trade and economics, and his
expectations for the economic development of underdeveloped areas along the
lines that BEW drew. As he saw it, with the end of the war the United Nations
would assume the bulk of that task. It would first have to concentrate on the
restoration of areas devastated by war, a function which devolved before the
end of hostilities to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration. An enthusiast for that agency, Wallace recognized that it had
to rely in its early work primarily on American resources, for the United States
alone of the great nations was emerging from the war with an ebullient economy.
But Wallace believed that American wealth should not give the United States a
proportionate influence either in UNRRA or within the United Nations. Those
agencies, in his opinion, had to bend to multilateral direction and to serve
multinational interests.
The internationalizing of responsibility
for providing nourishment, relief, and development throughout the world
depended upon political internationalism, which Wallace stressed. It could
eventuate only with the end of European imperialism and with the abandonment of
balance-of-power politics. On that account, he was especially critical of the
British, particularly Winston Churchill. Continued British domination over
India, in Wallace’s understanding, violated the whole purpose of the war, as
did Churchill’s impulse for empire, his unabashed belief in Anglo-Saxon
superiority, his disdain for China and distrust of Russia, his preference for
secret negotiations, and his manifest intention to hold the reins of world
leadership, whatever the semblance of world government, in British, American,
and, unavoidably, Soviet hands.
Roosevelt, too, expected the great
powers to dominate the UN and enjoyed and exploited his secret conferences
either alone with Churchill or in the larger company that included Stalin. But
the President seemed to Wallace to share his anti-imperialism and even some of
his other doubts about the British. So also, Roosevelt was determined to get
along with the Russians. Further he was as emphatic as was Wallace in calling
for the withdrawal of British arid European, as well as Japanese, political
influence in East and Southeast Asia. They looked forward there not to American
encroachments but to the independence, in most instances after a period of
transition, of the various Asian peoples. In the case of China, as they both
realized, Chiang Kai-shek could expect to rule only if he cleared out the
corruption of the Kuomintang, embarked upon major social reform including
distribution of land to the peasantry, and reached a modus operandi with his
communist opponents, whose growing strength fed on the discontent his policies
fostered.
Still, Roosevelt’s concern for victory
first and victory as fast as possible resulted in wartime decisions that struck
Wallace as ominous for the future. The United States, Wallace believed, had to
align itself unequivocally with the forces of democracy everywhere. On the
ground of military expediency, Roosevelt did not. He authorized the negotiations
and arrangements in North Africa and Italy that made notorious fascists the
approved local agents of Anglo-American occupation. The State and War
Departments nurtured those policies which Wallace came privately to oppose.
Wallace also parted with the President,
though without public or private acrimony, over the question of the
peace-keeping role of the United Nations. Roosevelt talked in general terms
about a postwar international police force to prevent aggression, but while the
fighting continued, he deliberately postponed serious consideration of the
nature and structure of such a force. Indeed he seemed often to regard it as a
convenient substitute for the positioning of American units abroad. Further, he
was too busy with grand strategy to give time to detailed postwar planning.
More important, he did not want predictable British, American, and Russian
disagreements atiout postwar policies to impede the functioning of the wartime
alliance. He sensed, too, that the Congress and the American people were loath
to approve much more than the principles of international organization, and he
dreaded a divisive domestic debate that might generate the kind of opposition
to a United Nations that had defeated Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. Roosevelt
had not wholly decided about his course. He did expect after victory rapidly to
withdraw American forces from Europe and Asia. He had no apparent sympathy for
postwar Ameiican military adventures overseas. Yet his announced descriptions
of postwar world organization, at best opaque, appeared to presume a political
stability founded on a balance of influence among the strong.
Wallace for his part advocated wartime
planning for a United Nations that would exercise responsibility for peace and
for disarmament. Like Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, he saw regional
agreements as a necessary foundation for the larger mandate of the UN.
Regionalism, as he later admitted, could provide a cloak for spheres of
influence – of the United States in the Americas, of the Soviet Union in
eastern Europe, and of the British, French, and Chinese in areas of their
traditional concern. But he counted on the United Nations to prevent
regionalism from becoming colonialism. Further, to estop aggression of any sort
he advocated endowing the United Nations with an own army and air force, and
with authority to impose economic sanctions.
He contemplated a degree of surrender of
national sovereignty to an international body larger by far than was acceptable
to any but an insignificant few in high offices in any of the governments of
the major partners in the war against the Axis. Indeed few Americans who
understood Wallace’s purpose fully supported it. The senior members of the
State Department especially looked upon his proposals as fanciful. So did the
senior Democrats in the Senate, while the Republican leadership was even more
chary of international commitments. For those critics, as for most of their
constituents, peace, in whatever international garment, implied primarily “freedom
from fear” – from threats to the security of the United States. That security
was to be assured essentially by American power alone or in willing alliance
with demonstrably trustworthy friends. As Wallace realized, from that position
the step was short to unilateral American adventurism undertaken in the name of
peace.
As in international, so in domestic
policies, Wallace by 1944 had advanced well beyond the consensus of the
American people and their congressional representatives.[24] That gap reflected their conservatism, for Wallace, by no means alone
in the forward sector, had not departed from the traditional objectives of
American reform movements or the growing body of economic doctrine of the time.
The bases far the political democracy
that Wallace associated with his century of the common man were so
conventionally American that he did not need to spell them out. The nuances of
his speeches and the thrusts of his activities indicated that he meant by
political democracy representative government, universal suffrage, and the
civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Those
conditions did not wholly obtain during the years of World War II. He worried
particularly about the distortions of representation that resulted from the
disfranchisement of blacks in the South, from the power of Democratic machines
in the North (Chicago especially bothered him), and from the influence that
wealthy individuals and corporations exerted on Congress and on some executive
agencies. He also despised the redbaiting techniques of the Dies Committee in
the House and the McKellar Committee in the Senate. Obsessed with fears about
radicals, those committees, reckless in their accusations, bullied the
witnesses they disliked. Again and again in his diary Wallace expressed his own
reservations about “Communists” or “reds,” but in his distress about the
tactics of the witch-hunters in Congress and the FBI, he constantly also
expressed a discriminating opposition to professional anticommunists.
Only men with the truncated mentality of
Dies or McKellar could discover, as they did, sinister and radical tendencies
in Wallace’s ideas about economic democracy. Wallace simply incorporated his
understanding of wartime developments into his long-standing proposals for
promoting and distributing an economy of abundance. The experience of the war
provided a telling verification of the theories of John Maynard Keynes and his
American interpreters and disciples. The enormous federal deficits of the war
years spurred private investment and employment, and achieved at last the full
recovery that had eluded the New Deal. To Wallace, as to the Keynesians he
regularly saw, it was patent that properly managed federal fiscal policy could
sustain prosperity in the postwar years. Accordingly he believed, with
Roosevelt, in the ability of the government to establish and preserve the
conditions that would provide sixty million jobs, a figure that seemed
outrageously high in 1944 to the adherents of conventional economics. In order
to achieve that goal, as Wallace understood, the government had systematically
to employ experts to study the economy and its performance, and to make
continual recommendations about federal fiscal and monetary policies to sustain
maximum employment. To that end he supported each of the series of bills
introduced by Senator Murray of which the last was passed, after revisions, as
the Employment Act of 1946.
The long years of depression had whetted
the interest of all Americans, however much they disagreed about means, in
achieving an economy of plenty. Americans, however, disagreed profoundly about
how and to whom to allocate shares of prosperity. Debates about the particular
aspects of that general question proceeded through the war years. After the
Democratic reverses in the elections of 1942, a coalition of Republicans and
southern Democrats controlled congressional decisions. While that coalition
tried, with considerable success, to roll back the New Deal, the President
accepted most of the defeats his policies suffered without more than token
protest. Eager for the support of the conservative coalition for his military
and foreign policies, he deferred battle over domestic issues. “Dr. New Deal,”
Roosevelt told the press, had been succeeded by “Dr. Win-the-War.” Depressed by
the resulting situation, Henry Morgenthau commented that he could put all the
remaining New Dealers in his own bathtub. He exaggerated. There was in
Washington a group of young liberal Keynesians who were eagerly planning a new
postwar New Deal. They had the significant cooperation of the leadership of the
CIO and the Farmers’ Union. In the Senate they had influential friends like
Claude Pepper of Florida and Robert Wagner of New York. And they had visible
champions in high office, of whom Wallace was the most senior in rank and most
articulate in speech. His program for economic democracy reflected their
thinking, as well as his own.
As he had for so long, Wallace during
the war combated the power of big business. In the continuing struggle for
control of the War Production Board, he sided with Donald Nelson, a protector
of small industry, against Ferdinand Eberstadt, the ingenious investment banker
who represented the preferences of the armed services and their corporate
allies.[25] Increasingly in 1943 and thereafter, Wallace also consulted the lawyers
in the antitrust division of the Justice Department, serious young attorneys
who were frustrated by the President’s suspension of antitrust proceedings at a
time when bigness was growing rapidly. With them, Wallace attacked American
corporate giants that had been (and would again be) associated with
international cartels, and, like them, he searched for ways to revise the
patent laws so as to prevent monopolies based on patent rights, especially
patents developed at large cost to the federal government. He was not
anti-business but anti-bigness; he was not an opponent of capitalism but a
proponent of competition.
So, too, Wallace allied himself with the
workers against their employers. He had earlier applauded the success of the
CIO in using collective bargaining to increase the share of labor in corporate
profits. Unions, he believed, would have to function to that end after the war.
Though he deplored wartime strikes that retarded production, he recognized the
validity of many of the demands of the strikers and he opposed congressional
efforts to punish union labor and its leadership. Supporting Roosevelt, Wallace
also advocated holding down wartime agricultural prices so as to prevent inflation
from eroding the gains in income that labor had achieved. To his satisfaction,
the strength of the unions, the impact of wage and price controls, and the
incidence of wartime taxes resulted during the war years in a significant
redistribution of income favorable to working men and women.
Wallace stood behind other programs to
assist industrial and agricultural workers. He advocated federal support for
education, especially in technical and scientific subjects, so as to make
learning available to qualified candidates who could not otherwise afford it.
He praised the proposals of the National Resources Planning Board (an agency
which congressional conservatives dissolved out of spite) and of the Social
Security Administration for postwar increases in old age and memployment
benefits, and for postwar extension of coverage to millions of Americans then
still outside of the social security system. Eager to improve the delivery of
health care within the United States, he commended the program Henry Kaiser had
devised for the collective care of workers employed by his firms. Wallace
applauded, too, the less adventurous but still controversial plan of the Social
Security Administration to include medical insurance within its province.
“Socialized medicine,” as the American Medical Association called it with
characteristic imprecision, stirred up so much opposition that Roosevelt would
not attach his prestige to a Treasury measure sponsoring it. He could not, the
President argued, take on the AMA in the middle of a great war. Wallace could
and did, as did Bob Wagner and the other authors of the unsuccessful
Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill for revising social security to encompass medical
insurance.
For Wallace, then, economic democracy
directly affected the common man. It would increase national income by
utilizing fiscal policy to encourage economic growth and antitrust policy to
discourage monopolistic restraints on production. It would increase the share
of the common man in national income. It would also provide him with protection
against the trials of unemployment, old age, and illness. Taken together, those
purposes constituted what Roosevelt meant by “freedom from want.” Taken
together, they also constituted what Wallace’s critics called either communism
or socialism or the welfare state. They were anathema to the still formidable
number of businessmen and their lawyers, accountants, and clerks who believed,
in spite of all that had happened since 1929, in something they called “the
American system,” by which they meant the political economy of the
Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years.
Wallace disturbed an equally large
constituency by his advocacy of „genetic democracy,” another major facet of his
century of the comn man. The phrase was peculiarly his own. His experiments in
hybridizing corn had led him to an adjective for which most other men
substituted “racial.” He meant that and more. He urged equal opportunities for
black Americans in voting, employment, and education, but he sought the same
objectives for women of whatever color. Further, he envisaged in the not
distant future equal political and economic opportunities for Asians and
Latins, not only for American citizens. In the case of the Jews, he came before
1944 to agree with the Zionists that a prosperous and dignified future for
European Jews, particularly after the ghastly experience of Nazi persecution,
could materialize only in an independent Jewish state in the area of Palestine,
then British-controlled. His were politically dangerous convictions. Even during
a war against Nazism, most white Americans remained openly prejudiced against
men and women of darker skins, most were uneasy about directly assisting
European Jews, most were indifferent about the rights of women. Indeed
Roosevelt disagreed with Wallace. The President had doubts about Zionism,
little patience with militant women, and little respect for most women in
public life. Further, he had condoned the incarceration of the
Japanese-Americans, and he had erected a bureaucratic barrier of personal aides
to spare him from having to listen to the legitimate demands of American
blacks. Wallace’s genetic democracy put him in a lonesome salient far out ahead
of the army of American voters and of their elected commander.
He had a related vision still further from
the American consensus. It was a prospect incomprehensible except to those few
who shared Wallace’s belief in the brotherhood of man, his faith in the
experience of westering as an avenue to that brotherhood, and his conviction
that commerce brought and held societies together. When first he met Molotov,
he described to him, as he later did in print for American readers, a huge
stretch of highways and airports reaching northward from the west coast of
South America to Alaska and across the Bering Sea westward through Siberia to
European Russia. Along that line he saw potentialities for a vibrant commerce.
When he reflected about strategy in the Pacific, Wallace gave Alaska a high
priority for defense, (or he viewed Alaska as the last American frontier. But
the larger frontier, the one he postulated for settlement and development in
the late twentieth century, made Alaska only one part of a vast area that also
included Soviet Asia and Mongolia. There he believed a commingling of peoples
from America, Siberia, China, and Mongolia could build a new center of
civilization, a center founded on agriculture, the commerce to sustain it, and
the industry that would follow population and employ the extraordinary
resources of the northern Pacific triangle. That prospect beguiled him before
his visit to Soviet Asia and China. The observations he made on that trip,
recorded in his diary and in his Soviet Asia mission, confirmed his sense of
the possibilities for realizing the prospect. The rivalries of international politics
made it only a dream in 1944, but it was precisely those rivalries which
Wallace believed had to be tempered and contained so that the century of the
common man could begin in the northern Pacific as in all lands.
Wallace’s beliefs provoked the opposition
to his renomination that was virtually universal among Roosevelt’s advisers and
the Democratic party leadership. He knew they did not want him. He knew, too,
that thousands of rank and file Democrats shared his kind of aspiration and
supported his candidacy. But in 1944, as in 1940, he did not campaign. By
default rather than by direction, he left his chances to a few friends who were
almost as clumsy and uninfluential as they were ardent and dedicated. At
Roosevelt’s request, Wallace even left Washington for Asia during the critical
weeks before the national convention. Again, as in 1940, he knew his presence
or his activity made little difference. The decision about the nomination was
the President’s to make. And Roosevelt dropped him. The President’s
disingenuous remarks during their discussion of the nomination wounded Wallace
at least as much as did the President’s decision. Once he became aware of it,
Wallace fought, too late and with too few allies, to hold his office, but he
accepted defeat in good grace and campaigned hard for the ticket. That earned
Roosevelt’s gratitude and Wallace’s nomination as Secretary of Commerce.
The episode confirmed Wallace’s sense of
the President’s style. Eager to dominate yet reluctant to offend, Roosevelt
hated to tell a loyal friend the simple truth when that truth was bound to
hurt. Instead he fenced, he turned to humor, evasion, and half-truths. He would
have been kinder in 1944 to tell Wallace the truth, for Wallace had the
character to accept it. The truth was that the renomination of Wallace would
probably have hurt the ticket. Wallace admitted as much in 1951 in conversation
with an interviewer who asked him what would have happened if he had been
renominated and then succeeded to the presidency after Roosevelt’s death.
“Anyone with my views,” Wallace answered, “would have run into the most
extraordinary difficulties... It would have been a terrific battle for control
of public opinion... It’s quite possible that I would not have been able to get
the support of Congress.“[26]
Indeed, it was quite probable, for the
Senate, with the Democrats bitterly divided, in 1945 barely approved Wallace’s
appointment as Secretary of Commerce, and then only after stripping that office
of the lending authority Jesse Jones had exercised. As for public opinion, in
1944, as Wallace realized, it was running against him. In his own retrospective
assessment, the American people were “prosperous, fully employed, complacent.”
They were weary of controls, weary of shortages, eager for victory and for
postwar security and personal comfort. They were not seeking new obligations,
new causes, or strange adventures.[27] Accordingly they were uncomfortable with the implications of Wallace’s
century of the common man. In Wisconsin the voters had eliminated Wendell
Wilkie, Wallace’s closest Republican counterpart, from the race for his party’s
nomination. Roosevelt, acepting the counsel of his advisers and of his own
instincts, removed Wallace, who had taken positions the President was willing
to have tested but, in the President’s judgment, had failed the test. Wallace
had said in 1940 that the question of his nomination was subordinate to the
best interest of the party. In 1944 he had not changed his mind. Though he and
his friends thought that his renomination would strengthen the ticket, he had
to defer to Roosevelt’s contrary conclusion. He would have found it more
palatable if the President had been more candid.
After Roosevelt’s death, Wallace
remained in the Cabinet because he expected, as Secretary of Commerce, to
initiate programs to expand both the American and the world economy, and
because he hoped to exert a liberalizing influence within the government. As he
confided in his diary, he did not trust the new President. Harry Truman, though
his own record was clean, had ties to the corrupt Pendergast machine in Kansas
City. His sponsors included men like Robert Hannegan and Edwin Pauley whose
motives and methods Wallace suspected. Further, in Wallace’s view Truman had
followed a devious course in winning the vice-presidential nomination. In time,
Wallace was to consider his suspicions confirmed. Where Roosevelt had been
engagingly disingenuous, Truman, in dealing with Wallace, became transparently
dishonest. But at first, though he did not much like Wallace, the President was
disarming. His apparent openness, his earthiness, his self-effacing eagerness
to master his new office and its problems persuaded Wallace that they might be
able to work together productively.
They remained within reach of each other
on domestic policies. Truman approved Wallace’s plans for reorganization of the
Commerce Department, though he kept Wallace off the governing board of the
Export-Import Bank. After some hesitation, the President gave his full support
to the employment bill. With less commitment than Wallace, he also supported
the continuation of the Office of Price Administration and its efforts to
retard inflation. He recommended continuing wartime policies designed to
provide equal employment opportunities for blacks. He opposed Republican
measures to cripple labor unions, but he had limited sympathy for the postwar
militancy of the CIO, and he recommended punitive action against the railroad
brotherhoods when they walked out on strike. Recognizing his own political
weakness in labor circles, Truman, as he later disclosed, kept Wallace in the
Cabinet primarily to placate the unions. He listened to Wallace’s advice about
labor issues and on occasion used him as an emissary to CIO leaders. That role
pleased Wallace, who also knew that Truman as a senator had voted consistently
for New Deal measures. As President, he now urged Congress to expand social
security, to provide for national medical insurance, and to increase minimum
wages. No more than Roosevelt could he be faulted for the conservative
coalition in Congress or for the yearning for “normalcy,” so like the mood of
the early 1920s, that infected so many Americans, war veterans not the least.
To Wallace’s growing disillusionment,
however, the President acted in a manner at variance with his rhetoric. It was
not the conservatives in Congress but Truman himself who altered the profile of
the Cabinet. Like any President, he naturally wanted his own men around him men
loyal to him, not to the memory of FDR. But most of those he chose struck
Wallace, as they did others, as less able than their predecessors, less
liberal, and often meaner in personal and public spirit. Wallace had never
found James F. Byrnes, the new Secretary of State, a sympathetic colleague. He
had liked Henry Morgenthau and valued his spontaneous enthusiasm for myriad
good causes, but after Morgenthau resigned, Fred Vinson and John Snyder, both
personal friends of Truman, brought to the Treasury department a narrow view of
both domestic and international issues. Wallace had had his problems with
Harold Ickes, but he cheered Ickes’ opposition to the nomination of Edwin
Pauley, another Truman crony, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The Senate
blocked that appointment, for Pauley’s associations with the oil industry made
the prospect of his control over Navy oil reserves ominous. Still, Ickes
resigned, dubious as was Wallace about Truman’s concern for the conservation
policies Roosevelt had nurtured. Even more disheartening had been the President
’s earlier selection of Howard McGrath to replace Francis Biddle as Attorney
General. A political hack from Rhode Island, McGrath filled the Justice
Department with nonentities who vitiated the antitrust division that Biddle’s
men had energized. The incompetence as well as the permissiveness of many of
the newcomers to the Justice and Treasury Departments led to the series of
episodes of petty corruption that later gave Truman’s cronies a deservedly
shoddy reputation, one that hurt the President, too. Wallace, who saw
government gradually losing its indispensable integrity before those scandals
occured, lamented equally the concurrent loss of constructive social purpose.
The President’s selection of associates, in Wallace’s opinion, cost him much of
his credibility.
The last of the New Dealers to remain in
the cabinet, Wallace held on primarily because of his overriding concern about
military and foreign policy. Truman let him stay in order to appease the
restless liberal intellectuals and labor leaders. Wallace symbolized their
hopes, as long as he was there, though they might grumble about Truman, they
were unlikely to desert him. Only slowly did Wallace learn that he was just a
symbol, that he had no influence, that Truman from the outset had had no
intention of taking his advice. The President let him talk, but he made him an
outsider. As they moved apart from each other, Truman contributed to the
ultimate separation by dissembling in what he told Wallace. Though Wallace
would probably have disputed anyway, he could not be expected to understand,
much less to approve, policies about which he was at least partially
misinformed.[28]
Still, the failure of communication
between Truman and Wallace counted for less than did their fundamental
disagreement about the role of the United States in world affairs. They started
with different assumptions. The President and his closest advisers believed
that national security depended upon military strength and position, on a large
and poised strategic air force that could retaliate in the event of an attack,
on the availability of safe bases from which both bombers and naval aircraft
could operate, and on a large reserve axe ready for quick mobilization. They
were, in a sense, preparing for the war that had just ended, for defense
against another blitzkrieg or another attack upon Pearl Harbor. They were
fashioning a system of deterrence (before that word had hecome the vogue), a
system to which the American monopoly ef the atomic bomb gave unparalleled
power. But there was no point in building that system of defense in the absence
of an enemy. They identified the Soviet Union as that potential enemy. That
identification rested on several premises. Those who made it considered Russian
policy in Poland and in the eastern zone of Germany evidence of an expansionist
purpose at least as extensive as were historic Russian ambitions in the Black
and the Mediterranean seas. They tended to forget or to ignore the natural
concern for their own security that the Russians felt, especially about Poland
through which the Germans had attacked twice within one generation. They
tended, too, to overlook the Russian need for reparations to replace capital
equipment destroyed by war and unavailable from the United States in the
absence of a credit which the State Department would not approve. Too,
suspicions of the Soviet Union fed on American fears about communism as a
doctrine and about Stalin as a dictator, as a mad and evil genius who quickly
replaced Hitler in American demonology. The Soviet Union did intend to protect
its interests as it defined them, but Truman’s councelors exaggerated the
dangers to the United States inherent in that intention. Truman’s own tough
talk to Molotov early in his presidency expressed his real opinion of the
Soviet Union better than did his more placatory public pronouncements. And more
and more the President accepted as fact the presumptions about a Soviet menace
that were advanced with rising emphasis by Secretary of State Byrnes,
Ambassador Averell Harriman, and their staffs.
Wallace proceeded from a different set
of assumptions. National security, in his view, depended not on American arms
but on a strong United Natians, on the abatement of international hostilities
rather than the deployment of American forces, on comity, not deterrence. A
large reserve army, a powerful strategic air force and navy, the bomb, and a
global ring of American bases, he argued, served only to alarm the Soviet
Union, obviously the only potential target for American strength. So alarmed,
the Russians in their turn were bound to be hostile. It was not some demoniacal
quality in Stalin or in communism, as Wallace saw it, but ancient Russian fears
that accounted for their policies in eastern Europe. New anxieties about
American encirclement would provoke them to an arms race that no nation could
afford and the peace of the world might not survive.
As before, like some others in
Washington, Wallace accepted the existence of spheres of influence as at least
a temporary circumstance of the postwar period.[29] He did not expect the Soviet Union to intrude in Latin America, and he
did not expect the United States to intrude in eastern Europe. Probably he
underestimated the repression that accompanied Soviet domination; certainly he
did so in 1947 and 1948. But at no time, his critics to the contrary, did
Wallace condone repression by any nation. Rather, he believed that the
elimination of international tension would, over time, lead both to a softening
of Soviet foreign policy and a relaxation of police methods within areas of
Soviet control. To encourage that relaxation he advocated more patience in
diplomacy than Byrnes or Truman ordinarily displayed. He urged, too, energetic
cultivation of Soviet-American commerce, first of all by the extension of a credit
to Russia, exactly the policy Harriman and the State Department blocked. The
establishment of a basis for trade, Wallace predicted, would serve the economic
advantage of both nations and help gradually to convert suspicious hostility to
tolerant rivalry between two different political and economic systems. He
wholly expected the American system to prove its greater worth.
Truman’s stance toward the Soviet Union
was the most continual but by no means the only source of distress to Wallace.
He worried, too, about relations with Great Britain, with Latin America, and
with China, as well as about decisions affecting the control of the atomic
bomb. With respect to China, he had no quarrel with Truman’s attempt,
unsuccessful though it was, to work out an accommodation between Chiang
Kai-shek and the communists. In contrast to Truman, however, Wallace held that
the presence and deployment of Soviet troops in Manchuria, which militated to
the advantage of the Chinese communists, accorded with agreements between Roosevelt
and Stalin. Still, Wallace and Truman agreed that the United States had done
and was doing all it could for the Generalissimo; if he fell, the fault would
be his.
They came close to agreement, too, about
domestic control of atomic energy, though not about related international
policy. Wallace, who had known from the beginning about the project to develop
the atomic bomb, turned for advice about its control to the nuclear scientists
who had created it. Informed by those physicists, whom he trusted as the
experts in their field, he concluded that atomic weapons were far too
destructive to be left to the control of the military. Too, the development of
atomic science was far too important to be removed from control of the
physicists. Wallace realized there was no secret about atomic energy. European
scientists had played indispensable roles in the American project; the Germans
and Japanese had built cyclotrons during the war; the Soviet Union, whose
scientists were first-rate, had an atomic bomb within its reach if it was
prepared to defray the enormous costs of making one. But the prospect of a
nuclear arms race appalled Wallace. He envisaged instead the utilization of
atomic energy as a source of power and a field of research, in both thrusts as
a boon instead of a threat to mankind.
Those considerations accounted for his
opposition to the May-Johnson bill which would have left the military with
authority over American atomic development. With many of the nuclear
scientists, with the essential assistance of Director of the Budget Harold
Smith, and against the devious opposition of General Leslie Groves, Wallace
encouraged the drafting and enactment of the McMahon bill. It provided, he
felt, even after unfortunate amendments designed to mollify congressional
saber-rattlers, acceptable assurances of civilian control over the domestic
atomic energy program.
The McMahon Act could not guarantee that
civilian authorities, the President included, would not yield to military
counsel. In Wallace’s opinion, many of them already had. Vannevar Bush had
supported the May-Johnson bill, as for a time had other scientists and
administrators of organized science including James B. Conant. Even Robert
Oppenheimer had not enlisted against it, and until Harold Smith. and others
persuaded him to reconsider, Truman had gone along with Bush and thus with
General Groves. In the end the President did exert his influence for the
McMahon measure, but he accepted, with far more equanimity than did Wallace,
the amendments to the bill that gave the military a stronger voice than most of
the veterans of Los Alamos deemed safe or wise.
With too few exceptions to matter,
congressmen felt a kind of panic at the thought of sharing the supposed secret
of the bomb with any nation, especially with the Soviet Union. Yet science
recognized no national borders. Passionately, therefore, Wallace advocated a
policy of openness about American scientific information, as his communications
to Truman and others disclosed. That policy would ease apprehensions about
American intentions, a politically desirable eventuality. It would also avail
people everywhere of knowledge with which they could harness atomic energy to
build an abundant society. That view, close to the opinion of Secretary Stimson
and a few others in the cabinet, was neither radical nor irresponsible. The
sharing of basic scientific information did not imply the disclosure of
technical details about the production of fissionable materials or the
triggering mechanism for an implosion weapon. But the sharing of basic
scientific information seemed to the timid and the ignorant equivalent to the
loss of a precious secret on which national security depended. So thought
Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. So thought enough congressmen and
ultimately, with less intensity, the President himself, to limit American
flexibility in approaching the issue.
Privately Truman concluded that
Wallace’s opinions about atomic policy were unsafe. He also took pains not to
venture beyond what Congress would approve. He could not obtain that approval
without Republican support, so in atomic, as in all foreign policy, he paid the
high price of bipartisanship. At the least that price involved continual
concessions to the outsized vanity of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, senior
Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee. On that and other accounts,
Truman found it necessary often to employ anticommunist rhetoric, which he
seemed not to consider distasteful. Further, he drew back without any prodding
from offering the Soviet Union anything, even basic scientific information that
he could not long keep secret, without receiving in return something he felt he
had been denied. In the case of atomic energy, he moved to circumvent the
Soviet position on the use of the veto in the Security Council of the United
Nations. The proposals that he had Bernard Baruch put forward in the UN were
less liberal than the preliminary recommendations drafted by David Lilienthal
and Dean Acheson, who was by no means soft in his view of Moscow. As Wallace
complained, the Baruch plan, unlike Acheson’s, eliminated the veto as it
applied to questions of atomic energy while it also guaranteed for a decade
American monopoly of atomic weapons, and offered the Soviet Union information
only on the installment plan, with each installment conditional upon Soviet
good behavior during the previous period. A proud and powerful nation, capable
of mounting an atomic energy program on its own, was bound to reject the Baruch
proposals. A more generous offer, Wallace believed, would have won Soviet trust
and acceptance. As he saw it, men like General Groves, Secretary Forrestal, and
Baruch had infected American opinion and warped American policy. As for Truman,
who had seemed to wobble for months, he struck Wallace, as he did Eleanor
Roosevelt, as a weak and vacillating man.
By Wallace’s standards, the President
also appeared cynical. Truman looked upon Latin America as a counter in the
game of world politics. To hold the nations to the south to a hemispheric
coalition dominated by the United States, the President through his spokesmen
at San Francisco arranged the admission of Argentina, then manifestly a fascist
country, to the UN. That maneuver aroused the suspicions of the Soviet Union,
which had been no less cynical in its role in the polities of the conference.
It also presaged the meretricious manner of the State Department in Latin
American relations – the appointment of ambassadors content to cooperate with
the conservative forces of the military, the church, and the large landholders;
the arming of those governing coalitions which used the weapons they received
to stifle opposition; the abandonment of the objectives the Board of Economic
Warfare had advanced. Wallace had seen Latin America as the first beneficiary
of the policies he advocated for the common man. Now he watched the President
and State Depaitment revert to the neocolonialism of the 1920s, to a policy
pitched to the alleged needs of national defense and the palpable advantage of
American investors, a policy impervious to the woeful conditions of daily life
which he believed the United States had an obligation to mitigate.
Wallace also interpreted as cynical
Truman’s early approach to the Palestine question. Disinclined to alienate
Great Britain, the President yielded to London’s anxieties about placating the
Arabs and protecting British control in the Middle East. The definition of
Palestine’s borders and the limits on Jewish immigration on which British and
American negotiators first agreed left Palestine too small and weak for
economic development or military security, and left thousands of displaced
European Jews without access to a permanent home. Wallace, who urged Truman to
demand a solution more favorable to the Jews, played on the President’s
political sensitivities. British convenience and prospects for American oil
investments in the Middle East came gradually to count less with Truman than
did the Jewish vote. But Wallace had meanwhile concluded that the President had
little more humane concern for the Jews of Europe than for the impoverished in
Latin America. He also considered the President’s original position on
Palestine as typifying an unfortunate course of American relations with Great
Britain.
That issue disturbed Wallace as much as
did any other. He admired the heroic role of the British common people in their
resistance to the Nazis. But like so many Middle Western democrats, he despised
the british upper classes for their haughty manner and their arrogance about
race, national origin, and social position. Further, he blamed them for British
imperialism, which he wished to eradicate. On that account he distrusted
Churchill, alike for his aristocratic ways and his imperialistic sentiments, so
freely expressed whenever the Prime Minister visited Washington. Even after the
election of a Labor government, Wallace feared that Great Britain would remain
Churchillian in purpose, would continue to hold the uncritical affection of
Anglophiles in the Department of State, and would induce the United States to
assume a partnership in world politics. He had trusted Roosevelt to resist that
role, but Truman was more vulnerable to British influence, partly because he
shared Churchill’s fear of Russia, partly because among his closest advisers
were men like Dean Acheson, who characteristically associated American with
British interests.
From April 1945, when Roosevelt died,
through the remainder of the year, Wallace grew more and more restive with the
international policies of the administration. Increasingly he realized that
Truman in private conversations gave him assurances that the President’s public
actions contradicted. Still Wallace allowed himself to hope that Truman might
change. During 1946 he lost that hope. The Baruch plan alarmed him. So did the
hard line toward the Soviet Union that Averell Harriman advanced upon his
return from Moscow to Washington, the tough policy that Secretary of State
Byrnes pursued in his negotiations with the Russians, the tough talk of State
Department Russian specialists like Charles Bohlen and George Kennan. They read
Stalin’s monitory address of February 9, 1946, as a trumpet of hostility, of
communist militancy and Russian expansionism. Wallace read it as a regrettably
inimical response to threats that Stalin perceived in his exaggerated
interpretation of American policy. According to that reading, there was still
room for reciprocal understanding. But then at Fulton, Missouri, with Truman on
the platform, Churchill delivered his celebrated “iron curtain” speech, that
called for a fraternal alliance of the Englishspeaking people. It was precisely
the alliance Wallace most opposed. Involving, as it did, the fading grandeur of
the British empire and the implicit threat of the atomic bomb, it was addressed
aggressively aginst the Soviet Union. It portended the rejection of spheres of
influence in Europe that had been defined by the deployment of troops at the
end of the war. It invited Anglo-American penetration of the Soviet sphere.
Speaking at Stuttgart, Germany, in Septeinber, Secretary of State Byrnes
sounded the first notes of that new policy which would gradually make the
United States the catalyst, initially in the economic and later in the military
reconstruction of West Germany as a part of a larger anti-Soviet bloc.
There were provocations, as Wallace
knew, for Byrnes’ address. The Soviet Union had permitted no democracy in the
areas it ruled; it had seized German industrial equipment and commandeered
German labor in its eastern zone; it had broken promises made at Yalta and at
Potsdam; it had disregarded human rights in Poland and elsewhere in eastern
Europe; it had been intransigent in preventing a common policy for occupied
Germany as a whole. But the United States had been intransigent, too, in its
unilateral control over occupied Japan, in its deployment of strategic air
power, in its manipulations in Latin America. American occupation authorities
in Japan had wantonly destroyed the Japanese cyclotron. Washington officials,
while denying a credit to Russia, had arranged one for Great Britain, possibly
on harder terms to the Labor government than they would have extended to the
Tories.
Politically and ideologically, the world
had begun to polarize by September 1946. Wallace’s hopes were evaporating for
the kind of world he had associated with a century of the common man. At
Madison Square Garden on September 12, he tried again to put his message
across, to warn against Churchill’s proposals and to urge another approach to
the Soviet Union. He criticized alike British imperial and Russian political
practices, and the communists in the audience booed him, for he was pleading
not for Russia but for peace. Truman, who had read and approved the speech,
disavowed it after Wallace’s opponents opened fire and Byrnes and Vandenberg
insisted that the speech impeded their diplomacy at the ongoing conference of
foreign ministers. On Truman’s order, Wallace promised to speak no more until
that conference was over. But that tenuous arrangement only postponed the
obvious solution. Byrnes, dissatisfied, demanded that Truman fire Wallace, and
Truman did. The President had, after all, issued the directions Byrnes was
following. As Wallace and Truman both knew, there could be at any one time only
one American foreign policy. Once the issue was openly joined, Wallace had to
go.
Though Truman’s administrative decision
was incontestably correct, his foreign policy was not. Like his critics at the
time, so critics since have questioned both his presumptions and his tactics.
Wallace was one of the first to do so. In the absence of access to the Soviet
archives, there can be no sure assessment of Wallace’s case. American
povocations may only have confirmed fixed Soviet decisions about postwar
policy. But provocations there certainly were, as Wallace argued. At least
until the time of Fulton, the possibility existed of a practical accommodation
between the United States and the Soviet Union, of a temporary coexistence of mutually
suspicious spheres of influence, of a gradual lessening of hostility and a
gradual movement, as Wallace recommended, first toward commercial and
scientific and then toward political cooperation, all within the framework of
the United Nations. Even after the Fulton speech, the United States could have
assisted the countries of the Southern Hemisphere more on an altruistic and
less on a political basis. American records, easy of access, disclose that
Truman never expected a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Wallace had reason
to disagree. He had the prescience to realize that the hard line abroad would
generate hysterical reactions to dissent at home, lead to the postponement of
urgent domestic reforms, and encourage military adventures costly alike of men
and morale. He had the foresight to propose alternatives to which the United
States government turned only after a quarter century of terrible waste had
made accommodation more attractive to most of the American people. Yet in the
months immediately following his departure from public office, Wallace’s
insights were cloudy. As his fears about Truman’s policies grew, so did his
vulnerability to those who were urging him to run for the presidency on a third
party ticket.[30] He was tempted to embark on that unhappy course on several counts. Out
of government, he was removed from the councils of state to which he had often
contributed and from which he had often also learned. He was removed, too, from
easy access to the kinds of experts who had given him such influential
assistance in earlier years, for one example in the making of agricultural
policies. He had to rely instead more on his intuitions and hopes than on hard
data and salient technical knowledge. Further, those who now advised him lacked
the experience and judgment of his former counselors. Many of the men in the
group around him were naive; some were eager to use him to advance their own
interests; none had much political insight. Yet their pressure moved Wallace less than did his own temperament.
Believing that Truman was leading the country and the world toward war,
committed to a contrary view of the new century, Wallace disregarded the
warnings of his family and old friends and followed his own compulsion to stand
political witness to his faith.
In his eagerness to find a rapprochement
with the Soviet Union, he blinded himself to the mounting evidence of Russian
tyranny in eastern Europe. In his determination to resist redbaiting, he became
indifferent to the debilitating tactics of communists within his Progressive
Party of 1948. For several years, his passion overcame his practicality.
Even so, he remained perceptive. Long an
advocate of American assistance in the rebuilding of the European economy, he
urged employing international agencies to administer aid programs and granting
aid exclusively on social and economic rather than political bases. Those
considerations led him to underestimate the responsibility of the Soviet Union
for keeping eastern Europe out of the Marshall Plan. Earlier, however, he had
protested against the Truman Doctrine and its applications in Greece and
Turkey. As Wallace then said, that doctrine ignored and weakened the United
Nations, substituted unilateral for multilateral aid, and gave military
assistance unfortunate priority over economic assistance. Worse, the
anticommunist rhetoric of the doctrine expressed a universal commitment to
antirevolutionary interventions. As Wallace foresaw, both the precedent and the
rhetoric had ominous portents.
Indeed Wallace’s fundamental
trepidations about American policy, all of them prominent before he left
office, had become by the early 1970s common criticisms of the history of the
interceding years. The collusion of the military with those industrial
interests that depended upon defense expenditures had resulted in enormous
waste and bureaucratic inefficiency. The military-industrial establishment
against which Dwight D. Kisenhower warned his countrymen in 1961 had worried
Wallace two decades earlier. Indeed the military, as Americans learned by 1970,
had proved unable to maintain the standards of financial probity and
disciplined warfare on which professional soldiers liked to pride themselves.
Unilateral military intervention, as Wallace had feared, had become something
of a national habit, with the war in Vietnam only the most recent and most
dreadful example of the corrupting dangers of American adventurism. Too, war
and preparation for war, deterrence and its cost, balance-of-power politics
with their related expenditures – even bribes – for the purchase of allies, had
debilitated the UN and absorbed national income needed for domestic social
programs, the very programs Wallace had urged for relief of poverty,
conservation of the land and its resources, education of the young, the
delivery of health care, and the protection of the aged. The inversion of
national priorities, attacked in 1968 by Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy and
in 1972 by George McGovern, had drawn Wallace’s criticisms in 1942.
In other ways also Wallace proved
prescient, a man far ahead of times, as he had so often been. After the
revolution in Cuba, Washington recognized Latin America again as a continent
full of people, not just a reservation for private investment and seductive
military aid. The Alliance for Progress that John F. Kennedy launched in 1961
had as its social targets precisely those of the Board of Economic Warfare.
Even Richard Nixon discovered what Wallace had always maintained, that
communist ideology did not constitute an insuperable hurdle to communication.
In 1971 Nixon went to China, which he had condemned as demoniacal for more than
two decades, and in 1972 to Moscow, there to suggest that the encouragement of
commerce between the Soviet Union and the United States would benefit both nations
and ease their political relationship. For saying such things Wallace had been
called a red or at least a pink from 1946 through 1948, as were others of his
opinion, with Nixon one of their most fervent accusers.
The irony of history should have restored
Wallace’s reputation, but in the early 1970s he was still remembered more for
his occasional fallibility than for his extraordinary foresight. Three decades
earlier he had imagined a splendid century which still had yet convincingly to
begin. He would have welcomed a century of the common man, as he welcomed the
New Deal, whenever it began. He would have lost none of his verve for
administering the agencies to promote it, shed none of his worries about the
persisting impediments to it, surrendered none of his zeal for opposing the
enemies of it. While he found armor for his missions in his faith, while he
preached his best hopes, Henry A. Wallace sought their fulfillment less in his
message than in the hard labor of learning and doing. By his works, he
believed, practical Christian that he was, men would know him.
In his works they would find a good man.
(*) Edited and with an introduction by
John Morton Blum, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company 1973
[1]
Quoted
in Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: The
Agrarian Years, 1910-1940 (Ames, 1968), p. 15. For the period it covers,
the Schapsmeiers’ thorough work has been continually an important source for
this introduction. Also useful for that period were Russell Lord, The
Wallaces of Iowa (Boston, 1947) and Mordecai Ezekiel, “Henry A. Wallace,
Agricultural Economist,” Journal of Farm Economics, Vol. 48, No. 4, Part
I, November 1966, pp. 789-802.
[2]
Henry A.
Wallace, “The Department as I Have Known It,” Ms., Wallace Papers in the
possession of his family.
[3]
Quoted
in Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, Wallace: Agrarian Fears, p. 19.
[4]
Ezekiel,
“Wallace.”
[5]
Wallace,
“The Department as I Have Known It.”
[6]
For a
somewhat contrary but informed and incisive view of the questions covered in
this section of the introduction, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming
of the New Deal (Boston, 1959), pp. 28-34.
[7]
Wallace
Diary, February 22, 1940.
[8]
Henry A.
Wallace, Soviet Asia Mission (New York, 1945), p. 21.
[9]
Ezekiel,
“Wallace.”
[10]
The best
account of the agricultural policies of the early New Deal, an account on which
I have relied heavily, is in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, Ch. 1.
Also helpful and sometimes of a contrasting interpretation were the works of
the Schapsmeiers and of Ezekiel, cited above.
[11]
Quoted
in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 63.
[12]
Wallace
Diary, January 26, 1935.
[13]
Wallace
Diary, February 3, 1935.
[14]
Wallace,
“The Department as I Have Known It.”
[15]
Wallace
Diary, May 22, 1940; see also January 2, 1940, on hemispheric policy.
[16]
Wallace
Diary, January 18, 1940.
[17]
Wallace
Diary, May 24, 1940.
[18]
Ibid.
[19]
Wallace
Diary, June 27, 1940.
[20]
Edward
L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and
the War Years, 1940-65 (Ames, 1970), p. 9.
[21] Ezekiel, “Wallace.”
[22]
Wallace
Diary, June 6, 1940.
[23]
Quoted
in Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, Prophet in Politics, p. 45.
[24]Compare the Wallace Diary
with the analysis of public opinion in Jerome S. Bruner, Mandate from the
People (New York, 1944) and the analysis of congressional roll calls in
Roland Young, Congressional Politics in the Second World War (New York,
1956); see also Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States
1948-1965 (Philadelphia, 1972).
[25] See Bruce Catton, The
War Lords of Washington (New York, 1948), chap. 10ff.
[26]
Oral
History, Henry A. Wallace, pp. 4566-4570, Oral History Project, Columbia
University.
[27] Ibid. and Bruner, Mandate
from the People.
[28] The entire discussion in
this section of the introduction rests primarily upon Wallace’s Diary and Harry
S. Truman, Year of Decisions (Garden City, 1955). On questions of
military and foreign policies, I found particularly stimulating Walter La
Feber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966 (New York, 1967).
Also useful was Thomas G. Patterson, ed., Cold War Critics (Chicago,
1971). For another informed but doctrinaire interpretation, see Norman D.
Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and
American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York, 1973).
[29] On that attitude in the
early postwar period, see H. Stuart Hughes, “The Second Year of the Cold War,”
Commentary, August 1969, pp. 27-32.
[30] Wallace kept no diary
after he left office. Further, there. is no wholly satisfactory study of his
role during the years 1946-48 or of the Progressive Party, for his papers for
that period have not been available. One useful brief account and another
compendious one are respectively Karl M. Schmidt, Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic
Crusade 1948 (Syracuse, 1960) and Curtis D. MacDougall, Gideon’s Army,
3 vols. (New York, 1965). The sympathies of the latter imbue Markowitz, The
Rise and Fall of the People’s Century.