Henry A. Wallace

Encyclopedia : H : HE : HEN : Henry A. Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the 33rd Vice President of the United States (1941–45), the 11th Secretary of Agriculture (1933–40), and the 10th Secretary of Commerce (1945–46). In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.

Contents

1 Early life
2 Vice Presidency
3 Later career
4 References

4.1 Secondary sources
4.2 Primary sources

4.2.1 Wallace's books

5 External links

Early life

Wallace was born on a farm near Orient, Adair County, Iowa, and graduated from Iowa State College at Ames in 1910, where he was a brother of Delta Tau Delta. He worked on the editorial staff of Wallace's Farmer in Des Moines, Iowa from 1910 to 1924 and edited the publication from 1924 to 1929. He experimented with breeding high-yielding strains of corn (maize), and authored many publications on agriculture. In 1915 he devised the first corn-hog ratio charts indicating the probable course of markets. The company he founded during this time, now known as Pioneer Hi-Bred, is among the most profitable agriculture corporations in the United States today.

In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Wallace United States Secretary of Agriculture in his Cabinet. (Wallace's father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, had served as Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1924.) Wallace had been a liberal Republican, but he supported Roosevelt's New Deal and soon switched to the Democratic Party. Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture until September 1940, when he resigned, having been nominated for Vice President as Roosevelt's running mate in the 1940 presidential election.

Vice Presidency

Wallace was elected in November 1940 as Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His inauguration took place on January 20, 1941, for the term ending January 20 1945.

Pulitzer Prize winner Ray Prigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette discovered that Wallace was consulting an Indian Guru, and was spending federal monies to look for a secret "cave of Kung-Fu" in Northern China. However the newspaper (which endorsed Republican candidate Wendell Willkie) decided not to publish the story at the time; it was published years later.

Roosevelt named Wallace chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) in 1941. Both positions became important with the U.S. entry into World War II. As he began to flex his new-found political muscle in his position with SPAB, Wallace came up against the conservative wing of the Democratic party in the form of Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce. The two differed on how to handle wartime supplies.

On May 8, 1942, Wallace delivered his most famous speech, which became known by the phrase "Century of the Common Man", to the Free World Association in New York City. This speech, grounded in Christian references, laid out a positive vision for the war beyond the simple defeat of the Nazis. The speech, and the book of the same name which appeared the following year, proved quite popular, but it earned him enemies among the Democratic leadership, among important allied leaders like Winston Churchill, and among business leaders and conservatives.

Wallace spoke out during race riots in Detroit in 1943, declaring that the nation could not "fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home".

In 1943, Wallace made a goodwill tour of Latin America, shoring up support among important allies. His trip proved a success and helped persuade 12 Latin American countries to declare war on Germany.

Wallace was far ahead of his time in trade relationships with Latin America. He convinced the BEW to add "labor clauses" to contracts with Latin American producers. These clauses required producers to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for their employees and committed the United States to paying for up to half of the required improvements. This met opposition from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

In 1944, as FDR's health began to fail, there was a growing likelihood that Wallace, as his running-mate in the upcoming presidential election, would succeed him. There were serious concerns over Wallace's far left beliefs and moderate position regarding Joseph Stalin. Wallace, if he became President, intended to appoint at the State and Treasury Departments respectively Laurence Duggan and Harry Dexter White. The Democratic Party dropped Wallace from its ticket in 1944 and after considering James F. Byrnes and Henry F. Schricker, FDR substituted a surprised Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman as the new Vice Presidential candiate for 1944.

Later career

Roosevelt placated Wallace by appointing him Secretary of Commerce. Wallace served in this post from March 1945 to September 1946, when he was fired by Harry S. Truman, who had become president upon Roosevelt's death, and who regarded Wallace as too supportive of the Soviet Union.

Following his term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace became the editor of The New Republic magazine, using his position to criticize vociferously Truman's hawkish foreign policy. On the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, he predicted it would mark the beginning of "a century of fear". He left his editorship position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. His platform advocated an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American South, and during the campaign he refused to appear before segregated audiences or eat/stay in segregated establishments.

In 1952 Wallace published Where I Was Wrong, in which he explained that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin's excesses and that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist.

Wallace resumed his farming interests, and resided in South Salem, New York. During his later years he made a number of advances in the field of agricultural science. His many accomplishments included a breed of chicken that at one point accounted for the overwhelming majority of all egg-laying chickens sold across the globe. He died in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965. His remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa.

Wallace for many years had been closely associated with a religious Eastern mystic whom he called Guru. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. explains, "Wallace's search for inner light took him to strange prophets.... It was in this search that he encountered Nicholas Roerich, a Russian emigre, painter, theosophist and con man. Wallace did Roerich a number of favors, including sending him on an expedition to Central Asia presumably to collect drought-resistant grasses. In due course, H.A. [Wallace] became disillusioned with Roerich and turned almost viciously against him." [link]

Wallace famously said, "The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information." [link]

References

Secondary sources

"The Prince of Wallace's: Chickens, Communists and Henry Wallace," Times Literary Supplement, 24 November, 2000.
Culver, John C. and John Hyde. American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (2002)
[Markowitz, Norman D. The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (1973)]
John Maze and Graham White, Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order. University of North Carolina Press. 1995
[Schapsmeier, Frederick H. Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: the Agrarian Years, 1910-1940 (1968)]
[Schapsmeier, Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier. Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years, 1940-1965 (1970)]
[Schmidt, Karl M. Henry A. Wallace, Quixotic Crusade 1948 (1960)]
[White, Graham, and John Maze. Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order (1995)]
[Walker, J. Samuel Walker. Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy (1976)]

Primary sources

Blum, John Morton, ed. The Price of Vision - The Diary of Henry A. Wallace 1942-1946 (1973)

Wallace's books

Agricultural Prices (1920)
New Frontiers (1934)
America Must Choose (1934)
Statesmanship and Religion (1934)
Technology, Corporations, and the General Welfare (1937)
The Century of the Common Man (1943)
Democracy Reborn (1944) [link]
Sixty Million Jobs (1945)
Toward World Peace (1948).

External links

[The Life of Henry A. Wallace: 1888-1965]
["The Century of the Common Man"] - the text of Wallace's 1942 speech.
[Henry A. Wallace Center for Agricultural & Environmental Policy]
[An Argument for a New Liberalism] by Peter Beinart, The New Republic, December 2 2004 - argues that Harry S. Truman's defeat of Wallace in 1948 helped make the Democrats an anti-totalitarian party and sees present-day Democrats as "Wallacite", a term it coins to mean soft on totalitarianism and external threats.

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United States Secretaries of Commerce

United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor>Secretaries of Commerce & Labor (1903–1913): Cortelyou | Metcalf | Straus | Nagel

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