Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the
33rd Vice President of the United States (1941–1945), the
Secretary of Agriculture (1933–1940), and the
Secretary of Commerce (1945–1946). In
the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the
Progressive Party.
Henry A. Wallace, son of
Henry Cantwell Wallace, a farmer, journalist, and political activist, was born on October 7, 1888, at a farm near the village of
Orient, Iowa, in
Adair County.
[1] Wallace attended
Iowa State College at
Ames, Iowa. At Iowa State he became a friend of
George Washington Carver, and they spent time together collecting botanical specimens. Wallace graduated in 1910 with a
bachelor's degree in animal husbandry. He worked on the editorial staff of the family-owned paper
Wallaces' Farmer in
Des Moines from 1910 to 1924, and he edited this publication from 1924 to 1929. Wallace experimented with breeding high-yielding
hybrid corn, and he wrote a good number of publications on agriculture. In 1915, he devised the first corn-
hog ratio charts indicating the probable course of markets. Wallace was also a self-taught "practicing
statistician",
[2] co-authoring an influential article with
George W. Snedecor on computational methods for
correlations and
regressions[3] and publishing sophisticated statistical studies in the pages of
Wallaces’ Farmer. Snedecor eventually invited Wallace to teach a graduate course on
least squares.
[4]
With an inheritance of a few thousand dollars that had been left to his wife, the former
Ilo Browne, whom he married in 1914, Wallace founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company in 1926, which later became
Pioneer Hi-Bred, a major agriculture corporation, acquired in 1999 by the
Dupont Corporation for approximately $10 billion.
Wallace was raised as a
Presbyterian, but left that denomination early in life. He spent most of his early life exploring other religious faiths and traditions. For many years, he had been closely associated with famous Russian artist and writer
Nicholas Roerich. According to
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "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. 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."
[5] Wallace eventually settled on
Episcopalianism.
Henry Wallace was also a
Freemason and attained the 32nd Degree in the
Scottish Rite.
Secretary of Agriculture
In 1933,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Wallace
United States Secretary of Agriculture in his
Cabinet, a post his father,
Henry Cantwell Wallace, had occupied from 1921 to 1924. Henry A. 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. During his tenure as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture he ordered a very unpopular strategy of slaughtering pigs and plowing up cotton fields in rural America to drive the price of these commodities back up in order to improve American farmers' financial situation. He also advocated the
ever-normal granary concept.
Vice President
Wallace was elected in November 1940 as Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket with President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. His inauguration took place on January 20, 1941, for the term ending January 20, 1945.
Roosevelt named Wallace chairman of the
Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and of the
Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) in 1941. Both positions became important with the U.S. entry into
World War II. As he began to flex his newfound political muscle in his position with SPAB, Wallace came up against the conservative wing of the Democratic party in the form of
Jesse H. Jones,
Secretary of Commerce, as 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 twelve countries to declare war on
Germany. Regarding trade relationships with Latin America, he convinced the BEW to add "labor clauses" to contracts with Latin American producers. These clauses required producers to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for their employees and committed the United States to paying for up to half of the required improvements. This met opposition from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Wallace believed that both the American and the Russian revolution were part of "the march to freedom of the past 150 years." After having met
Molotov, he arranged a trip to the "Wild East" of Russia. On May 23, 1944, he started a 25-day journey accompanied by
Owen Lattimore. Coming from Alaska, they landed at
Magadan where they were received by
Sergei Goglidze and
Dalstroi director
Ivan Nikishov, both
NKVD generals. The NKVD presented a
fully sanitized version of the
slave labor camps in Magadan and
Kolyma to their American guests, convinced them that all the work was done by volunteers, charmed them with entertainment, and left their guests impressed with the "development" of Siberia and the spirit of the "volunteers." Lattimore's film of the visit tells that "a village... in Siberia is a forum for open discussion like a town meeting in New England."
[6] The trip continued to Mongolia and then to China.
After Wallace feuded publicly with Jesse Jones and other high officials, Roosevelt stripped him of his war agency responsibilities and entertained the idea of replacing him on the presidential ticket. The Democratic Party, with concern being expressed privately about Roosevelt being able to make it through another term,
chose Harry S. Truman as Roosevelt's running mate at the
1944 Democratic convention, after New Deal partisans failed to promote
William O. Douglas. Wallace was succeeded as Vice President on January 20, 1945, by Truman. On April 12, 1945, Vice President Truman succeeded to the Presidency when President
Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Henry A. Wallace had missed being the 33rd President of the United States by just 82 days.
Roerich controversy
From the middle 1920s, Wallace was a devoted supporter of
Nicholas Roerich, a philosopher and Russian emigre.
[7] With agreement from Roosevelt, Wallace had lobbied Congress to support Roerich's
Banner and Pact of Peace which was signed in Washington, D.C. in 1935 by delegates from 22 Latin American countries. Roerich and his son George were sent to Central Asia by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to search for drought-resistant grasses to prevent another
Dust Bowl.
During the
1940 presidential election, a series of letters that Wallace had written in the 1930s to Roerich was in the possession of the Republicans. In the letters, Wallace addressed Roerich as "Dear
Guru", and signed the letters as "G" for
Galahad, the name Roerich had assigned him. Wallace assured Roerich that he awaited "the breaking of the New Day" when the people of "Northern
Shambhalla" — a Buddhist term roughly equivalent to the kingdom of heaven – would create an era of peace and plenty.
With the Republicans planning to reveal the "eccentric" religious beliefs of Wallace to the public prior to the November 1940 elections, the Democrats countered by threatening to release information about Republican candidate
Wendell Willkie's rumored
extramarital affair with the writer
Irita Van Doren.
[5][8] The Republicans did not publicize the "Guru" letters, and Roosevelt and Wallace won the election, overwhelmingly.
In the winter of 1947, independent columnist
Westbrook Pegler published extracts from the letters. Pegler characterized Wallace as a "messianic fumbler," and "off-center mentally." There was a personal confrontation between the two men on the subject at a public meeting in Philadelphia in July 1948. Several reporters, including
H.L. Mencken, joined in the increasingly aggressive questioning. Wallace declined to comment on the letters, while labeling some of the reporters "stooges" for Pegler.
[9]
Secretary of Commerce
Roosevelt placated Wallace by appointing him
Secretary of Commerce. Wallace served in this post from March 1945 to September 1946, when he was fired by President Harry S. Truman because of disagreements about the policy towards the
Soviet Union. He is the last former Vice President to serve in the President's cabinet.
The New Republic
Following his term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace became the
editor of
The New Republic magazine, using his position to criticize vociferously Truman's foreign policy. On the declaration of the
Truman Doctrine in 1947, he predicted it would mark the beginning of "a century of fear".
The 1948 Presidential election
Wallace left his editorship position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a
Progressive Party candidate in the
1948 U.S. presidential election. With
Idaho Democratic
U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor as his running mate, his platform advocated friendly relations with the Soviet Union, an end to the nascent
Cold War, 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 that during the campaign he refused to appear before segregated audiences or eat or stay in segregated establishments.
As a further sign of the times, he was noted by
Time as ostentatiously riding through various cities and towns in the South "with his Negro secretary beside him".
[10] Many eggs and tomatoes were hurled at and struck him and his campaign members during the tour, while at the same time President Truman referred to such behavior towards Wallace as very un-American. Wallace commented that "there is a long chain that links unknown young hoodlums in North Carolina or Alabama with men in finely tailored business suits in the great financial centers of New York or Boston, men who make a dollars-&-cents profit by setting race against race in the far away South."
[10] State authorities in Virginia sidestepped enforcing its own segregation laws by declaring Wallace's campaign gatherings as private parties.
[11]
Wallace's campaign to advance progressive causes inspired several activists and organizations. One short-lived effort was an attempt by
Harry Hay, an active Communist teacher in Southern California, to create an organization of homosexuals, to be called Bachelors for Wallace, which would lobby for the inclusion in Wallace's platform of a call for the reform of sodomy and other laws that were the basis of widespread anti-gay discrimination and persecution. Hay was unsuccessful in his efforts to find other homosexual men willing to join such a risky venture, and the idea was never realized. Two years later, however, Hay and other leftists successfully founded the
Mattachine Society, now recognized as the first significant grassroots organization for
LGBT rights in the United States.
[12] Wallace had not made any official statements in support of gay rights and it is unclear how much support this group gave to the campaign. Yet, in the tenor of the times, such an organization would have been highly controversial. The fact that group generated almost no notice by the press or even the campaign itself, may be because of other controversies facing the campaign.
The "Dear Guru" letters reappeared now and were published, seriously hampering his campaign.
[5] Even more damage was done to Wallace's campaign when several prominent journalists, including
H.L. Mencken and
Dorothy Thompson, publicly charged that Wallace and the Progressives were under the covert control of Communists. Wallace was endorsed by the
Communist Party (USA), and his subsequent refusal to publicly disavow any Communist support cost him the backing of many anti-Communist liberals and socialists, such as
Norman Thomas.
Christopher Andrew, a
University of Cambridge historian working with evidence in the famed
Mitrokhin Archive, has stated publicly
[13] that he believed Wallace was a confirmed KGB agent, though evidence for this was never produced.
Wallace suffered a decisive defeat in the election to the Democratic incumbent
Harry S. Truman. He finished in fourth place with 2.4% of the popular vote.
Dixiecrat presidential candidate
Strom Thurmond outstripped Wallace in the popular vote. Thurmond managed to carry several states in the Deep South, gaining 39 electoral votes to Wallace's electoral total of zero.
Later career
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. The
Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the largest agricultural research complex in the world, is named for him.
In 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, Wallace broke with the Progressives and backed the U.S.-led war effort in the
Korean War.
[5] In 1952, Wallace published
Where I Was Wrong, in which he explained that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and
Joseph Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin's crimes and that he, too, now considered himself an
anti-Communist. He wrote various letters to "people who he thought had traduced (maligned) him" and advocated the re-election of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.
[5]
In 1961, President-elect
John F. Kennedy invited him to his inauguration ceremony, though he had supported Kennedy's opponent
Richard Nixon. A touched Wallace wrote to Kennedy: "At no time in our history have so many tens of millions of people been so completely enthusiastic about an Inaugural Address as about yours."
[5]
Wallace first experienced the onsets of
Lou Gehrig's disease on one of his frequent trips to South America in 1964.
[14] He died in
Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965.
[5][15] His remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in
Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery,
Des Moines, Iowa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace
