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May 2000

American Dreamer By John C. Culver Norton Click on the title to buy the book

This is a mighty big (600 page) first- rate biography, written with fervor but told in the calm of long-ago history (Wallace died nearly 35 years ago) about one of the most intriguing almost-but-not-quite characters in America's twentieth century.

Who was Henry Agard Wallace? Son of a Republican secretary of agriculture, he was an Iowa hybrid corn breeder (who made lots of money from that pursuit) who was tapped, as a Democrat, by Franklin D. Roosevelt to be his first and only agriculture secretary. He was the one who plowed under 10 million acres of growing cotton and slaughtered six million little pigs in a desperate effort to bring farmers out of the depth of the Great Depression. If that were all, we would not have this book. But when FDR decided in 1940 to run for an unprecedented third term, and Vice President John N. "Cactus Jack" Garner would have none of it, the president finally picked Wallace to be his number two.

I still remember the day he became vice president because I covered that event for the now long-dead Washington Daily News. Wallace was late getting to the Capitol, FDR was waiting, the band kept playing. I followed Wallace as he ran up the circular staircase near the Senate wing to reach the inaugural stand on the west front, crying out as he reached the top: "Where is the vice president supposed to go?" Nobody seemed to know, and few cared. Only FDR mattered.

Authors Culver, a former Iowa congressman and senator, and Hyde, a former Des Moines Register reporter, embarked on this love-of-their-lives project a dozen years ago. They have combed the archives, included Wallace's nearly 5,000-page oral history, and put the results in order and in perspective to produce a highly readable and sympathetic biography, but without sparing Wallace's many faults. The low point was his disastrous 1948 presidential candidacy, to which I will return---for therein lies my criticism.

In The Cornfields

The tale begins with agriculture. For Wallace, beginning in high school: "corn became his passion, his cause, the medium of his genius. He knew corn as well as he knew people ... " By 1932, when FDR was first nominated, Wallace was well known. Through Rexford Guy Tugwell (who would be his undersecretary) he met the newly nominated candidate at Hyde Park. It was an instant success. Wallace saw FDR as a man "with a fresh, eager, open mind, ready to pitch into the agricultural problem at once ..." At 44, Wallace became the youngest member of the Cabinet.

The Agriculture Department was bedeviled by internal feuds and fights, even a purge, and in 1936 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the New Deal's first effort to save the farmers. The authors never really explain how the department came to be home to so many young communists, including Alger Hiss, John Abt, and Lee Pressman.

Wallace made good copy for the newspapers as "a ferociously competitive [and ambidextrous] tennis player without a trace of style or grace." He threw boomerangs on the Mall, beaning a photographer. With his family he lived in a Wardman Park Hotel apartment, hiking the three miles to work. And he made the cover of Time magazine in 1938 with a flattering Grant Wood portrait now on the cover of this book. He was among those mentioned as possible successors to FDR.

There was, however, an aspect of Wallace not generally known. He long had been a mystic. His intellectual curiosity led Wallace to explore "esoteric phenomena" such as seances, symbols, rituals, astrology. By 1933 Wallace's search for "inner light" led him to a guru named Nicholas Konstantinovitch Roerich, a fellow talented at "separating wealthy Americans from their money." He didn't get Wallace's money but the relationship became an albatross, with Wallace's "guru letters," written often at fever pitch, always seemingly on the point of exploding in public. They finally did in 1948.

The key to Wallace's selection in 1940 as FDR's vice presidential candidate was Roosevelt's feeling that Wallace "thinks right" and has "the general ideas we have." So FDR told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that "I have decided on Wallace" and she passed word to Harry Hopkins, his emissary at the Chicago Convention. The authors of American Dreamer explain the choice better than I have seen it done before.

When FDR praised Wallace to his political expert, James A. Farley, Farley said many people considered Wallace a mystic. FDR snapped back: "He's not a mystic. He's a philosopher. He's got ideas. He thinks right. He'll help the people think." So Farley recorded it, and he had a fabulous memory. But the party bosses gathered in convention wanted someone, anyone, other than Wallace and it took the calming words of Eleanor Roosevelt to shame the convention into voting for Wallace. One must remember, looking at this political history that at this moment Europe was aflame in World War II as Hitler vanquished the continental democracies.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette threatened to make the guru letters public. But the story never appeared, perhaps because the Democrats let it be known that they knew FDR's opponent, Wendell Willkie, had as his mistress Irita VanDoren, the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune. There is a tape of FDR chuckling at the prospect of its use. As Wallace commented, that campaign "was exceedingly dirty."

As vice president, Wallace inherited a position his predecessor, Jack Garner, has called "not worth a barrel of warm piss." (The line is generally cleaned up as "warm spit" but I was assured long ago of the true original.) Wallace found time on his hands---and few friends, for this teetotaler offered no drinks in the vice president's office.

After five months FDR named Wallace chairman of the new Economic Defense Board and soon he was "heavily engaged in winning a war" which the U.S. had yet to enter. With Pearl Harbor, all that changed. Wallace early on had been among a group of five that FDR had picked to secretly advise him on atomic policy and the "secret of the bomb colored much of his thinking about postwar planning and security arrangements."

The authors tell us that if there was any one day that represented "the zenith" of Wallace's "influence and authority as a public official" it "would be January 15, 1942." By then Wallace had become "a figure in his own right" both within the war mobilization machinery and as a public advocate for the war effort. But on that day FDR shifted gears, putting Donald Nelson in charge of war production.

Wallace finally realized that he was not the only one with a friendly relationship with FDR and "slowly there would build in Wallace a Œsense of distrust' toward the president." Wallace's battle with the wily Texan, Jesse Jones, and his ally, Texas Rep. Martin Dies, produced charges of communists in Wallace's part of the bureaucracy.

Roosevelt cheerfully agreed that Wallace could speak out about the possible shape of the post-war world. So Wallace kept to the high road with his "Century of the Common Man" speech, widely contrasted with Henry Luce's declaration of the "American Century." In short, Wallace became the hero-spokesman of the liberal-left. Too far left, for many, in fact. Churchill resented his anti-colonialism and "Conservative elements of the Catholic Church objected to his revolutionary rhetoric," the authors say.

American communists, lackeys of the Kremlin, liked what Wallace said because he upheld the alliance with the Soviet Union and condemned American criticism of that war-time ally. He confessed, years later, that "I distrusted Britain---Tory Britain---as much as I did Russia." Publicly, Wallace declared that "in case we double-cross Russia," war with the Soviet Union "will be probable ..." To Jesse Jones, Wallace was simply "a crackpot, a misty-eyed dreamer, a messianic do-gooder ..."

All this culminated in the 1944 drive to force him out of the vice-presidency; worries about FDR's health accentuated that urgency for many party leaders. Wallace was no match for the likes of Bob Hannegan, who became the champion of Harry Truman. The story of this switch has long been known. But reading the Culver-Hyde account impresses one about FDR's negligence---or maybe just his Machiavellian instincts---in this crucial switch. The authors flatly state that FDR "joined the conspiracy" to dump Wallace. The authors don't speculate about Wallace as FDR's successor but it would have been traumatic. My guess is that a President Wallace would have been impeached, after the fashion of Andrew Johnson, not Bill Clinton.

So Wallace, now commerce secretary, watched with alarm as Truman followed FDR's first moves into the Cold War era; he felt the Greek-Turkish aid and the Truman doctrine could only lead to war with the Soviet Union. The newly formed American for Democratic Action (ADA) brought most liberal leaders together, but Wallace was not invited. Labor leader Walter Reuther, who knew from experience the nature and practice of American communists, called it "tragic that he is being used by the Communists the way they have used so many other people."

Culver and Hyde declare that "certainly Wallace gave no thought to Communist Party wishes in deciding to run" for president in 1948 on the Progressive ticket. But the "Wallace movement," as columnist Stewart Alsop wrote, was "exposed for what it is: an instrument of Soviet foreign policy ..." All the revelations of the decades since then only add to that conclusion, but Culver and Hyde seem most reluctant to say so, once and for all. A lengthy footnote, for example, on Harry Dexter White, Laurence Dugan and Lauchlin Currie is employed to absolve Wallace of reports that he had thought of White and Dugan as potential Cabinet members.

One true puzzle is the motivation of C.B. "Beanie" Baldwin, Wallace's long-time friend and '48 campaign manager. Baldwin's convictions are truly shown to be far left, but whether he was a C.P. member is not resolved here. Baldwin finally broke with Wallace when North Korea invaded the South: Wallace backed Truman, Baldwin and the rest of the Progressive structure opposed American intervention. As a result, Wallace quit the party.

Wallace, in the amazing '48 election, received only 2.38 percent of the votes nationally, trailing third-place Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (yes, young people, the same Strom Thurmond). Wallace never returned to Iowa (his home state gave him about one percent of its vote). He showed little of his hurt, bought a farm in New York state where he thrived until age 77, when he was struck down by Lou Gehrig's disease.

The authors conclude with Hubert Humphrey's tribute that "above all he was a good man." Yes, but too naive for a politician and would-be president.