#1581 Henry Wallace and the World That Might Have Been
2024-01-08 00:58:12
Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.
Hello everyone, it's Clay Jenkinson. This podcast introduction to today's program. It's on Henry Wallace. You probably don't really know that name.
He was one of the four candidates for the presidency in 1948.
That's when Truman defeated Dewey for the presidency. Truman was being elected in his own right. Although the whole country, including everybody around him and his wife, too. Bess, thought that Truman could not win that election, but he did. And, of course, you've all seen the famous photograph Dewey defeats Truman, and Truman grinning about as widely as it's possible to grin.
Jeremy Gill is somebody I met many years ago in Kansas. He lives out in a part of the world that I have a special fondness for, Western Kansas. He's at Hayes, which is a hundred and some miles away from where my daughter grew up, in Wallace County, Kansas. I've been to Hayes and Fort Hayes State a number of times. And you go through it all the time. When you're leaving western Kansas for Topeka or Wichita or Kansas City, I want to really recommend these two books. Dewey Defeats Truman, The 1948 Election and The Battle for America's Soul, by A...J.
Boehm. I'm going to try to get him on the program. He also wrote The accidental President, Harry S. Truman and the four months that changed the world. That's the one I particularly recommend.
And I came at it via J. Robert Oppenheimer, and what makes Henry Wallace interesting is that he agreed with Oppenheimer that our only chance after Nagasaki was to share atomic secrets with the Soviets. With everybody, to try to forge levels of cooperation and trust. And that if we didn't do that, a Cold War could be not only calamitous, but it could lead to the end of the world. In other words, it might not be our happiest choice to befriend the Soviet Union and to share our secrets with the Russians.
But if we didn't, the world could end. And Henry Wallace seems to have held something like the same view, so I find that all fascinating. And Wallace had been assigned by FDR to have some oversight on the Manhattan Project. Whereas when Harry Truman became president, on the afternoon of April 12, 1945, he heard about the Manhattan project for the first time.
He knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the coming of atomic devices. So it's a story filled with irony and loss, I think, and a fascinating character. You know, there are many fascinating people who never became the president of the United States. You could do a book. I'm sure this has been done, in fact, on extraordinary people who should have been president.
Adlai Stevenson, for example, or Henry Clay, for that matter. People that should have been president of the United States and for whatever reason, never achieved that. So I recommend those books. It's an interesting conversation. I want to thank Jeremy Gill for contacting me.
If you have thoughts about programs we should do or subjects we should explore, please let me know. I'd be fascinated to hear from you. Take your suggestions seriously, and I'm expanding the program. I'm trying to reflect on America's 250-year experiment, beginning with the Declaration of independence.
I've got that era down pretty well, I have some weakness on the civil War, era and reconstruction. I've always felt that if you get too close to the Civil War, it's like a vortex. It will take you down into a black hole from which you will never emerge. And so I know something about that era, particularly about Lincoln.
But I've never been a civil war historian, and then I pick things up again with the Indian wars, the wars against Native Americans in the West. Then I become stronger when we talk about Theodore Roosevelt and all that followed. But there are whole gaps, giant holes in my understanding of this experiment, how we got here. And I'm trying to figure out what you have to understand in order to make sense of us at 250..
And one of those questions is our place in the world. Jefferson was an isolationist. Isolationism has been an important streak in American life from the very beginning. We're seeing it again now. One of the things that distinguishes Donald Trump is that he is effectively an isolationist. And wanted America to come home and stop involving itself in futile and unwinnable wars abroad.
Whether he was able to make the case for that very well or do much about it is another question. But that would be a question for any president in American history. So I'm fascinated with the isolationist streak in our history. We were sort of drawn into the world's arena in 1917, 1914 to 1918, the Great War, the United States was a latecomer. Wilson campaigned in 1916, saying He kept us out of war and would keep us out of war.
He didn't, of course, he had already planned to get us into the war. Between the wars, the United States returned to its isolationist sort of its fundamental mission, which was an isolationist one. But then FDR Slyly carried us into World War II and, of course, probably would have gotten us into it anyway. But the Japanese precipitated our participation on December 7th, 1945, and then there was an isolationist streak again after the war. And we're in one now.
So that's an important, you know, what is America's duty and role in the world's arena? is a really important question. And I think we're having a pretty incoherent national dialogue, a national conversation about this. At the present time, we should be thinking about it much more seriously, and particularly with the resurgence of the Russian empire under the direction of Vladimir Putin. But also China rising. So these things are going to be a huge challenge to the United States in the last 60 years, 70 years of the 21st century. So that's one thing I'm looking at.
Another issue is race, of course, and Henry Wallace was a true liberal on this question, far in advance of even Harry S. Truman, a believer in racial equality. And he. The other third party candidate standing in the 1948 election was Strom Thurmond. The Dixiecrat created the Dixiecrat Party to keep the national government from meddling with apartheid in the American South. You know, legal segregation he didn't do very well, but he started a trend in southern politics of finding ways to resist the two parties as they attempted agonizingly to integrate the country and end legal segregation.
That's another theme in American life. Native Americans are a huge theme for me, you know, I like to say that. When Columbus bumbled into the New World in 1492, it was all natives, all the way out, from the tip of Canada to the bottom of South America. This is a world that had been largely left alone by the rest of the world, undiscovered, at least according to their own idea of discovery. And suddenly Europe came, and the rest has been what might be called the Europeanization of the Western Hemisphere, an enormous cataclysmic loss for Indigenous people.
Now there's a resurgence of national conversation about the plight of Native Americans and their rights and their lands. And what happened and what can still happen and should happen. So that's a theme that I find fascinating and to get ready for my tour of the country in the wake of John Steinbeck. I want to read books on women in American history, on agriculture in American history, on race in American history, on an environmental history of the country, a labor history of the country, on the history of cities in America, the history of politics in America, the history of the Supreme Court in America, the history of the American Dream, the history of the Westward movement. I mean, on and on. This is my chance later in life to get a second big education.
I'm planning to take it very seriously. So anyway, this is a program with Jeremy Gill of Hayes, Kansas, about Henry Wallace, who was the vice president in the third term of Franklin. Delano. Roosevelt dropped for the fourth. But he stood independently as a presidential candidate, as a progressive in 1948. Let's go to the program.
Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkins. And today, Henry Wallace Henry Wallace, Vice President of the United States, candidate for the presidency, controversial figure from the new deal. I'm talking with Jeremy Gill. He's a library specialist at Hayes Public Library in Hayes, Kansas, also an adjunct professor at Fort Hayes State. Welcome.
Thank you Clay. I really appreciate you letting me be on the air.
Who is Henry Wallace in a nutshell?
Henry Wallace is a complete enigma of a politician. Henry Wallace is a scientist, a political thinker, a philosopher, and an overall just a fascinating character within our American political landscape. That really has not been rivaled by many other people.
So, give us his approximate dates.
Sure, so. Henry Wallace was actually born in 1888 in Adair County, Iowa. He was born to a kind of agricultural dynasty of a family, the Wallace's, in Iowa. What we're talking about today is Henry A. Wallace, or Henry Agar Wallace, who really took a huge influence from his grandfather. And kind of was embedded with this idea of, like, God and agriculture, or God and land.
He really, really took a huge influence from his grandfather in that regard. His father, Henry C. Wallace, was an editor of a magazine, a newspaper that kind of dealt with agricultural topics. He eventually became Wallace's farmer. He was called upon to serve as secretary of Agriculture under both Harding and Coolidge.
And his son kind of takes the helm, that's kind of the world that he kind.
Of grows up. So our Henry Wallace grew up in the Midwest, in an agricultural world. His father was a political figure who served in a couple of Republican administrations. What was our Henry Wallace's profession besides politics? Sure.
And I should back up here because Henry Wallace is.
Kind of known within the Democratic circle, and we'll probably get to that here shortly. But his family was a very prominent Midwestern Republican. But as something that we're both probably interested in. Clay is someone like Theodore Roosevelt, who was this more progressive wing of the Republican Party. And that's kind of where his family's wing was at. They were ardent supporters of Theodore Roosevelt.
They were ardent supporters of Gifford, Pinchot the U.
S Forest Secretary, and they were supporters of the Bold Moose Party as well. But Wallace himself? After he graduated from Iowa State University, he also followed in his father's footsteps and worked for him in the newspaper business. His first assignment was actually going all over the west and kind of exploring irrigation projects within the western half of the United States. Including my hometown of Burden City, where he stopped by to look at flood irrigation and ditch irrigation there.
He then is, he gets picked up then by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be the Secretary of Agriculture.
So, all right, 1888 comes from a progressive family, strong interest in the agrarian, family, interest in government. He then winds up being the vice president of the United States.
How he? First he's picked up by Franklin Roosevelt to be the Secretary of Agriculture, and then he serves that for two terms. And then he kind of reshapes that entire, that entire department with the Agriculture Adjustment Act. He then is selected by Roosevelt to be his running mate for his controversial third term. Which people didn't even know.
Within political circles of both parties, that was obviously completely unheard of to do that, and that he was even considering it. This actually comes on the heels of FDR's failed attempts to basically do a court packing scheme. So he had been kind of damaged politically already. Roosevelt's vice president was John Garner Nance of Texas, who was looking to either be president or step back from politics. Roosevelt kind of looked at different people within his party.
He was also looking for loyalty. Wallace kind of was a diehard Roosevelt supporter, he kind of hem-hawed about the third party run, but eventually kind of came out in support of it. Then, on the World War II, this kind of catapulted FDR into being able to run by third term and Roosevelt.
Chose Wallace. He is a running mate in his third term. FDR first becomes president in 1932, displacing the one-term president, Herbert Hoover. He stands for re-election in 1936..
He's resoundingly re-elected. Then he does something that has really never occurred previously in American history. He wins a third term as president in 1940. John Nance Garner, his vice president from Texas, famously said of the vice presidency. It's not worth a bucket of, he actually said, piss, but it has been usually changed to a bucket of spit. But he certainly realized that the vice presidency was a sort of a dead end.
So how did FDR come to choose Henry Wallace to be his VP in 1940?
There was several different candidates that were kind of up for consideration, there was much more liberal. And even Henry Wallace becomes further throughout his political career, becomes more and more progressive and liberal. But there was other candidates that were kind of being considered some other new deal-type people. But they thought that maybe Wallace could carry kind of more of that midwestern area that they kind of lacked. In some cases, this is also after they had resoundingly beat someone like Al Flandon from Kansas, the governor of Kansas governor.
But Wallace kind of was that touchstone of being able to tap into the American heartland and speak to an electorate that had a Roosevelt administration.
You know, I'm going to skip forward, I'll come back. But skip forward to 1948 when he stands for the presidency, and he's in a fairly large in 1948. There are a number of people who want to be the president of the United States, including, of course, Harry. S. Truman, who came in through the back door at the death of FDR on April 12, 1945 and became an accidental. President, wanted very much to be reelected in his own right and was famous. Truman defeats Dewey in 1948. By that time, Wallace was considered to be too far left, too radical, maybe even socialist in some circles, maybe even thought to be a communist sympathizer.
You said that he grew more progressive over the course of his life. Did FDR know in 1940 how radical a figure Wallace was?
I don't think so because FDR himself kind of stayed away from that a little bit. And I think Henry Wallace, Henry Wallace didn't do the same kind of politicking that FDR did. He was much more of a thinker. I think he thought very hard about what he believed in, and he came to those mobilizations later on.
But Wallace does this thing where, you know, he starts out kind of, you know, obviously in a Republican family, switches sides to the Democratic Party, but that's, I think, several years into FDR's administration, so you're still a Republican. So even Democrats within Roosevelt's rankings didn't particularly trust him because of that. But Wallace's viewpoint was he was a proponent of peace, an extreme proponent of peace.
And I think that's what led him to that more left-leaning side of the political spectrum, and what got him into trouble with Truman. And then in the post, and after he had left Truman's administration and then subsequently ran for office himself, is that he thought that you could warm up basically to the Soviet Union? Maybe you could play into more of a peaceful approach instead of this ramping up of the Cold War. He had visited the Far East, where a lot of historians think that he probably was a little led astray by the Soviet government. Showing them kind of the highlights of their country, maybe not so much the poor parts of their country as well. He was for the common man, whether that was in the United States or around the globe.
So I think that kind of pushed him into those realms of being seen more as a left-wing, progressive person in the political areas of Washington, D.
C I know, Clay, that you're interested in. J. Robert Oppenheimer This is also kind of a time when Oppenheimer is being called into question by his loyalties to the United States. And Henry Wallace also gets caught up deeply in that era of the first red Scare.
So then back to FDR. So John Nance Garner makes it clear he does not want to be the vice president. In 1940, Henry Wallace had been a very useful member of the new deal team, particularly distinguished himself in agricultural recovery. This was a time when the dust bowl had devastated much of the Great Plains, widespread poverty, lots of farms and ranches were literally ruined. And the new deal came in to try to stabilize American agriculture and to stabilize the grass.
So conservation was born at this time. This was a very important time for the U.S government to intervene in what was a man-made national and international environmental catastrophe, the dust Bowl. Henry Wallace performed admirably in all of that. A good soldier for the new deal. But now John Nance Garner is leaving.
FDR chooses him. They win in 1940, in spite of the fact that there was some concern about whether FDR should have a third term. But he manages to win that election. So now, Henry Wallace is the vice president of the United States by the time the 1944 election comes, where Roosevelt stands for an unprecedented fourth term. A couple of things, Jeremy.
One is, FDR was not well, in fact, FDR was dying. I don't suppose he would have put it that starkly, but we know historically that he was dying. Everybody had to know this, that the chances that he would live till 1948 were slender, and he might be incapacitated, even if he survived that long.
It would have been very easy for FDR, who had many other things on his mind. This is the end of the war. To just go with what. He had to stay with Wallace if FDR had died in office, as he did in April 1945. Whatever else is true, Wallace was an insider who would have known how to proceed. He was well versed in government, he knew the inner workings of Franklin Roosevelt's administration.
Why didn't FDR just leave that alone when he had so many more vital things to?
Think about in the fall of 1944.
So it wasn't actually totally up to FDR in making that decision, so FDR, like you said, was very ill at this time. He had a lot on his mind, probably knew that he was dying. He had always kind of had this understanding. That, due to his paralysis, that he could become incapacitated at any time in his political career, that he had been reborn, that he had gotten a second chance.
He wasn't sure what was going to happen, but of course he had fallen very ill. He had actually gotten very sick prior to this. And they didn't think that he was going to pull through, he kind of miraculously did pull through. But this time, it looked way more grim than it had ever before. In his political career, Roosevelt leaves to go overseas, and he tells his aides he says, Well, I just hope it's the old team again.
And what he means by the old team is he means the very few new dealers that are still in an office, like Francis Perkins, those types of new deal people. And so it kind of left Wallace feeling kind of in a weird state of, I don't know what's going to happen. The Democratic National Committee, and also Roosevelt insiders wanted to dump Wallace from the ticket. They thought he was way too much of a wild-eyed, wide-eyed kind of a radical, or just didn't fit in with the political establishment at the time.
So FDR did not play a significant role in this. You're saying he had other things on his mind, he didn't advocate for Wallace, but others in the Democratic Party, others in the administration.
Wanted Wallace to be dropped? Roosevelt would do this thing where he kind of played both sides of people, he would play people off of each other a little bit, too. And his response was, If I was the one voting at the Democratic National Convention, I would choose Wallace, and that was kind of left at that.
He had also privately talked about selecting William O. Douglas from the Supreme Court to be his running mate, as well as Harry S. Truman. Possibly from Missouri. It goes to the convention, and Wallace is basically not blindsided, but basically dumped from the ticket. Despite his popularity within the overall National Party, he was not as popular within the own rankings of the Democratic Party. But he was still fairly popular within the country.
Harry Truman is kind of seen as this consensus candidate that could take a helm during that convention.
And he is ultimately selected when we come back. I want to ask you more about the time when Wallace was the vice president for four years. What sort of a vice president he was. I'm talking about Jeremy Gill of Hayes, Kansas, we're talking about one of the most extraordinary political figures of the 20th century, now mostly forgotten Henry Wallace.
We'll be back in just a minute.
Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm talking with Jeremy Gill, whom I have met in Wildest Kansas. I have roots in Western Kansas. my daughter grew up in Sharon Springs. I want to ask you about Henry Wallace's time as vice president.
So, for four years between 1940 and 1944, some of the most momentous years in American history. He was the vice president of the United States. What sort of a vice president was he? Did he make enemies? did he have any role other than what most vice presidents did in those days, which was ceremonial?
Sure, so Henry Wallace kind of reshapes the vice presidency. Prior to this, like you said, his predecessor, John Nance, gave the very famous quote about what he thought about the vice presidency. And it might just been of a combination of one. Roosevelt was a very, you know, there was no government agency that he probably didn't think should be expanded.
He was a very large government kind of guy, so it might have been a combination of that as well as entering World War II. But Henry Wallace is given a lot more duties than has been previously assigned to other vice presidents. One of the ones that is probably the most significant and interesting is that he oversaw the Atomic Bomb Commission. Roosevelt didn't have very many scientists within his ranks.
And despite Henry Wallace being a plant breeder scientist, knew some animal husbandry and had a bachelor of science, he was basically the only connection to science within the political arena at that time. Under Roosevelt and the cabinet, FDR encouraged Wallace to take the lead in overseeing the Atomic Commission. And he shared a lot of the same views as many of the scientists who came to sort of regret or have this ambiguity over the atomic Commission. After it actually had detonated. Wallace said that he had felt like he was kind of almost disappointed that the thing went off, because he just knew how much it changed after that point. So yeah. During Wallace's tenure as vice president, he really oversees a lot more than most previous vice presidencies. And probably kind of set the stage for future vice presidents in their roles within federal government.
So let me stop you there, Jeremy Gill. I mean, it's so interesting. So Wallace understands the Manhattan project, he's overseeing parts of it. He knows that there's going to be an atomic bomb if the tests are successful.
He develops misgivings about it, as did many others, including, of course, J. Robert Oppenheimer. But when Harry S. Truman becomes the vice president in 1944, he does not know that. There's an emergency effort to build an atomic bomb before Adolf Hitler can get one, he learns of the existence of the atomic bomb project, the Manhattan Project, for the first time.
He had been a United States senator. Whereas the other vice president, who's been dropped by the Democratic Party in 1944, was fully aware of what was going on. And would have been probably in a much better position in the spring and summer of 1945. To understand what it meant and whether we should use it, and, if so, in what way. So it's a double irony, isn't it? It's one of those great historical conundrums. And I think I have to say, I want your opinion on this, Jeremy. I think FDR and the Democrats were fundamentally irresponsible in nominating for vice president at a time when it was clear that FDR was not going to survive a second term.
A person of limited political scope, and he suddenly has to go to Potsdam to sort out the post-war situation. He has to decide what to do about the atomic bomb and whether to detonate it. He's faced with the failure of FDR at Yalta to stand up to Stalin on the question of Eastern Europe. I think it's an incredibly strange and irresponsible thing for the Democratic Party and FDR to have done.
With them dropping Wallace on the ticket, I think it had. I think the Democratic National Convention got way more involved than the idea of what was best for probably the country. And the inner workings of a monumental shift in how the globe was going to be divvied up. I think there was a lot of people, probably within the Democratic National Convention, that, even though FDR clearly was sick, clearly probably wasn't going to make it. Through his fourth term, there was this belief that, well, he's been president for what 12 years, surely he'll pull through.
Surely this is the same old, same old? And I think that they made a huge miscalculation of understanding that this was not the same old, same old election. And the succession planning was very poor on their part. I mean, you could argue what a Wallace presidency would have been like. It probably would have been a lot different, especially with shaping the Cold War, possibly.
But, like you said, to throw a guy that knew absolutely nothing about the huge decision that he was going to have to make and throw that basically at him is kind of unheard of. I mean, I can't even imagine the feeling that you would have. They always say that Harry Truman just basically went home and ate a turkey sandwich and went to sleep. He probably had a, you know, possibly mental breakdown or a panic attack, like, wouldn't we all?
Like, Oh, good luck. Wallace at least would have understood the technology was being built. Whether he would have decided to drop it, I don't know. There's a lot of speculation of that. Historians probably believe that he probably would have still chosen to do it.
But maybe they would have gone about it differently with telling Japan, you know, obviously we have absolutely no idea if that would have happened or not. But yeah, to throw someone in that had no connection really to the administration. And not even just the atomic bomb. But just kind of knowing, probably where FDR stood on the inner workings of the world. And being at those conferences, it was probably kind of a weird, it was a weird misstep of, probably with the Democratic National Convention, to pick someone completely out of that realm.
But every president in my lifetime, especially since Jimmy Carter, has made a big deal about their vice president. This is not just going to be a ceremonial office. We're going to give them actual things to do, we're going to meet every week, they'll have a portfolio.
They'll be essential to the work of the administration, and that sometimes that's more effective and sometimes less. But today, the orthodoxy is the vice president should not just sit around and go to funerals. Back then it was the opposite, back then the vice president had very little to do and nobody really understood.
The founding fathers had kind of wrestled with, what should the vice president do except sit around? They finally gave that person the presiding role over the U.S Senate and to break ties in Senate votes, but that was it.
So the vice presidency, as we now understand it, is kind of an invention of the last 40 or 50 years in American political life. So we get it that they weren't thinking along the lines that we think along. And yet it does seem crazy that there was no advance planning for what comes after FDR should he not survive his fourth term, especially at a time of international crisis? I mean, this was maybe the most critical moment of the 20th century. And the United States was at this point the most critical player, along with the Soviet Union in the most critical moment of the 20th century.
First of all, I want to defend Harry Truman when he came in, he said to the reporters. Have you ever had a load of hay drop on your shoulders? Well, of course they hadn't. They're not Midwestern farm stock, but you get the point, it was like a cataclysm, like a ton of bricks being dropped on your shoulders.
And he understood that, he said, Pray for me, guys, the reporters, and it was clear that he felt that he was in over his head. In fact, he turned out to be an extraordinary president of the United States. He handled the four months following the death of FD.R. with great political savvy and command.
His confidence grew, he stood up to Stalin at Potsdam, he was not afraid of Winston Churchill. He turned out to be a really extraordinary president of the United States, although he wasn't necessarily thought so at the time. Just speculate for a minute.
Henry Wallace stays on the ticket. FDR dies. When he did. We don't know whether Henry Wallace would have dropped the atomic devices over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, leaving that out for the moment. What kind of a president would he have been, do you think?
So Henry Wallace kind of alluded to what a president that he would want to be. And I think that's where the controversy comes in on. If he would have taken over. He wasn't like any other political figure, let alone within the cabinet. Within Roosevelt's administration, he had a very wide interest, like I said, probably his main interest in the post-war era was peace.
He thought of this kind of like the great reshaping of the world, which it basically was. He really sought out to be more of the peace guy. Like that. You can negotiate more with someone like Joseph Stalin. He came later to regret that he later called the Soviet Union the great Evil Empire.
But at the time, he thought the Soviet Union had been beaten down, which they had been. This was the time that we could prevent something like this from happening again. While other people within both political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, were pushing for varying degrees of how to confront Russia or the Soviet Union. And Wallace was not as interested in that, and he was more interested in negotiations and talking with all of these nations.
Either a you end up in a situation where a lot of the bulk of the Cold War is avoided, and probably in a pie-in-the-sky situation. Or Joseph Stalin is Joseph Stalin and probably doesn't care who he's talking with. And they might have completely overrun way more territory than we would have expected, which is what ended up happening. So it's very hard to say on what a Wallace presidency would have been like. Because he wasn't like any other character that probably would have gotten into that post. Sometimes, when people run, their ideas are much different than what they become in office.
It might have not looked much different than what we see now or what we saw after that. There's more progressive or left-wing thinking type people like Oliver Stone, who believe that. You know, that was the great miss of the 20th century. Whether that's true or not, you know, that's just up for total speculation.
You know that eminent historian Oliver Stone, who muddled the Kennedy assassination once and forever with that ridiculous film that he made? I don't trust him as necessarily being able to read the history of the 20th century in the United States. But I want to go back to this. So Henry Wallace, you tell me if I've got this right? He believed that it was possible to find an accommodation with the Soviet system, that it would be a mistake to get rigid about it, that the conversation, negotiation was the right thing to do, and maybe it wouldn't turn out. But we had a duty to do this, especially now that we lived in a nuclear era. And that he felt that the others, including Truman, were rattling their sabers too much, and they were increasing the likelihood of a conflagration. And maybe the end of the world. That this was a very dangerous game and the rules had changed on August 6th and August 9th, 1945. And that we had a moral duty to bend over backwards for peace and take some risks for peace. And avoid a kind of binary good versus evil, U.S. versus them, black versus white reading of the international situation.
Is that a fair analysis? Yes, I would agree. That's a fair analysis of what happened. Like, I say, I think the total underlying part of Wallace's philosophy was pushing for peace.
Maybe he was right, maybe maybe, maybe, I mean, because Oppenheimer believed that the only way out of this was to tell the Soviets everything. Now that this, now that the war was over, to share data with them, he said the science can never be put back in the can anyway. That we should cooperate, that we should try to find situations in which we could do joint projects, we should. We should do everything in our power not to alarm the Soviets, but rather to ease tensions. And that if we didn't, it could be the end of the world. So he and Wallace are very much on the same page about this. But, you know, Oppenheimer paid the ultimate price for this.
He was discredited and had his security clearance stripped, and he was disgraced and had a fall, kind of the fall of a tragic character that nearly killed him. So the times were not really ripe for that sort of thinking. I personally think that Wallace would not have been able to get very far as president. Given the emergence of the Air Force, the emergence of the Cold War, the hardliners. Like Curtis Lemay. I think that he would have made the case for a more peaceful approach. But it seems to me that the president has less unilateral power in situations like this.
Than he would have wanted. Yeah, and I don't think that he probably wielded. He also didn't wield the massive influence that Franklin Roosevelt did. A guy like Roosevelt was like way beyond anything that D.C. had ever seen before and could charm people. Could, like, I say, play people off of each other. He was just a huge force and anyone that was going to follow him probably didn't have that political skill.
And Wallace himself didn't really have a lot of political skills anyway, because he didn't really bother himself much with interpoliticking, as much as the rest of Washington, D.C. did. So, yeah, I don't know how much influence he would have had. He probably would have gone to a lot of meetings and a lot of conferences overseas and made a lot of people in D.C. Very uncomfortable with what he said, which was kind of later. What gets him in trouble with Truman anyway? But he probably would have done more of that as president of the United States.
So he's dumped. What does he do between 1944 and 1948??
So he basically gets told that he's not going to be the vice president and that Truman had been picked. Him and Truman met with each other and they were very gentlemanly about it. They shook hands. They both said something along the lines of, We're both masons, or they were both freemasons, so they were kind of like this brotherly, on-the-level type thing within masonry.
So they kind of didn't try to look at each other too badly, at least in public. I'm sure they had some choice. Words about each other behind closed doors or with their own private thoughts. So when Truman is picked for vice president and Wallace finds this out, Roosevelt himself tells Wallace Sorry, that didn't happen the way that we thought it was going to. Whether that was true or not, who knows? And he says, Tell your wife, don't pack her bags just yet and don't leave Washington, D.C. And he's kind of just left.
Like, what does that mean? Kind of like, if you're going to leave the vice presidency, unless you're going to the presidency, what are you supposed to be doing? And Truman actually ends up picking him to be secretary of Commerce, which is kind of an interesting way. That that came about, or why? But he's chosen as secretary of Commerce, which really, within the rankings of the Cabinet, didn't wield a ton of influence at the time. So Wallace stays as Secretary of Commerce under Truman. Kind of phase of, like, we're a unified body still.
But he then takes a trip overseas, he starts speaking with peasantry around the world, kind of like, again, the common man. This is a theme within Wallace. He again picks up where he left off, where he starts talking about peace, he talks about maybe concessions. With the Soviet Union working together, he had brought Oppenheimer. It also was in the same realm of thinking that you share the information about the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union. He probably knew, like we said earlier, he actually knew about what was going on with the Manhattan project. So he probably knew where the rest of the world was standing. With that. And that, you know, the Soviet Union didn't, you know? They thought that if you could share that, you know, you could prevent, you could have more peaceful ties. This wildly upsets Truman. Just kind of an overstepping.
And he asked for Wallace's resignation, which he gladly gives to Truman. And then he leaves, leaves office, and people kind of think that he can. Possibly might just be done with politics. He might mount a challenge to Truman with the Democratic nomination in the next election. But he does something very curious in that he runs for a party under the Progressive Party, which is kind of built around his candidacy. And kind of the likes of one of his own political heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, who had done the same thing.
All right, so he's kept on by Truman, but fired by Truman when he oversteps, when he gets out of sync with Truman's foreign policy, he's probably bitter by now. Decides to stand for the presidency himself in 1948. Thomas Dewey is the Republican nominee. Truman very much wants to be elected in his own right, he is nominated by the Democratic Party, and so it looks like a Truman V.
Dewey Race But Dewey was a kind of a moderate, almost a liberal himself, and Truman certainly had become a liberal president, to the surprise of many of his midwestern friends. There's not a lot of oxygen left in the race here. But Henry Wallace decides to stand as an independent for the presidency, all right. Was there any chance that he could win? So why'd he do it?
Why'd he do it? You're going to humiliate yourself, exhaust yourself, annoy a lot of people and probably not move the needle on the national political debate. So Wallace probably chose to do this.
Just in the same realm that most people choose to tend to run for a third party. Unless, like we just said, with Roosevelt, who probably did believe possibly that he could win, his own ego probably thought that he could win, Wallace probably had no intention of actually probably winning. He hoped to influence his own view of the world, stay within the conversation, and Wallace chooses in the Progressive Party as his running mate, Glenn Taylor, the singing cowboy from Idaho.
It was another, I think probably the most left-wing member of the Senate at the time, chooses him to be his running mate. They go all over the United States and, to his credit, he takes a very controversial stand or platform to a lot of places that don't receive him well. Like I said, this is 48. This is the Dixiecrat party, which actually does, I believe, pick up quite a few precincts in the south. Wallace goes right to the steps of the Southern United States and promotes racial equality, more women's rights. A way more progressive platform than probably anyone was more comfortable with saying within the two-party system.
Truman also is for civil rights, but maybe not maybe can be as vocal as someone like Wallace could be. He also, he campaigns with, like foreign laborers in California labor movements. Just way more of that kind of like you would think of as kind of more aggressive side of things, which obviously that's the name of the party, so that would be expected. Jeremy, We need to take another break.
A fascinating conversation about the little known, but quite important political figure of the FDR new Deal Truman era, Henry Wallace. We'll be back in just a minute.
Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. So, Jeremy, he runs in 1948, everybody knows the famous photograph of Truman holding up the newspaper in Chicago. Dewey defeats Truman. It was universally thought that Truman could not win election in 1948, that it was going to be a landslide, that Dewey was going to win. That many people thought that Truman had had a disastrous first term filling in for FDR.
But he surprisingly wins wins big in the election of 1948 and then has a second term until he's retired in 1952 and Dwight David Eisenhower becomes president. One of the things that struck me in my recent reading of books about this is that when Truman met Eisenhower in Europe during the Potsdam Conference, he said to Eisenhower Anything you want, I'll get out of your way. You want to be the next, you want to be the president of 1948, I'll get out of the way. And he meant it, he was a very humble man at heart.
So he wins, and Dewey's shocked, of course, and of course, the Dixiecrats. Strom Thurmond There's a story and a half. You know, he's talking about segregation forever, saying openly racist things about African Americans, advocating perpetual segregation of the races.
Didn't do very well, it turns out. So you got a bunch of different things going on in 1948. But Truman wins, so Wallace is defeated. And when you read accounts of this election?
Instead of realizing that he had no chance, he seems to get more shrill, more outspoken, maybe more candidly leftist as the campaign goes on. What did he do after he lost so ignominiously?
Here, and I also want to touch on that just really quick, about why he kind of was building on this. I believe Wallace from a very young age was introduced to another American historical figure that I admire greatly. It was George Washington Carver. The great scientist and Wallace actually became friends as a young boy living in Ames, Iowa, because his father worked at the university there.
And Carver was also a student there, so he kind of, like, took him under his wing and really showed him. This vision and kind of this philosophy that God was kind of in everything, kind of broke down any kind of racial barriers, the entire Wallace family was much more open-minded on racial issues than you would have found during that period. So he carries that with him through his entire life, and also kind of that vision from his grandfather was a little more progressive thinking, a little more open-minded.
And that kind of influences him. I think that when you kind of come to a time when you realize that your days of politics is probably waning, you kind of can come out full strength of what you believe. And I think that that's what happened with Wallace, and especially with the 48th election. Kind of like, kind of snubbing his nose at the Democratic National Convention, too. He was not a machine politics kind of guy, he was not born in that.
He didn't come up in politics in that way, so he didn't really care about the smoky back rooms, he didn't smoke or drink himself. I mean, he was a very clean-living kind of guy, which is not what Roosevelt was, that's not what Truman was.
So I think it was a little bit of a snubbing of the nose at the Democratic National Convention. To run in that 48th election and really push some of these issues that he deeply believed in.
When we look at these situations today, there's concern, like, sort of the Ralph Nader effect. Does third-party candidacy help or hurt either of the main two-party candidates? Does it affect the election? Do you think that the presence of Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat Party, which he formed that year, or Henry Wallace running as a progressive, changed the outcome?
At all of the 1948 election, you know, I hate to speak on that too much because I don't know the numbers off the top. It might have had, you know, some effect on that. I don't know where all votes were being pulled from. You know, you have to understand, too, is this is a time when every, you know, political parties within themselves, you know, had varying degrees on who was conservative, who was more liberal.
You don't really see that today. So I don't know where all votes were being pulled from and who was hurting who at that time. So I'm not entirely sure, like, how much of an effect that actually had. I'm sure political scientists, or, you know, historians, could look into that and figure that out.
Wallace has lost, he's washed up now, you know, he hasn't. In other words, he hasn't done well enough to have another shot at it in 1952 or 1956. He's done. What does he do for the rest?
Of his life. So after the 48 election, which again he expected to probably lose. He was kind of a pariah within D.C. circles, he had kind of used up all of his political capital in that election. Most of the Democratic Party did not like him. And when I mean that, I mean the actual establishment, maybe not individual people of the Republican Party.
Obviously, you know, they laughed at him, he was kind of mocked, he was kind of openly mocked in newspaper articles and magazines. As this wide eyed dreamer, kind of pie in the sky guy, so he's. He's kind of just pulverized from all angles, which really hurt him personally, but he thought that was more hurtful because it affected his family a lot.
He tried desperately to get ahead of any kind of rumor. Which, I mean, think about how fast things move today, it would be impossible, but, you know, move just as fast. Then. It's like, by the time he got his typewriter out, the story was around the world, so he couldn't really keep ahead of anything. He was painted as a socialist, as a communist. Which, you know, people still throw around terms that don't actually have much meaning, or have an understanding of what those terms even mean.
But he then does this weird thing where he turns around and kind of goes back. I mean, he's still left wing, but then he kind of becomes sympathetic to some Republican candidates. He endorses Dwight Eisenhower. He thought that he was an advocate more for peace. I don't believe he endorsed him in his first election, but I believe he endorsed him in his second election.
He became friends with Richard Nixon. Wallace ends up spending the majority of the rest of his life back where he loved the most, which was his farm. He does not move back to Iowa, which is kind of an interesting thing. He purchased a farm in upstate New York, about an hour from Hyde Park, where FDR's estate was at. And Roosevelt had these kind of like these dreams that him and Wallace would be kind of farmers next to each other.
There's kind of this interesting dichotomy of the aristocratic estate family. Money partier like FDR and a guy like a hardscrabble kind of Midwestern farmer from Iowa, Henry Wallace, kind of living kind of side by side in kind of this agrarian place in New York. Obviously, FDR passes away, so that's never realized, but Wallace spends the majority of the rest of his life in New York. He ends up breeding chickens. Early in his life, he bred corn.
He'd come up with hybrid corn and revolutionized the corn industry, which became a pioneer seed. But then he ends up breeding chickens, which is kind of highline chickens, which was massively successful, I think. They said, like, one out of every three eggs came from the Wallace chicken. He also bred strawberries. He went back to being a scientist and kind of like a Jeffersonian.
In that way, he unfortunately is diagnosed with ALS after he's hiking on a pyramid in South America and feels his leg kind of give out a little bit. Gets diagnosed with ALS, which is just a horrible, horrible disease that still is. Today, he doesn't have much longer to live. It's always a death sentence.
But he even approached that in his scientific mind and wrote down notes about how he felt, if anything, had helped. Kind of dedicated his body to his kind of living body, to science in that way, to try to kind of advance any kind of.
Understanding of such a horrible disease, that's fascinating. So you contacted me saying, we should talk about Henry Wallace. Why? What does Henry Wallace mean to you?
Sure, so I came across Henry.
WALLACE I kind of knew who he was. I think everyone who studies American history has this idea that he was the guy that got done by FDR. Maybe they know him because of the Secretary of Agriculture. But I came across an article several years ago in the New Yorker called The Uncommon Man.
And I just love this photo of him standing at his farm in New York, where he's standing in front of his jeep as a bunch of chicken grates on it. And I thought, Who is this guy? And, you know, I knew he was Henry Wallace, but, you know, I was like, I guess I never even thought about, you know, reading into him. And so when I read the article, I just became really fascinated with his life. I, myself, with a history background, am interested in environmental history, horticultural history, agriculture history.
And he touches on a lot of that. And then obviously I'm just also a political junkie, so it kind of mixes those worlds together quite nicely. And I love characters within American history that you can't put in a box easily. I'm also I had become very interested in Theodore Roosevelt.
But then, after reading Douglas Brinkley's book on Franklin Roosevelt about his conservation efforts, I started thinking a whole different way. And then Wallace kind of bounced back through that way, through Roosevelt, so it's just kind of a fascinating topic. And just like with a lot of other characters, just like with you with Thomas, Jefferson is like, you can go so many different ways with Wallace.
We kind of talk more about his political career, but his career as a scientist, which he liked more than anything, is also very fascinating. First, I'm a little surprised that anyone in.
Western Kansas reads The New Yorker. I congratulate you for that. What should we read? What's a good?
Biography of Wallace So the most complete biography is American Dreamer A Life of Henry Wallace by John C. Culver and John Hyde. It kind of shows a very favorable view of Henry Wallace, but that's definitely the most complete book by Henry Wallace, but Henry Wallace himself was a writer.
He wrote several articles and within his own newspaper, but he had. He ended up writing a book on the history of corn. We didn't really get much into that on this. He's the corn guy.
He even thought the national symbol shouldn't have been an eagle, He thought it should have been.
Corn I'm so glad that didn't happen. Say again. American Dreamer Who are the two authors? It's John C.
Culver and John Hyde All right. So do you think history has been unfair to Henry Wallace? I mean, he's essentially forgotten. If you went out tonight to all the restaurants in Hays and asked everyone you met who was Henry Wallace? you wouldn't get much response.
I don't think, not even like he wasn't, didn't he have a relationship, in some sense with FDR? I don't even think that would be the case.
So he's basically forgotten. It seems like that he and FDR were simpatico, that the FDR was a liberal and at times a radical liberal. And Wallace was sort of a more pure embodiment of that politics. But that FDR was not paying attention by 1944 and let this thing happen, so it is what it is. I'm a big fan of Harry S.
TRUMAN So I like the fact that he was an unusual and accidental president. But do you think that that the Democrats and the American political system failed to understand the greatness of this man? I believe so, I think it's.
Interesting, you brought up, you know? If I went in and polled, you know, 20 people, who Henry Wallace was? I mean, I would maybe get like one or two people. You'd have to be kind of a political American history junkie to kind of understand who he is. But being here in Western Kansas, I can say, Do you know what? Pioneer Seed is? Of course, everybody knows, and Henry Wallace is the.
Founder of that company, Sure, but nobody says, Oh, pioneer seed. Yeah, that wasn't that, Henry.
Wallace, who did that? yeah, exactly, you know, and his family is, you know, probably benefited very well from that company. But no, a lot of people don't know who Henry Wallace was. And when you read about him, if you were to do a Google search, it's like, Oh yeah, he was just this weird, you know? He was into kind of religion. He kind of had this controversy, he had this connection with. Roosevelt, could have been president, but he wasn't.
I think more people I've kind of followed, kind of a trend of kind of seeing if any. Other articles have popped up over time. And I feel like more people have paid attention to Wallace over the years. But I definitely don't feel like he's still a common name at all. But had a huge impact on our political system. And with him being Secretary of Agriculture, he massively affected family farms that are probably still feeling those repercussions a little bit today.
You mentioned his religion. Say a little bit more about that as we close today.
Yeah, so his religious background is what could be a whole book, probably in itself. So his father was a Presbyterian minister, but after his grandfather passes away, that connection to the Presbyterian church kind of is severed. And he goes on this whole wild throughout his entire life, this wild searching for, you know, religious truth. He was very much a deeply religious person, whatever that meant to him or how people saw it, but he was.
He believed very much in God, God being kind of in everything, kind of a mystic view of the universe he dabbled in, like Native American religion. He, I think, at one point, thought, or was told, you know, by some kind of an Indigenous leader that he was part of a tribe. In a past life, he dabbled with Zoroastrianism.
But within mainstream Christianity, he eventually joined the Episcopal Church, but before that he founded the Liberal Catholic Church, not connected to the Roman Catholic Church in Des Moines. So he was kind of all over the place, especially for a guy of his time and kind. I would say that he's sort of like a Jeffersonian type guy, with a scientific part, but definitely not a Jeffersonian, probably when it comes to religious beliefs. I'd imagine Thomas Jefferson would have enjoyed learning about his concepts of genetics and plant breeding, but probably would have scoffed at his view of the religious world.
As many did, I mean, he was seen as a religious.
Whack job by a lot of people. That hurt him in the 1948 election, among other things, we need to remember how conservative the country was small C conservative in the 1940s and 50s. That there may have been liberals. But it was a time of sort of old style. Mainline Christianity. Some of which still reigns supreme in western Kansas, but less so, perhaps, in other parts of the world. He's a fascinating figure, a kind of a Renaissance man. If F.DR had been younger and stronger, if the country had been less susceptible to the Cold War mania. Henry Wallace might indeed have gone on to a bigger political career, might have been the president of the United States.
It's interesting to speculate on what that might have been. But as things are, he led a distinguished life. Did he end? Do you think, in happiness or in bitterness? You know, I think that Wallace took.
Life like any other scientific experiment, and I think that he looked at, you know, if that was an experiment, that he kind of rolled the dice with. His grandfather didn't want to be involved in politics, but his father kind of reluctantly took the reins of politics. Of this kind of your duty of being thrown into the ring if you needed to be. And so I think Wallace always kind of, I think he didn't necessarily want to be subjugated to politics, but kind of like the world thrusted upon him. But I think that he probably prior to him getting obviously very sick, I think he was probably very much enjoying what he was doing in New York with his farm.
He, you know, it's interesting to talk about, kind of an agrarian streak of him throughout his entire life. And one tidbit that I know that you'll really enjoy is Hanks Wallace. He had a family member that was connected, I think it was a family member, might have been a friend or something like that. Had a connection with the Swiss Embassy in Washington, D.C. And they had kind of worked up a deal that he could use a plot of land in D.C. for a victory garden. And Wallace would go out as vice president and work in his garden in the morning. And that's how he kind of just stayed in touch with the common man.
And people would come by and talk with him and not even have a clue that he was the vice president of the United States. Which you could never imagine today. One guy eventually came by and said, You know, like, I'd heard that you're the vice president. And he said, kind of, like, laughed and was like, Yeah, I guess I am. And he's like, but look at my tomatoes over here.
And so they just talked about that instead. It had nothing to do with anything. And especially. This would have been like a massive, you would think, a national security risk, you know, being during World War Two. But I think that he carried that humbleness and that that agrarian thing all through his life, so I think he adapted that into his political retirement.
And I think he was probably a little bit embittered of watching things unfold in kind of a post war era. That he probably would have done differently and probably criticized Truman in private. But I think that he was probably back to where he wanted to be most of all, and that was with his hands on.
The soil Last question, You know, FDR started the soil conservation service. And I've read a couple of times in a couple of places that he actually had an idea to plant a shelter belt from the Canadian border to the bottom of Texas in a single line. That it was going to be up, maybe 100 miles wide, it was going to be wide, but it was going to be this like linear shelter belt. All the way from the top to all the way to the bottom, that didn't happen, I wish it had would have been a great thing.
Did Wallace have any role in this crazy idea? So, I guess I don't, I don't remember.
Right off the top of my head about that particular project, but I do know that. Wallace was an advocate for shelter belts, planting trees along the Midwest to kind of mitigate the manmade disaster. That was the dust bowl. So, I mean, maybe you know a little bit more about that particular project, but I don't have that on top of my head. But that does seem like something of his interest.
You know?
It's a sad thing that the shelter belts have reached their lifespan in North Dakota. And they're being bulldozed now because, and not being replanted, because we think we've overcome that with no till and so on. But I hate to see them being bulldozed down and burned. Because they represent one of the noblest things that the USDA, one of the noblest things that the USDA ever did. Yeah, you can, kind.
Of see that the ghost, of that that past here in western Kansas, as well, of old trees that have died now. Or places that I even knew that were there in my life. Yeah, it would have been very interesting to see if they would have planted it and how much would have existed. You know, there was kind of a far reaching idea of planting a national forest in southwest Kansas as well.
And then go accordingly. But there is one in Nebraska. So, you know, we, that legacy continues. Jeremy Gill, thank you so much. I appreciate your contacting me about this.
You've been really interesting on the question of Henry Wallace, and to all of you, we'll see you next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
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