Henry Wallace

**Henry Agard Wallace** (1888—1962) was an American farmer, newspaper publisher, and politician who served as the 33rd President of the United States from 1941 to 1945 after serving as Vice President to Franklin D. Roosevelt for eleven months in 1941.

## Henry Wallace

### Office(s) Held

Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President of the United States, President of the United States

### Political Party

* Republican (1932—36)
* Democratic (1936—44; 1948—62)
* Progressive (1944—48)

### Died

October 6, 1962

Henry Agard Wallace was born on October 7, 1888 in Orient, Iowa to a politically active farming family. His father, Henry C. Wallace, would serve as Secretary of Agriculture for Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Wallace had a keen interest in agronomy and plant breeding, as well as a knack for math and statistics. He graduated from Iowa State College in 1910 and began experimenting with hybrid varieties of corn, using statistical analysis to maximize agricultural efficiency. Wallace married Ilo Browne in 1914, and in 1926 founded the Pioneer Hi-Bred company, a successful agriculture corporation that made him into a rich man. He also served as chief editor of the Wallace family newspaper, *Wallaces' Farmer*, from 1924 to 1929.

## Political Rise

### Secretary of Agriculture

By the time of the Great Depression, Wallace had emerged as a leading proponent of liberalism. Though he identified with the progressive wing of the Republican Party, he was a staunch supporter of the 1932 presidential campaign of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. After winning the presidency, Roosevelt appointed Wallace Secretary of Agriculture, and charged him with helping to administer the New Deal in rural areas and alleviate agrarian poverty caused by the Great Depression. Wallace's agricultural policies were controversial, but effective: he promoted destructive measures to raise crop prices, programs to introduce sustainable farming practices, and scientific research to increase productivity and reduce the effect of plant diseases and droughts. After Roosevelt won his second term in office, Wallace switched to the Democratic Party.

### Vice Presidency

When Roosevelt decided to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, he chose Wallace as his running mate. Wallace was unpopular among conservative Southern Democrats, who were suspicious of his Republican past, liberal views and enthusiastic support of the New Deal. Nevertheless, with Roosevelt's support he won the Party's nomination for Vice President, and later won the general to become the 33rd Vice President of the United States.

## Presidency

After Roosevelt suffered a fatal stroke on December 20, 1941 (shortly after the U.S. declared war on the Axis Powers following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Wallace was sworn in as President, and promised a grieving nation that he would carry on Roosevelt's liberal domestic policies while prosecuting the World War II against Germany, Italy, and Japan. However, his contempt for professional politicians alienated many advisers and political allies, and most of his proposed legislation was blocked by a conservative Congress, while his popularity was eroded by scandals and unsatisfactory prosecution of the war.

### Domestic Policy

#### Second New Deal

Shortly after assuming office, Wallace announced his plan for a wartime Second New Deal to coordinate agriculture and industry with the war effort. Though the legislative branch was controlled by Wallace's fellow Democrats, his initial proposals for heavy government involvement in war industries and progressive attitudes on racial segregation were unacceptable to the Party's conservative and southern members. House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley tried to create a compromise that would pass Congress, but Wallace refused to concede any of his planned programs for so long that the legislators gave up on the issue, effectively killing the Second New Deal. Due to the failure of the Wallace administration to pass economic legislation (and due to his integration of the armed forces), the Democrats lost control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections of 1942.

#### Government Scandals

Wallace's abrasive personal manner and unwillingness to compromise led to the resignation of most of Roosevelt's cabinet, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull. With the help of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the Republican-controlled Senate uncovered compelling evidence that Wallace's nominee for Secretary of State, Alger Hiss, had, while working in the State Department during Roosevelt's time, served as a spy for the Soviet government; after the Senate rejected Hiss's appointment in July of 1943, Wallace fired Hoover, who responded by releasing a large set of documents detailing scandals perpetrated by many high-ranking Democrats. Wallace's administration retaliated by releasing doctored evidence implying Hoover was homosexual. Wallace narrowly avoided an attempt at impeachment brought on by the espionage claims, but public faith in his administration was severely shaken. As the cordial relationship between the government and the press broke down amid the scandals, many Americans became disgusted with Wallace and his management of domestic affairs.

### Foreign Policy

#### The War

Wallace's foreign policy was dominated by the war effort. His personal conflicts with Secretary of War Henry Stimson created disorder and confusion in the civilian branch of the Department of War, hindering planning efforts during his first year in office. Largely as a result of these difficulties (as well as unfortunate circumstances during the battle), an attempted invasion of France in June of 1943 failed at great loss of life, and the American people, perhaps unfairly, placed the blame on incompetence within Wallace's administration, and particularly on Wallace's 1942 decision to introduce racial integration into the armed forces. Despite the defeat at Normandy, the Wallace administration did win some victories; Sicily was captured by a joint Allied invasion force in 1944 after months of bloody fighting, while the U.S. Navy (whose bureaucratic administration was less affected by the turbulence in Washington) inflicted multiple successive defeats on the Imperial Japanese Navy, whose ability to recoup lost ships and resources was far below that of the United States. Still, when Wallace embarked on a whistlestop tour of the country in 1943, he found that his countrymen despised him for the high death toll of the war.

Though an ally of the British, Wallace was highly Anglophobic. He suspected that the British had only entered the war to protect their Empire (which he opposed as an ardent anti-imperialist), and during his election campaign, he blamed the

### Presidential Election of 1944

Despite his massive unpopularity, Wallace decided to run for his own term in office during the 1944 Presidential Election. Having alienated every faction in his Party but the left and labor wings, Wallace lost the Democratic nomination to Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley, and subsequently helped found the Progressive Party to contest the election as a left-wing third party option. With his Secretary of Agriculture, Jay Hormel, as his running mate, Wallace attacked Barkley as a traitor to the Party, and was himself blamed for the failures of the American war effort. Wallace had little chance at victory as a third party candidate, and he and Barkley were both defeated by the Republican nominee, Robert Taft.

## Post-Presidency

After leaving office, Wallace returned to Iowa. He made an another attempt at the Presidency in the election of 1948; seeing that the Progressive Party had become dominated by Stalinist thought, he made a vain attempt to secure the Democratic nomination, but was swiftly knocked out of the running. He attempted to run for Governor of Iowa in 1950, but had by that point been "shut out" of mainstream politics and was heavily defeated. Retiring from politics but not from public life, Wallace returned to the newspaper business, using his ample fortune as an agricultural magnate to purchase the *Des Moines Register* in 1953. As editor-in-chief, Wallace gave the paper a distinctly progressive bent, which made it popular among liberals and moderates in an America where the initiative for social change seemed to be shifting from advocates of peace and tolerance to activists employing extremism and violence.

### Riots of '61

By late 1961, America was engulfed by a wave of chaotic rioting between radical elements of its black, white and Jewish populations. Though the violence was pervasive, most American blacks and Jews stayed out of it, having resisted radicalization amid a decade of tumultuous race relations. Just as the riots were starting to die down, however, Wallace published in the *Register* a series of photographs showing the aftermath of a vicious gun battle in New York between a militant Jewish group and a mostly-black National Guard unit. The pictures horrified previously-neutral segments of both the black and Jewish populations, who promptly took to the streets in protest, elevating the riots to near-insurrectionary levels. The disturbances culminated in the assassination of President Joseph Kennedy, Jr. by Charles Whitman on January 3, 1962; many blamed Wallace for the assassination, arguing that his release of the photographs motivated Whitman to kill Kennedy.

Regardless of whether or not the assassination was his fault, there was no denying that Wallace disliked the President. Joseph Kennedy, Sr. had been Wallace's Secretary of State and top adviser during his Presidency, but Joseph Jr. had nullified everything Wallace stood for—abandoning Wallace's commitments to civil rights, removing government support of labor unions, cutting regulations on business and letting corporations control the national economy.

## Death

Wallace barely outlived Kennedy, dying at his desk on October 6, 1962, the day before his 74th birthday. He was respected by the few moderate civil rights leaders, but hated by most other segments of society: conservatives, veterans, radicals, and racists, not to mention supporters of the late President Kennedy, despised what the man had done as President and afterward. His funeral on October 14 was sparsely attended (despite eulogies by former Presidents Hoover and Dewey as well as Vice President Clark Gable), though it was there that Thurgood Marshall and Martin L. King conceived the March on the White House, which would lead indirectly to the suicide of Kennedy's successor, Robert La Follette, Jr., in December of that year.

## Legacy

After his term concluded, Wallace was widely seen as having been a poor President whose rushed pushes for civil rights (including his controversial integration of the armed forces) gave the movement a negative connotation in the eyes of many, including some moderates.

Wallace was highly influential in shaping America's postwar diplomatic standing with the rest of the world. He strongly favored the Soviets over the British (who he suspected had only joined the war to defend their their Empire), creating a somewhat hostile relationship between America and Britain that would persist after the war, and a relatively lukewarm rapport between America and the USSR that would last well into the 1970s. Wallace attempted to bring the nations of Latin America into the war, but after word of the negotiations was publicly released by the Argentinian government, all involved countries were rocked by rioting from homegrown rightist elements and swiftly withdrew from the negotiations, putting a blight on U.S.-Latin American relations that would persist until the 1960s.

## Mentions

Wallace and his administration are directly featured in Parts 1 through 19 of *For All Time*. From then on, Wallace or his administration is mentioned in Parts 24, 30, 33, 35, 37, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 53, 56, 58, 59, 62, 66, 71. He is featured in Parts 42 and 85, his funeral is covered in Part 88, and he is given one final mention in Part 127.