Commerce Cabinet Crisis X: Henry Wallace
In Henry Wallace, the nation once again found a Commerce Secretary who, though a very noteworthy figure, didn’t do much of note in his capacity as Secretary of Commerce—Henry Wallace.
Wallace was born in Iowa, and his father, also named Henry, was the editor of an agriculture-themed publication called Wallace’s Farmer. The younger Wallace worked on the Farmer and served as editor from 1924 to 1929. The elder Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1924. In 1915, he’s credited with having published the first ever corn-hog ration charts, which I think shows the amount of corn you need per hog but honestly I have no idea. More importantly, he worked on the development of higher-yield strains of corn which became important for farmers across the nation. This work was the foundation of his company, Hi-Bred Corn, later Pioneer Hi-Bred which was eventually acquired by Dupont.
The Wallaces were liberal Republicans and the younger Wallace was a New Deal supporter, and thus FDR reached out and appointed him Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. As Secretary, Wallace was in charge of implementing one of the New Deal’s odder and more misguided ideas, namely that the government should try to foster the deliberate destruction of agricultural products in an effort to raise commodity prices and turn deflation around.
Meanwhile, during FDR’s second term, his Texas conservative Vice President moved into a posture of more aggressive opposition to Roosevelt, going so far as to challenge FDR for the nomination at the 1940 convention. Clearly, a new VP was needed, and Roosevelt tapped Wallace, a reliable liberal, in part to ensure loyalty and in part because FDR new full well that he was turning away from the New Deal and toward national security and wanted to keep the New Dealers in the tent. During the campaign, GOP operatives got their hands on a series of letters written from Wallace to Russian new age leader Nicholas Roerich. In the letters, Wallace address Roerich as “dear guru.” Democrats threatened to expose an extramarital affair of Wendell Willkie’s if the Republicans went public with the “dear guru” letters, and both sides wound up agreeing to hold their fire. As Vice President, Wallace ran the Board of Economic Warfare, denounced anti-black riots in Detroit, and earned the enmity of conservatives in the United States and U.K. by portraying the war as part of a broader campaign for racial, social, and economic equality. Wallace’s clashes with the conservatives got him stripped of his authority, and dumped from the ticket in the 1944 election at which point he became Secretary of Commerce.
He didn’t actually do anything important as Secretary of Commerce related to the job’s responsibilities, but he did clash with Harry Truman over policy toward the Soviet Union, arguing for a softer line. Truman eventually sacked him, at which point he became editor of The New Republic. At the time TNR’s foreign policy involved being too far left rather than too far right, so Wallace denounced the Truman Doctrine and lay the groundwork for his 1948 Presidential Campaign on the Progressive Party ticket. The Wallace agenda was in many ways admirable—he stood foresquare for civil rights, voting rights for African-Americans, and universal health care. The campaign was also shot-through with Communists being controlled by Moscow, and there’s some indication in the Mitrokhin Archive that Wallace himself was considered a KGB asset at the time.
Wallace went back to farming, supported the Korean War in 1950. In 1952 he published Where I Was Wrong, disavowing his earlier soft-on-Stalin views. He backed Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 and Nixon in 1960, and died in 1965.
23 Responses to “Commerce Cabinet Crisis X: Henry Wallace”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I never knew Wallace renounced his Soviet-philia.
Interesting twist.
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Patrick J. (Buchanan) says he was an American Guy Burgess or Philby. Along with Harry Dexter White and others.
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Wallace’s “soft on Stalin” characteristics were and are wildly overblown. The 1940s version of the right’s “soft on terror” for not wanting to invade Iraq.
Henry Wallace is perhaps the second or third most underrated progressive leader of the twentieth century, with Debs and LBJ being numbers 1 and maybe number 2.
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
The word you are looking for is “knew” not “new.” My offer to edit still stands.
February 23rd, 2009 at 3:26 pm
A reasonably good summarization…
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I’m not quite sure why Matt ignored the role Wallace’s pro-Soviet biases were responsible being dropped from the ticket in ‘44, but that’s a central reason all accounts I’ve read give for FDR’s decision. And Francisco, if you have any evidence to suggest that Wallace wasn’t as soft on Stalin, or the USSR, as has been previously claimed — well, I’d love to hear evidence of that bizarre revision of history.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
When talking about a possible Presidency, Wallace mentioned Harry Dexter White for Treasury and Laurence Duggan for State.
Oops.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I don’t understand the disparaging reference to Wallace’s time as agriculture secretary. He was responsible for implementing commodity price supports and stabilization payments, which were instrumental in saving family farms during the Great Depression and restored stable and affordable food prices. He also supervised rural electrification and the development of the food stamp and soil conservation programs. The reform of the USDA under Wallace is now considered one of the great achievements of the New Deal — and his success at USDA was the reason he replaced John Garner as VP in 1940.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Wallace was the one who made a fortune breeding Hi-bred corn, Not his father. Wallace became interested in plant breeding as a boy of seven when George Washington Carver stayed as a long-term guest at their house, while attending or teaching at the University of Iowa. (Wallace’s grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister and fervent abolitionist). As an adult Wallace realized that there was no connection between the symmetry and outward appearance of corn on the ear (at the time the criteria for judging the plants), with the vigor and productivity of the plants.
I don’t think Wallace’s alleged Pro-Soviet sympathies were the reason Wallace was dumped in favor of Truman as vice presidential candidate. It may have been his experimentation with mysticism — he was a sort of theosophist for a while. The charges of being pro-Soviet were leveled at him during his 3rd party run for president in 1948. The real reason may have been that he campaigned in the South with an interracial entourage, risking their lives (they called in Gideon’s March). It was important for the Democratic centrist to keep the Southern coalition together.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Google seems to think that it’s a “corn hog ratio” chart, which is a type of feed ratio. Which is actually the ratio of the price of corn needed to feed a hog to the price you can sell that hog at. So, basically, it’s a measure of how much profit (over feed) you can get for a hog, by feeding it corn.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:21 pm
I liked this post better the first time I read it.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Just reposting this comment into the proper thread on Wallace.
I don’t think “By 1944, Roosevelt was sick of Vice President Henry Wallace and wanted him dumped from the ticket which he was, in favor of Harry Truman” accurately describes the situation. Wallace was dumped at the behest of conservative Democrats, who thought Wallace was a leftie and too friendly to civil rights. Truman was chosen, not because Roosevelt particularly liked him or because conservative Democrats (read: Dixiecrats) particularly liked him, but because he was a border-state Senator (and thus neither Northern nor Southern), a loyal party man (of the Pendergast machine), and his investigations committee work gave him a good-government reputation.
And Jim is quite right. New Deal ag policies get a bad rap because they destroyed crops (although a lot of the crops did get given to families on relief through the Surplus Relief Corporation) and because people don’t like current ag subsidies. However, the fact of the matter is that they worked – ag prices rose, and farm family incomes rose by 50% in the first three years. They weren’t perfect – notably, tenant farmers in the South (including the majority of male black workers in the South, but including many whites as well) got screwed out of their fair share of the cotton crop reduction payments – but they did achieve what they were supposed to.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:37 pm
I hope I don’t blow this, because I’m relying on memories that go back to about 1962, but I’d like to put a word in for Wallace’s running mate in 1948, Glenn Taylor of Idaho (can that be true?)
Why Glenn warms my heart is that back when I used to go minor league hockey games at the Cow Palace one of my memories (in addition to the amount of beer the players drank after the games, the Red Garter, and ads for transvestites) was that Glenn regularly had ads in the program for the Taylor Topper, some sort of new and improved men’s wig.
Ah, the good old days.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:55 pm
As Matt indicated, Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign was riddled with Communists taking instructions directly from Moscow, and there is rather strong evidence that he was not so passive of a fellow traveler. Please, spare us the rather lazy cliche that every progressive public figure during the middle of twentieth century who supported civil rights was wrongfully/unjustly accused of being a Communist by the far right. This was **sometimes** the case, but it is contradicted by the overwhelming mass of evidence with Wallace. And Pete Seeger, for that matter. And the Hollywood Ten. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:16 pm
John Says:
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Please, spare us the rather lazy cliche that every progressive public figure during the middle of twentieth century who supported civil rights was wrongfully/unjustly accused of being a Communist by the far right.
If he accepted the endorsement of the CPUSAin his ‘48 campaign, he wasn’t hiding it too hard. A big “so what?” if he was a communist at that time. Later he became an Eisenhower and even a Nixon supporter. Again, so what?
Yglesias: At the time TNR’s foreign policy involved being too far left rather than too far right, so Wallace denounced the Truman Doctrine and lay the groundwork for his 1948 Presidential Campaign on the Progressive Party ticket.
Have no idea what “being too far left” is supposed to mean here.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Wallace was a man of the left, and sympathetic to some aspects of the Soviet Union, but he wasn’t a Stalinist. Whoever made that vile slur doesn’t know what “Stalinist” means.
February 24th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Isn’t it true that FDR also accepted the help of Communists in getting elected. Where is the evidence that Wallace was a man of the left or sympathetic to Stalin? He threw several people out of the Agriculture Department in the 1930s because he regarded them as to far left.
February 24th, 2009 at 2:26 am
Harold:
FDR – depends on how you look at it. The left wasn’t big on FDR in 32, the C.P ran William Z. Foster and the Socialist Party ran Norman Thomas. In 36, many leftists supported a more left-leaning FDR, especially C.P members who followed the Popular Front line and/or were operating within the CIO. In 1940 and 1944, however, the C.P didn’t run a candidate. They didn’t exactly endorse Roosevelt, but supported a general alliance of the Left.
Wallace – certainly wasn’t a major leftist early on in his career, say in 1933-35; he shifted left as time went on.
Overall, however, I would say that Communist!=controlled by Moscow. C.P politics were much more complicated than that, with big differences between the party’s more hardline and more reformist elements, likewise between the grassroots and the leadership. There certainly were Communists who took direct orders from the Comintern and the Soviet intelligence apparatus, but I think it’s going a bit far to say that Wallace’s campaign in 1948 was controlled by Moscow.
February 24th, 2009 at 3:03 am
Golly, Hector, why would you consider “Stalinist” to be a vile slur? You’ve previously written that human beings are rightly considered property of the state, and thus can be legitimately disposed of like used tissue paper.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:00 am
The blind spot on the liberal-left with regard to the moral implications of Stalinism is still a tremendously embarrassing part of their intellectual history. The fact that communism was responsible for ten times the deaths of totalitarian fascism in the 20th century carries no import with them still. In a more just world, those who were sympathetic to Stalinism/Maoism should have been (and should be) showered with abuse and contempt. They should not be exonerated by the nobility of their motives nor by their pro forma positions on important domestic issues like civil rights.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Apparently Wallace’s biggest mistake was going to China with Joseph Alsop and others, where he got on the wrong side of Henry Luce and his minions (the equivalent of today’s PNAC) when he questioned whether Chaing was doing a good job of fighting off the Japanese. He wrote to Roosevelt that: “Chaing at best is a short-term investment.”
That and his questioning British colonialism, which enraged Churchill. According to Culver and Hyde’s biography, American Dreamer, “Everyone on that trip [except Alsop] had his career destroyed. Later:
He apologized in 1952 for having been fooled by the Soviets by one of their Potemkin village son a trip to Mongolia. John Kennedy invited him to his inauguration and fellow Iowan Eisenhower continued to be friends with him. Wallace had no sympathy for Marxism, his opinions were grounded in his Christian beliefs. But he was sort of quirky, like the former Governor Brown of California. He fell victim to power politics.
February 24th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Steve Attewell,
Good point. It would be absurd to say that any of the many people who, at one time or another, sided with the Soviet Union were all ‘Stalinists’. It would be just as absurd as to imply that everyone who ever took America’s side in the Cold War were fans of the Ku-Klux-Klan.
Was Marshal Tito a Stalinist? It would be pretty hard to argue ‘yes’, given that he and Stalin were bitter enemies who plotted to assassinate each other.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Good evening. America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
I am from United and , too, and now am writing in English, give true I wrote the following sentence: “Cheap airline tickets, travel deals, airline companies, cruises, hotels, rent a car.”
Thank
Yuki.