Unlikely President: Henry A. Wallace: A Novel

By Robert G. Morris

Unlikely President: Henry A. Wallace

Born in 1888 as a third-generation farmer-journalist (at Wallaces Farmer) Henry A.Wallace graduated from Iowa State in 1910. He went to work for the influential family publication after graduation and he became editor upon the appointment of his father Henry Cantwell Wallace as Hardings secretary of agriculture. Henry Agard himself became Franklin Roosevelts agriculture secretary 1933-1941 and was instrumental in turning around the depressed farm economy in the thirties, helped by a squadron of land-grant college graduates and county agents in running one of the most efficient government departments ever.

FDR specifically chose Wallace as his running mate in 1940 to help win the Midwest. Wallace didnt care much for the job as vice president until be was given more responsibility after the war began.

As agriculture secretary and later as vice president Wallace wrote and spoke widely, traveling across the United States and on missions abroad to Mexico, Latin America and the Far East. He spoke to his Spanish-speaking listeners in their own language and even managed some Russian in Siberia. In 1942 he gave a speech entitled The Century of The Common Man in which he recognized the dignity and potential of the common man, wherever he might live. It was reprinted and distributed and sold in 20 languages and millions of copies.

His science training enabled him to represent the government in talks with the atomic bomb scientists and understand what they were doing. And later he was a prime mover in the development of hybrid corn, which revolutionized corn cultivation and made him, his family and his partners wealthy.

To Wallaces great disappointment in 1944 Franklin D. Roosevelt dropped him and chose Harry S. Truman for vice president, who, of course, became president in April 1945 when FDR died. Truman was nominated and elected in his own right in 1948. But this book conjectures what might have happened if Wallace instead of Truman had been the choice of the Democratic party in 1944 and had succeeded Roosevelt, an unlikely president from 1945 to 1949.

Wallace joined a third-party movement in 1948 and campaigned for the presidency. A naive idealist, he was cruelly taken in and humiliated by communists and others and received not a single electoral vote. He withdrew from public life after the election. In 1950 he broke with his party and supported the Korean War. He died in 1965 at 77.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469103891

Robert G. Morris

About the Author Robert G. Morris is from Des Moines and has a PhD in physics from Iowa State University. After teaching and doing research, he joined the US Foreign Service in 1974 and worked on nuclear nonproliferation, science cooperation, and environmental issues in Washington, Paris, Bonn, Buenos Aires, and Madrid. He has three sons; Beverly, his wife of fifty-nine years, died in 2014. The author dedicates this book to her memory.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

On June 24, 1950, North Korean troops in Russian-made tanks invaded South Korea. The United States went before the United Nations Security Council, which agreed unanimously that the action was one of unprovoked aggression. Russia could not vote against the resolution because it was boycotting the Security Council for the UN’s refusal to recognize China’s new Communist government. On June 30 the United States committed troops already in the Far East to the fighting under General MacArthur.

Henry Agard Wallace, who had been the 1948 presidential candidate of the liberal Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), a so-called third party, opposed the near-unanimous position of other PCA leaders against United States intervention. He issued a statement justifying his stance:

I am on the side of my country and the United Nations (AD508, McC274)

Thus ended Wallace’s association with the new third party and indeed his participation in politics altogether.

*     *     *

Wallace’s political career had started in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected him as his secretary of agriculture, a post previously filled 1921-4 by Wallace’s father Henry Cantwell Wallace under presidents Harding and Coolidge. Father and son were from a farming family and had graduated from Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. After his graduation in 1910 Henry A. Wallace went to work for the family’s magazine Wallaces’ Farmer, established by Wallace’s grandfather, also named Henry, and when his father died in 1924, Henry A. succeeded him as editor.

The Wallaces had always been Republicans but Wallace changed his party loyalty as a result of the widespread financial hardship he observed farmers were suffering, hardships he saw Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover did little to ease.

He served eight years as agriculture secretary, overseeing application of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), a mammoth new program to regulate production and raise crop prices. When Roosevelt decided in 1940 to run for an unprecedented third term he insisted upon Wallace as his running mate for the vice-presidency. Wallace already had a devoted following, as well as detractors, particularly Republicans who considered Wallace a defector. FDR and Wallace won.

In 1944, with the country winning the war, Roosevelt sought a fourth term. Choosing the Democratic nominee for vice president was extremely contentious and with its aftermath is a central part of this narrative. Successfully elected and inaugurated, FDR died in April 1945. The years subsequent to the 1948 presidential convention were tumultuous against the backdrop of the ending of the war in Europe and the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan, leading to its capitulation. There followed a series of domestic crises and the economic and political rebuilding of Europe as well as warding off a growing menace from the Allies’ former partner, the Soviet Union.

Senator Harry S. Truman was the Democrats’ nominee in 1948. The Progressives nominated Henry A. Wallace. A Southern wing of the Democrats, upset over the party’s call for civil rights, nominated Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Almost no one thought Truman could possibly win in this race against the formidable Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey, but he did. No one thought Wallace could win either and he didn’t; in fact he got no electoral votes at all.

After his 1950 statement supporting his government in the Korean War Wallace returned to his farm where he resumed his work as a scientific farmer and writer until his death in 1963.

PART I

The Road to the 1940 Democratic Presidential Convention

CHAPTER 1

Family Tradition (1836-1924)

If anyone could have trained to be secretary of agriculture it was Henry Agard Wallace. On the other hand, his training for the vice-presidency was not for lack of scope or depth but for lack of requirements, duties and useful precedents. But serving as secretary of agriculture was a great challenge in the first two Roosevelt terms (1933-1941) even for someone with Wallace’s family background, talent and training. Wallace had to confront problems of falling prices for farm products, foreclosures, consequences of drought for the farms and a general feeling of rage and helplessness by the farmers and by the whole country. Farm income dropped by two-thirds from 1924 to 1931. Six of ten farmers were mortgaged and subject to foreclosure. American farmers prided themselves on being single entrepreneurs, independent, responsible to no one other than themselves, individual capitalists who were in some respects the best example of American capitalism. In general, while they sold in an open market—subject to wild swings in prices paid for their output, swings depending on the weather, the market for their product, the interest charged on their loans and mortgages—they bought in a closed market. Farmers were forced to buy seeds and implements and even loans in anything but a free and open market. It was common for farmers to borrow for machinery or seed or increased acreage with the near assurance that the crop would pay debt at the end of the season. This did not always work, and less and less by 1930. If the market for the crop went bad, many farmers could not pay the loans. Foreclosure meant losing acres they already had under mortgage, plus more that they may have bought. Machinery went back to the dealer—who was lucky to sell it—and even debts for seed were hard or impossible to pay.

Henry A. Wallace did not solve all these problems of farmers in his tenure as secretary of agriculture but he accomplished a great turn-around in their depression-era lives and fortunes. His grandfather and father were farmers, agriculturists and journalists who were examples and mentors for him as he followed their footsteps, first as a journalist then as secretary of agriculture like his father, and finally a high position in the Democratic party and the government.

*     *     *

This man was the third generation of farmers in Iowa named Wallace and the third named Henry. He was born into a family of inquiring minds devoted to agriculture and public service. HAW’s grandfather, Henry Wallace (with no middle initial), often called Uncle Henry, was an ordained Presbyterian minister. The year he graduated from the seminary, 1863, he married Nancy Ann Cantwell, with whom he had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood, including Henry Cantwell. In 1873 he moved to Iowa, near Winterset, where he farmed in Adair county. He began to write for local newspapers.

Beginning in 1883 he edited Iowa Homestead, a farming periodical. The majority stockholder drove him out of the business in 1895, so he founded a new periodical, Wallaces’ Farmer,¹ with his sons Henry Cantwell and John. He pursued reform of Iowa State College in Ames, a pale shadow of what it was to become, to serve farmers better. He promoted extension services for farmers and agricultural experiment stations. He helped establish the successful 4-H program for young farmers-to-be. In the 1880s he supported the Farmers’ Alliance (not to be confused with the more activist Farmers’ Union). He opposed formation of the People’s Party in 1890, a party attractive to many farmers. He did, however, join the Progressive Movement—also called the Country Life Movement—to advance farmers’ interests early in the twentieth century. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the Country Life Commission in 1908. At the magazine he wrote a popular column by Uncle Henry, full of advice for farm families and especially for farm sons whom he urged to remain on the farm.

Clearly animated to serve the real interests of the farmer, Uncle Henry Wallace’s all-embracing concepts were good farming, clear thinking, right living. His goal was simple: to develop a distinctly rural civilization.

Henry Wallace died in Des Moines Feb. 22, 1916, at 80, while presiding over the convention of a missionary organization. The prolific Uncle Henry left behind at his death unpublished columns that appeared in the magazine for years.

*     *     *

Uncle Henry’s son, Henry Cantwell Wallace, continued the father’s mission to help the farmer. Born in 1866 in Illinois, he moved with his parents when they settled near Winterset, Iowa, in 1877. Ten years later he married May Broadhead. Of their six children Henry Agard was the eldest. At the age of seventeen he began working with his father at Iowa Homestead. Henry Cantwell Wallace entered Iowa State College in 1888 but quit to farm. He was encouraged to finish at Iowa State in order to teach there. After two more years as a student he began teaching at Iowa State in 1893, and two years later he and his father purchased the publication Farm and Dairy, which in 1898 became Wallaces’ Farmer. From the year of its founding until 1916 Henry Cantwell was the general manager and associate editor of the magazine. After the death of his father in 1916 he became editor.

In 1921 President Warren G. Harding appointed Wallace secretary of agriculture. Wallace brought to the job a belief that government should intervene to deal with distress and dislocation on the American farm. While in office he helped raise tariffs on agricultural imports (there were already tariffs on many manufactured goods), establish new lines of rural credit and exempt agricultural cooperatives from anti-trust laws. A favorite target of his wrath were the railroads and their monopolistic pricing. Wallace supported the McNary-Haugen bill, which was designed to provide relief to farmers by controlling output. This bill or its derivatives kept surfacing for years until finally some of its provisions were incorporated into the Agricultural Adjustment Act of the New Deal. Harding was interested in the concept but he died in 1923 before any of its features could be put in place. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, was decidedly cool to the idea. Wallace himself died in 1924, leaving behind a book to be published entitled Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer.

It remained for Uncle Henry’s grandson and Henry Cantwell’s son to carry on the family tradition of help to the farmer: Henry Agard Wallace.

CHAPTER 2

Henry Agard Wallace, Scientist (1888-1910)

The young Henry Agard Wallace² became interested in plants by the time he went to elementary school. At ten he established his own garden on the family lot in Des Moines. His mother May taught him how to cross two varieties of pansies, dusting pollen from one onto the incipient seed pod of another and then waiting to harvest the resulting seeds. He once corrected his teacher, correctly maintaining that oak trees do have flowers. While still a teenager he conducted a careful experiment to disprove a prevalent theory of the day—that the most beautiful corn kernels on the most beautiful ears would produce the highest yields when planted. He planted two rows each of thirty-three samples of corn, including seeds from the beautiful ears, and kept careful records, weighing and observing the results. Some of the best-yielding seed had been from the poorest looking, and the most beautiful of all was among the ten lowest in yield.

A friendship with George Washington Carver inspired Wallace in his love of plants. Carver appeared in Ames unannounced in 1891 and was accepted as a student. HAW’s father was at first a classmate of Carver’s (1892-3) and