Henry A. Wallace
Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was an American politician, journalist, farmer, and businessman who served as the 33rd vice president of the United States, from 1941 to 1945, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He served as the 11th U.S. secretary of agriculture and the 10th U.S. secretary of commerce. He was the nominee of the new Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election.
For other people with similar names, see Henry Wallace.
Henry A. Wallace
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Harry S. Truman
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Office established
Office abolished
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Office established
Office abolished
Franklin D. Roosevelt
November 18, 1965 (aged 77)
Danbury, Connecticut, U.S.
Glendale Cemetery
- Republican (1909–1936)
- Democratic (1936–1947, 1964–1965)
- Progressive (1948–1950)
Progressive "Bull Moose" (1912)
3
- Henry Cantwell Wallace (father)
The oldest son of Henry C. Wallace, who served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1924, Henry A. Wallace was born in rural Iowa in 1888. After graduating from Iowa State University in 1910, he worked as a writer and editor for his family's farm journal, Wallaces' Farmer. He also founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, a hybrid corn company that became extremely successful. Wallace displayed intellectual curiosity about a wide array of subjects, including statistics and economics, and explored various religious and spiritual movements, including Theosophy. After his father's death in 1924, Wallace drifted away from the Republican Party; he supported Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election.
Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture under Roosevelt from 1933 to 1940. He strongly supported the New Deal and presided over a major shift in federal agricultural policy, implementing measures designed to curtail agricultural surpluses and to ameliorate rural poverty. Roosevelt overcame strong opposition from conservative leaders in the Democratic Party and had Wallace nominated for vice president at the 1940 Democratic National Convention. The Roosevelt-Wallace ticket won the 1940 presidential election. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, conservative party leaders defeated Wallace's bid for renomination, placing Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman on the Democratic ticket instead. In early 1945, Roosevelt appointed Wallace as Secretary of Commerce.
Roosevelt died in April 1945 and Truman succeeded him as president. Wallace continued to serve as Secretary of Commerce until September 1946, when he was fired by Truman for delivering a speech urging conciliatory policies toward the Soviet Union.[1] Wallace and his supporters then established the nationwide Progressive Party and launched a third-party campaign for president. The Progressive platform called for conciliatory policies toward the USSR, desegregation of public schools, racial and gender equality, a national health-insurance program, and other left-wing policies. Accusations of communist influence followed, and Wallace's association with controversial Theosophist figure Nicholas Roerich undermined his campaign; he received just 2.4% of the popular vote. Wallace broke with the Progressive Party in 1950 over the Korean War, and in a 1952 article he called the Soviet Union "utterly evil". Turning his attention back to agricultural innovation, he became a highly successful businessman. He specialized in developing and marketing hybrid seed corn and improved chickens before his death in 1965 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Early life and education[edit]
Henry Agard Wallace was born on October 7, 1888, on a farm near Orient, Iowa, to Henry Cantwell Wallace and his wife, Carrie May Brodhead.[2] Wallace had two younger brothers and three younger sisters.[3] His paternal grandfather, "Uncle Henry" Wallace, was a prominent landowner, newspaper editor, Republican activist, and Social Gospel advocate in Adair County, Iowa. Uncle Henry's father, John Wallace, was an Ulster-Scots immigrant from the village Kilrea in County Londonderry, Ireland, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1823.[4] May (née Broadhead) was born in New York City but was raised by an aunt in Muscatine, Iowa, after her parents' death.[5]
Wallace's family moved to Ames, Iowa, in 1892 and to Des Moines, Iowa, in 1896. In 1894, the Wallaces established an agricultural newspaper, Wallace's Farmer.[6] It became extremely successful and made the family wealthy and politically influential.[7] Wallace took a strong interest in agriculture and plants from a young age, when his father, a professor of dairying at Iowa State Agricultural College, invited his student, African-American botanist George Washington Carver, to stay with them in the Wallace home, since Carver was barred from college housing because of his race. In gratitude, Carver took the young Henry Wallace under his wing, giving him tutorials after school on botany and plant breeding.[8] Wallace was particularly interested in corn, Iowa's key crop. In 1904, he devised an experiment that disproved agronomist Perry Greeley Holden's assertion that the most aesthetically pleasing corn would produce the greatest yield.[9] Wallace graduated from West High School in 1906 and enrolled in Iowa State College later that year, majoring in animal husbandry. He joined the Hawkeye Club, a fraternal organization, and spent much of his free time continuing to study corn.[10] He also organized a political club to support Gifford Pinchot, a Progressive Republican who was head of the United States Forest Service.[11]
Early political involvement[edit]
During World War I, Wallace and his father helped the United States Food Administration (USFA) develop policies to increase hog production.[20] After USFA director Herbert Hoover abandoned the hog production policies the Wallaces favored, the elder Wallace joined an effort to deny Hoover the presidential nomination at the 1920 Republican National Convention. Partly in response to Hoover, the younger Wallace published Agricultural Prices, in which he advocated government policies to control agricultural prices.[21] He also warned farmers of an imminent price collapse after the war. Wallace's prediction proved accurate: a farm crisis extended into the 1920s. Reflecting a broader decrease in agricultural prices, corn prices fell from $1.68 per bushel in 1918 to $0.42 per bushel in 1921.[22] Wallace proposed various remedies to combat the farm crisis, which he believed stemmed primarily from overproduction. Among his proposed policies was the "ever-normal granary": the government buys and stores agricultural surpluses when agricultural prices are low and sells them when they are high.[23]
Both Wallaces backed the McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill, which would have required the federal government to market and export agricultural surpluses in foreign markets. The bill was defeated in large part because of the opposition of President Calvin Coolidge and Commerce Secretary Hoover. When Coolidge became president after Harding died in 1923,[24] the elder Wallace stayed on as Agriculture Secretary but died at age 58 in October 1924. His son, Henry, always blamed his father's premature death on Hoover, because of the stress of the titanic policy battles they had over matters like the McNary-Haugen bill, with Hoover insisting on a hands-off "laissez-faire" attitude toward business and Wallace pushing more active government interventions to help farmers. In the November 1924 presidential election, Wallace voted for the Progressive nominee, Robert La Follette.[25] Due in part to Wallace's continued lobbying, and despite fervent opposition from Hoover, Congress passed the McNary–Haugen bill in 1927 and 1928, but Coolidge vetoed the bill both times.[26] Dissatisfied with both major party candidates in the 1928 presidential election, Wallace advocated for the creation of a new party to unite the interests of the Western and Southern branches of the Democratic Party against its Eastern wing, but did not advance the idea beyond the conceptual stage.[27] In the lead-up to the fall presidential election, Wallace attempted to persuade Illinois Governor Frank Lowden to run for president. He ultimately supported Democratic nominee Al Smith, but Hoover won a landslide victory.[28][29] The onset of the Great Depression during Hoover's administration devastated Iowa farmers, as farm income fell by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932.[30] In the 1932 presidential election, Wallace campaigned for Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt, who favored the agricultural policies of Wallace and economist M. L. Wilson. Although his family was traditionally Republican, Wallace gradually came to support the Democratic Party, and became a registered Democrat in 1936.[31]
Later politics[edit]
Wallace initially remained active in politics following the 1948 campaign, and he delivered the keynote address at the 1950 Progressive National Convention. In early 1949, Wallace testified before Congress in the hope of preventing the ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty, which established the NATO alliance between the United States, Canada, and several European countries.[165] He became increasingly critical of the Soviet Union after 1948, and he resigned from the Progressive Party in August 1950 due to his support for the UN intervention in the Korean War.[166] After leaving the Progressive Party, Wallace endured what biographers John Culver and John Hyde describe as a "long, slow decline into obscurity marked by a certain acceptance of his outcast status".[167]
In the early 1950s, he spent much of his time rebutting attacks by prominent public figures such as General Leslie Groves, who claimed to have stopped providing Wallace with information regarding the Manhattan Project because he considered Wallace to be a security risk. In 1951, Wallace appeared before Congress to deny accusations that in 1944 he had encouraged a coalition between Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communists.[168] In 1952, he published an article, "Where I Was Wrong", in which he repudiated his earlier foreign policy positions and declared the Soviet Union to be "utterly evil".[74][169]
Wallace did not endorse a candidate in the 1952 presidential election, but in the 1956 presidential election he endorsed incumbent Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower over Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. Wallace, who maintained a correspondence with Eisenhower, described Eisenhower as "utterly sincere" in his efforts for peace.[170] Wallace also began a correspondence with Vice President Richard Nixon, but he declined to endorse either Nixon or Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. Though Wallace criticized Kennedy's farm policy during the 1960 campaign, Kennedy invited Wallace to his 1961 inauguration, the first presidential inauguration Wallace had attended since 1945. Wallace later wrote Kennedy, "at no time in our history have so many tens of millions of people been so completely enthusiastic about an inaugural address as about yours". In 1962, he delivered a speech commemorating the centennial anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Agriculture.[171] He also began a correspondence with President Lyndon B. Johnson regarding methods to alleviate rural poverty, though privately he criticized Johnson's escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War.[172] In the 1964 election, Wallace returned to the Democratic fold, supporting Johnson over Republican nominee Barry Goldwater.[173] Due to declining health, he made his last public appearance that year; in one of his last speeches, he stated, "We lost Cuba in 1959 not only because of Castro but also because we failed to understand the needs of the farmer in the back country of Cuba from 1920 onward. ... The common man is on the march, but it is up to the uncommon men of education and insight to lead that march constructively".[174]
Business success[edit]
Wallace continued to co-own and take an interest in the company he had established, Pioneer Hi-Bred (formerly the Hi-Bred Corn Company), and he established an experimental farm at his New York estate. He focused much of his efforts on the study of chickens, and Pioneer Hi-Bred's chickens at one point produced three-quarters of all commercially sold eggs worldwide. He also wrote or co-wrote several works on agriculture, including a book on the history of corn.[175]
Illness and death[edit]
Wallace was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1964, at the age of 76. He consulted numerous specialists and tried various methods of treating the disease, stating, "I look on myself as an ALS guinea-pig, willing to try almost anything".[176] He died in Danbury, Connecticut, on November 18, 1965, at the age of 77.[177] His remains were cremated and the ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa.[178]
Family[edit]
In 1913, Wallace met Ilo Browne, the daughter of a successful businessman from Indianola, Iowa.[179] Wallace and Browne married on May 20, 1914, and had three children.[177] Henry Browne (b. 1915), Robert Browne (b. 1918), and Jean Browne (b. 1920).[180] Wallace and his family lived in Des Moines until Wallace accepted appointment as secretary of agriculture, at which point they began living in an apartment at Wardman Park in Washington, D.C.[181] In 1945, Wallace and his wife purchased a 115-acre farm near South Salem, New York, known as Farvue.[182] Ilo was supportive of her husband's career and enjoyed serving as Second Lady of the United States from 1941 to 1945, though she was uncomfortable with many of Wallace's Progressive supporters during his 1948 presidential campaign.[183] Wallace and Ilo remained married until his death in 1965; she lived until 1981. In 1999, Wallace's three children sold their shares in Pioneer Hi-Bred to DuPont for well over $1 billion.[180] Wallace's grandson, Scott Wallace, won the Democratic nomination for Pennsylvania's 1st congressional district in the 2018 elections. He was defeated by Republican incumbent Brian Fitzpatrick in the general election.[184]
Legacy[edit]
During his time in the Roosevelt administration, Wallace became a controversial figure, attracting a mix of praise and criticism for various actions.[201][75] He remains a controversial figure today.[202][203][204] Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. pronounced Wallace to be both "an incorrigibly naive politician" and "the best secretary of agriculture the country has ever had".[205] Journalist Peter Beinart writes that Wallace's "naive faith in U.S.-Soviet cooperation" damaged his legacy. Historian Andrew Seal lauds Wallace for his focus on combating both economic and racial inequality.[203] Wallace's vision of the "Century of the Common Man", which denied American exceptionalism in foreign policy, continues to influence the foreign policy of individuals like Bernie Sanders.[206] In 2013, historian Thomas W. Devine wrote that "newly available Soviet sources do confirm Wallace's position that Moscow's behavior was not as relentlessly aggressive as many believed at the time". Yet Devine also writes that "enough new information has come to light to cast serious doubt both on Wallace's benign attitude toward Stalin's intentions and on his dark, conspiratorial view of the Truman administration".[207]
Alex Ross of The New Yorker writes, "with the exception of Al Gore, Wallace remains the most famous almost-president in American history".[74] Journalist Jeff Greenfield writes that the 1944 Democratic National Convention was one of the most important political events of the twentieth century, since the leading contenders for the nomination might have governed in vastly different ways.[98] In The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone argues that, had Wallace become president in 1945, "there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War".[208][209] By contrast, Ron Capshaw of the conservative National Review argues that a President Wallace would have practiced a policy of appeasement that would have allowed the spread of Communism into countries like Iran, Greece, and Italy.[210]
The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland, the largest agricultural research complex in the world, is named for him. Wallace founded the Wallace Genetic Foundation to support agricultural research. His son, Robert, founded the Wallace Global Fund to support sustainable development.[202] A speech Wallace delivered in 1942 inspired Aaron Copland to compose Fanfare for the Common Man.[74] The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum's grounds in Hyde Park, New York, include the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center at its north end.