In 1940, President Roosevelt was 59 years old, partially paralyzed, with signs of physical decline and an ominous outlook on his longevity. But he pushed Wallace to the brink of a presidency for which Wallace was grotesquely unfit. This story is told in historian Ben Steele’s new biography, The World That Wasn: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century, which you should read. right now.
Wallace had a strange jumble of attributes that were hard to decipher, and he hid his long-held preoccupation with political evil. He was a scientist and an agronomist obsessed with the abstraction of humanity, but he liked plants more than actual people. Wallace, who called himself a “practical mystic,” was fascinated by his charlatan guru and wrote an embarrassingly passionate letter to him, calling himself Galahad and speaking of “karmic duty” and the “Holy Grail.” I wrote a letter.
Wallace’s nonsense about “changing the human heart” and ending “selfishness” advocated an apology for and accommodation to the bloody oppression imposed by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and beyond. It made him seem more like a harmless naive person than he really was. Exported to Eastern Europe.
On a four-week tour in 1944 organized by Andrei Vyshinsky (prosecutor of the show trials of Stalin’s Great Purges of 1936-1938), Wallace and his Soviet handlers visited Siberia’s vast prisons and forced labor toured the complex. Ideologically blinded, Wallace saw this as (in Steil’s words) “a testament to the economic, social, and artistic achievements of the Soviet Union.” Mr. Wallace credited Siberia’s high wages and healthy working conditions (perhaps on par with high-ranking Red Army officials for an eight-hour day) for bringing the “miners,” or all the POWs, to the “Far East.” did.
An overjoyed Wallace said: “They know how to laugh, they know how to play, they know how to sing.” Were they singing among the people forced to labor for 14 hours under armed guard while Wallace’s car waited for the line to pass? “There is no Potemkin continent the size of the one Wallace traversed,” Steil wrote, “and you can’t fool someone who doesn’t want to be fooled.” Wallace’s “perceptions are simply projections of predispositions.”
Mr. Steil, who studies Soviet-era archives, said members of what Mr. Wallace approvingly called the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s “extreme liberal group” included Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman and John. They included Abt and Nathan Witt. All of them, Steil wrote, “continued to develop long-standing secret relationships with the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence.”
FDR replaced Wallace as his running mate in 1944 with Harry S. Truman. Shortly before his death the following year, Roosevelt appointed Wallace Secretary of Commerce. Mr. Steil writes that Mr. Wallace’s “manipulation of Soviet assets within the Commerce Department” was followed by “back-channel collusion with Stalin to undermine official U.S. foreign policy.”
President Truman belatedly fired Wallace in 1946 for his pro-Soviet comments. Wallace then ran against Truman in 1948 as the candidate of the thoroughly communist Progressive Party. In the 1950s, when Wallace was no longer relevant, he reconsidered Stalinism.
Mr. Wallace is both the first and last vice presidential candidate selected for short-term political advantage (in his case, an agricultural state) without any responsible consideration of his suitability for the presidency. But it wasn’t. (Abraham Lincoln’s second vice president, Andrew Johnson, was drunk at his 1865 inauguration and was a particularly virulent white supremacist, drunk or sober.) The world was on fire. In 1940, Wallace’s dishonorable sympathies and bizarre ideas would have been disqualifying. But even a vice presidential candidate in 1940 whose shortcomings were merely mundane — a lack of adequate talent, for example — would have been astonishingly reckless.
FDR’s 1940 missteps were replaced in 1944 by a Missouri senator who, as president, initiated the Berlin Airlift, implemented the Marshall Plan, oversaw the creation of NATO, and defeated communists in Greece, Turkey, and Korea. resisted the invasion. Wallace condemned all such anti-Soviet measures.
The lesson from Steil’s timely and fascinating biography is that even if, as Otto von Bismarck allegedly said, a special providence takes care of fools, drunks, and the United States, This means that playing roulette to determine a successor is dangerous. Perhaps a special providence extended FDR’s life for the four years that Wallace was one step away from the presidency, or a heartbeat or a brain hemorrhage. However, it is now recommended that supplementary precautions be taken in case providence is ignored at some point before 2029.