Henry A. Wallace
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Henry_A._Wallace.jpg
Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) served as the 33rd Vice President of the United States.
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Early life
Wallace was born on a farm near Orient, Adair County, Iowa, and graduated from Iowa State College at Ames in 1910. He worked on the editorial staff of Wallace's Farmer in Des Moines, Iowa from 1910 to 1924 and edited the publication from 1924 to 1929. He experimented with breeding high-yielding strains of corn (maize), and authored many publications on agriculture. In 1915 he devised the first corn-hog ratio charts indicating the probable course of markets. The company he founded during this time, now known as Pioneer Hi-Bred, is among the most profitable agriculture corporations in the United States today.
In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Wallace United States Secretary of Agriculture in his Cabinet. (Wallace's father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, had served as Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1925.) Wallace had been a liberal Republican, but he supported Roosevelt's New Deal and soon switched to the Democratic Party. Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture until September 1940, when he resigned, having been nominated for Vice President as Roosevelt's running mate in the 1940 presidential election.
Vice Presidency
Wallace was elected in November 1940 as Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His inauguration took place on January 20, 1941, for the term ending January 20, 1945. He immediately set out to counter his predecessor John Nance Garner's characterization of the vice presidency as "not worth a bucket of warm piss".
Roosevelt named Wallace chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) in 1941. Both positions became important with the U.S. entry into World War II. As he began to flex his new-found political muscle in his position with SPAB, Wallace came up against the conservative wing of the Democratic party in the form of Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce. The two differed on how to handle wartime supplies.
On May 8, 1942, Wallace delivered his most famous speech, which became known by the phrase "Century of the Common Man", to the Free World Association in New York City. This speech, grounded in Christian references, laid out a positive vision for the war beyond the simple defeat of the Nazis. The speech, and the book of the same name which appeared the following year, proved quite popular, but it earned him enemies among the Democratic leadership and among important allied leaders like Winston Churchill.
In 1943 Wallace made a goodwill tour of Latin America, shoring up support among important allies. His trip proved a success and helped convince 12 Latin American countries to declare war on Germany.
Wallace was far ahead of his time in trade relationships with Latin America. He convinced the BEW to add "labor clauses" to contracts with Latin American producers. These clauses required producers to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for their employees, and it committed the United States to paying for up to half of the required improvements. Not surprisingly, this upset many at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The Democratic Party bumped Wallace from its ticket in 1944, largely due to party concerns over FDR's failing health and thus the likelihood of his running-mate succeeding him, over Wallace's alleged "communist" beliefs and perceived closeness to the Soviet Union, as well as over his unorthodox New Age tendencies. The party went on to nominate Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman for Vice President.
Later career
HenryAgardWallace.jpg
Harry S. Truman placated Wallace by appointing him Secretary of Commerce. Wallace served in this post from March 1945 to September 1946, when W. Averell Harriman replaced him because Truman regarded Wallace as too critical of Truman's foreign policy.
Following his term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace became the editor of The New Republic magazine, using his position to criticize vociferously Truman's foreign policy. On the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, he predicted it would mark the beginning of "a century of fear". He left his editorship position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American South, however, the party's opposition to Truman's hard-line stance against the Soviets brought it into disrepute and its members largely rejoined the Democrats.
In 1952 Wallace published Why I Was Wrong, in which he explained that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin's excesses and that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist.
Wallace resumed his farming interests, and resided in South Salem, New York. During his later years he made a number of advances in the field of agricultural science. His many accomplishments included a breed of chicken that at one point accounted for the overwhelming majority of all egg-laying chickens sold across the globe. He died in Danbury, Connecticut. His remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa.
Sources
- "The Prince of Wallese: Chickens, Communists and Henry Wallace," Times Literary Supplement, 24 November, 2000.
- The Life of Henry A. Wallace: 1888-1965 (http://www.winrock.org/wallacecenter/wallace/bio.html)
External links
- "The Century of the Common Man" (http://www.winrock.org/wallacecenter/wallace/CCM.htm) - the text of Wallace's 1942 speech.
- Henry A. Wallace Center for Agricultural & Environmental Policy (http://www.winrock.org/what/wallace_center.cfm)
- " An Argument for a New Liberalism (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=m2g1OkLsg5TrkOFXtVxLYB%3D%3D) by Peter Beinart, The New Republic, December 2 2004 - argues that Harry S. Truman's defeat of Wallace in 1948 helped make the Democrats an anti-totalitarian party and sees present-day Democrats as "Wallacite", a term it coins to mean soft on totalitarianism and external threats.
| Preceded by: Arthur M. Hyde | United States Secretary of Agriculture 1933 – 1940 | Succeeded by: Claude R. Wickard | ||||
| Preceded by: John Nance Garner | Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate 1940 (won) | Succeeded by: Harry S. Truman | ||||
| Preceded by: John Nance Garner | Vice President of the United States January 20, 1941 – January 20, 1945 | Succeeded by: Harry S. Truman | ||||
| Preceded by: Jesse Holman Jones | United States Secretary of Commerce March 2, 1945 – September 20, 1946 | Succeeded by: W. Averell Harriman
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