With Joe Biden having picked Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate, I thought it would be a good idea to discuss another vice president from America’s past.
How different might America and the world be today if Henry Wallace had succeeded Franklin Roosevelt as US president in April 1945 instead of Harry Truman. I first encountered Wallace a number of years ago after reading Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone’s excellent book The Untold History of the United States.
For the last of Roosevelt’s three terms, Wallace served as vice president from 1941-1945. He was on the ticket again as Roosevelt sought a fourth term in office but was removed by the Democratic Party establishment at the Democratic Party National Convention of July 1944 and replaced with the more conservative Truman as they believed Wallace to be too progressive. Roosevelt won re-election in 1944 but died in office in April 1945 and was replaced by Truman.
One of the strongest proponents of the 'New Deal'
As one of the strongest proponents of the New Deal, Wallace spent almost eight years as Secretary of Agriculture from March of 1933 until September of 1940 before becoming vice president. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. stated about Wallace’s time as Secretary of Agriculture that:
“Wallace was a great Secretary of Agriculture…In time he widened his concern beyond commercial farming to subsistence farming and rural poverty. For the urban poor, he provided food stamps and school lunches. He instituted programs for land-use planning, soil conservation and erosion control. And always he promoted research to combat plant and animal diseases, to locate drought-resistant crops and to develop hybrid seeds in order to increase productivity.” (Quote taken from The Untold History of the United States.)
It’s vital to understand how historically important the side-tracking of Wallace in 1944 was. There’s every chance Hiroshima and Nagasaki wouldn’t have happened with Wallace as President, seeing as it is widely accepted that Japan was retreating on all fronts before the attacks and the atomic bombs were instead a message to the Soviet Union rather than a strategic attack to make the Japanese surrender. A progressive like Wallace would not have sacrificed the lives of over 150,000 civilians in order to send a message.
There’s every chance Hiroshima and Nagasaki wouldn’t have happened with Wallace as President
Just as important, once America became a world superpower after WWII, it had two pathways it could have followed: One was a vision of American hegemony; the other was Wallace’s vision of making the 20th century “the century of the common man.” This vision is outlined by Wallace in an address to the Free World Association on May 6, 1942. It may be viewed on YouTube under the title ‘Henry A. Wallace Common Man Speech’.
Spoken within the context of fighting Nazism during WWII, the speech was populist and internationalist in nature. My favourite part of the speech is when Wallace talks about his hopes for the post- WWII world:
“We failed in our job after World War One. But by our very errors we learned much and after this war we shall be in position to utilise our knowledge in building a world which is economically, politically and I hope spiritually sound. There must be neither military nor economic imperialism. Some have spoken of the American century. I say that the century on which we are entering, the century which will come out of this war, can be and must be the century of the common man. If we really believe we are fighting for a peoples’ peace, all the rest becomes easy.”
Unfortunately for America and the rest of the world, the American hegemony vision won out. This might seem like unfair criticism when placed in the context of the Cold War; but the United States did not engage in a Cold War against the Soviet Union in order to free millions of people from Soviet rule, but in order to emerge from the Cold War as the world’s sole superpower, which it did when the USSR collapsed in 1991.
And yet, I still have hope for the United States; because of people like Wallace. I realise that there are good and bad people in every country. My hope is always that the good people will prevail and to not judge a whole country based on the actions of a few individuals.
This is why internationalism is so important. It enables people to see past flag waving and realise that we are all struggling against the same neoliberal economic system; a system whose by-products include endless for-profit wars, economic exploitation, environmental destruction and climate change.
In the current era of hyper-nationalism, if we are to have any chance of surviving as a species, internationalism must prevail. It is thus vital that the story of Henry Wallace is kept alive in order to remind us that another world is possible.
Mark Manduca has a Master’s Degree in Diplomatic Studies from the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies.