Henry Agard Wallace, 33 years oldrd The vice president of the United States was an unusual man.
He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and he didn't swear.
He did not like to tell jokes, read novels or play golf. In fact, he disliked any pursuit in which he could not find room for self-improvement.
As author Ben Still explains in The World That Wasn: Henry Wallace and the Fate of The American Century (Avid Reader Press), Wallace was highly intelligent, but I had a hard time with it.
Steil believes that Wallace actually had Asperger's syndrome. Asperger syndrome is a type of autism spectrum disorder first described by Austrian physician Hans Asperger in 1944, Wallace's final year as vice president.
According to Steil, Wallace remains the most fascinating, “almost president in American history,” and in The World That Wasn't he wrote that if Wallace, instead of Harry S. Truman, would have succeeded Franklin D. I imagine how different America would have been if he had been. Roosevelt in 1945.
Born in October 1888 on a farm near Orient, Iowa, Wallace initially pursued a farming career.
After college, he edited the family newspaper, Wallace's Farmer, and eventually purchased his own farm, where he developed hybrid corn and founded the successful Hi-Bred Corn Company. Ta.
Like agriculture, politics was conducted within the family.
His father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Wallace held the position under the Roosevelt administration from 1933 to 1940 and then served as FDR's vice president from 1941 to 1945.
FDR seemed likely to ask Mr. Wallace to run for a third term, but his left-leaning views, especially regarding the Soviet Union, scared some moderates within the Democratic Party.
Roosevelt instead chose Truman as his running mate in the 1944 election, and it was Truman who became president after FDR's death in April 1945.
This decision had long-term implications not only for the Democratic Party and the United States, but for the world.
“This most unpromising politician… [Wallace] “He was on the verge of becoming FDR's successor at a critical juncture in 20th century geopolitics,” Steil writes.
“And even if the Cold War had only been delayed by Wallace's presidency, postwar history would undoubtedly have been very different because of it. . . . Had Henry Wallace been in the White House, the Truman Doctrine would have been There would not have been. There would be no Marshall Plan. There would be no NATO. There would be no West Germany. There would be no containment policy… All these efforts… Henry Wallace opposed them.”
Wallace was Secretary of Commerce under Truman, but Truman fired him in September 1946 when he gave a speech calling for a more conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union.
Wallace's appeasement policy toward the Soviet Union was clearly out of place in postwar America.
Nevertheless, Wallace redoubled his sympathies with the Soviet Union.
First, he wrote a book detailing his belief that the Soviet Union was experiencing a renaissance under the Bolshevik regime, with the help of known KGB informants.
And in 1948, he unsuccessfully ran for president under the Progressive Party, colluding with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and even allowing the dictator to edit important campaign speeches.
Wallace also struggled with the 1947 Truman Doctrine, which was intended to contain the threat of Soviet expansion.
This doctrine was a red line that the former vice president could not cross. “[It] This was the clearest evidence of the president's alliance with “fascists'' and “reactionaries'' in Congress, the military, and the State Department. ”
Wallace's approach to the Soviet Union drew widespread criticism, but so did his belief in mysticism.
Despite being raised as a Presbyterian, he found Christian orthodoxy “fanciful.”
Instead, he turned to spiritualism and explored Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.
“He considers himself a kind of 'practical mystic', one who can inform the path to positive social, economic and political change, whether gathered through calculation or introspection.” “He will come to profess to be a man in search of eternal truth,” Steil wrote.
For Truman, that was even more reason to expel him.
In his memoirs, the president wrote that Wallace “morphed into a mystic with a zeal that bordered on fanaticism, and that was “to steal votes from me.'''' ”
Wallace retired from politics in 1964 to further experiment with hybrids and lecture on agricultural innovations throughout the United States and Central America.
He tried and failed to breed more efficient chickens that would eat less feed and lay more eggs. And so he began writing a book about the history of strawberries.
But he never went through with it.
Wallace died in November 1965 at the age of 77 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease.
For Still, Henry Wallace's political career clearly shows that success in life as well as politics requires aspirations that are compatible with reality.
“People cannot demand higher yields, and dictators cannot compromise,” he concludes.
