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Henry A. Wallace

Vice President of the United States from 1941 to 1945

Henry A. Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was an American economist and politician. He was the thirty-third vice president of the United States (1941–45), the eleventh secretary of agriculture (1933–40), and the tenth secretary of commerce (1945–46). In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.

Henry A. Wallace-Townsend, 1940
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public. ~ Henry A. Wallace

Quotes

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  • American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information... Fascism is a worldwide disease... greatest threat to the United States will come after the war... within the United States itself.
  • If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.
  • The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
  • If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort.
  • My first introduction to economics came by way of Professor B.H. Hibbard. I remember being asked in 1910, at the close of my college course, who had influenced me most, and I said Professor Hibbard. Later, of course, we came to disagree violently about the McNary-Haugen Bill and some other things; but I still think that Professor Hibbard is a very good teacher.

Quotes about Henry A. Wallace

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  • the Progressive Party, with its extravagant claims, has, therefore, imposed on itself the considerable burden of proof. The only party within recent memory which made equally strident claims of fellowship were the Communists, who failed to survive this test; and the only politician of similar claims was, of course, Wallace's erstwhile master, Roosevelt, who did not after all, now that the magic of his voice is gone, succeed in raising the darker brother to the status of a citizen. This is the ancestry of the Wallace party, and it does not work wholly in its favor. It operates to give pause to even the most desperate and the most gullible.
  • The nature of the American consensus was redefined from the 1940s, with important political, social and intellectual effects. Left-wing ideas were castigated as was cultural relativism. Instead, there was pressure for support of a conservative view of American culture. The failed attempt by Henry Wallace, a New Dealer who had been Vice-President in 1941–5, to challenge Truman by running for President in 1948 as a candidate of the new Progressive Party, reflected not only the divisive impact of taking a relatively pro-Soviet foreign policy line, but also the popular preference of, and for, Truman. He had dismissed Wallace as Secretary of Commerce in 1946 for opposing American foreign policy as overly anti-Soviet.
  • What all this reminds us is that in order to defeat an enemy they routinely denounced as barbaric the Western powers had made common cause with an ally that was morally little better - but ultimately more effective at waging total war. 'The choice before human beings,' George Orwell observed in 1941, 'is not . . . between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil . . . Whichever you choose, you will not come out with clean hands.' Orwell's Animal Farm is nowadays revered as a critique of the Russian Revolution's descent into Stalinism; people forget that it was written during the Second World War and turned down by no fewer than four publishers (including T. S. Eliot, on behalf of Faber & Faber) for its anti-Soviet sentiments. Nothing better symbolized the blind eye that the Western powers now turned to Stalin's crimes than the American Vice-President Henry Wallace's visit to the Kolyma Gulag in May 1944. 'No other two countries are more alike than the Soviet Union and the United States,' he told his hosts. 'The vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate - from tropical to polar - her inexhaustible wealth, [all] remind me of my homeland . . . Both the Russians and the Americans, in their different ways, are groping for a way of life that will enable the common man everywhere in the world to get the most good out of modern technology. There is nothing irreconcilable in our aims and purposes.' All were now totalitarians; in the words of Norman Mailer's general in The Naked and the Dead.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 532
  • Like everyone else I was misled by the size and the enthusiasm of the crowds that Wallace was attracting across the country. In Los Angeles ten thousand Chicanos came to hear Wallace speak in Lincoln Park under the banner of "Amigos de Wallace," and twenty-five hundred blacks came to hear him speak in Watts. We filled Gilmore Stadium, with its 32,000 seats, on three occasions. Charlie Chaplin endorsed him; Katharine Hepburn spoke at the first of those Gilmore Stadium meetings and made a very powerful speech supporting Wallace and attacking red-baiting. The Students for Wallace movement was very strong at UCLA, and we recruited many young people into the Party as a result. In Berkeley, Wallace was banned from speaking on campus but managed to attract eight thousand students to hear him speak from a sidewalk adjoining the campus. In the California primaries in June, about a half million people cast ballots for candidates who had filed or cross-filed as Progressives, one fifth of the total primary vote. It was a very energizing campaign, and no one in the Party thought that Wallace could possibly end up with less than five million votes nationwide.
  • In 1948 the two-party duopoly smeared and suppressed the pro-labor efforts by the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, former Vice President (under Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Henry Wallace. This was followed by more onerous restrictions on state ballot access and exclusions of third parties, enacted by both the Republicans and Democrats, that further stunted competitive choices of candidates and agendas.
  • Instead, the main challenge to Truman’s decision to confront the Soviet Union came from the Left. And it was not much of a challenge. Roosevelt’s former secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace—a Democratic Party grandee who regarded himself as a leader of the Left—decided to form a separate party for the presidential elections in 1948. “The bigger the peace vote in 1948,” Wallace said in declaring his candidacy, “the more definitely the world will know that the United States is not behind the bipartisan reactionary war policy which is dividing the world into two armed camps and making inevitable the day when American soldiers will be lying in their Arctic suits in the Russian snow.” Even though it was supported by some Democrats who felt that Truman was moving away from the legacies of the New Deal by breaking the wartime alliance with the USSR, Wallace’s campaign was undermined by his own haplessness as a candidate and the rather shrill US Communist Party support for his cause. To everyone’s surprise, Truman narrowly won the election against the Republican Thomas Dewey. Wallace’s Progressives scored 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond’s Southern segregationists ticket.

See also

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