Henry Agard Wallace, the 33rd vice president of the United States, was a strange man.
He does not drink, smoke or swear.
He doesn’t like to joke, read fiction or play golf. In fact, he hates any venture where he can’t see room for improvement.
Although highly intelligent, Wallace struggled in social situations, as author Benn Steil explains in “The Other World: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century” (Avid Reader Press).
Steil believes Wallace actually has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism spectrum disorder first highlighted by Austrian physician Hans Asperger in 1944 — Wallace’s last year as vice president.
According to Steil, Wallace remains the most interesting, “almost-president in American history” and in “The World That Wasn’t” he imagines how different America would have been if Wallace, and not Harry S. Truman, had replaced Franklin D Roosevelt in 1945.
Although highly intelligent, Wallace struggled in social situations, as author Ben Steil explains in “The Other World: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century” (Avid Reader Press).
Born on a farm near Orient, Iowa, in October 1888, Wallace was initially on the agricultural path.
After college, he edited the family newspaper, Wallace’s Farmer, and eventually bought his own farm where he grew hybrid corn and formed the successful Hi-Bred Corn Company.
Like farming, politics also runs in the family.
His father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, was the US secretary of agriculture under presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Wallace held the position himself under Roosevelt from 1933 to 1940, and then served as FDR’s vice president from 1941 to 1945.
Although it seemed likely that FDR would ask Wallace to join him in a bid for a third term, his left-leaning views, especially on the Soviet Union, frightened some moderates in the Democratic Party.
Roosevelt instead chose Truman as his running mate for the 1944 election, so Truman became president after FDR’s death in April 1945.
Born on a farm near Orient, Iowa, in October 1888, Wallace was initially on the agricultural path. Getty Images
The decision has long-term implications, not just for Democrats and America, but the world.
“This most unpromising political figure [Wallace] came in short order to become FDR’s successor at a critical juncture in twentieth-century geopolitics,” Steil wrote.
“And even if the Cold War was only delayed by Wallace’s presidency, post-war history will certainly be different because of it . . . With Henry Wallace in the White House, there would be no Truman Doctrine. There is no Marshall Plan. No NATO. No West Germany. No containment policy. . . All these initiatives. . . Henry Wallace opposed.”
Wallace was secretary of commerce under Truman but when he gave a speech urging more conciliatory policies toward the Soviet Union in September 1946, Truman fired him.
Wallace’s appeasement of the Soviets clearly did not sit well in postwar America.
However, Wallace redoubled his Soviet sympathies.
First, he wrote a book detailing his belief that the Soviet Union was undergoing a revival under the Bolshevik regime — and he did so with the help of a known KGB informant.
Then, in 1948, he made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency under the Progressive Party and colluded with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, even allowing the dictator to edit an important election speech.
Wallace (left) served as FDR’s vice president from 1941 to 1945. Bettmann Archives
Wallace also struggled with the 1947 Truman Doctrine, which was intended to contain the threat of Soviet expansion.
That doctrine was a red line for the former VP. “[It] is the clearest evidence yet that the president has allied himself with ‘fascists’ and ‘reactionaries’ in Congress, the military, and the State Department.”
While Wallace’s approach to the Soviet Union drew widespread criticism, so did his belief in mysticism.
Raised a Presbyterian, he nevertheless found Christian orthodoxy “clean”.
Instead, he turned to spiritualism, exploring Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.
“He would claim to be a ‘practical mystic,’ a man in search of eternal truths that, whether obtained through calculation or introspection, could inform the path to positive social, economic, and political change,” Steil wrote.
For Truman, all the more reason to dump him.
“Wallace,” the president would write in his memoirs, “had ‘turned into a mystic with a zeal bordering on fanaticism, and that, he said, would ‘get me the vote.’ “
Although it seemed likely that FDR would ask Wallace to join him in a bid for a third term, his left-leaning views, especially on the Soviet Union, frightened some moderates in the Democratic Party. Roosevelt instead chose Harry Truman to be his running mate for the 1944 election. Bettmann Archive
Wallace retired from politics in 1964 to conduct more experiments in hybridization and lecture on agricultural innovation throughout the US and Central America.
He tried – and failed – to breed more efficient chickens that ate less food and laid more eggs and began writing a book about the history of strawberries.
But he never finished it.
Wallace suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease – and died in November 1965 at the age of 77.
For Steil, Henry Wallace’s political career clearly shows that success, in life as well as in politics, requires the conformity of desire with reality.
“One cannot corn for higher yields, nor is a dictator to compromise,” he concluded.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
