Wallace, Henry A. (1888–1965)

HENRY ACARD WALLACE was a leftist Democrat who served at both the center and the fringe of American politics. Wallace was born in Orient, Iowa, son of Henry Cantwell Wallace and May Brodhead. He graduated from Iowa State College in 1910, and worked on [Page 857]his family's farm magazine until 1929. During this time, he also became known in the agribusiness community as an agronomist and agricultural scientist. He married Ilo Browne on May 20, 1914, with whom he had three children. Wallace became secretary of agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt, a position Wallace's father, who died in office, had held less than a decade earlier under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The agriculture post had often been filled with someone with left-of-center politics, or at least agrarian populism. Wallace's father had, in fact, been regarded as a liberal Republican, an important faction within that party at that time, although ignominious today. Henry Wallace's time as secretary was one of great despair in the agricultural sector, and Roosevelt's New Deal program gave Wallace the opportunity to cultivate his progressive reputation nationally.

Roosevelt had been elected president twice with John Nance Garner as his vice president. It was expected that Roosevelt would decline to seek re-election in 1940, as no president before him had run for a third term. Garner, as the two-term incumbent vice president, naturally ran for the presidency. However, Garner did not abandon his presidential campaign even after Roosevelt sought a third term. Thus, he had to be replaced. Roosevelt chose Wallace. This was also seen as a nod to the left wing of the Democratic Party. Wallace continued to serve as an ideological lightning rod while he was vice president, a time when the world was at war.

Wallace alienated Roosevelt by engaging in some personal and political squabbles with others in the Democratic Party. The party replaced him with Harry S Truman as the vice presidential candidate for the 1944 election. Presumably, if Wallace had been able to hold his tongue and endure the role of a passive vice president, then he, and not Truman, would have become president when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. As a face-saving measure, Roosevelt made Wallace secretary of commerce, but it was not long before Wallace's vocif-erousness became too much for Truman, and Wallace resigned on September 20, 1946. He briefly served as editor of the liberal magazine, The New Republic.

Soon afterward, Wallace led a leftist faction in the tumultuous election of 1948. Truman was challenged both on the left and the right within his own party. This was a time when fervent Anti-Communism led to expulsion of Communists and other leftists from the Democratic Party. Many gravitated to Wallace's Progressive Party. J. Strom Thurmond (then a Democrat) led a breakaway southern faction of anti-civil rights Democrats known as the Dixiecrats. Wallace received votes in all but three states, more than a million total, and kept Truman from receiving a majority of the popular vote.

However, Wallace won no electoral votes, and later came to believe he had been used as a tool by Communists in that election. He became an outspoken Anti-Communist. He spent his later years returning to his work as an agricultural scientist. Wallace died in Danbury, Connecticut on November 18, 1965 and his remains were buried at Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa.

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