Henry A. Wallace Totally Explained

Everything about Henry A Wallace totally explained

Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) 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.

Early life

Wallace was born on a farm near Orient, Adair County, Iowa, and graduated from Iowa State College at Ames in 1910, where he was a brother in the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. His father was Henry Cantwell Wallace. He worked on the editorial staff of Wallace's Farmer in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1910 to 1924 and edited the publication from 1924 to 1929. He experimented with breeding high-yielding strains of corn (maize), and authored many publications on agriculture. In 1915 he devised the first corn-hog ratio charts indicating the probable course of markets. With a small inheritance that had been left to his wife, the former Ilo Browne, whom he married in 1914, Wallace founded Hi-Bred Corn, which later became Pioneer Hi-Bred, a major agriculture corporation.
Wallace was raised as a Presbyterian, but left that denomination early in life. He spent most of his early life exploring other religious faiths and traditions. For many years, he'd been closely associated with the Russian theosophist Nicholas Roerich. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Wallace's search for inner light took him to strange prophets.... It was in this search that he encountered Nicholas Roerich, a Russian emigre, painter, theosophist and con man. Wallace did Roerich a number of favors, including sending him on an expedition to Central Asia presumably to collect drought-resistant grasses. In due course, H.A. [Wallace] became disillusioned with Roerich and turned almost viciously against him." Wallace eventually settled on Episcopalianism.

Political career

Secretary of Agriculture

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Wallace United States Secretary of Agriculture in his Cabinet, a post his father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, had occupied from 1921 to 1924. Wallace had been a liberal Republican, but he supported Roosevelt's New Deal and soon switched to the Democratic Party. Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture until September 1940, when he resigned, having been nominated for Vice President as Roosevelt's running mate in the 1940 presidential election.

Vice President

During the 1940 presidential election, a series of letters that Wallace had written in the 1930s to Nicholas Roerich was uncovered by the Republicans. Wallace addressed Roerich as "Dear Guru" and signed all of the letters as "G" for Galahad, the name Roerich had assigned him. Wallace assured Roerich that he awaited "the breaking of the New Day" when the people of "Northern Shambhalla" - a Buddhist term roughly equivalent to the kingdom of heaven - would create an era of peace and plenty. When asked about the letters, Wallace lied and dismissed them as forgeries. When the Republicans threatened to reveal his "eccentric" religious beliefs to the public, the Democrats countered by threatening to release information about Republican candidate Wendell Willkie's rumored extramarital affair with the writer Irita Van Doren.

Secretary of Commerce

Roosevelt placated Wallace by appointing him Secretary of Commerce. Wallace served in this post from March 1945 to September 1946, when he was fired by President Harry S. Truman because of disagreements about the policy towards the Soviet Union.

The New Republic

Following his term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace became the editor of The New Republic magazine, using his position to criticize vociferously Truman's foreign policy. On the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, he predicted it would mark the beginning of "a century of fear."

The 1948 Presidential election

Wallace left his editorship position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. His platform advocated an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American South, and that during the campaign he refused to appear before segregated audiences or eat or stay in segregated establishments. The "Dear Guru" letters reappeared now and were published, seriously hampering his campaign. Even more damage was done to Wallace's campaign when several prominent journalists, including H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Thompson, publicly charged that Wallace and the Progressives were under the covert control of Communists. Wallace's subsequent refusal to publicly disavow any Communist support cost him the backing of many anti-Communist liberals and socialists, such as Norman Thomas.
Wallace suffered a decisive defeat in the election, to the Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman. Gaining 2.4% of the popular vote, he ended up third runner-up behind Republican Thomas Edmund Dewey and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, and didn't carry any states.

Later career

Wallace resumed his farming interests, and resided in South Salem, New York. During his later years he made a number of advances in the field of agricultural science. His many accomplishments included a breed of chicken that at one point accounted for the overwhelming majority of all egg-laying chickens sold across the globe. The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the largest agricultural research complex in the world, is named for him.
   In 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, Wallace broke with the Progressives and backed the U.S.-led war effort in the Korean War. In 1952, Wallace published Where I Was Wrong, in which he explained that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin's excesses and that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist. He wrote various letters to "people who he thought had traduced him" and advocated the re-election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.
   In 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy invited him to his inauguration ceremony, though he'd supported Kennedy's opponent Richard Nixon. A touched Wallace wrote to Kennedy: "At no time in our history have so many tens of millions of people been so completely enthusiastic about an Inaugural Address as about yours.".
   He died in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965, of Lou Gehrig's disease. His remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa.

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