The Chris Moeller Archives

Opponent of hunger and racism, champion of peace

Every couple years, in search of human inspiration, I re-read John Culver and John Hyde's 2000 biography of Henry A. Wallace, entitled American Dreamer. Wallace is my very favorite American. His story is so extraordinarily progressive that historians have clearly felt the need to suppress it. But if and when they ever chisel out the Mount Rushmore that exists and re-sculpt it with improvements in mind, it would be my choice that they honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Eugene Debs, Lucy Parsons, and Wallace. My alma mater, Iowa State University, would be a strong candidate to be renamed Wallace University because of the man's work in the agricultural and global political sciences. (If Northeast Missouri State can rename itself after Harry Truman, a man forever entangled with Wallace by time and circumstance, but one best known for nuclear holocaust and mass murder, then Iowans have an opportunity to easily one-up their neighbors to the south.) As a student at then-Iowa State College during the early 1900's, Henry's family took the African-American "plant doctor" George Washington Carver into their home and it was Carver that taught the young Wallace some of his first lessons in plant breeding.

Wallace was an Iowan in the deepest sense. It was as if he grew from this soil. He is by far the most revolutionary man, the most left-wing man, to hold high public office in the United States. He served as Secretary of Agriculture under FDR during the Depression. His father had served in the same position under Republican administrations during the 1920s. His grandfather had started the magazine Wallaces Farmer in the mid-19th century (it is still published), and that first Henry Wallace, the grandfather, lived in Des Moines late in his life in a Victorian home that still stands about 200 steps from my house. The gardens there also helped to form the keen, inquisitive, and unbiased mind of the young agronomist.

Before being tabbed by Roosevelt, Henry A. had already transformed the world by developing high-yielding hybrid corn that has since saved literally tens of millions of lives worldwide. Even in the 1990's, a quarter-century after his death, descendants of his inbred and crossbred chickens were laying almost half of the eggs sold throughout the world. In the FDR Cabinet, he introduced the concepts of food stamps, school lunches, federal land-use planning, and soil conservation. By the time he was tabbed to be Vice President in 1940, he was already, personally, a confirmed vegetarian, and at this point you probably think I'm making all this up. Why have Americans never heard of him?

Now as Vice President, he came to embody the New Deal more than any other man, even more than the President himself, who had backed off some of the original tenets of the wide-ranging program. Wallace was the West Wing's champion fighter against Wall Street and economic manipulation by large banks, against global imperialism and military aggression, against anything he believed posed a challenge to global peace. But under America's perverted political system, then and now, anybody that uses the word "peace" as routine must be ceremonially treated as a a crank, so you can probably guess what the sinister city bosses and Southern bigots of his Democratic Party thought of this scientific and unimpeachably ethical visionary of the Iowa corn fields, and what they had up their sleeves at the 1944 party convention in Chicago while the President was out of town dying. Harry Truman was nominated as Vice President instead to pacify the Southern bigots and evidently to assuade Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast's personal goal of getting one of his "office clerks" as far up the American political ladder as possible.

Backstabbed by the party hacks, Wallace ran for President in '48 under the banner of the Progressive Party. It was a remarkable campaign platform that advocated peaceful dealings with the Soviet Union. Wallace had predicted even before FDR's death that another worldwide conflict would quickly break out after the fall of the fascists if the new imperial powers, Russia, England, and the U.S., attempted to establish and/or re-establish their empires. He was not so parochial as to believe that imperialism on behalf of the Allied nations had played no role in sparking World War II. He publicly declared that the goal of the U.S. should be to help peoples in Asia, Africa, and South America gain self-autonomy, but for the U.S. to also get out of the contradictory business of colonialism. He felt the only role the U.S. should have over the lives of those people was to share the scientific strategies and breakthroughs he had long championed and even been directly responsible for to help end world hunger.

He was also a man ahead of his cultural times on American race relations, and his '48 third party campaign found him touring the South by bus through some extremely hostile territory. Wallace and his campaigners refused to stay in segregated hotels or to eat in segregated restaurants, opting instead to stay and be fed in the homes of African-Americans. At campaign events, he was pelted with eggs. This was 15 years before the March on Washington and seven years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

He was attacked in the press by hatchet men of the Democratic Party, by frothing columnists of the establishment right-wing press, and by the white supremacist Winston Churchill, who was eager to re-establish the grip of the dying British empire he was presiding over. Having now had a bitter separation from both the Republican and Democratic parties, it was open season on the popular Wallace and that popularity started to rapidly decline. Democrats warned voters that his campaign boosted the chances of New York Governor Tom Dewey beating Truman in the general election. Some things never change. Wallace supporters, among them celebrities like Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie, were red-baited and physically threatened. Wallace referred to the two parties as two wings of the same party and also had the balls to label them what they were fast becoming, pioneers of a uniquely American breed of fascism.

Today, Wallace is largely overlooked or forgotten in historical texts. His name appears on buildings at the Iowa Capitol in Des Moines and in Ames, home of the university. His vice presidential bust sits in the Smithsonian Museum, but even in Iowa, he seems to share his legacy with his less-controversial father and grandfather, who both shared his common sense and social vision, but steered clear during their lives of the garbage can of American politics. The establishment political structure of the United States certainly wants nothing to do with the man that would have had us skip the Cold War era entirely, and therefore miss out on that golden economic opportunity for graft, corruption, and mass exploitation. Meanwhile, Harry Truman is a man celebrated today for his service to the Empire. He's looked to with pride by a Democratic Party that, seven decades later, still flatters itself hollowly as the party of "the common man," even while Truman, nominated as Roosevelt's likely successor even against the will of rank and file Democrats in 1944, became, revealingly, Condoleeza Rice's "man of the century."

For your enlightenment, here is an "Untold History" interview with American University history professor Peter Kuznick about the life and legacy of Henry Agard Wallace. The discussion between guest and host heard here aptly demonstrates the exactly-perfect use of the worldwide web.

posted by CM @ 1:58 PM