The Wallace case - 50th anniversary of Democratic Party's Jul 21, 1944 selection of Harry S. Truman to replace Henry Wallace as Franklin Roosevelt's running mate

National Review, August 1, 1994 by Arnold Beichman

Fifty years ago, the fate of the Free World rested in the hands of a bunch of machine pols.

A MIDST all the World War II anniversaries being celebrated this year, one of the most fateful is likely to be among the least noted: the 50th anniversary of the evening the Democrats chose their 1944 vice-presidential candidate. The events in Normandy starting on June 6 of that year, changed the course of world history, but so did the event in Chicago on July 21.

The incumbent was Henry Wallace, whom FDR had chosen as his running-mate in 1940, dumping his two-term Vice President, John Nance Garner. Mr. Roosevelt had tapped Garner in 1932 under pressure from William Randolph Hearst. By 1940, FDR felt that two terms for Garner had been sufficient payoff for the publisher. But as FDR quickly learned, he had made a terrible mistake.

Wallace was a religious devote--indeed, something of a holy fool. Born a Presbyterian, he yearned for a more emotional religion. He studied Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Islam, Christian Science, Oriental cults, and merged all these into what he called pantheism." In the 1930s he became involved with Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich, a Russian expatriate. Wallace and Roerich began a correspondence, one of whose themes was the belief that--as Newsweek put it in 1948, when the letters became public--"somewhere on the mysterious plains of Outer Mongolia could be found signs of the Second Coming of Christ."

The letters, some in longhand, slosh about in a syrupy mysticism. Wallace addressed Roerich as "Dear Guru." Roosevelt was referred to as "The Flaming One," Churchill as "The Roaring Lion," Secretary of State Cordell Hull as "The Sour One," and Russia as "The Tiger." One sentence supplies a taste of the Wallace prose: "Yes, the search, whether it be for the lost world of Masonry or the Holy Chalice or the potentialities of the age to come is the one supremely worthwhile in objective. All else is Karmic duty. Here is life."

Eventually Wallace and Roerich had a falling out. The letters that Wallace had supposedly written (several may have been forgeries) came into the hands of Republican leaders. Having proved the authenticity of several letters through handwriting examination, they decided to use them as campaign ammunition. The Hearst, Scripps-Howard, and Paul Block chains were invited to make these letters public. But before the press could decide whether or not to do so, the Republicans withdrew them. According to Newsweek, Harry Hopkins, then managing the New Deal campaign, went to Wendell L. Willkie, the GOP candidate, and told him that if the Wallace correspondence became public, then so would Willkie's private life (he had an ongoing liaison with Irita Van Doren, the editor of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review). So the threat to the Democratic ticket was resolved--but Roosevelt never forgot it, nor did Hopkins. (The letters were finally published in a series of columns in March 1948 by Westbrook Pegler, in the New York Journal-American.

So now, in 1941, there's a Vice President Wallace. And he is not merely a holy fool; he is at the very least a Communist sympathizer. For anyone who has studied Wallace's public record there is no question that he had thrown in his political lot with the Comintern apparat which operated successfully in Washington, D.C., throughout the war--Alger Higs, Lauchlin Currie, probably Harry Dexter White. Wallace was their biggest catch.

It is my thesis that Wallace was an unwitting "agent of influence," as the phrase is used today, rather than a conscious participant in a Soviet global master plan. Wallace, however, worked openly with American Communists. A striking example of his loyalty to the apparat was his ringing endorsement in 1946 of a New York congressman who consistently followed the Communist line. Vito Marcantonio, said Wallace, "has the best voting record of all 435 members of Congress." In his book, Soviet Asia Mission (1946), Wallace described Magadan, in Kolyma (one of the more notorious Gulags), as "a combination TVA and Hudson's Bay Company." Dwight Macdonald wrote at the time, "It is not true that Henry Wallace is an agent of Moscow. But it is true that he behaves like one."

Even more telling was his choosing to run for President in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket--a candidacy that could only have hurt Harry Truman's chances. Wallace refused to reject Communist support in that campaign, and, as David McCullough later wrote, the Progressive Party platform "was virtually no different from the Communist Party platform in its denunciation of the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the new draft law[; it also] called for the destruction of American nuclear weapons, which were still the only nuclear weapons known to exist."

With Hitler's attack on the USSR on June 21, 1941, Wallace became the political hero--here I speak from some personal knowledge--of a trio of influential pro-Soviet manipulators. Two were Communists, Lillian Hellman and her lover, Dashiell Hammett. The third was Ralph Ingersoll, founder, editor, and publisher of the year-old newspaper PM, for which I worked. Ingersoll and Miss Hellman had been lovers in an earlier day, and he had probably been a Communist Party member. His authorized biographer, Roy Hoopes, says Ingersoll had attended Communist Party study groups, a standard piece of euphemistic Communist cant.