AMERICAN DREAMER: A Life of Henry A. Wallace. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, May, 2000 by Chalmers M. Roberts

AMERICAN DREAMER: A Life of Henry A. Wallace By John C. Culver and John Hyde Norton, $35.00

THIS IS A MIGHTY BIG (600 PAGE) FIRST-RATE biography, written with fervor but told in the calm of long-ago history (Wallace died nearly 35 years ago) about one of the most intriguing almost-but-not-quite characters in America's twentieth century.

Who was Henry Agard Wallace? Son of a Republican secretary of agriculture, he was an Iowa hybrid corn breeder (who made lots of money from that pursuit) who was tapped, as a Democrat, by Franklin D. Roosevelt to be his first and only agriculture secretary. He was the one who plowed under 10 million acres of growing cotton and slaughtered six million little pigs in a desperate effort to bring farmers out of the depth of the Great Depression. If that were all, we would not have this book. But when FDR decided in 1940 to run for an unprecedented third term, and Vice President John N. "Cactus Jack" Garner would have none of it, the president finally picked Wallace to be his number two.

I still remember the day he became vice president because I covered that event for the now long-dead Washington Daily News. Wallace was late getting to the Capitol, FDR was waiting, the band kept playing. I followed Wallace as he ran up the circular staircase near the Senate wing to reach the inaugural stand on the west front, crying out as he reached the top: "Where is the vice president supposed to go?" Nobody seemed to know, and few cared. Only FDR mattered.

Authors Culver, a former Iowa congressman and senator, and Hyde, a former Des Moines Register reporter, embarked on this love-of-their-lives project a dozen years ago. They have combed the archives, included Wallace's nearly 5,000-page oral history, and put the results in order and in perspective to produce a highly readable and sympathetic biography, but without sparing Wallace's many faults. The low point was his disastrous 1948 presidential candidacy, to which I will return--for therein lies my criticism.

In The Cornfields

The tale begins with agriculture. For Wallace, beginning in high school: "corn became his passion, his cause, the medium of his genius. He knew corn as well as he knew people ..." By 1932, when FDR was first nominated, Wallace was well known. Through Rexford Guy Tugwell (who would be his undersecretary) he met the newly nominated candidate at Hyde Park. It was an instant success. Wallace saw FDR as a man "with a fresh, eager, open mind, ready to pitch into the agricultural problem at once ..." At 44, Wallace became the youngest member of the Cabinet.

The Agriculture Department was bedeviled by internal feuds and fights, even a purge, and in 1936 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the New Deal's first effort to save the farmers. The authors never really explain how the department came to be home to so many young communists, including Alger Hiss, John Abt, and Lee Pressman.

Wallace made good copy for the newspapers as "a ferociously competitive [and ambidextrous] tennis player without a trace of style or grace" He threw boomerangs on the Mall, beaning a photographer. With his family he lived in a Wardman Park Hotel apartment, hiking the three miles to work. And he made the cover of Time magazine in 1938 with a flattering Grant Wood portrait now on the cover of this book. He was among those mentioned as possible successors to FDR.

There was, however, an aspect of Wallace not generally known. He long had been a mystic. His intellectual curiosity led Wallace to explore "esoteric phenomena" such as seances, symbols, rituals, astrology. By 1933 Wallace's search for "inner light" led him to a guru named Nicholas Konstantinovitch Roerich, a fellow talented at "separating wealthy Americans from their money." He didn't get Wallace's money but the relationship became an albatross, with Wallace's "guru letters," written often at fever pitch, always seemingly on the point of exploding in public. They finally did in 1948.

The key to Wallace's selection in 1940 as FDR's vice presidential candidate was Roosevelt's feeling that Wallace "thinks right" and has "the general ideas we have." So FDR told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that "I have decided on Wallace" and she passed word to Harry Hopkins, his emissary at the Chicago Convention. The authors of American Dreamer explain the choice better than I have seen it done before.

When FDR praised Wallace to his political expert, James A. Farley, Farley said many people considered Wallace a mystic. FDR snapped back: "He's not a mystic. He's a philosopher. He's got ideas. He thinks right. He'll help the people think." So Farley recorded it, and he had a fabulous memory. But the party bosses gathered in convention wanted someone, anyone, other than Wallace and it took the calming words of Eleanor Roosevelt to shame the convention into voting for Wallace. One must remember, looking at this political history that at this moment Europe was aflame in World War II as Hitler vanquished the continental democracies.