Good Intentions

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000 by John Patrick Diggins

John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 608 pp., $35.

IT WAS ON the day of July 11, 1944 that FDR finally decided to accept the urging of his advisers and dump his vice president. Henry A. Wallace had turned out to be politically incorrect, caught up in his dreams of a better world for the "common man." Perhaps out of affection and respect, FDR would delay informing him of the decision. At the Democratic convention, held in Chicago less than two weeks later, party leaders were stunned when the stadium thundered with the deafening chant, "We want Wallace!" The convention was veering out of control, and party officials feared that if a vote were taken immediately Wallace would be nominated and the plan to replace him with Senator Harry S Truman frustrated. With much jockeying the following day, Truman picked up winning votes on the third ballot and made a short, humble acceptance speech, while behind the scenes Wallace graciously bowed out of the administration.

A month later Wallace met with the President and was asked not to leave Washington since his services would still be needed. Wallace wrote in his diary that Roosevelt told him that he was "four or six" years ahead of his time and that the causes he advocated would "inevitably come." Four years later, the ideals Wallace embraced did indeed stir the nation's imagination when he ran for president as the leader of the new Progressive Citizens of America. The far-reaching Progressive platform of 1948 reads like a harbinger of Lyndon Johnsons's "Great Society." It called for

desegregation of public schools, an end to Jim Crow laws, open housing, national health insurance, equal rights for women, public day-care facilities, the minimum wage for workers, free trade, immigration reform, the direct election of presidents, home rule for the District of Columbia, indemnity for Japanese-Americans, collective bargaining for federal employees, new soil conservation programs, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, full taxation of capital gains, creation of a federal education department, and admission of Alaska and Hawaii to the Union.

The list is impressive, and in American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace authors John Culver and John Hyde have good reason to treat their subject as a prophet as well as a dreamer. Wallace knew where he wanted to take America and even the rest of the world; the problem was that he thought he could bring along the Soviet Union, too. During the Second World War, Wallace told Americans that he could think of no reason why the United States and Soviet Russia would have difficulty understanding one another. Did they not share a common history? "Both peoples were molded by the vast sweep of a rich continent. Both peoples know that their future is greater than their past. Both hate sham." Noting that both peoples hated imperialism as well, Wallace then offered his version of a convergence theory, speaking of "the new democracy" that he believed would emerge m the postwar world:

Some in the United States believe that we have over-emphasized what we might call political or bill-of-rights democracy. Carried to its extreme form, it leads to rugged individualism, exploitation, impractical emphasis on states' rights, and even to anarchy.

Russia, perceiving some of the abuses of excessive political democracy, has placed strong emphasis on economic democracy. This, carried to an extreme, demands that all power be centered in one man and his bureaucratic helpers.

Somewhere there is a practical balance between economic and political democracy. Russia and the United States both have been working toward this practical middle ground.

"Somewhere"! One definition of utopia is "nowhere", which is exactly where Wallace's hopes for the future would go, since they had no basis in the past. History blessed America with the presence of the very ideas and institutions that burdened the USSR by their absence. Wallace's mistake was the fallacy of Bolshevism itself: the assumption that socialism could be built and freedom realized in an environment suffering from the long legacy of feudalism, autocracy, peasantry, and, as well, a resistance to Western liberalism and the absence of a Protestant tradition that honored the work ethic. Comparing Russia and America in 1905, Max Weber concluded that the appearance of liberty in the world might never be repeated, since the combination of circumstances that led to its establishment in England and the United States might have occurred for the last time centuries earlier. Mesmerized by his version of "the new democracy", Wallace had no inkling that it would be the older "bill of rights democracy" that succeed ed in realizing many of the planks in the Progressive platform. (Where would today's feminism be without our rights-based political culture and the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law?)

Wallace's thinking about the world is a case study of the heart prevailing over the head, desperate sentiment over prudent skepticism. Nevertheless, in our present age of politics, when fund-raising takes precedence over governance and cynicism leaves no room for shame, and in our academic world of postmodernism, where all politics is power and knowledge has no foundation in truth, it is edifying to read about an idealist who believed in the simple force of truth; a humanitarian whose concern for the welfare of the world's poor and forgotten remained a daily passion; a fallible leader who could err in judgment but would not tell a lie to save face. At the time of Wallace's death in 1965, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a critic as well as an admirer, was right when he said in a eulogy: "Above all he was a good man."