Henry A. Wallace

Henry A. Wallace

Henry A. Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace (born October 7, 1888 in Orient , Adair County , Iowa , † November 18, 1965 in Danbury , Connecticut ) was an American politician . Initially a member of the Republican Party , he later switched to the Democrats and later briefly became a co-founder of the Progressive Party .

From March 1933 to September 1940 he was Minister of Agriculture , from January 1941 to January 1945 Vice President in the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt . In March 1945 Roosevelt brought him back to his cabinet and entrusted him with the duties of Minister of Commerce ; even after Roosevelt's death a month later, he remained in this position under the new President Harry S. Truman until September 1946. Wallace ran in the 1948 presidential election as a candidate for the Progressive Party.

Life

Early years

Henry A. Wallace, who was born on a farm, was the son of the future Secretary of Agriculture Henry Cantwell Wallace . After graduating from college in 1910, he was editor of Wallace's Farmer and also published on agricultural sciences. From 1925 to 1935 he was a member of the Theosophical Society Adyar , was involved in the Liberal Catholic Church and came under the influence of the Russian painter and theosophist Nicholas Roerich .

Minister of Agriculture 1933 to 1940

Although his family members had consistently supported the Republicans and he was himself a member of this party - by family tradition - Wallace - disappointed by the agricultural policy and restrictive wage policy of the Republicans - switched to the Democratic Party in 1928. He was an advocate of Roosevelt's New Deal , as well as a proven agricultural expert. After being instrumental in the victory of the Democratic Party in Iowa in the 1932 election, President Roosevelt appointed him to his cabinet as Secretary of Agriculture after his election victory in 1933 ; it was his job to implement the New Deal policy in the agricultural sector.

Wallace remained in this post until 1940 and represented the continually controversial agricultural policy of the Roosevelt administration throughout the period.

Vice President and Minister of Commerce

Henry Wallace (far right) with Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) and Harry S. Truman (November 1944)

Wallace resigned from the post of Agriculture Minister in September 1940 to run as a running mate alongside Roosevelt in the 1940 election. After winning the election, he was introduced to office on January 20, 1941. His vice presidency was dominated by World War II; so he chaired important working groups and committees for economic warfare and for securing supplies for the American troops and made goodwill trips to South and Central America, which led to the entry of twelve states on the side of the Allies.

Before the 1944 election , he was accused of sympathy for communism (especially for Stalin ), so that not he, but Harry S. Truman was nominated as Roosevelt's vice-president. At the instigation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry A. Wallace, an avowed anti-fascist - in the run-up to the Yalta Conference - together with the geographer Owen Lattimore in May 1944 undertook a 25-day information trip to Siberia, where he came from Alaska Visited Gulag camp complex in Magadan on Kolyma. There the 50-year-old Soviet camp commandant and NKVD general Nikischow presented him with the advantages of the alleged Soviet settler life in Siberia. Commandant Nikischow had unceremoniously relocated the Gulag prisoners for the visit of US Vice President Wallace, and replaced them with NKVD troops in settler clothing, so that there was no obvious reference to the Gulag camp complex. Nikischow never mentioned to Vice President Wallace that the "settlers" were Gulag inmates. Wallace fell for the production in good faith. Wallace enthusiastically compared the settler life of the well-fed workers presented to him with that of the first settlers in the Wild West: "... all this reminds me of my homeland". Wallace enjoyed the company of his new friend "Ivan", the Soviet gulag commander Nikischow, and reported enthusiastically on his return to the United States. His term of office ended on January 20, 1945. In March 1945, however, President Roosevelt appointed Wallace as Minister of Commerce in the government cabinet.

Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, so that Truman succeeded only 82 days after taking office as the new president. Wallace remained Secretary of Commerce for some time. In September 1946 he was dismissed from office by President Truman because of a serious disagreement on foreign policy. Wallace had previously criticized the president in a public address for his tough stance on the Soviet Union.

Presidential Candidate and Later Life

For the election of 1948 he ran for the Progressive Party against President Truman and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey for the office of President of the United States. However, Wallace received only 2.4 percent of all votes and not a single voter in the polls on November 2, 1948 , as he won a majority of the votes in no state. He then withdrew from political life and devoted himself to agricultural research until his death on November 18, 1965.

Memberships

In 1943 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .

literature

• John C Culver, John Hyde: American dreamer: the life and times of Henry A. Wallace . Norton, New York 2000, ISBN 0-393-04645-1 .
• Thomas W Devine: Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign and the future of postwar liberalism . 2013, ISBN 978-1-4696-0203-5 .
• Mark L. Kleinman: A world of hope, a world of fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American liberalism . Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH 2000, ISBN 0-8142-0844-4 .
• Graham J White, J. R Maze: Henry A. Wallace: his search for a new world order . UNC Press, [Chapel Hill] 2015, ISBN 978-0-8078-5715-1 .
• Thomas Reuther: The ambivalent normalization. Discourse on Germany and images of Germany in the USA, 1941–1955. Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-515-07689-1 , pp. 92-104 (on Wallace's concept of Germany).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Past Issues of Theosophical History ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ Henry Scott Wallace: American Fascism, in 1944 and Today. In: New York Times. May 12, 2017. (nytimes.com)
3. ^ Henry A. Wallace: Special Mission in Soviet Asia and China. Zurich 1947, DNB 455356572 .
4. ^ Paul Johnson: The Survival of the Adversary Culture. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick 1988, ISBN 1-56000-554-8 , p. 180 (English).
5. ^ E. Lipper: Eleven years in Soviet prisons and camps. Second edition. Zurich 1950, p. 101 "And what HA Wallace says about it"
6. ↑ Frido Mann : The White House of Exile . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-10-397404-1 , p. 127.
7. ↑ A. Applebaum: The Gulag. Siedler-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-88680-642-1 , p. 446 ff.
8. ^ Member History: Henry A. Wallace. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 8, 2018 . 

Web links

Commons : Henry A. Wallace  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• The Life of Henry A. Wallace: 1888-1965. ( Memento from January 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Biography. (English)
• Henry A. Wallace Center for Agricultural & Environmental Policy. ( Memento of February 2, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
• Literature by and about Henry A. Wallace in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Henry A. Wallace in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Henry A. Wallace in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)

• Henry A. Wallace in the database of Find a Grave (English)