Henry Wallace

• Vice President to:       Franklin D. Roosevelt
  
  
• Dates Served: Wallace served as Vice President from 1941 - 1945.
  
• Political Party: Wallace was a Democrat, from Iowa.
  
• Born: 1888.
  
• Died: 1965, at the age of 77.
  
• The presidential opponent during the 1940 campaign was:
  
  
  • Wendell Willkie - Republican - Popular public-speaker from Indiana with no government background
    
    
• Campaign issues in 1940:
  
  
  • The issue this year was Roosevelt's choice to seek a 3rd term and the latest war in Europe. The Republicans chose Wendell Willkie, who had the oddest name of any Presidential hopeful, due largely to the fact that he could speak well. He had no government background what-so-ever, but Conservatives loved his Left-bashing speeches. (The original Rush Limbaugh?) Willkie tried to make an issue out of FDR's choice to break with tradition and serve for more than 2 terms, and also pledged to continue with the New Deal but implement it more efficiently. He also called for a strong stance against the Nazis in Europe. But these weren't strong enough reasons for voters to kick out a President they had come to love. Roosevelt took the easy route and played on the conventional wisdom that the Republicans were responsible for the nation's sufferings. He also made a pledge to keep America out of Europe's war, the same pledge that Wilson had made 24 years earlier. Like Wilson, FDR would not be able to keep it. On election day Willkie joined his predecessors under the mountain of votes for FDR.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Henry Wallace:
  
  
  • Wallace was the son of Henry C. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Harding and Coolidge.
    
    
  • Religious affiliation: Religion played a significant role in Wallace's views, although of a nature quite non-conventional for his time. He had been raised in a Presbyterian household but spent his young adulthood exploring a wide variety of religions, with a focus on Eastern religions, specifically Hindu disciplines. He later returned to his Christian roots and compromised by becoming an Episcopalian, but never let go of his broad collection of eccentric religious views. He spent many years associating with a Russian mystic named Nicholas Roerich, who preached a complex set of doctrine focused on the idea that Jesus had visited Mongolia. Wallace's involvement with Roerich, described below, would haunt his later political career.
    
    
  • Holding a university degree in animal husbandry, Wallace was originally a researcher in plant genetics. Conducting research between 1913 - 1933 he successfully cross-bred a new kind of hybrid corn that was more resilient than previous breeds.
    
    
  • From 1910 - 1931 he was a writer and editor for the magazine "Wallace's Farmer and Iowa Homestead", founded by his grandfather. In 1931 the magazine went bankrupt and Wallace divided his time between his plant research and speaking out on the need for federal relief for struggling American farmers.
    
    
  • Wallace was dogged for years by several strange rumors surrounding some of his more obscure interests. In 1930 Wallace met a man named Nicholas Roerich, a painter from Russia, who claimed to possess mysterious spiritual powers and knowledge. He claimed to have evidence that Jesus had visited Mongolia prior to his ministry in the Holy Land and that he wished to go there to find this proof. He also supposedly told Wallace that he wished to lead an expedition into Asia to gather wild grass seeds for Wallace's work in plant genetics.
    
    Wallace became interested in his ideas, and sponsored an expedition for Roerich to go to Mongolia, ostensibly to collect seeds in the Gobi desert to see if anything could be learned from them in relation to the dustbowl problems then plaguing the US. But when Roerich arrived in China, stories began appearing in Chinese newspapers claiming that Roerich had asked the U.S. Infantry stationed in Tientsin for rifles and ammunition, and that his true goal was to incite a Communist revolution. Roerich was not a botanist, and he had no special qualifications for identifying any grass seeds. A growing number of people in China charged that his real purpose was to lead a rebel force up into Siberia to set up a new independent state, of which he would be the head, with Henry Wallace as his American sponsor.
    
    Roerich failed in his expedition and Wallace eventually disassociated himself from him.
    
    
  • Originally a Republican, Wallace converted to the Democratic Party in 1928 to support the Democratic Presidential candidate that year, Alfred E. Smith, who lost to Herbert Hoover. Due to his support of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 Presidential campaign, Roosevelt appointed him Secretary of Agriculture that same year. He oversaw Roosevelt's program in 1933 to stabilize farm prices by paying off farmers to grow less and plow under any surplus produce, as well as slaughter "redundant" farm animals, a practice which angered many.
    
    
  • In 1940 when Roosevelt decided to run for a third term, Roosevelt's Vice President, John Garner, refused to support him and quit to run for President against Roosevelt. Roosevelt then named Wallace as his choice for Vice President on his campaign.
    
    Due to his far-Left sympathies, Wallace was not trusted by many delegates at the Democratic Party Convention in 1940. The Governor of Oklahoma was asked what he thought of Wallace on the ticket and he replied, "Henry is my second choice". When asked who his first choice was he replied, "Any son of a bitch, red, white, black, or yellow that can get the nomination!" But his name remained on the ballot because Roosevelt threatened to withdraw from the race if Wallace wasn't chosen. Roosevelt got his way.
    
    
  • After he won re-election, Roosevelt named Wallace his "Goodwill Ambassador" to Latin America. Wallace spoke Spanish and delivered speeches in the language while visiting Mexico.
    
    
  • During World War II he once said that, in his opinion, "The object of this war is to make sure everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day."
    
    
  • During and after his term as Vice President, Wallace often voiced his admiration for the Soviet Union and their policies of Central Planning for the welfare of the working classes. This made a lot of people in the Democratic Party very nervous, especially as concerns over Roosevelt's health grew more ominous. Roosevelt had decided to run for a 4th term in 1944, and few people in the Party wanted to deal with the prospect of Wallace becoming President if Roosevelt died in office.
    
    Officials convinced Roosevelt to dump Wallace on his re-election campaign, and replace him with Missouri Senator Harry S Truman. With Roosevelt's death shortly after the election, Wallace missed being President by only a few months.
    
    
  • After Roosevelt won re-election, and shortly before his death, he appointed Wallace Secretary of Commerce, serving from 1945 - 1946. He was dismissed from his post by President Truman after one year for publicly criticizing Truman's "get tough" policy towards the Soviet Union.
    
    
  • From 1946 - 1948 Wallace was Chief Editor of the magazine "New Republic", a Leftist Socialist journal supportive of the Soviet Union and Critical of the Cold War.
    
    
  • One of his more quoted comments by his detractors was from a speech he made in 1948, in which he said, "If I fail to cry out that I am anti-Communist, it is not because I am friendly to Communism, but because at this time of growing intolerance I refuse to join even the outer circle of that band of men who stir the steaming cauldron of hate and fear."
    
    
  • Wallace liked to refer to Capitalists as "Midget Hitlers". Wallace was rarely called a Unifier of his Party.
    
    
  • In 1948 Wallace ran for President for the Progressive Party (not the party of the same name that Teddy Roosevelt had founded), his running mate being "The Singing Cowboy from Idaho". His campaign focused on criticizing the role of large corporations in government policies, criticizing the Marshall Plan being enacted in Europe as tool of American business interests, and calling for friendlier relations with the Soviet Union. He was endorsed by the American Communist Party, which didn't exactly help him win the trust of Middle America. Even though he lost, he managed to get about 1.5 million votes. After the election he retired to a life of farming and writing.
    
    
  • Documents obtained as result of the Freedom of Informations Act, under President Jimmy Carter, verified long-standing rumors that the FBI had long been monitoring Wallace for any overt pro-Communist activities during and after his term as Vice President.
    

Notable Events during his Vice Presidency:

• The Atlantic Charter, in 1941. In August of 1941 Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and initiated this charter which dedicated both countries to the destruction of Nazi Germany, but without US soldiers being directly involved in the war in Europe.
  
  
• Pearl Harbor, 1941. On December 7, 1941 hundreds of Japanese airplanes unexpectedly bombed the US Naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, in which a large number of the US Navy's ships happened to be stationed that day. Most of the US fleet was annihilated, killing over 2,000 Americans. The Japanese were in the process of invading most of Southeast Asia and they were trying to keep the US from interfering. The US had also been maintaining an emarbgo against the Japanese, so US-Japanese relations hadn't been good for some time.
  
  Congress responded by declaring war on Japan, and since Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany the declaration also applied to Germany. The US was now fighting a two-front war.
  
  
• Lots of battles from 1942 - 1944. The Battle of Midway in the Pacific and invasions against the Nazis in north Africa in 1942, the overthrow of Mussolini in 1943, the pounding of the Japanese Navy in the Pacific and the invasion of Normandy in Europe and the liberation of Paris all in 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge against the Nazis in 1945 led to the collapse of the Nazis and Hitler's cowardly suicide after 4 years of American troops fighting the biggest war in history.
  
  
• The Slinky is invented by Richard James, in 1943.
  
  
• Silly Putty is invented by James Wright, in 1943. Silly Putty is later taken on a trip around the moon in 1968 aboard Apollo 8.
  
  
• By the end of Roosevelt's 13 years in office he had appointed 9 new Supreme Court Justices, replacing every Justice that had been there when he first took office.