For all the intemperate rhetoric about how dangerous Wallace was to the American way of life, it is striking how very common a specific type of American middle class man he actually was: An avid, if ungraceful tennis player; a middle aged man who marveled at the health benefits of such mundane choices as forswearing the elevator for stairs. It is easy to imagine a David Brooks “bobo” profile of Wallace in the late 1990s, albeit with a quaint pastoral twist. Wallace’s biggest political sin may have been being born too early. Perhaps the changing times have afforded Wallace a certain degree of recognition that previously escaped him: Though he never got his own presidential library, in 2003 the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library opened the newly constructed Henry A. Wallace Visitor, Education, and Conference Center.
It had been Franklin D. Roosevelt, America’s greatest president and savior, the personal friend and mentor of HAW, who in 1939 pledged his presidential artifacts and a plot of land at Hyde Park, New York to be used to build a presidential library open to the public. 11 years later, FDR’s successor announced that he, too, would provide for such a repository of his papers and speeches. Of course, in the successor’s case there would be no grand family estate on which to erect his The Presidential Library would be in Ames, on the campus of Iowa State College, his alma matter, a campus that had grown, like its most distinguished alum, from an obscure agricultural school to a liberal arts institution that could be favorably compared to most of the state schools in the Midwest. It may have lacked the distinction of the University of Illinois, but distinguished alumni must count for something- Iowa State had Carrie Chapman Catt, the founder of the League of Women Voters; Henry C. Wallace, the great Secretary of Agriculture who had been hounded to death by the most pernicious and discredited technocrat in the history of American government; George Washington Carver, the great botanist who was Iowa State’s first black student… and, of course, the Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President, and 33rd President of the United States who had redeemed his father and secured for all time the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the sanctity of the individual soul, Henry Aagard Wallace… .
Of course, several cruel twists of fate ensured that everything past the first two sentences in the preceding paragraph would be nothing more than the romantic fantasy of a man who nearly became immortal. In 1950, it was Truman, the usurper of Wallace’s heir-apparency whose approval rating had been north of 50% for the last time nearly a year earlier, who had announced that he would imitate his predecessor and establish a public repository of his documents and effects. Five years later, Congress granted federal recognition and funding for the purpose of presidential libraries, and every president since Hoover, the oldest living president at the time the law was enacted, no matter how hated or undistinguished, has some manner of edifice dedicated to him. Thus there would be a library 230 miles south of Ames, in Independence, Missouri, and one 150 miles east in West Branch, Iowa, the idealized boyhood home of the hated Hoover until the age of 9, but nothing for Ames. But even though he was now prematurely obscure beyond serving as the occasional rhetorical punching bag for ambitious young conservatives like Congressman Richard Nixon of California, Wallace was still respected enough to merit an oral history project dedicated to his life, career, and forebears. So at age 62 he began to share his life story with the researchers from Columbia University’s oral history project, still in an unassuming Iowa manner that found more personal interest in the minutiae of ‘book farming’ than in the rough and tumble of American politics, but informed by the closest thing to a pure concern for the ordinary person than any comparable figure in American political history. After all, the vice presidency was the only elected office Wallace had ever held, and the presidency the only other position he had ever sought. The only other man with a comparable lack of experience (or corruption) in previous elected offices was Herbert Hoover, who Wallace hated still. “I hope I never again feel as intensely antagonistic toward anyone,” Wallace said of Hoover. (Culver 87) As fate would have it, Hoover and Truman were the bookends of Wallace’s career. Of the three, Wallace was the medium between the icy, aloof, technocratic Hoover and the outgoing, engaged, simple Harry Truman. All three were products of their time and place, and today Wallace is the least remembered and least revered.
The general trajectory of Henry Wallace’s life came form his grandfather and namesake, who was known as “Uncle Henry” to a remarkable swath of the Midwestern farm belt. Uncle Henry was the son of James Wallace, an Irish immigrant who had established himself as a prominent citizen in a small Pennsylvanian town in the first half of the 19th century. Uncle Henry majored in theology at Illinois’ Monmouth College, but found his calling muted after serving as a Union chaplain during the Civil War. His post-war rectory in Rock Island, Ill. saw Uncle Henry experience a mental and physical decline that prompted a move to Iowa and a return to farming. He thrived upon returning to his roots, and by his grandson Henry’s birth in 1888 was the largest landholder in Adair County and had revived a failing local newspaper. As editor, Uncle Henry was a pugnacious, but proper progressive who eschewed populist ranting. He endorsed practical solutions to the problems of farmers, such as a co-op that broke a barbed wire monopoly by manufacturing its own from the dues of its members. He befriended such agricultural figures as James “Tama Jim” Wilson, who would soon become a congressman, and ultimately the longest serving Secretary of Agriculture in American history. The rising tide of influence lifted Uncle Henry to the editorship of the Iowa Homestead, the state’s largest farm publication, which further increased his influence within the state’s agricultural community.
Henry A. Wallace was born to Henry “Harry” Wallace, son of “Uncle Henry”, and his wife May on October 7, 1888, in a farmhouse five miles outside of Orient, Iowa. The farm was owned by “Uncle Henry”, and young Harry attempted to farm the stake while attending Iowa Agricultural College, utilizing the “book farming” of the educated gentleman farmer. Yet the American Gothic ideal became a nightmare in short order: editorial squabbles and the national economic depression of 1893-94 claimed his father’s job at the Homestead and Uncle Henry found himself $30,000 in debt with all of his properties heavily mortgaged. Meanwhile, Harry, contending with his studies and futile efforts to support his growing family amidst chronically sick livestock and collapsing crop prices, nearly died of typhoid fever. While still bedridden he received his Bachelor’s degree, and through the efforts of a family friend he secured a faculty position at the college, supplying the family with a desperately needed income. Although they wanted for money, young Henry A. had advantages other lacked, among them the family’s frequent companionship with Iowa Agricultural College’s first black student, a promising botany major named George Washington Carver. Carver was a constant guest at the Wallace’s modest home, and was impressed with Henry’s precocious interest in plant genetics.
Meanwhile, the Wallaces were reinventing themselves by purchasing a struggling monthly agricultural newspaper, Farm and Dairy, with a $5,000 loan secured and signed for by James Wilson. The family name was inserted in the title, and Uncle Henry presented the new paper as an antidote to the suddenly evil Homestead. Buoyed by Wallace’s prominent name and aggressive promotional efforts across the state, the paper turned a small profit within a year of its 1895 debut. The paper began to publish weekly, and established the formula that would carry the enterprise to amazing financial success until its patriarch’s death: the occasional article explaining ‘scientific farming’ amply augmented with articles and photos that featured prize-winning livestock and “show ring” standard ears of corn; the occasional editorial blasting drunkenness and licentiousness on the fairground midway; homemaking tips from Uncle Henry’s wife, Aunt Nancy, and, far and away the publication’s most popular column, “Uncle Henry’s Sabbath School Lessons,” which became a rural institution.
Although his family members were bona fide members of the local elite, Henry Wallace was a shy and reserved boy whose performance in school was good, but indifferent. His singular obsession was agriculture. He kept his own garden from the age of 10, and was elated to be paid to do farm chores for an uncle, only to be devastated upon learning that a hired hand had been paid six times as much for the same work. By the time he entered high school in a tony neighborhood of Des Moines, he was a socially misfit student who saw himself as intellectually superior to his classmates and teachers, came to school in muddy clothes, and avidly played the-then exotic sport of tennis. Aside from German and foreign languages, none of the school curriculum appealed to him. His peers likely didn’t notice that Wallace was something of an expert in corn- he was drawn to the magnetic agricultural evangelist and huckster P.G. Holden, a leading exponent of the “show ring” beauty standards that all good corn supposedly should have had. Wallace’s family newspaper fervently endorsed such theories, but 15 year old Henry doubted that the looks of a given ear of corn were relevant to the true goal of producing large yields. “What’s looks to a hog?” the adolescent inelegantly asked the eminent pseudo-scientist while attending one of his summer seminars at Iowa State. (Culver 28) When Holden retorted that the best looking corn invariably produced the largest yields, Henry decided to test this assertion. The next spring he persuaded his father to let him plant 66 rows of corn on five acres of their Des Moines estate, and spent the summer meticulously tending to his crop. By fall he had determined that the seed judged by Holden to produce the best looking corn often times produced the lowest yields, and vice versa. Over the next twenty years, Henry Wallace would become the agricultural community’s leading opponent of corn shows, and ultimately helped devise a new type of corn show that judged yield, not looks.
After matriculating at Iowa State, Henry was irritated to find most of his professors swearing by the show ring standards his corn experiments had disproved. Although a member of the Hawkeye Club fraternity and the singular force who successfully agitated for the construction of an additional tennis court on campus, Wallace remained a loner who occupied himself studying William James, going on long walks, and devising bizarre diets that he and, occasionally, a fraternity brother or two attempted to subsist on, oftentimes with distressing results, as when he broke out in severe hives while eating only an experimental cattle feed. Most of his peers saw him as likable, intelligent, serious, and flakey. During the summer break following his junior year he toured the American West at his family’s expense, producing articles for the Farmer for which he was paid the publication’s standard rate. After he graduated at the top of his class the following year, his father paid for a European tour, where, among other things, he met George Russell, a friend of his grandfather’s who became a spiritual advisor and correspondent to young Henry. It was during this period that he met and married Ilo Browne, the unintellectual, but college-educated daughter of a small town businessman. Though she possessed the kind of small town sophistication that led her to wear Parisian gowns in Des Moines, Ilo devotedly followed her new husband into a dairy farm operation that proved even more star-crossed than his father’s during Henry’s infancy. The cows suffered from an epidemic of bovine tuberculosis that was caught by a pregnant Ilo, and Henry suffered a severe case of undulant fever. The dairy cows were ultimately slaughtered, and the Wallaces retreated to Colorado to recuperate. Wallace would be strikingly thin for much of the rest of his life, and had difficulty obtaining life insurance.
Following this misadventure, Wallace foreswore a graduate degree and went to work full time on the Farmer. Yet his capacity for self-education more than made up for this loss. When he found himself unable to explain why hog prices were declining, he purchased an economics primer to learn the reason. When he couldn’t comprehend the math behind the primer’s curves and statistical models, he taught himself calculus from a textbook borrowed from the public library. Nor was his thinking always linear and pragmatic: he also attempted to determine whether the position of the planets influenced weather. His more fanciful ideas were kept out of the newspaper, which saw a dramatically increased intellectual quotient following his full-time presence. The Farmer began to track and analyze commodities prices and report more on scientific farming, at the expense of space formerly devoted to dress patterns, homemaking tips, and photos of prize bulls and “show-ring” corn. Yet some things were indispensable: following Uncle Henry’s widely-noted death in 1916, his “Sabbath School Lessons” continued to run in each issue until 1932.
With Harry now in charge of the newspaper as America entered into World War I (which the Wallaces had opposed in a subdued way), the family was about to begin their surprisingly consequential feud with Herbert Hoover, a native Iowan who grew up with an aunt in Oregon and became a wealthy geologist and widely-admired technocratic humanitarian. Having distinguished himself as head of the nongovernmental Committee for the Relief of Belgium, President Wilson in 1917 named Hoover head of the American Food Administration. Foreseeing a desperate famine in Europe, Hoover’s new agency used heavy-handed patriotic appeals to implore American farmers to increase hog production by 15%. In the pages of the Farmer, Harry Wallace editorialized that, given unusually high corn prices, the effort was bound to fail unless farmers were guaranteed a reasonable rate of return for their efforts. The Wallaces believed a price ratio of 14.3 bushels of corn for every hundred pounds of pork was the minimum necessary for hog producers to break even, and called for the adoption of a 17:1 ratio. Over several months, Hoover agreed with the Wallaces’ call for a ‘Swine Commission’ to study the problem. Henry devised a complicated price formula that linked the price of hogs with corn, which was ratified by the commission. Hoover, however, was philosophically opposed to government subsidies and special interest groups, and refused to adopt anything other than a meager 13 bushels of corn to 100 pounds of pork price ratio and a general policy statement that the Food Administration supported stable hog prices. By early 1918, Hoover scrapped the insufficient ratio entirely in favor of a “fairer” flat rate that the Wallaces contended was equivalent to a 10.8 to 1 ratio, causing hog producers to lose $5.73 for every hundred pounds of hogs produced. Harry Wallace blasted Hoover’s new pricing scheme as “a straight confidence game” meant to “bamboozle the farmers.” (Culver 50) Hoover stopped responding to the Wallaces’ letters, and an incensed Harry began an “anyone but Hoover” campaign in early 1920 to deny his nemesis the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. He also co founded the American Farm Bureau Federation, which solidified his already-significant clout within the agricultural community.
Having received a 3-J necessary agricultural deferment from the draft, Henry Wallace escaped the war unscathed. His editorials on the Farmer reflected his new obsession with the work of Thorstein Veblen, and in 1920 he published Agricultural Prices, a 224-page chart-and-graph-packed study of commodities that was influenced by Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. It was later considered to be the first econometric study published in the United States. The impetus for the book had been to substantiate his editorial claims that the war-era boom in most commodities prices was illusory and destined to crash- by the time the book was published, corn prices had already fallen from $1.38 a bushel in 1919 to 67 cents, and would bottom out at 42 cents the following year. Farm income was more than halved during the recession, and agriculture was generally exempt from the subsequent prosperity of the 1920s.
The bad times for farmers translated into political success for the Wallaces. Harry Wallace, like his father before him, was intensely courted to run for governor of Iowa. He declined, but his assistance to Senator Albert Cummins, a family friend, in his narrow victory in an intense primary against the populist Smith Brookhart and their subsequent endorsement of Warren Harding for president directly resulted in Harry being recommended to serve as Secretary of Agriculture. Harry hesitated, but, taking the advice of Gifford Pinchot, accepted the appointment, and Henry, 32, was now the editor of the Farmer. In his new position, Henry continued to dream big: he counseled desperate farmers to plant clover as a cheap way to add nitrogen to their tired soil (most ignored the advice); he bucked the GOP platform by advocating on behalf of free trade, inflationary policies, and reduced interest rates as solutions to depressed farm prices; and, in what would eventually become one of his life’s signature accomplishments, he proposed that the government follow the precedent of the Biblical Joseph and the ancient Chinese and establish a national storage system for grain surpluses. He supported the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway more than thirty years before it finally happened. And, in showing that he wasn’t completely aloof from the farm, Henry founded an immensely popular corn-husking contest.
Harry Wallace, on the other hand, had no time for such frivolities. To his great dismay, one of his cabinet-mates was the loathed Hoover, the new Secretary of Commerce whom Washington insiders soon dubbed, “the under-secretary of everything else.” The first and foremost target of Hoover’s ambitious power grabs was Wallace when he proposed that all marketing functions be stripped from the Agriculture Department. Wallace employed his million-member strong American Farm Bureau Federation to good effect, and deflected the proposal. Having weathered this storm, Wallace turned to President Harding, an affable dunce more interested in playing bridge than governing, and inclined to leave the big decisions to his friends. In contrast to the aloof Hoover and Coolidge, Harry Wallace was easily able to cultivate Harding- a former newspaper publisher- over coarse jokes and whiskey sours at a card table. Soon, “Hank” Wallace was one of the President’s good friends, and Wallace felt reasonably assured of Harding’s support for an activist farm policy. The rub was formulating a plan of action- for the moment, the best Harry could do was propose a National Agricultural Conference, which Harding approved and gave a peppy oratory to on January 22, 1922. Henry was disappointed by the tightly-orchestrated conference: his father had rejected his calls to invite Thorstein Veblen to speak and to discuss free trade. Unlike his father, Henry was impressed by University of Wisconsin professor Richard Ely’s proposal for a national land use policy. The dominant plan of the conference was developed by struggling Moline, Illinois plow manufacturer George N. Peek and his new executive officer, retired General Hugh Johnson. In effect, the plan called for subsidized exports of crops that would supposedly be paid for by an equalization fee collected from farmers. The farmers would recoup their money- and more- through higher prices, and no additional taxes would be required from those outside the agricultural community, although food prices would rise. Henry felt the plan was fatally flawed by its willful ignorance of the problem of overproduction, but Harry became a fervent believer, and gained assurances from an increasingly harried Harding that he would support legislative action following the midterm elections.
Despite Wallace’s efforts on behalf of the party, the Republicans were crushed- even in Iowa, where the frightening pitchfork populist Smith Brookhart was elected to the Senate. Wallace proceeded with the Peek-Johnson legislation, but was stymied again by Hoover, who resumed his efforts to strip the Agriculture Department of its marketing functions and asserted that the worst of the farm crisis had passed, and would be solved by a private-sector expansion of credit to farmers. Wallace intensified his personal cultivation of Harding, and was present when Harding suffered a fatal stroke on the presidential train during a cross-country speaking tour on August 2, 1923. Hoover, with whom Wallace’s feud had grown intensely personal, was now in even greater favor, and now-President Coolidge pointedly ignored Wallace. Wallace still retained his considerable clout and popularity among the agricultural community, which he gambled would provide him job security until the next election. Despite Coolidge and Hoover’s explicit and public condemnation of the Peek-Johnson plan, Wallace induced Senator Charles McNary of Oregon and Representative Gilbert Haugen of Iowa to sponsor the legislation. Harry personally testified in Congressional hearings, and Henry put the full weight of the Farmer behind his father’s fight, enthusiastically editorializing on behalf of the plan. With intense opposition from the Administration, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the banks, and large commodity processors, the bill was defeated in the House by a 223 to 154 margin in June 1924. Harry began work on a book entitled Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer, but was slowed by a sudden and significant decline in health. By the end of August he spent most of his time in bed. The removal of his gall bladder failed to restore him, and he was diagnosed with toxemic poisoning a day before his death on October 25th at age 58. Coolidge and Hoover praised the deceased Secretary of Agriculture, and Coolidge insisted on a state funeral in the White House. Henry privately blamed Hoover for his father’s death, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. The McNary-Haugen bill came up for votes in Congress three more times during Coolidge’s tenure: it was passed by substantial majorities in a considerably altered form in 1927 and 1928, and was successfully vetoed by Coolidge both times.
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