Henry Wallace was an ambitious left-winger in Roosevelt’s Democratic Party who, as secretary of agriculture and then as vice president, helped make radical the New Deal of the 1930s. His ultimate defeat by the right of his own party shows the obstacles the insurgent left has always faced within the Democratic Party.
by Paul Heideman
Part 2 - The Soul of the New Deal
Wallace’s emergence as torchbearer for the progressive left took an unusual path. Born to a family of prominent Iowa intellectuals, he established himself as an authority on American agriculture and an innovative farmer in his own right. After Roosevelt’s election in 1932, he appointed Wallace secretary of agriculture. His eight years at the Department of Agriculture go almost entirely undiscussed in Nichols’s book, which is unfortunate, given that in this capacity he presided over one of the most exciting democratic experiments in American history.
As recounted in Jess Gilbert’s invaluable Planning Democracy, Wallace and a cadre of like-minded agrarians put in place a large-scale experiment in democratic planning, linking local farmers with economists to collectively plan the nation’s rural land use policies. Though the program was terminated in 1942 after a campaign against it by large capitalist farmers, it represented the New Deal’s most ambitious attempt to subject the economy to democratic control.
It’s in part thanks to this experiment that when Roosevelt brought Wallace onto the ticket in 1942 (ditching the conservative Texan John Nance Garner), he knew he was recruiting one of the New Deal’s most progressive voices to stand beside him.
Nichols argues that this move by Roosevelt revealed the direction the president hoped to take the country in during the 1940s. Sure that war was coming, he wanted a dedicated anti-fascist like Wallace by his side to wage the ideological battles. Similarly, Roosevelt wanted a committed New Dealer to help him preserve and extend his administration’s achievements in the face of strong opposition from the country’s business interests.
Some of the book’s best passages concern Wallace’s ideological battles in this capacity. At a time when the Democratic Party depended on the votes of racist Dixiecrats, Wallace stood firm for racial equality, declaring after the 1943 Detroit race riot that “those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step towards Nazism.”
In response to arch-conservative magazine magnate Henry Luce’s speech calling for American hegemony after the war ended, Wallace pronounced the beginning of the “century of the common man,” arguing that, “There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis. And we cannot perpetuate economic warfare without planting the seeds of military warfare.”
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