The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In 1913, at age twenty-four, the shy and somewhat eccentric Henry Wallace went to a picnic in Des Moines where he met a pretty and demure young woman half a year older, named Ilo Browne. He courted her relentlessly, and even though he seemed a bit strange to her friends, they were married in May 1914.5 Together they bought a farm with his sparse savings and the sale of some property she had inherited, then began a business in corn production and dairying.

  When the United States entered the Great War, both Wallaces, now the parents of a young son, were opposed to it and the profiteering that went with it but were not pacifists. When Congress passed the military draft in May 1917, calling all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, Henry, at twenty-eight, signed up. Heavily engaged in the farm and helping his father edit the family paper, he sought an exemption on the grounds of his family status and occupation and was classified 3-J—exempt as engaged in necessary agricultural work. He did not, as some critics suggested much later, file as a conscientious objector.6

  By the time the war ended in November 1918, farmers were enjoying prosperous days, but after the armistice farm prices for corn and other crops began to fall. After the election of 1920, the Republican presidential nominee Warren Harding named the elder Wallace secretary of agriculture, and his son stepped in as editor of Wallaces’ Farmer.7 The senior Wallace died in 1924, and his son took over as publisher of the influential family farm journal.

  In 1926, Henry and eight other Iowans formed a company to develop, raise, and sell a special hybrid corn called Pioneer Hi-Bred. After a few difficult start-up years at the onset of the Great Depression, Wallace joined forces with a young Coon Rapids salesman named Roswell Garst, kicking off what ultimately would be a multimillion-dollar high-yield hybrid corn empire in a revolution of American farming.8

  In the fall of 1929, Wallaces’ Farmer bought its rival, the Iowa Homestead, and Wallace became editor of the joint publication. But the merger failed to withstand the eroding farm economy, and in 1932 the Wallace family had to drop ownership. Henry continued as editor, while also engaging in a personal religious quest that soon won him a reputation as a mystic. The furthest he would go in admitting it was to say he was “probably a practical mystic … that if you envision something that hasn’t been, that can be, and bring it into being, that is a tremendously worthwhile thing to do.” He said he shared the view of a friend “who believed that God was in everything and therefore, if you went to God, you could find the answers,” adding, “Maybe that belief is mysticism. I don’t know.” In Des Moines, he often attended meetings of the local Theosophical Society.9

  En route to a European vacation in 1929, Wallace visited an art museum in New York run by a Russian expatriate painter, peace activist, and self-styled guru named Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich. They struck up a strange correspondence that later produced what came to be known as “the guru letters,” a considerable embarrassment to Wallace for the somewhat bizarre otherworldly discussions they revealed. Roerich turned out to be a con artist who milked wealthy Americans for support of his enterprises. In 1935 Wallace finally severed all connections with Roerich and his wife, who fled to India without paying the taxes owed. The fiasco haunted Wallace long after and fed the impression that he was indeed a mystic who bore watching and might even be dangerous.

  As neither mysticism nor Herbert Hoover in the White House had been able to lift Iowa and the rest of the Farm Belt and the country out of its economic despair, Wallace began to look to the Democratic Party in the early 1930s, although without much enthusiasm for its ambitious New York governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in the spring of 1932, Wallace received a totally unexpected visitor in Henry T. Morgenthau Jr., a friend and neighbor of Roosevelt and also a publisher of a farm journal. Morgenthau talked up FDR as a friend of agriculture. A few days after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated Roosevelt for the presidency, Wallace was invited to have lunch at FDR’s home in Hyde Park. Roosevelt engaged his guest for nearly two hours with questions about agricultural matters, without ever once raising politics or any possible appointment. Several weeks later Wallace was asked to help draft a major speech on farm policy that would commit Roosevelt to domestic crop allotments aimed at increasing prices for farmers without overproduction. FDR delivered the speech in Topeka, and Wallace thereafter threw himself into writing in support of the president’s policy, lobbying farm leaders and speaking at numerous political meetings.

  The focus on the farm vote paid big dividends. For only the second time since Iowa statehood, the state went Democratic, and Roosevelt was easily elected over Hoover. Wallace was offered the post of secretary of agriculture, the same office his revered father had occupied under Harding.10

  The first Department of Agriculture appointment Wallace made was of a Republican named Milton Eisenhower, brother of the army major Dwight D. Eisenhower, without regard to his party, to be Wallace’s personnel policy director. Wallace called an immediate conference of the nation’s farm leaders who agreed that “farm production must be adjusted to consumption” and domestic allotment instituted to reduce production and restore buying power.11

  The emergency Agricultural Adjustment Act, to cope with spreading farm foreclosures and plunging crop prices, was written in a week, and the House passed it without amendment in another week. In the Senate, however, the bill stalled and was saved only by an outbreak of violence in the small town of Le Mars, Iowa. A mob of six hundred farmers seized a judge considering a farm foreclosure, put a noose around his neck, and threatened hang him, but cool heads prevailed. The governor of Iowa declared martial law and sent troops to disband “the Corn Belt rebellion,” so the Senate finally passed the bill, and Roosevelt signed it.

  The frenetic energy that burst from the new farm secretary’s department became the talk of Washington, sparking a raft of hiring as he tackled the task of dealing with huge crop surpluses, coupled with planned crop reductions to achieve livable commodity prices for farmers. Young and idealistic lawyers with names like Abe Fortas, Adlai Stevenson, and Alger Hiss flocked to the department as a cutting edge of the Roosevelt agenda. Wallace, as the genius behind hybrid seed boosting corn production across Iowa, was ironically charged now in his new post with the task of cutting that production, in the interest of higher prices for the farmers who planted his prized product.

  As part of the program, Wallace caused a particular furor by raising cotton and pork prices for farmers by cutting production, having them plow under ten million acres of cotton and slaughter six million young pigs. To critics, Wallace blandly observed, “Perhaps they think that farmers should run a sort of old-folks home for hogs.”12 Farm prices in some cases doubled under his plan.

  In 1936, the innovative New Deal agenda whose crest Wallace was riding was abruptly interrupted when the conservative-led Supreme Court ruled the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional by a 6–3 vote. The majority opinion said farming was “a purely local activity” that was not subject to federal regulation. Wallace was both incredulous and irate, writing, “Were agriculture truly a local matter in 1936, as the Supreme Court says it is, half of the people in the United States would quickly starve.”13 The decision was not a surprise, however. The previous May, the court had unanimously struck down the business version of the AAA, the National Industrial Recovery Act, signaling the legal fight against the New Deal ahead. Wallace reflected much later that when that happened, he had thought, “We’re not going to be caught flat-footed as these boys are,” if the Supreme Court were to invalidate the entire AAA.14

  Wallace quickly set his mind to salvage the critical farm relief program. The result was the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, designed to cut production and raise farm prices. Congress speedily passed it and Roosevelt signed it, greatly impressed with Wallace’s resilience and ingenuity. The law was challenged but upheld. Wallace, more determined than ever that his boss be reelected that November, took his wife to the courthouse in Des Moines, where they b
oth registered as Democrats for the first time.

  But when FDR pushed his scheme to pack the Supreme Court, Wallace quietly lamented it, observing thereafter, “It was the last time the New Deal really breathed defiance. From then on, while many of us didn’t realize it, it was a downhill slide, very much a downhill slide.”15

  Long before Roosevelt finally made clear he would seek a third term, he had made up his mind that chief aide Harry Hopkins would be his running mate. Serious illness, however, struck Hopkins in February of the election year, and by May he took himself out of contention. When Garner and Farley announced they would challenge FDR, all Wallace would say was that he would support any New Dealer nominated.

  Finally, on April 9, 1940, world events forced Roosevelt’s hand with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, making it all but inevitable that he would seek a third term to forge national unity. FDR retained his silence on the matter, but when a group of Iowans approached him in May about supporting Wallace for president on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, he told them to desist. Wallace quickly assured him he had had no hand in it and would follow his boss’s wishes.

  He was aware by now, however, of the chance that Roosevelt might pick him as his running mate. At a dinner in New York, when he told the FDR aide Sam Rosenman he believed the president should run again, Rosenman replied, “In that case, you’ll have to be the vice president.”16 But Wallace went into the convention without having any word from FDR about his intentions.

  In a meeting with Farley in Hyde Park before the Democratic convention, Roosevelt had hinted he would run again and that he might choose the agriculture secretary to run with him. Farley later wrote that he told FDR, “Boss, I’m going to be very direct with you. Henry Wallace won’t add a bit of strength to the ticket.… I think it would be a terrible thing to have him President.… I think you must know that people look on him as a wild-eyed fellow.” Roosevelt replied only, “The man running with me must be in good health because there is no telling how long I can hold out.

  You know, Jim, a man with paralysis can have a breakup at any time. While my heart and lungs are good and the other organs are functioning along okay … nothing in this life is certain.”17

  Two days after the fall of France to the Nazis, the Republicans convened in Philadelphia and surprisingly nominated a political neophyte, Wendell L. Willkie of Indiana, a folksy, rumpled, and appealing public utilities executive. He was given as his running mate Senator Charles McNary of Oregon, the Senate minority leader and coauthor of farmer-friendly agricultural bills in the Harding and Coolidge adminstrations, obviously calculated to help the GOP ticket in the Farm Belt.

  At the subsequent Democratic convention in Chicago, at which Roosevelt was renominated, FDR by now had settled on Wallace, and he made it clear he would have no alternative. Nevertheless, Hopkins advised the president of rising opposition to Wallace. According to Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary, when Hopkins told him that “the convention might not go for Wallace, the Boss really got his Dutch up. ‘Well, damn it to hell,’ he barked at Hopkins, ‘they will all go for Wallace or I won’t run, and you can jolly well tell them so.’ ”18

  To calm the waters, Eleanor Roosevelt flew to Chicago and took a seat on the convention rostrum next to Wallace’s wife, Ilo, and awaited her turn to speak. When Wallace’s name was placed in nomination to be FDR’s running mate, boos and catcalls were heard from the galleries; one delegate grabbed an open microphone and complained, “Give us a Democrat! We don’t want a Republican!”19

  Back in Washington, Roosevelt sat at a card table in the Oval Office playing solitaire and listening to the convention on the radio. Sam Rosenman later described the scene: “As the fight got more and more acrimonious, the President asked Missy [LeHand, another secretary] to give him a note pad and a pencil. Putting aside his cards he started to write. The rest of us sat around wondering what he was writing.… Finally he laid his pencil down, turned to me [Rosenman] and said: ‘Sam, take this inside and go work on it; smooth it out and get it ready for delivery. I may have to deliver it quickly, so please hurry it up.’ ”20

  What FDR finally wrote was a message to the convention that in light of the “discord” that had surfaced, he was “declining the honor of the nomination for the presidency.”21 The statement was sent to Harry Hopkins, who pocketed it awaiting the right time to release it. FDR phoned him and told him he had decided on Wallace but gave him no instructions about what he had written. When Hopkins informed him the convention had expected that the choice would be left to the delegates and there would be sharp objection, the president curtly snapped back, “It’s Wallace.”22 Hopkins dutifully called Wallace with the news. As word leaked out, the mood at the convention became increasingly restless, even surly.

  When it was Mrs. Roosevelt’s turn to speak, she rose and made a firm appeal for support for her husband. She did not mention Wallace, but her intent was clear. “We people in the United States have got to realize that we face now a grave and serious situation,” she said. “… We cannot tell from day to day what will come. This is no ordinary time, no time for thinking about anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole, and that responsibility is on each and every one of us as individuals.… This is a time when it is the United States we fight for.”23

  The First Lady brought the conventioneers to their feet in cheers. Wallace was nominated on the first ballot, and half an hour after midnight, Roosevelt addressed the convention by long-distance hookup, thanking the assemblage for accepting his choice of Wallace, adding that his practical idealism would be of great service to the president individually.24 He never had Hopkins deliver the letter written in anger in the Oval Office, which could have changed history.

  Roosevelt’s strong-arm selection of Wallace was the most blatantly personal and unilateral choice of a presidential running mate up to this time. With the third-term issue offering the Republican Party a potent weapon to raise against FDR, Wallace in the fall campaign pitched in with speeches through the Farm Belt as Roosevelt whistle-stopped by train across the industrial states, claiming economic recovery and assuring anxious mothers, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”25

  The race was closer than the Democrats had expected in the popular vote, but Roosevelt and Wallace won decisively in the electoral college. The American voters were determined not to change horses in the middle of the stream of a cataclysmic world war.

  As vice president, Wallace spent his first months speaking in support of FDR’s lend-lease deal with Britain and presiding over the debate on it in the Senate before it was passed by Congress and signed by the president in mid-March 1941. In July, Roosevelt made good on his earlier magazine musing about making the vice president “useful” by appointing Wallace as chairman of the new Economic Defense Board, to be “a policy and advisory agency.” It was to deal with all manner of international economic matters relating to American involvement as a noncombatant in the European war and what might come after its end. It was the first such stipulated executive role for a vice president, and Wallace eagerly grasped it. After Roosevelt and Winston Churchill joined in the Atlantic Charter, FDR also put Wallace at the head of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) to oversee the speedy dispatch of armaments to the British. These moves made him the most engaged vice president in history.

  In October 1941, Wallace became one of the few Americans privy to the nation’s greatest military secret. Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, met with the president and vice president and informed them of the conclusions of separate American and British scientific experts that it was possible to build an atomic bomb of indescribable destructive force and that the Nazis were also pursuing it. The only immediate decision was FDR’s instruction that if such a weapon were to be built, only he would decide whether to do so and when to use it.26 In late November, Roosevelt ordered that the research go forward, and he appointe
d the Top Policy Committee, which included Wallace, to oversee it.

  On December 7, 1941, when Wallace was in New York engaging in public preachings of the need to step up war preparations while thinking beyond to peacetime, the news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He flew back to Washington and went directly to the White House for night-long talks with Roosevelt and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. When FDR called on Congress to declare war on Japan for the “date which will live in infamy,” Wallace emerged as a major spokesman for the administration, particularly in rallying public support behind the war effort.

  About five weeks later, however, shortly after the influential James Reston of the New York Times had written that Wallace was “not only Vice President but ‘Assistant President,’ ” Roosevelt suddenly summoned Wallace and Donald M. Nelson, executive director of the SPAB under Wallace, to the Oval Office. He told them he was creating still another superagency, the War Production Board under a single chairman, and he would be … Nelson, not Wallace! After a shocked Nelson left, Wallace neither asked nor was told why he had not been selected, inquiring only whether FDR wanted him to remain on the board as a member, and he was told yes.27 Wallace also retained his chairmanship of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), responsible for the financing and purchasing of wartime raw materials from foreign sources and for postwar planning.

  Though not a bureaucrat at heart, Wallace found himself entangled in a series of bureaucratic fights, the worst of which were with FDR’s secretary of commerce, Jesse Jones, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull over BEW affairs. Wallace particularly castigated Jones on the grounds that he had failed to stockpile certain vital materials. When Jones fired back, calling Wallace’s allegations “hysterical” and “filled with malice and misstatements,” Roosevelt asked James Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization, to referee the fight.