Nothing to Fear

by Adam Cohen

  At the same time, Wallace was campaigning for a new monetary policy. A generation earlier, Uncle Henry had opposed William Jennings Bryan’s populist call for abandoning the gold standard. Wallace was now convinced that going off gold and promoting inflation were necessary if farmers were ever going to get out from under their debt. Writing in Wallaces’ Farmer, he advocated for the “honest dollar,” a term Bryan had used in the 1896 presidential campaign. To Wallace, an honest dollar was one that restored farmers’ buying power, relative to urban residents, to where it had been before the war. Wallace testified in favor of inflation before the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency. He put the issue in scientific terms. Technology of all kinds was fast improving, he said, enabling manufacturers to improve efficiency and raise the nation’s standard of living. What America needed now, he argued, was “up-to-date machinery for industrial and social justice equivalent to our industrial progress and development.” A new monetary policy, Wallace insisted, was “part of the machinery.”33

  Wallace was increasingly being recognized as a national leader on farm issues. In August 1931, he attended the Conference on Economic Policy for American Agriculture, a gathering of prominent agricultural reformers, at the University of Chicago. While M. L. Wilson looked on, the conference formally endorsed domestic allotment. Wallace continued to talk up the plan and to speak out against Hoover’s modest version of farm relief, which he dismissed in a March 1932 speech to the National League of Women Voters as “nonsense.”34

  The Farm Belt depression continued to deepen. Between 1929 and 1932 farm income had fallen by another two-thirds, and the foreclosure crisis was becoming ever more serious. Farmers were increasingly responding with radical politics and violence. In May 1932, two thousand farmers descended on the state fairgrounds in Des Moines to form the Farmers’ Holiday Association. The group, headed by the fiery Milo Reno, a longtime Iowa farm activist, urged farmers to declare a “holiday” from farming. Operating under the slogan “Stay at Home—Buy Nothing—Sell Nothing,” members vowed to withhold their corn, beef, pork, and milk until the government addressed their problems. As one piece of Farmers’ Holiday Association doggerel put it:

  Let’s call a Farmers’ Holiday

  A Holiday let’s hold

  We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs

  And let them eat their gold.

  More violent forms of protest also began to break out. In Sioux City, farmers put wooden planks with nails on the highways to block agricultural deliveries. The “red army” of Nebraska, one of many vigilante groups that were forming, showed up at a foreclosure sale and saw to it that every item that had been seized from a farmer’s widow sold for five cents, leaving the bank with a total settlement of just $5.35. A wave of “penny auctions” of this sort swept the Farm Belt, forcing creditors to proceed with caution. The threat to the nation’s well-being was clear. “When the American farmer comes out to the road with a club or a pitchfork,” Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White observed in The Saturday Evening Post, “the warning flag is out.”35

  Wallace looked on the growing extremism with dismay. The Wallace family had always kept its distance from Farm Belt radicals. Wallaces’ Farmer had been founded as a Republican journal for the “conservative type of farmer,” which it defined as those with “no mortgages or low mortgages.” Wallace supported the Farm Bureau, the old-line lobby that represented the “four-hundred-acre” farmers, rather than the upstart Iowa Farmers Union, which fought for the least well-off. The radicalism that was sweeping through the Farm Belt may have “served a purpose,” Wallace would later say, “but it wasn’t my way of doing things.” Wallace believed in working through the system. He also had a more modest view than the farm radicals of what sort of reforms were needed. He believed that if crop prices could be increased, farmers would do fine in the capitalist system. He did not see a need for a war on Eastern bankers, or for any of the farm radicals’ other revolutionary stands. Wallace was worried that if Hoover did not do more, the Farm Belt would be in complete rebellion. “I think the Republican administration was gravely culpable,” he later said. “I’d blame them far more than I would Milo Reno.”36

  Wallace was still waiting for a Farm Belt savior. In June of 1932, the signs of one began to appear. Wallace attended another farm conference in Chicago, where he met Rexford Tugwell. The two men hit it off right away. Tugwell thought Wallace was a bit eccentric—he noticed that when they went out for a beer, Wallace would always order an ice cream soda. Tugwell was impressed, however, with Wallace’s “keen mind,” and with Wallace and M. L. Wilson’s idea of domestic allotment. Tugwell acted quickly to inject it into the presidential campaign. He sent the proposal to Roosevelt, who was about to address the Democratic National Convention. “To show how close a margin we worked on,” Tugwell said later, the domestic allotment plan that he had picked up in Chicago “went to Albany by wire; and it came back to Chicago by plane—incorporated in Mr. Roosevelt’s acceptance speech.” Roosevelt kept the reference to domestic allotment brief, to avoid alienating its critics, but the speech marked his first endorsement of the idea. Before long, Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s good friend, showed up in Iowa. He was on a mission to round up farm support for Roosevelt. Morgenthau, who owned a fourteen-hundred-acre fruit and dairy farm near Hyde Park and published American Agriculturist magazine, talked to Wallace about Roosevelt’s concern for farmers. Wallace was beginning to believe that Roosevelt could be the farmers’ champion that he had been waiting for, but he still was not sure. He was not even entirely certain, he would later say, whether he was still a Republican or on his way to becoming a Democrat.37

  Roosevelt, who had received positive reports from Tugwell and Morgenthau, invited Wallace to Hyde Park in mid-August. Wallace went, but he was still wary. To save money, he accepted an invitation to lecture first at Cornell University, which paid for the trip. “I was rather leery of politicians,” he later recalled. “I didn’t intend to go out of my way to see him, but as long as I could get my expenses paid I was willing.” Over lunch, Wallace talked with Roosevelt and Morgenthau about conditions in the Farm Belt and laid out the case for domestic allotment. Wallace was impressed by his host’s energy. “I had heard that his legs were paralyzed, and I feared that he would be completely tired out,” he wrote in Wallaces’ Farmer. “Imagine my great surprise, therefore, to find a man with a fresh, eager, open mind, ready to pitch into the agricultural problem at once.” On his return to Iowa, Wallace signed on with Roosevelt.38

  In his campaign against Hoover, Roosevelt spoke out strongly for farm relief. He reminded voters that he was a farmer himself. “I am not, as you say, an ‘urban leader,’ ” he wrote to a South Dakota newspaper, “for I was born and brought up and have always made my home on a farm in Dutchess County.” Roosevelt also reminded voters that although New York was known for its tall buildings and teeming immigrant neighborhoods, it was also a farm state, first in the nation in income from dairy cows and hay, second in production of apples and grapes, and sixth in overall farm income. On his swings through the West and the South, Roosevelt echoed Wallace’s complaints about the plight of the farmer. Farmers had to bring two wagon-loads of produce into town to buy the same clothing, farm implements, and other manufactured goods they used to buy with one wagonload, he said. Roosevelt emphasized that farm relief would help the whole country, not just farmers. Nearly half of Americans made their livings directly or indirectly from agriculture, and when they lost buying power, the whole economy was dragged down. “No Nation can long endure half bankrupt,” Roosevelt had declared that spring in his “Forgotten Man” speech. “Main Street, Broadway, the mills, the mines will close if half the buyers are broke.”39

  Roosevelt was scheduled to deliver a major agriculture address in Topeka, Kansas, in mid-September, which M. L. Wilson would draft. He asked Wilson to work on it with Wallace since, as Moley observed, no one was more familiar than Wallace “with the tastes and prejudices of the gre
at farm area whose traditional Republican allegiance Roosevelt had to destroy to be elected.” Wilson and Wallace’s draft of the speech made a strong case for domestic allotment. Moley kept in the promise of domestic allotment, but he toned down the references to make the speech more acceptable to supporters of rival plans, including McNary-Haugenism, and to Easterners, who worried that farm relief would be expensive and that it would drive up the cost of food. Moley was pleased with the final draft, which he believed was pivotal in winning Roosevelt the votes of Midwestern farmers “without waking up the dogs of the East.”40

  Wallace barnstormed for Roosevelt across Iowa, driving to church suppers and county fairs in his Model A Ford. In the final days of the campaign, Wallaces’ Farmer made its endorsement. “The only thing to vote for in this election is justice for agriculture,” Wallace wrote. “With Roosevelt, the farmers have a chance—with Hoover, none.” Iowa put aside its traditional Republican sympathies and gave Roosevelt nearly 60 percent of its votes. Farm regions across the West and the Midwest that had been Republican for generations joined the new Roosevelt coalition, which also included big cities and the solidly Democratic South. In the beleaguered Farm Belt, Roosevelt’s victory brought a measure of hope. “I was going to tell the loan company to take my farm, but now I’m going to make a fight to hold it,” a farmer told Wallace after the election. “It looks to me, for the first time in years, as if we farmers had a chance.”41

  The speculation began right away over who would be the next secretary of agriculture. George Peek, the farm equipment manufacturer who had long championed McNary-Haugen, was eager for the job. Morgenthau also desperately wanted to be agriculture secretary. Although he was an old friend of Roosevelt, the odds against him were heavy. The Nation bluntly explained that he was seen as “too Eastern and too Judaic” to oversee American farming. Tugwell, who scoffed at Morgenthau’s ambitions for the job, was himself not a viable candidate, as a New York academic. Tugwell was pushing for Wallace, and had enlisted Moley to talk to Roosevelt on his behalf. Roosevelt did not require much convincing. He regarded agriculture secretary as a position that should go to a farm leader. Wallace was one of the nation’s most prominent farm leaders, his views were compatible with Roosevelt’s, and the two men had hit it off when they met in Hyde Park. Wallace had the further advantage of being a Republican, a group Roosevelt was especially eager to see represented in the Cabinet.42

  Roosevelt invited Wallace to Warm Springs, and in the bungalow where Roosevelt was staying, they resumed the discussion they had begun at Hyde Park. Roosevelt asked Wallace to go to Washington to keep an eye on farm legislation pending in Congress, and to meet with Marvin Jones, the Texan who used his chairmanship of the House Committee on Agriculture to look out for the interests of Big Cotton. There did not appear to be much chance of a farm bill emerging from the lame-duck Congress, or of Hoover signing one if it did, but Roosevelt wanted to monitor what was going on. Over lunch, Roosevelt, Wallace, Moley, Morgenthau, and Senator John Bankhead of Alabama discussed farm policy while Roosevelt expertly carved a Georgia wild turkey. In the afternoon, Wallace, Moley, and Morgenthau discussed what they wanted to see in a farm bill.43

  In Warm Springs, Wallace was exposed to Roosevelt at his most charming. He watched as the president-elect sent Morgenthau out to find liquor for cocktails, no easy feat in Prohibition-era Georgia. At dinner, Roosevelt held forth about a hunt for hidden treasure on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia. The exotic Georgia property, the bootleg liquor, and the devotion of much time at a moment of national crisis to a rambling pirate’s tale left Wallace thinking he had wandered into “something out of this world.” Wallace went away with a new appreciation for his host. “Roosevelt does not have the extreme pride of personal opinion that has characterized some of our more bull-headed presidents,” he wrote in Wallaces’ Farmer. “He knows that he doesn’t know it all, and tries to find out all he can from people who are supposed to be authorities.” Roosevelt returned the admiration. It was most likely on this visit that he decided to appoint Wallace secretary of agriculture.44

  In early December, Wallace went to Washington, as Roosevelt had requested. He, Tugwell, and Morgenthau met with Congressman Jones to discuss farm legislation. There were divisions in the ranks of the Roosevelt contingent. Wallace and Tugwell argued for domestic allotment, while Morgenthau made the case against it. Jones did not have much to say either way. It did not take Wallace long to conclude that the lame-duck Congress was not going to take action on a farm bill. On December 12, also in Washington, Wallace attended a conference of farm leaders representing about half of the nation’s organized farmers. To Wallace’s great satisfaction, a consensus had begun to form in favor of domestic allotment. The conference made a formal recommendation that the government pay farmers to reduce production, and finance the payments through a tax on processors. When word of the conference’s endorsement of domestic allotment spread, the processors who would be taxed to pay for it protested loudly. The chairman of General Mills declared that there was a growing sense “that Mr. Roosevelt has been alienating himself from his conservative friends and leaning toward the more radical elements in his party.”45

  Wallace returned home to Iowa, where he was still editing Wallaces’ Farmer. In January, he wrote to Roosevelt to tell him about the “pathetic letters” he was receiving. Wallace enclosed a letter describing the dire situation of tenant farmers, which was, he said, “even more desperate than that of the unemployed in the cities.” Roosevelt was close to making a decision about agriculture secretary. Moley, who was helping screen Cabinet selections, had asked a Washington lawyer to review Wallace’s writings. After examining six years of Wallaces’ Farmer, the lawyer reported back that Wallace was a “distinctly effective” stylist and that “much of his writing on Hoover is as devastating as anything I have read.” Testimonials for Wallace poured in from across the Farm Belt, including a letter from 105 farmers from Bon Homme County, South Dakota. Whether out of modesty or conviction, Wallace was dismissive of his own prospects. In a February 2 letter to a friend, he said he thought that his outspoken advocacy on controversial subjects would work against him. “I have not failed during the past month to express myself with the utmost freedom on the money question,” he noted.46

  Within days, a letter arrived from Roosevelt inviting Wallace to join “my official family.” Wallace was uncertain whether to accept the job that his grandfather had spurned and that had made his father so miserable. He did not respond for days, and Moley finally had to call him to press him for an answer. Wallace told his friends and family in Iowa that, in the end, his desire to help the nation’s farmers overcame his reluctance to move to Washington and enter public life. Moley radioed Roosevelt, who was vacationing on Vincent Astor’s yacht, “Corn Belt in the Bag,” their code for Wallace accepting. The news of Wallace’s appointment was greeted enthusiastically throughout the farm states, and especially in Wallace’s home state. “IOWANS LAUD FARM CHOICE,” The Des Moines Register announced in a front-page headline. In the same paper, a cartoon captioned “Turning the Case Over to the Family Physician” portrayed “Agriculture” as an old man in his sickbed and Wallace as a doctor holding a black bag.47

  Wallace headed to New York to meet with Roosevelt. He stopped off to see his sister, who lived outside Detroit, and saw firsthand the distress that had hit industrial America. Michigan’s banks were on the brink of insolvency, and the state’s residents were panicked about whether they would see their savings again. At his brother-in-law’s invitation, Wallace visited Father Charles Coughlin, the radio demagogue, in his suite in the opulent Book-Cadillac Hotel. Wallace knew that Father Coughlin had supported Roosevelt in the election, but little more. It came as a surprise that the first thing his host said when he arrived was, “We’re going to take the gold away from the Jews.” The visit underscored for Wallace how angry many Americans had become, and what sort of leaders were waiting in the wings if Roosevelt failed.48

&nb
sp; When Wallace arrived at Roosevelt’s East Sixty-fifth Street town house, he got his first real exposure to the new team he would be joining. He was introduced to William Woodin. The incoming secretary of the treasury seemed “very gentle” with “a lovely personality,” Wallace said later, but he did not understand why Roosevelt had chosen him. He also met Louis Howe, who struck him as “a cynical, critical soul” who was “utterly loyal to Roosevelt,” but also a “pure opportunist.” Wallace and Roosevelt talked some more about agriculture, but this time Roosevelt introduced a new and, for Wallace, unwelcome subject. Roosevelt said he was intent on reducing government spending, and that Wallace should expect to cut his department’s budget by one-third. Wallace was able to bargain the president-elect down to a reduction of one-fourth, but he was troubled to see how enthusiastic Roosevelt was about budget cutting.49

  Wallace returned to Iowa to wrap up his affairs. Two weeks later, he headed to the inauguration on a special train with the Iowa delegation. Wallace was embarking on a mission, and a new kind of challenge. He had spent his entire career giving advice from the safe perch of a farm journal. Now, he would be setting national farm policy and carrying it out, and he would be responsible for the results. Wallace set off in a spirit of optimism. “When I come back to Iowa, I hope prices will be higher, mortgages and taxes lower,” he wrote in Wallaces’ Farmer’s March 4 issue. When he arrived in Washington, Wallace took a room at the Cosmos Club, while his family remained behind in Iowa until May. It was fitting that he moved into temporary quarters, because he made clear that his tenure as agriculture secretary might be brief. “This department will make good as far as the farmer is concerned,” Wallace told reporters, “or I’ll go back home and grow corn.”50