The Man Who Was Almost President

Had Franklin Delano Roosevelt died three months sooner, Henry A. Wallace would have been the thirty-third President of the United States. The implications of such a scenario would have dramatically changed the world as we know it. I'll explain.

For one thing, I can say with some certainty that a Wallace administration would not have dropped atomic bombs on Japan, nor would we have engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Furthermore, I believe that Wallace would have instead used the vast resources that the U.S. invested in maintaining the military-industrial complex to promote greater social equity, including his proposal for nationalized health care. Basically, had Henry A. Wallace been President, the American superpower would resemble something far different than what it is today, and frankly, it's a damn shame that this country took the path that it did. 

In many ways, Wallace was too good for American politics. He was the editor-in-chief of his family's highly successful agricultural journal, Wallaces' Farmer, and as a botanist, he made major breakthroughs in hybrid corn farming that would significantly reduce starvation in developing countries. 

Wallace's seed company (above) was sold to DuPont in 1999 for $9.6 billion.

When FDR took office in 1933, Wallace was appointed Secretary of Agriculture, despite being a card-carrying member of the Republican Party throughout his early career. His father, Henry C. Wallace, had also been the Secretary of Agriculture under Warren G. Harding, a notoriously corrupt Republican who died in office before he could ever face the consequences of his crimes. Sadly, Henry C. Wallace also died in office shortly thereafter.

The younger Wallace's experimental approach to government allowed him to forge policies that helped to end the Dust Bowl and restore commodity prices for farmers, many of whom had been suffering tremendous losses ever since the end of the First World War. Basically, he made the U.S. agricultural sector economically and environmentally sustainable again. At the time, he was one of the only people in Washington who actually seemed to give a shit about rural America, and to most of the farmers of this country, Wallace was nothing short of a hero.

For FDR's unprecedented third term, which covered most of World War II, Wallace was the Vice President, as well as the head of the Board of Economic Warfare. In this role, he was in charge of securing the resources that the U.S. military needed to win the war, which is to say that what he did was pretty important. In 1942, Wallace gave an empassioned speech in which he declared this to be the "Century of the Common Man." This was in direct response to Time/Life publisher Henry Luce's claim that the postwar era was to mark the beginning of the "American Century." In his speech, Wallace argued for better relations with the Soviet Union, an end to racial segregation in the U.S., and a call for continuing "the people's revolution."

As FDR geared up for a fourth term, right before the 1944 election, Wallace was replaced by Truman for shadowy political reasons, even despite Roosevelt's own objections. As a consolation, the President then offered him any Cabinet post that he wanted... except Secretary of State. Wallace chose to be the Secretary of Commerce in order to take the position from his greatest rival in the administration, Jesse Jones, who was a major advocate for the oil and finance industries. 

As Secretary of Commerce, Jones also controlled the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which had a budget of over fifty billion dollars (not adjusted for inflation) that could be allocated without Congressional oversight. Chew on that for a minute. After Wallace's appointment, Jones appeared before Congress to request that the RFC be taken out of Wallace's hands specifically because Wallace had publicly vowed to use that money to help regular people. Jones won, but the two men later engaged in an actual fistfight, which is to say that despite losing control of the Reconstruction Finance Corpoaration, Henry A. Wallace still managed to punch the face of Big Business right in the jaw.

Shortly thereafter, Wallace resigned from this position, in large part because he could not support Truman's "Get tough with Russia" policy or the exploitative economic stipulations of the Marshall Plan. In 1948, Wallace was then a fourth-party (Progressive Party) candidate in the Presidential race, ultimately finishing behind Truman, Thomas E. Dewey, and Strom "White Supremacist" Thurmond. The attack campaigns that painted Wallace as a communist sympathizer effectively ended his political career. He was among the last of the New Deal Democrats, and his resounding defeat marked a major ideological shift in mainstream American culture. Check out this interview from 1952. These guys clearly loathe everything he stands for, especially his non-aggressive stance toward Russia.

Had Wallace been President, the nation and the world we live in would be vastly different. In fact, the only reason that Harry S. Truman, a relatively unknown first-term Senator from Missouri (whose middle name is just an initial that he made up because he thought it made him seem more like a real politician) ever became the thirty-third President of the United States at all is because Wallace pissed off the wrong people as Vice President. Truman, on the other hand, seemed like the kind of person who could be easily manipulated by his advisors... especially if you consider that he never really wanted to be President in the first place.