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The third in a line of men named Henry, our subject today is Henry Agard Wallace, who was born on October 7, 1888 on a farm near the village of Orient, Iowa. His father was Henry Cantwell Wallace, a farmer, newspaper editor, university professor, author, and Secretary of Agriculture for Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. His mother was the former May Brodhead. She was deeply religious and also college educated. When the African-American agronomist George Washington Carver became a student and later an instructor at Iowa State University, the Wallaces took him into their home, at a time when racial prejudice prevented Carver from living in the dorm. As a boy, Wallace accompanied Carver on nature walks. Wallace attended Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa, graduating in 1910 with a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry. He worked on the editorial staff of the family-owned paper in Des Moines from 1910 to 1924, and took the role of Chief Editor from 1924 to 1929. Wallace also experimented with breeding high-yielding hybrid corn.
In 1914, Wallace married Ilo Browne, and in 1926, with the help of a small inheritance that had been left to her, he founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, which made him a wealthy man. The company later became Pioneer Hi-Bred, a major agriculture corporation. It was acquired in 1999 by the Dupont Corporation for approximately $10 billion.
Wallace was raised as a Presbyterian but in 1919 he stopped attending the Presbyterian church and explored other religious faiths and traditions, including spiritualism and esoteric religion. In 1925 he helped organize a Des Moines parish of the Liberal Catholic Church, but in 1939, however, he formally joined the Episcopal Church.
During the 1930s Wallace corresponded with Russian artist and peace activist Nicholas Roerich. In 1933 the Roosevelt Administration had just formally recognized the Soviet Union, and it sent Roerich on an expedition to Central Asia on behalf of the Department of Agriculture. Roerich and his wife Helena Ivanova had developed their own brand of Theosophy that they called Living Ethics or Agni Yoga. Wallace met him in 1929. Some of their correspondence became known as the "guru letters".
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Wallace United States Secretary of Agriculture in his Cabinet, a post Wallace's father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, had held from 1921 to 1924. Henry A. Wallace was a registered Republican at the time but he had campaigned for Democratic candidate Al Smith. He was one of the three Republicans that Roosevelt appointed to his cabinet. As Agriculture Secretary, Wallace's policies were controversial. For example, to raise prices of agricultural commodities he instituted the slaughtering of hogs, plowing up cotton fields, and paying farmers to leave some lands fallow.
In 1934, when Roosevelt and Wallace had sent Nicholas Roerich and his son George to Central Asia to search for drought-resistant grasses to prevent another Dust Bowl, Roerich caused a stuir by trying to bring about a revival of the legendary Buddhist kingdom of Shambhalla, variously located in Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, or Manchuria. These areas were under the jurisdiction of the British and Japanese empires, which did not look kindly on movements for national self-determination. After Wallace recalled him, the U.S. government aggressively pursued Roerich for tax evasion, causing Roerich to move to India. During the 1940 presidential election, the Republicans gained possession of a series of letters that Wallace had written to Roerich in the 1930s. In them, Wallace had addressed Roerich as "Dear Guru", signing himself as "G" – for Galahad, the name Roerich had bestowed on him. Wallace told Roerich in the letters that he awaited "the breaking of the New Day" when the people of "Northern Shambhalla", a Buddhist term for the "land of pure enlightenment", would create an era of peace and plenty. The Republicans had threatened to reveal to the public what they termed Wallace's eccentric religious beliefs prior to the November 1940 elections, but they chose not to when the Democrats countered by threatening to release information about Republican candidate Wendell Willkie's rumored extramarital affair with writer Irita Van Doren.
Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture until September 1940, when Roosevelt selected him as his running mate in the 1940 election. Many at the convention booed the announcement of Roosevelt's choice of Wallace. Eleanor Roosevelt delivered a speech that caused some of the delegates to come around. Wallace received the support of about 59% of the 1100 delegates. He was elected in November 1940 as Vice President and inaugurated on January 20, 1941.
Roosevelt named Wallace chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) in 1941. Wallace found an enemy in Commerce Secretary Jesse H. Jones, as the two differed on how to handle wartime supplies. Wallace also spoke out during race riots in Detroit in 1943, declaring that the nation could not "fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home."
In 1943, Wallace made a goodwill tour of Latin America, shoring up support among allies. His trip proved a success, and helped persuade twelve countries to declare war on Germany. On May 23, 1944, he started a 25-day tour of Russia. The trip continued through Mongolia and then to China.
After Wallace feuded publicly with many in the conservative wing of the Democratic party, Roosevelt began to entertain the idea of replacing him on the presidential ticket. Although a Gallup poll taken just before the Democratic Party's 1944 vice presidential nomination found 65% of those surveyed in favour of Wallace, he was replaced by Harry Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Henry A. Wallace had missed being the 33rd President of the United States by just 82 days.
Roosevelt placated Wallace by appointing him Secretary of Commerce in March 1945. In a speech on April 12th 1946, Henry Wallace said 'aside from our common language and common literary tradition, we have no more in common with Imperialistic England than with Communist Russia'. He was portrayed as being 'soft' on Communism and in September 1946, he was fired by President Harry S. Truman because of disagreements about the policy towards the Soviet Union. He is the last former Vice President to serve in the a subsequent cabinet.
After his dismissal from cabinet, Wallace became the editor of The New Republic magazine. In that role he was an aggressive critic of Truman's foreign policy. He predicted that the Truman Doctrine of 1947 would mark the beginning of what he called "a century of fear".
In 1948 Wallace ran as the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. Idaho Democratic Senator Glen H. Taylor was his running mate. His platform advocated friendly relations with the Soviet Union, an end to the Cold War, an end to segregation, full voting rights for African Americans, and universal government health insurance. In an era before Brown v. Board of Education, his campaign included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American South. During the campaign, Wallace refused to appear before segregated audiences or eat or stay in segregated hotels. Audiences in the south threw eggs and tomatoes at him. Wallace said "there is a long chain that links unknown young hoodlums in North Carolina or Alabama with men in finely tailored business suits in the great financial centers of New York or Boston, men who make a dollars-&-cents profit by setting race against race in the far away South."
The "guru letters" reappeared during the campaign and were published, with the intention of making Wallace look like a flake. Journalists H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Thompson charged that Wallace and the Progressives were under the covert control of Communists. Wallace refused to publicly disavow the endorsement of his candidacy by the American Communist Party, which cost him the support of many anti-Communist liberals.
Wallace suffered a decisive defeat in the election to the Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman. He finished in fourth place with 2.4% of the popular vote, behind Truman, Republican Thomas Dewey and "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond. Although it was at first believed that Wallace's candidacy would siphon off Democratic votes from Truman, historians like David Pietrusza and Zachary Karabell argue that his candidacy helped Truman because Wallace's frequent criticisms of Truman's foreign policy, combined with his acceptance of Communist support, served to refute the Republicans' claim that Truman was "soft on communism". Wallace failed to win any electoral votes.
Wallace resumed his farming interests, and lived in South Salem, New York. During his later years, he made a number of achievements in the field of agricultural science, including breeding chickens that were top egg layers. In 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, Wallace broke with the Progressives and supported the U.S. in the Korean War. He learned from Gulag survivor Vladimir Petrov about the true nature of the Soviet treatment of dissidents and he publicly apologized for allowed himself to be fooled by the Soviets. He published a book in 1952 called "Where I Was Wrong" in which he explained that his former attitude toward the Soviet Union stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin's crimes and that he now considered himself an anti-Communist.
In 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy invited Wallace to his inauguration ceremony, even though he had supported Kennedy's opponent Richard Nixon. Wallace wrote in his thank you letter to Kennedy: "At no time in our history have so many tens of millions of people been so completely enthusiastic about an Inaugural Address as about yours."
Wallace first experienced the onsets of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1964. He died in Danbury, Connecticut, on November 18, 1965. His remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and his ashes are interred in Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa.