The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century
By Ben Steil  
(Simon & Schuster, 704 pages, $40)

When you arrive at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum on the grounds of the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, New York, you are greeted by National Park Service staff at the Henry A. Wallace Visitor Center, named after the man who was FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture from 1933-1940, Vice President during FDR’s third term, and the Progressive Party’s presidential candidate in 1948 who ran against Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey with the open and welcome support of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The National Park Service, using your tax dollars, honors a man who blamed Harry Truman, not Josef Stalin, for starting the Cold War. 

As Benn Steil points out in his fascinating new biography of Wallace, The World That Wasn’t, had the Democrats in 1944 picked Wallace to be FDR’s running mate that November, Wallace would have become President of the United States upon FDR’s death in April 1945, and as a result “there would have been no Truman Doctrine. No Marshall Plan. No NATO. No West Germany. No policy of containment.” Henry Wallace opposed them all. He trusted Josef Stalin more than Harry Truman. As a “progressive,” Wallace was ideologically closer to communism than capitalism. All of Wallace’s enemies were on the right. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Nixon, Not Kissinger, Was the Architect of ‘Detente’)

Henry Wallace was born in Iowa. His father was a successful farmer and later served as Secretary of Agriculture under Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Henry’s politics would turn in another direction. Steil notes that Wallace was both an intellectual and a spiritualist who experimented with theosophy, described by Steil as “an occult movement, popular in the 1920s among artists, intellectuals, and progressives, defined by a belief in a divine wisdom residing in the Beyond but accessible to a small spiritual elite.” Progressives like Wallace had a “universalist outlook” that led them to “embrace utopian ventures — in Wallace’s case, he found utopia in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Universalist progressives like Wallace, Steil explains, love “humanity” but not individual people. Wallace once wrote that Lenin was “one of the few men of [the] century whose earnestness deserves to rank with that of [the prophet] Amos and [the theologian] John Knox.” Wallace respected Lenin’s “power to transform society in line with [his] vision.” He praised Stalin’s collectivization of the farms, even as it was killing by starvation and other means millions of Russians and Ukrainians. While Agriculture Secretary, he bizarrely dabbled in secret plans to work with a Russian mystic to create a new central Asian power named “Shambhala.” Steil suggests that Wallace’s central Asian fiasco, which included embarrassing correspondence (“Guru letters”) between Wallace and the mystic was covered-up by Roosevelt and one of FDR’s former political aids who became a judge. 

That was the man that FDR and Democratic insiders selected to be FDR’s vice-presidential running mate in 1940, when Roosevelt sought an unprecedented third term. As Vice President, Wallace presided over the Senate — a job he hated. During the Second World War, FDR made Wallace chairman of the Economic Defense Board, later renamed the Bureau of Economic Warfare. When the Soviet Union became our ally in the war, Wallace in a speech before the Free World Association called the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 an event that “spoke for the common man in blood.” Wallace and Roosevelt promoted “economic democracy” and believed it was a common bond between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Like FDR, Wallace sought the dissolution of the British empire after the war and looked to a partnership with the Soviet Union to establish the postwar order. 

Robert Nisbet called Roosevelt’s approach to Stalin a “courtship.” Steil views Wallace’s approach as more of an ideological endearment. Both Roosevelt and Wallace established an environment in which Soviet spies and agents of influence flourished. Steil details the significant Soviet penetration of Wallace’s Bureau of Economic Warfare where Stalin’s agents “operate[d] unimpeded.” Wallace, Steil writes, “would become an evermore valued target for both Soviet and CPUSA manipulation.” (READ MORE: What Else MacArthur Said About Taiwan)

As the 1944 presidential election grew closer, the FBI and some Democrat Party officials began to worry about who would be Roosevelt’s successor if he won a fourth term. Wallace traveled to Siberia and praised labor conditions there — in the very heart of Stalin’s Gulag. Soviet intelligence officers, Steil writes, “transformed sites along the vice president’s route into Potemkin villages, scrubbing all traces of Gulag life.” Steil notes, however, that like other American and Western “political pilgrims” to the Soviet Union, Wallace saw what he came to see — the great Soviet experiment in economic democracy. Wallace also saw another such experiment developing in China with Mao Zedong’s communists leading the way. “Wallace,” Steil writes, “was trying to shape the postwar Asian architecture in a manner decidedly friendly to Soviet interests.” 

Democratic Party politicos and Roosevelt insiders knew that the president was dying as the 1944 election approached. This made the choice of his running mate extremely important — it was likely that whomever was picked would play a key role in shaping the postwar world. Steil notes that Roosevelt — deceitful man that he was — promised at least three potential candidates, including Wallace, that each was his favorite. The future of the postwar order was at stake but Roosevelt, as always, was playing politics. 

Thankfully, the party bosses settled on Truman, and FDR went along with the decision. The American and Western side in the coming Cold War was in much better hands with Truman than it would have been with Wallace. FDR made Wallace Secretary of Commerce, where Wallace’s cadre of communists and Soviet sympathizers continued to influence him. As the Cold War developed, Wallace repeatedly blamed Truman for the deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations. Wallace became one of the leading American critics of anti-communism. He was already planning a presidential run for 1948, but he had to decide whether to run as a Democrat or a third party candidate. He eventually chose to run on the Progressive Party ticket. He welcomed the support of the CPUSA. He secretly met with Soviet officials who wanted to help his campaign. Wallace conveyed to Soviet officials that a Wallace presidency would mean no Cold War. Steil writes that Wallace was “skating the borders of U.S. law.” Here, unlike the more recent case with Donald Trump, there was real evidence of “collusion between the Wallace campaign and the Soviet Union.” (READ MORE: Ranking Presidents, Miseducating Our Children)

Wallace denounced American actions during the Berlin Airlift. He denounced the formation of NATO. He decried the policy of containment. But at some point, Steil writes, Wallace had an epiphany of sorts. He began to see that his support of Stalin was erroneous. Steil gives Wallace the benefit of the doubt, calling him a “distinctly progressive idealist who staked his career on a categorical error of judgment.”

It was an error of judgment that progressives made throughout the Cold War because progressives and communists share ideological and philosophical roots. That common vision was perhaps best explained by Whittaker Chambers in Witness: “It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals.” It was Henry Wallace’s vision. It is still the vision of American progressives today.