Misadventures of a Stalinist Stooge
Benn Steil’s engrossing new biography of Henry A. Wallace is a timely cautionary tale and a masterpiece of 20th-century American history.
A review of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century by Benn Steil; 687 pages; New York: Avid Reader Press (January 2024)
I. Henry A. Wallace and His Apologists
Benn Steil is a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and the prize-winning author of The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War and The Battle of Bretton Woods. These two books have justly established Steil as a major diplomatic historian, who has shed new light on important episodes in our recent past. Now, Steil has turned his attention to the life and career of Henry A. Wallace, whom FDR appointed as his secretary of agriculture in his first Cabinet. In 1940, Roosevelt made Wallace his vice-presidential candidate for a critical wartime election. In 1944, he succumbed to pressure from major Democrats to bounce Wallace from the ticket, and chose Senator Harry S. Truman to be the vice-presidential candidate instead. Wallace was given the consolation prize of secretary of commerce, a post he held until Truman—who became president after Roosevelt’s sudden death in office—fired him in September 1946.
I have been thinking and writing about Wallace’s life and career for many years, since I made him the subject of my MA thesis as a young graduate student. While working on that project, I got to spend an entire day in 1959 with Wallace at his farm in South Salem, New York, where he responded to my many questions. He also gave me exclusive access to—and use of—his private diary, which had not yet been published. I found Wallace to be cooperative, pleasant, friendly, and an easy conversationalist. As his 1948 campaign song had it, he appeared to be “Friendly Henry Wallace.” He picked me up at the train station in his Volkswagen Beetle, which was not the kind of car I expected the former vice president and millionaire to be driving. And when I departed after dinner, he insisted on giving me a carton of eggs that his chickens had laid.
Wallace’s father had been secretary of agriculture in the Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge cabinets in the 1920s, and his grandfather was the founder of the most well-known agricultural journal, Wallace’s Farmer. Henry Wallace may have been the most influential of the lineage; he discovered the process of making hybrid corn, which led to an agricultural revolution. As a result, Mexico tripled its corn production and saw a five-fold increase in wheat production. But what has drawn historians’ attention was not Wallace’s expertise as an agricultural pioneer. It was his support and defense of the totalitarian Soviet Union and his admiration for Joseph Stalin.
With the onset of the Cold War at the end of World War II, Wallace prominently argued that Stalin was not interested in spreading communism and expanding a Soviet empire. Soviet policy, he insisted, was to continue the wartime American–Soviet alliance in pursuit of a peaceful postwar world. Perversely, Wallace’s Soviet sympathies have made him a hero to contrarian documentarians, intellectuals, writers, journalists, and political figures today. Among them is Glenn Greenwald, who wrote an essay for the Intercept in 2019 in which he claimed that Wallace was persecuted on account of his “pro-peace” beliefs. (I replied to Greenwald in these pages at the time.)
Ronald Radosh
The previous year, Peter Beinart had published an essay in the Atlantic arguing that Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, was “reviving Henry Wallace’s vision for global democracy.” Wallace, Beinart wrote, “saw unchecked private wealth as a threat to liberty” and believed that Nazism was “the result of a toxic alliance between demagogues and big business.” Beinart seemed to agree with Wallace that America’s “hard line against the USSR” was unnecessary, and that in our own time, America’s leaders—be they Democrats or Republicans—want the US to dominate and uplift the world at the same time. Beinart sought a policy based not on the myth of American exceptionalism, but on the “empowerment” of what Wallace called “the common man.”
But no one has shown greater dedication to defending Wallace than filmmaker Oliver Stone and his historian colleague Peter Kuznick. These two men believe that the Cold War would have been avoided entirely had Wallace’s policies been adopted, and they produced a ten-part documentary series for the Showtime network that praised Wallace as a man devoted to peace and cooperation with the Soviet Union. The book that accompanied the film led the late historian Martin Sherwin (co-author of the Oppenheimer biography on which Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award-winning biopic was based) to write that Stone-Kuznick had given us “the most important historical narrative of this century.” (In an essay for the Weekly Standard, I explained why Sherwin’s blurb was outrageous and completely wrong.)
In the New York Times Magazine, Andrew Goldman wrote that in Stone’s view, “Stalin, compared with Truman, still comes off as heroic, as an honest negotiator who, following F.D.R.’s death, was faced at every turn with Truman’s diplomatic perfidy.” Wallace, on the other hand, is depicted as “the biggest hero of all” and “treated to reverent orchestral music when his face appears on-screen, intercut at times with clips from ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’” Wallace, Stone tells viewers in the film’s narration, “stuck out like a sore thumb on Capitol Hill. He studied Buddhism and Zoroastrianism... He liked to spend evenings reading or throwing boomerangs on the Potomac.” Had he been President, we learn, “there would have been no Cold War at all.”
In Goldman’s article, the liberal Princeton historian Sean Wilentz remarks that Stone’s documentary “is basically a very standard left-wing, C.P., fellow traveler, Wallace-ite vision of what happened in 1945–46.” Wilentz is right. Toward the end of his documentary’s fourth episode, Stone waxes ecstatic over what might have been had Henry Wallace’s third-party bid for the presidency in 1948 succeeded. According to Stone, not only would the Cold War likely have been halted, but America might also have fulfilled FDR’s dream of a second Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom from want for all.
Benn Steil’s new biography makes it abundantly clear that Stone’s utopian counterfactual is simply a fantasy. Steil calls the Progressive Party that Wallace led in 1948 “Gideon’s Red Army,” since it was created and led by members of the American Communist Party. When confronted with the truth about communist domination of his movement, Wallace simply replied: “Anyone who will work for peace is okay with me.” I would only add to Steil’s admonition that had Wallace become America’s president, Stalin would likely have achieved his goal of domination and control of Western as well as Eastern Europe, and would eventually have posed a military threat to the United States. After all, Wallace believed that only his own country threatened world peace and that there were “more warmongers concentrated in the USA than in any other nation of the world.”
Steil’s book is an important corrective because, in recent decades, scores of hagiographic books have celebrated Wallace’s life and politics. These books include Richard J. Walton’s Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War; communist historian Norman D. Markowitz’s The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948; a biography by Edward and Frederick Schapsmeier titled Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years; Allen Yarnell’s Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Presidential Election as a Test of Postwar Liberalism; and John C. Culver and John Hyde’s American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace.
The last of these was the only other comprehensive biography, and the authors acknowledged that they resented what they called the “vilification of Wallace and his followers.” They exonerate Wallace of Soviet sympathies and mock anticommunist liberals of the day who claimed that Wallace’s so-called fight for peace was “further proof of a candidacy [for president in 1948] hatched in the Kremlin or a candidate held prisoner by a leftist ‘palace guard.’” Were the two authors writing their biography of Wallace today, they would not be able to get away with such blatant falsehoods.
Finally, in 2020, Nation magazine editor John Nichols published The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry A. Wallace’s Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics. Needless to say, the book received glowing blurbs from Noam Chomsky, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Ilhan Omar. “Wallace,” Noam Chomsky informs us,“was right about a lot of things.” Benn Steil’s book reminds us that he was not.
II. Soviet Mysticism and Tyranny
Steil begins by charting Wallace’s rise to prominence—he was an indisputably brilliant businessman and agronomist, and Steil is careful to acknowledge his subject’s knowledge and expertise in these areas. The company Wallace formed to produce hybrid corn breed in 1926 netted a sparse $30 profit in its first year. Twenty years later, Wallace’s dividend was $150,000 a year—$2.5 million in today’s money. Seventy-five years after Wallace founded the company, the US multinational DuPont bought it for $9.4 billion.
With that record, and with farm prices falling during the Depression, it was not surprising that FDR appointed Wallace as his secretary of agriculture. In that job, Wallace orchestrated the famous policy of “plowing under” crops, which drove up prices by depressing supply. Farmers may have found the policy irrational, but they were happy to accept the farm subsidies they received in exchange for their cooperation. Those who now champion Wallace as some kind of progressive would be shocked to learn that his policy hurt the poorest sharecroppers, whose earnings collapsed. Farm administration radicals, many of them socialists or closet communists, became his fierce opponents and unsuccessfully tried to sabotage his policy’s implementation. Steil concludes that the administration’s agricultural policy might have helped farmers, tenants, and laborers more—and better contributed to recovery—“just by mailing them checks.”
Steil’s attention then shifts to Wallace’s views on theosophy, and his strange devotion to an occult leader named Nicholas Roerich, a White Russian mystic whose goal was to develop a new religious nation somewhere in Soviet Central Asia. Roerich called this nation the “Sacred Union of the East” or “Shambhala,” and he believed that its past existence was “a onetime early Tibetan-Buddhist paradise that now existed as a heavenly vision of perfection.” These ideas, Steil writes, were “an eclectic combination of social activism and millenarian fatalism.”
Wallace adopted Roerich as his personal guru, pledged fealty, and promised to help him achieve his goals. To that end, Wallace used his position in government to fund Roerich’s Asian adventures, which included establishing a mission to survey how countries in the region were developing their crops. Of course, the Bolsheviks now controlled Russia, but the mystic believed that Buddha himself “was building a communistic system,” and since Lenin was a “prominent communist,” he and the Bolsheviks would be “natural allies” in this quest. The Soviet leaders decided that they could go along with this crackpot scheme and use it to their own ideological and geopolitical advantage. It was placed in the hands of the Commerce Department.
Steil writes: “Wallace, under the guise of aiding American agriculture, intended to mislead Congress into funding a Russian mystic’s plan to change the political map of Central Asia,” even though he had “no idea of what sort of polity this mystic sought to create.” In other words, Wallace was a kook. He called FDR “The Flaming One” or (if he feared the president’s disapproval) “The Wavering One.” American botanists thought they were leading the mission, but soon found that they were pawns in Roerich’s crazy scheme and decided that he was a liar and a crook. Wallace’s loyalty was not to his own government or the State Department but to Roerich. He concluded one letter, “In deep reverence I bow access across the seas … to those who are so dear to the Great Ones in the time of great trial.”
Wallace’s relationship with Roerich was discovered by his Republican opponents in 1940, when they obtained copies of the mystic’s correspondence with Wallace. In these letters, Wallace had addressed Roerich as “Dear Guru,” and they might have ruined his political career had they been disclosed. But Republicans opted to keep them private because they feared that their own presidential candidate’s romantic affair would be exposed in turn by the Democrats. Democrats pledged to keep the affair under wraps during the presidential campaign if the GOP agreed not to make the Wallace–Roerich letters public. In any event, the entire Roerich enterprise failed. Wallace, once its greatest supporter, now distanced himself and sought to blame others he had enlisted for pushing Roerich’s private agenda.
Wallace responded to this setback by transferring his allegiance from his personal guru to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. On this topic, Steil has obtained new sources not used by any previous authors. With the service of a Russian assistant, who obtained and translated the new documents, Steil offers far more extensive proof of Wallace’s ties to the totalitarian power than has hitherto been known. Early on, Wallace had warned of what he called “fascist interests” motivated by “anti-Russian bias,” as if no valid reasons existed to oppose the Soviet political system. FDR sent Wallace on a foreign-policy mission to wartime Asia, during which he visited 22 cities in Soviet Siberia, accompanied by the China hand John Carter Vincent and the leftist Asian scholar, Owen Lattimore (later accused by Senator Joe McCarthy of being the top Soviet spy in the United States).
Steil reveals the extent to which the Soviet secret police—the NKGB and its sister agency the NKVD—stewarded the entire journey and ensured that Wallace would depart with a wholly positive view of what the Soviet Union had accomplished in Asia. At each stage of his trip, his guides and hosts were working for the intelligence agencies, and his hosts were often high-ranking intelligence agents, disguised as either regular army officers or other officials. The trip was arranged by Andrei Vishinsky, the infamous prosecutor of the Moscow show trials, and aided by V. Merkulov, the head of the NKGB. One of the guides who showed Wallace around (whom Wallace described as a “very fine man”) was an agency chief and part of Lavrenti Beria’s inner circle of secret-police agents. It was a classic Potemkin village tour.
In a ravished land torn by war and great scarcity of food and goods, Wallace was given extravagant meals that even Soviet apparatchiks were not usually able to enjoy, as well as liquor at each stop. “We were served the best there was to offer,” he later wrote, “caviar, venison steaks … delicious fried fish … and rose-petal wines.” The Soviets, he concluded, had achieved “economic democracy,” and Siberian laborers’ eight-hour days were well paid and supplemented with overtime. In fact, Steil observes, most laborers worked 14-hour days, “earned a pittance, and had ‘migrated’ by force. They were prisoners.” Wallace believed that Kolyma had an abundance of food, but Steil notes that, in fact, the population “lived on the brink of starvation.”
In Magadan, Wallace saw handicrafts made by native talent, met with goldminers, and was entertained by a ballet troupe and choral group he thought was the Red Army Choir, supposedly brought in from Moscow for his pleasure. What he actually saw was a prisoners’ choir dressed in military uniforms. In his diary, Wallace described Magadan as a “combination of TVA and Hudson’s Bay Company,” but it was actually a prison camp run by slave labor. Actors took the place of actual inhabitants, guard towers were dismantled, and wire fences were removed to make Magadan look like a normal town. The entire region was run by the NKVD, correctly described by Steil as “the commissariat responsible for counterintelligence, public order, and penitentiaries.” Soviet coalminers were “underfed prisoners … who slept in lice-ridden tents.” But the people to whom Wallace was introduced were Young Communist League members “assembled to play the part of miners,” all of whom were given new clothes and wristwatches to make them look prosperous. When Wallace left, they were told to hand these props back.
The commissars got their money’s worth from the credulous vice-president, and he returned to the US singing Stalin’s praises. If only America’s arctic frontier were more like the Soviet system, he mused wistfully: “Under Marshall Stalin’s wise leadership … the multi-national Soviet peoples have shown that for them nothing is impossible.” Wallace fell for the ruse completely, although Steil wonders what he thought when he spotted prisoners being marched down a road, something he was not meant to see. Wallace later acknowledged that Soviet Russia used harsh methods to advance. But, he argued, although their methods were “costly in human terms,” they were a “necessary measure if the industrialization plan … was to succeed.” This was, of course, the established rationale used by fellow travelers to justify all Stalinist brutality: You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
III. Useful Idiocy in the Truman Administration
Having fallen in love with the Soviet Union during his carefully curated trip, it is hardly surprising that in the later war years, when he was secretary of commerce, Wallace was among those who most vehemently insisted that Stalin and his henchman were peace-loving leaders of great wisdom and foresight. So, what would have happened had FDR retained Wallace as his vice-president in 1944, instead of ditching him at the Democratic convention and installing the little-known senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, in his place? Steil’s judgment is sharp and compelling: “With Henry Wallace in the White House,” he writes, “there would have been no Truman Doctrine. No Marshall Plan. No NATO. No West Germany.” The Cold War would indeed have been avoided because Stalin would not have needed to wage it.
Later in his book, Steil writes that, during a secret meeting with Ambassador Andrey Gromyko in March 1948, Wallace stated that peace was so important, he would ask for “no actual concessions from Stalin” if the Soviets would agree to secretly support his forthcoming candidacy for president [italics in Steil’s book]. There would be no demand for free elections in Berlin; no end to the debasing of the German currency; no demand to end the imposition of communism where Soviet troops held sway; no assent to Korean unification; indeed no hint of “anything that a responsible American government had cause to expect from a partner in peace.” Gromyko responded by demanding immediate unilateral American nuclear disarmament without any international inspection of Moscow’s stockpile, since such action would infringe on the Soviet Union’s “national sovereignty.”
Steil’s account of Wallace’s time in office as secretary of commerce is the most complete to date. Using newly mined Soviet archival material, Steil reveals the extent to which Wallace was highly influenced by pro-Soviet ideologues, communists, fellow-travelers, and even a bona fide Soviet agent, who was passing material he obtained directly to Soviet intelligence. That individual was Harry Magdoff, Wallace’s chief speechwriter and main aide, who referred to his job as a post in the “capitalist, imperialist government.” Magdoff began his career in commerce as publisher of the Survey of Current Business, and as the man who provided weekly economic reports to the president’s cabinet. He advocated 18 percent wage raises for coalminers, seizure of the mines by the government, and a national railroad strike. Truman would act to stop the union’s strike threat, for which Magdoff called him a “dope.”
Impressed with his work, Wallace promoted Magdoff to chief economic analyst, apparently unaware of his “long-standing ties to Soviet intelligence.” Along with other Soviet moles in various government agencies, Magdoff routinely collected memos, reports, and confidential documents. He then passed these to CPUSA chief Earl Browder, who immediately handed them over to the Soviet intelligence agencies. Magdoff was also a member of what became known as “the Perlo group”—a group of American Soviet sympathizers named after its chief Victor Perlo, who had been working for NKGB agents in the United States since 1944. One of Wallace’s allies and colleagues was the senator from Florida, a pro-Soviet figure named Claude Pepper, whom conservatives called “Red Pepper.” Pepper’s chief staff adviser and speechwriter was Charles Kramer, a friend of Magdoff and a Perlo group member, who also became a Soviet intelligence source and regularly shared material with Magdoff.
Magdoff’s codenames were first “Kant” and later “Tan.” Alexander Vasiliev, the former KGB agent who defected to Britain and published the secret KGB documents he had copied, wrote that Magdoff felt “very proud of himself.” Among other documents Magdoff obtained for the NKGB were a cable about an Anglo-American Oil Agreement and excerpts of a Wallace cabinet memo on atomic energy—all part of active intelligence operations against the United States. But Magdoff was never arrested or prosecuted, and never had to account for his betrayal. On the contrary, Wallace promoted him again, this time to special assistant in the Office of Program Planning. In 1948, when Wallace decided to run for president on the new pro-communist ticket of the Progressive Party, he made Magdoff his chief campaign adviser and speechwriter.
Harry Truman began his unintended presidency by attempting to carry out FDR’s foreign policy, which he believed was based on continuing American–Soviet friendship. He quickly learned that Stalin had another agenda in mind, and that Stalin was rapidly abandoning what Truman had believed were pledges for free elections in Poland and elsewhere. Instead, the Soviet leader sought to consolidate Soviet control over the Eastern European states liberated from Nazism by the Soviet military’s wartime advances.
In response, Truman adopted his “get tough” policy, which committed the United States to supporting democracy and independence for the newly freed Eastern European nations. While he was a Cabinet member, Wallace began to support Soviet foreign-policy proposals rather than those made by others in the Truman administration. Secretary of Defense Forrestal wanted Russia to prove its cooperation before sharing any atomic data; Wallace, on the other hand, believed that the United States had to freely share its atomic secrets first to prove its peaceful intentions to Stalin. The Soviet leader knew his stance, since Harry Magdoff immediately gave the NKGB the private memo advocating this policy.
Wallace immediately began to resist the response to Soviet policy slowly being adopted by the Truman administration. While a cabinet officer, he met privately with a Soviet embassy employee named Anatoly Gromov, who was secretly the station chief of Soviet intelligence in the US capital. Wallace informed Gromov that there were two groups in the administration—one “very anti-Soviet” and “decidedly hostile to the Slavic world,” and a second group (led by himself) that believed “the well-being and fate of mankind is dependent on good relations” with the Soviet Union. Shockingly, Wallace asked Gromov to assist his side in the internal administration debate, telling him that the USSR “could help this smaller group significantly.” When the head of the NKGB in Moscow received Gromov’s report, he directed it “be sent to Comrade Stalin without fail.” In other words, Wallace courted Soviet interference in America’s political system and elections.
The tension between Truman and the Wallace wing of the Democratic Party finally came to a head on July 23, 1946, when Wallace handed the president a 12-page letter laying out the foreign policy he espoused in detail. In addition, he told the press that Truman’s policy gave the Soviets “some very real and probably well-founded reasons for not trusting us.” Truman called Wallace’s letter a “political document” that Wallace was using to advance his own interests. One of the people who saw Wallace’s letter as it was circulated in the government was another Soviet agent, Harry Dexter White, who deemed it “very, very impressive.”
Wallace also had a speech written for him by Magdoff (or so Magdoff told me in 1959) that he planned to deliver on September 12, 1946, at an American–Soviet friendship rally to be held at Madison Square Garden. Wallace announced at a press conference that he had shown his speech to Truman in advance and that Truman had told him that it “represented the policy of this administration.” When Truman was asked about this, he said “I approved the whole speech,” but later clarified that he only meant that he approved Wallace’s right to make the speech, not its substance.
Wallace’s speech coincided with Secretary of State James Byrnes’s visit to Germany, where he was negotiating postwar terms with the Soviets. Byrnes stated that the USSR had breached the agreements reached by the US and Russia at the wartime Potsdam conference, and that the Soviet Union was now unilaterally resetting Poland’s borders. That statement contrasted sharply with Wallace’s declared view that the US had no business “in the political affairs of Eastern Europe.” Truman’s aides told the president that Wallace’s speech “cut the ground right under” Secretary Byrnes.
Steil notes: “Wallace’s foreign policy was, the [New York] Times would conclude, one that would appeal to isolationists, pacifists, and ‘those who believe Russia is always right,’ but one which made a mockery of ‘the wartime pledges of the Great Powers.’” Byrnes threatened to resign in protest, and Truman had no option but to fire Wallace. On September 20, he relieved Wallace of his cabinet position and any other role in his administration. Wallace’s strident pro-Soviet views had at last made him a pariah—a politician now seen as subservient to America’s new global opponent.
IV. Presidential Ambitions
Wallace’s ejection from the Truman administration now left him free to take his “campaign for peace” to the American public at large, and he began by accepting the position of editor at the New Republic. The magazine’s first editorial under his helm, writes Steil, was “an apologia for Soviet plunder of Central and Eastern Europe,” justified by the losses suffered by Russia during WWII. If any other editor dared to propose an editorial even slightly critical of the Soviet Union, Wallace simply rejected it. Russia, Wallace proclaimed, “really wants peace.” The magazine opposed the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the Marshall Plan—the keystones of America’s new postwar policy.
Moreover, contrary to the wishes of the New Republic’s publisher and owner Michael Straight—a former NKVD recruit—Wallace toured the major European capitals, where he repeatedly attacked US foreign policy. In Britain, former prime minister Winston Churchill remarked that Wallace’s views were only accepted by a “small minority of crypto-Communists.” Although Wallace didn’t know it, his visit to Paris was organized by Martha Dodd Stern, who was then a secret OGPU-NKGB agent who had asked a Soviet asset and leading French politician, Pierre Cot, to invite him. At the airport, the only public figures greeting him were the two major French Communist Party leaders, Marcel Cachin and Jacques Duclos.
After a few months with the publication, and no evidence that the Truman administration was softening its approach to the Soviet Union, Wallace succumbed to pressure from his supporters and left the New Republic to accept his nomination as the presidential candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party. The new party was, in fact, a front for the American Communist Party, which correctly judged that Wallace would always accept advice from its advisors. As Bruce Bliven noted, “Working through concealed Communists within friendly liberal and labor organizations … they did a ‘superb snow job’ on Wallace” and “convinced him that they were just a bunch of good liberals who liked and admired him.”
Steil notes that Moscow’s goal was that of “steering U.S. foreign policy through covert support for a ‘third party,’” which they first sought to do in 1924, when Moscow backed Bob Lafollette’s presidential run on an early political group also called the Progressive Party. During the 1948 election campaign, Truman now found himself opposed by both the Wallace candidacy on the Left and by the racist Senator Strom Thurmond on the so-called Dixiecrat ticket created by Southern Democrats. So, most observers believed the election would be won by Republican candidate Thomas Dewey. Meanwhile, Wallace’s secret cooperation with the Soviet Union continued.
Wallace decided to publish an Open Letter to the Soviets that he had written in April and May of 1948 for his forthcoming campaign. It summarized Wallace’s previous support of Soviet positions and laid all the blame for geopolitical tension at the door of the United States. Wallace’s aides ensured that the text found its way to Stalin in Moscow before it became public. Stalin insisted on one point above all, writing in italics that “We are not waging any cold war. It is the USA that is waging it.” Stalin personally approved 90 percent of what Wallace wrote and indicated that when the letter became public, he would endorse it. His only disagreement was with Wallace’s call for freedom of speech and political democracy, which Stalin wrote was “the business of each particular nation.”
Using newly uncovered Soviet archival evidence, Steil has now established that Stalin had “personal involvement” in the writing of Wallace’s Open Letter before it was finally released to the American and world public in mid-May 1948. On May 10, Stalin wrote to Wallace and said, “I would think it necessary to make one addition to your proposals, namely to supplement a point on resuming unlimited commerce between our two nations with the words ‘excluding any discrimination.’” That exact phrase was then inserted into the Open Letter by Wallace before its publication. This may be the only time that an American presidential candidate, albeit one running on the ticket of a new left-wing party, has had a campaign announcement pre-approved and amended by America’s leading adversary. Indeed, Stalin was in touch with Wallace until the very day the text was made public! This, Steil writes, “is documentary evidence of [Stalin’s] involvement in the writing of Wallace’s Open Letter.”
Stalin was delighted. He wrote to Wallace to tell him that “this is all good … Your letter is timely … it is making a step forward, creating a foundation for the improvement of our relations. This is a serious difference between your move and the move of the U.S. Government. If the content of your letter is taken as a foundation for the agreement between the USSR and the USA, then settling our differences will be possible. We approve such a road to settlement.” It is no surprise that Stalin responded so positively to Wallace’s proposals. Wallace was eager to approve every element of Stalin’s foreign policy, which he believed offered the only road to peace between the two countries. “Presumably,” Steil writes, “Gromyko had provided Wallace with the assurances he had repeatedly sought regarding Stalin’s ‘preliminary agreement’ on the issues detailed in the letter.”
When Stalin made his views public on May 18, “it was everything Wallace had hoped for.” He called the letter “an important document” and emphasized those proposals that demanded Western concessions to his positions. Wallace ignored that and told a rally how proud he was that his letter might have provided a “good and fruitful purpose” by moving the two nations towards peace and cooperation. But even the left-wing Nation magazine’s editor, Freda Kirchwey, had to admit that the Open Letter was “heavily weighted in favor of Moscow.”
All of Wallace’s problems burst into the open when he launched his presidential campaign. The conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, who wrote for the anticommunist Hearst press, made Wallace’s “Guru letters” to Nicholas Roerich public and published photocopies of the correspondence in Hearst’s newspapers. This time, there was no quid quo pro deal with which the Roerich letters could be suppressed. At a raucous press conference, Wallace refused to make any comment about them and his past relationship to the Russian mystic.
In Germany, the Russian zone began a currency war and blocked access to Berlin, and the Truman administration began the round-the-clock Berlin airlift. During his presidential nomination speech at the Progressive Party’s convention in July, Wallace blamed the crisis on Truman’s “get tough” policy towards the Soviet Union. His words, Steil comments, “played well in the Kremlin.” Steil reveals that Wallace’s disastrous convention speech was rewritten for him by two communist screenwriters, Allan Sloan and Millard Lampell.
As the convention delegates met, the delegation from Vermont introduced a resolution stating that the new party would not “give blanket endorsement to the foreign policy of any nation.” That simple statement was overwhelmingly rejected by the delegates, who declared it to be a Red-baiting attack on the Soviet Union and unworthy of consideration. With the dismissal of the Vermont resolution, communist control of the Progressive Party was now clear to anyone who still doubted it.
When the presidential vote was finally held in November 1948, Wallace did not win a single vote in the electoral college and came in behind the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. He received a little over a million popular votes nationwide—a scant 2.4 percent of the US population. Half of his vote came from New York City and its suburbs; 37 percent came from New York City alone. He lost the vote of his home state Iowa, a farming bulwark, gaining only 1.7 percent of its vote. He lost union support as its leaders deserted the communists once powerful in the CIO. And despite his fierce fight for civil rights in the segregated South during the campaign, he received only two percent of the black vote. They “had their chance,” Wallace griped, “and they let me down.” He did, however, win 18 percent of the Jewish vote (Truman received 60 percent), which was most likely due to his strong support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
After his defeat, Wallace continued his efforts to rally the country behind a change in foreign policy, and he continued to inveigh against NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the Berlin airlift. NATO, he declared, was a “military alliance designed for aggression.” By late 1949 and early 1950, he had begun to re-evaluate his old pro-Soviet views somewhat. He had by now come around to the idea that “Russia wanted the cold war and perhaps even the hot war eventually.” Yet he continued to blame Soviet policies he disliked—such as the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia—on Truman’s foreign policy, which he claimed had compelled Stalin to defend his interests by force. It would take him a few more years to publicly acknowledge that the Prague coup orchestrated by Stalin was Moscow’s fault alone. Then, in 1952, while the communists were busy blaming the Korean War on US aggression, Wallace offered Truman his support for sending US troops to help South Korean troops resist North Korean aggression. This was, Steil notes, “the end of his reign as America’s apostle of peace, its Cassandra of Cold War.”
Who Americans choose as their president, we have learned, can have enormous consequences. FDR’s removal of Wallace as his third term vice-presidential candidate granted the US the strong leadership it needed to create the Western alliance that eventually produced the fall and defeat of the Soviet Union. Benn Steil’s engrossing account of Wallace’s life and career is a timely cautionary tale and a masterpiece of 20th-century American history. It is the definitive biography of Henry A. Wallace, and all the previous hagiographies can finally be consigned to the irrelevance they so richly deserve.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that “Wallace’s relationship with Roerich was discovered by his Republican opponents in 1944” instead of 1940. Apologies for the error.
