The Mystery of Henry Wallace (Spring 2024 | Volume: 69, Issue: 2)

The Mystery of Henry Wallace

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Authors: Derek Leebaert

Historic Era: Era 8: The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)

Historic Theme:

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Spring 2024 | Volume 69, Issue 2

The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century, Benn Steil, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2024, 655 pages.
The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century, by Benn Steil

Editor’s Note: Derek Leebaert is the author of several books on American history and the military, including Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made. He is a founder of the National Museum of the United States Army.

A short article in the Sunday New York Times of March 9, 1930 reported a lecture to the American Society of Agronomy by one Henry Wallace, 42. Apparently, his experiments in the scientific breeding of corn promised a huge increase of productivity for Midwestern crops. The Times was glimpsing what would become the Green Revolution after World War II, which multiplied the world’s food supply to save over a billion lives by 1975, a decade after Wallace’s death. 

For three generations, Wallace’s staunchly Republican family had run the important weekly, Wallaces Farmer, out of Ames, Iowa. The Great Depression drove their paper into the hands of creditors, while Henry struggled to keep alive a biotech company. Yet he campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, although politicians found Wallace remote. That said, any man who combined brilliance, lonely idealism, involvement with the land, and an element of desperation was likely to appeal to another very unusual man, Franklin Roosevelt.

Time featured Wallace in 1933
Time featured Wallace in 1933 when he was named Secretary of Agriculture.

FDR appointed Wallace to head the Department of Agriculture, the biggest federal agency, and The Times then profiled him in depth. It described Wallace’s total recall for numbers, his brain a “machine powered by curiosity,” and acclaimed him as an astute administrator. Altogether, The Times observed, his intellect was “freakish.” 

Wallace was part of the tough, enduring, liberal core of FDR's presidency — and was indispensable to his achievements in peace and war.

Wallace was nearly six feet tall, weighed 175 pounds, had a lean face, chiseled features, blue eyes, thick reddish-brown hair, a starchy voice, and the mild untidiness of a man who was happiest in his fields. He became one of only four hands-on operators to remain at the top from spring 1933 until FDR died in April 1945. The others were Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and Harry Hopkins, the de facto secretary of public welfare until he became FDR’s political-military alter ego during World War II. 

The four became friends. Together, they composed the tough, enduring, liberal core of this presidency — and were indispensable to FDR’s achievements in peace and war.

Beginning in 1933, it was Wallace who launched the programs that transformed the political economy of American agriculture. Much went wrong with a brutal conservative approach that enforced scarcity by paying farmers not to farm. Big landowners benefitted,