National Affairs: Wallace on the Way

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Last week Midwestern farmers studied the actions of a man who might be President.

There was nothing sensational about these actions. This was typical: Henry Wallace, a pleasant-appearing, embarrassed man with an honest eye and a slight touch of hay fever, drove into the farming community of St. Peter, Minn, to campaign as the Democratic nominee for the Vice-Presidency. A Democratic National Committeewoman lives in St. Peter; nevertheless something had gone wrong. St. Peter citizens did not know the candidate was in town, did not even know that he was coming.

Candidate Wallace stopped unheralded at a street corner and engaged four surprised passers-by in conversation. A tireless talker, the ablest interpreter of intricate New Deal theories of spending, lending, taxation, Henry Wallace held forth on these matters while the crowd grew slowly from four to 40. Shy but resolute, he fixed his blue eyes on the ground as he talked, sometimes scuffed the dirt away with his shoe. Presently one listener spoke up: “The trouble is, there’s no limit to this spending.” Henry Wallace replied that when private capital does not flow Government funds must be expended. An elderly man suggested that interest rates had been pounded down, while taxes increased, thus injuring men of property. Fair-minded Henry Wallace agreed that “some had been hurt” but contended that greater good had been achieved. By this time he was standing in the street, while 75 stood on the sidewalk. Then, with a criticism of Republicans in Congress, and a note of praise for Senator McNary, his Republican rival, Henry Wallace returned to his automobile and set out for New Ulm, Sleepy Eye, Olivia, Moose Lake, Crookston, Fergus Falls, Elbow Lake and other small towns in the farm belt.

So last week ran the campaign of Henry Wallace, 51, author of Corn and Corn Growing, editor, savant, dreamer and mystic. There was nothing quite like it in U. S. political history. Three weeks ago the candidate opened with his acceptance speech in Des Moines, in which he damned Republicans as the party of appeasement. Then he spoke in twelve Illinois communities, moved on to Weeping Water, Neb. and so followed his methodical, patient, unheralded path into 41 cities and towns that had gone for Roosevelt in 1936. Other men got the headlines—chief among them, Franklin Roosevelt. Other men drew the crowds—notably, Wendell Willkie.

New Dealers, who had counted on Wallace to do the fighting, were disappointed. Some editorial writers were pained. Henry Wallace told farmers who had always been Republicans (except for their two votes for Franklin Roosevelt) that Hitler wanted the Republican Party to win. To violently protectionist cattlemen, he praised the Hull trade treaties.

He talked dry economics to Nebraska farmers who were waiting for a chance to cheer about something. From eleven Nebraska cities and towns Henry Wallace drew a total of 15,000. In Minnesota his biggest crowd was 1,300, smallest, 35.

Farmers’ Votes. But the issues for the farmers were bigger than the small crowds would indicate. One of the four powerful U. S. farm organizations is the Farmers’ Educational and Co-operative Union of America,* formally allied with John Lewis’ Labor’s Non-Partisan League. Its dynamo and chairman of its legislative committee is able Myron Thatcher, most frequent White House caller of all U. S. farm leaders, close ally of Henry Wallace in carrying out the Administration’s farm program. Last month Farm Leader Thatcher reported to Farmers’ Union members on five conferences he had held with then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, on one lengthy conference alone with President Roosevelt.

The President, said Mr. Thatcher, “is very worn and tired, and to me, he looked sorely beset. He seriously discussed, at great length, how Mr. Wallace was chosen for Vice President through a process of elimination and. in all of that analysis, it was evident to me that he is deeply conscious that he may not live or it may be necessary for him to resign if he is reelected. . . .

“I am positive that if he is re-elected and the war situation gives him an opportunity to get out, he will resign. I make this statement because he emphasized the qualities of Mr. Henry Wallace as one who is a thorough New Dealer, who has unquestioned integrity, fidelity to the common people of this country and the cause of democracy, and who also has one of the best minds and the clearest concepts of world problems of any in his group.”

As Henry Wallace began his campaign in the farm belt, the Sioux City Tribune republished Farm Leader Thatcher’s report, commented, “Well, of course, that’s one man’s impression, but … it is well for voters to consider that possibility and to ask themselves whether they want Henry A. Wallace for President.”

Farmers’ Answers. There were no outward signs last week to indicate what their answers would be. Farm life over the U. S. slowed down for a week of going to fairs and preparing for winter; Midwest harvests were in, except for corn; light snowfall had already whitened the mountains of Colorado, where stockmen were celebrating a good year. In Minnesota the days were mellow and there was an evening haze; schools were open and school children rode in bright yellow school busses or trudged down country roads. At their fairs and festivals—Sauerkraut Day at Springfield, Turkey Day at Worthington, Rutabaga Festival, Potato Day, Egg Festival, Come & Get It Pancake Day-farmers talked about the queer weather that gave them a dry July and a rainy August. Or they were starting the fall plowing that left the plowed-up loam, chocolate or ebony black against the green countryside, looking almost edible in its richness.

In Kansas, where the silo cutters droned, where plowing was under way for 1941’s winter wheat, where upland corn burned out in July’s drought, where the sorghums were good and cattle brought the best price in years, there were arguments hotter than political disputes over the best kind of wheat—Tenmarq, which the State College has pushed, Chiefkan, which farmers found more profitable. In Ohio, with its 255,000 farms (1.03 autos per farm, .66 tractors, .31 trucks), where late spring rains delayed corn and soybean planting, where the corn crop was down by 20,000,000 bushels—there was talk of a new 40-inch combine and of what the weather will be like for next month’s delayed harvest.

In Colorado, ranchers were getting in hay for the long winter snows; in Texas they were pitching horseshoes, getting ready for the fall roundup, looking over some of the finest Hereford cattle in the world at an exposition in Marfa in the Big Bend country. In Louisiana, where a Caribbean hurricane spread havoc last month, flooding out rice, breaking sugar cane, killing livestock, cotton picking started last week, the sugar mills tuned up, the first of the State’s 47 fairs were opening, and at night the levees were studded with the bright fires of fish fries and shrimp boils.

There, too, the farm political scene was more animated than anywhere in the U. S. Governor Sam Jones at the Chicago convention snorted: “I’m 1,000% against Wallace.” (Six years ago Henry Wallace said, “Cotton is an efficient industry and so is hog raising. Sugar is an inefficient industry. … I do not believe Louisiana sugar . . . should be put out of business all at once. That would be hard on human rights. . . .” Four years ago the sugar parish of Assumption voted for Landon.) Scholarly, weather-beaten Planter David Washington Pipes, venerated in the sugar country because he grew the cane which routed mosaic disease (as Wallace made his reputation in the corn belt by helping develop hybrid corn), bolted to Willkie, ran for Congress on the Republican ticket, and his regular Democratic opponent withdrew in his favor.

But nowhere else was the farm political picture so clear. Colorado and Texas cattlemen were vehemently opposed to the Administration farm program—but in both State’s the farmers who far outnumbered them were not. The feeling for Wallace, vague, contradictory, possessive, was compounded of many things—admiration for him personally, respect for his honest expression of his views, a conviction that he is sincerely for them, a belief that they may criticize him in a way that his political opponents should not.

But in the average U. S. county there are now about 100 agents of various Government farm agencies (REA, FSCC, SCS, AAA, the Farm Security Administration); farmers’ dislike for red tape and regimentation has not decreased; farmers’ complaints range from charges that Queen Anne’s lace grows on the land set aside from production to the charge that the grain stored in the ever normal granary breeds insects who never were given such a bounty to fatten on before. Since debt is a reality to foreclosure-conscious farmers, fear of the mounting public debt means more than it does in the cities.

In Rome, Ceres was the goddess of grain. In the U. S. she is a goddess of politics. This year both major parties picked the Vice-Presidential candidates to appeal to farmers—McNary because his farm bill (for export subsidies) was the unfulfilled hope of farmers, Wallace because his AAA at last brought farmers cash in the depths of Depression. But having made sacrifices on the altars of Ceres, politicians still could not tell whether the offerings would prove acceptable, or whether Henry Wallace would be as attractive to farmers as a potential President as he was as Secretary of Agriculture.

Mystic. Henry Wallace appeared in Washington in the early days of the New Deal like a Will Rogers of the intellectuals. His reddish-brown hair stood perpetually on end, his hat was always worn on the back of his head, his clothes were almost ostentatiously untidy and the knot in his tie always stopped, as if it had met an immovable object, about an inch below his collar. He studied his shoelaces while he talked, or, seated behind his desk,, propped his feet on his wastepaper basket and held forth on the intricacies of the farm program.

There was no pose in the Wallace manner. Henry Wallace was no farmer, and Washington well knew his story—how the grandson of the founder of Wallaces’ Farmer, son of Warren Harding’s Secretary of Agriculture, had grown up among agricultural theoreticians and politicians, how he had painstakingly conducted experiments that led to the commercial development of Professor Shull’s discovery of hybrid corn,* how, taken by Henry Morgenthau to Candidate Franklin Roosevelt, he had ticked off the things he would say if he were appealing to the farmers, how Franklin Roosevelt had followed his advice and seen the rousing response it got.

Washington learned more slowly to know the other Wallace, the constant reader—of Robert Frost, the Bible, Tom Paine, Rousseau. St. Augustine, Adam Smith. Darwin, Karl Marx—who believed that Das Kapital, more than any other book, had shaped the mind of the modern world. It did not know his ascetic habits—his vegetarian diet of lettuce leaves, cottage cheese, crackers, milk, fruit—or the food experiments he had conducted as a young man, when he fasted for a week to observe the effects, and once fed himself solely on a diet of popcorn and milk to see how little a man could live on. It did not know his relaxations—driving fast at night to clear his mind of the pressures of office; getting up at 5:50 a.m. to play a sweating, awkward game of tennis; playing with astrology and numerology as a hobby, as he had once begun his corn breeding. Used to his vagaries, Washington was not surprised when he took up boomerang throwing, but predicted that it would not last because it was not active enough for so restless a physical and intellectual exerciser.

Least of all did Washington see Wallace the mystic, the author of Statesmanship and Religion, a Presbyterian who became an Episcopalian, who sang lustily at service, and whose hard-boiled campaign managers worried lest he go on a religious spree. No deep internal struggle foreshadowed Henry Wallace’s mysticism. Wallace was religious by temperament, with a calm, measured look that his friend Grant Wood (who drew the cover of this week’s TIME) caught in his portrait.

He moved without a wrench from the Republican to the Democratic Party. And it was he who broke the political truce when World War II began, by coming out for the Third Term (“the President’s talents and training are necessary to steer this country, domestically and in its foreign relationships, to safe harbors”). At that time, despite his long belief in internationalism, his hatred of fascism, he believed the U. S. should give up thought of open aid to Britain and France. Later he read Thorstein Veblen’s The Nature of Peace and Imperial Germany, and changed to a policy of all aid short of war. Stubborn, slow to make up his mind, he drives hard once it is made up.

His old Washington friends see less of him than they once did. Now his appearance is neat, his hair always in place. He sees fewer farmers, more farm leaders. He still loves to argue, using his old questioning form of argument. Now he is surer that he is right, but his patience is abundant. If Roosevelt and Wallace win, Henry Wallace, more than any other man, would be conscious of the weight that would fall upon his shoulders if anything should happen to the President, whom he regards as indispensable.

*Membership, 120,000. Others: American Farm Bureau Federation, 2,950,000; National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, 800,000; National Cooperative Council, 1,500,000. *The Wallace Family still has a small interest in a firm for producing hybrid seed corn. Wallaces’Farmer and Iowa Homestead (whose poll last week showed Iowa farmers 34% for Roosevelt, 34% for Willkie, 32% undecided) passed out of the Wallace control early in the depression.