The Stranger

Last week the Democrats nominated an unknown for Vice President. His name was not unknown: a Henry Wallace has been in the news since Grandfather Henry advised Theodore Roosevelt on matters agricultural, and Father Henry served Harding and Coolidge as their Republican Secretary of Agriculture. But after seven New Deal years in the headlines, Henry Agard Wallace was a stranger even to the delegates who sourly put him on their ticket in Chicago.

The man mostly to blame for this state of affairs was Henry Wallace himself. Perhaps he was congenitally unable to break through a forest of agricultural statistics and theories, show himself to the U. S. people. That he never troubled to show himself to the Democratic Party was wholly natural: to Henry Wallace the Third, parties and party ties were unimportant to the point of nonexistence. Last week, after he was nominated, he casually explained that his daddy was a Republican, and that out of filial loyalty he had remained one until 1924. Then he campaigned for Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, joined the Roosevelt Cabinet without giving the matter further thought until 1936, when some precisionist pointed out that he was still technically in the G. O. P. In this respect if no other, Henry Wallace is thus suited for candidacy in 1940. For in this campaign party labels are equally unimportant to a lot of other people, notary ex-Democrat Wendell Willkie.

Nominee Wallace is generally supposed to be a radical farmer who pays other farmers for not planting crops, and encourages a low birth rate among pigs. This supposition is only part of the truth. Now 51, Henry .Wallace was born and grew up on an Iowa farm. His grandfather and father before him were well-off, distinguished editors and gentlemen who in Iowa society had positions somewhat akin to the aristocratic Roosevelts in the Hudson Valley.

Actually Henry Agard Wallace is not so much a dirt farmer as a cloud mystic. He is also one of the few mystics who turn their oddities to practical account. He once subsisted for five days on cottonseed meal, soybean oil and cauliflower--not in the interest of dietary flagellation, but in a quest for cheap foods. He has passed many a night hour lying on the ground, looking at the stars. Purpose: to check a complex theory about the relation of the heavenly bodies to weather cycles. He is equally fond of integral calculus and boomerang throwing. Both have their uses: calculus helps in working out agricultural formulas; boomerangs, tennis, badminton, horseback riding give him exercise and open air. thus combating a faint family strain of tuberculosis which has not touched robust Henry Wallace.

Last week sturdy, baggy-trousered Mr. Wallace sat unobtrusively on the Convention platform, hearing his name booed and wondering what all the rumpus was about. With his grey-haired, brown-eyed wife sat Eleanor Roosevelt. Afterward Mrs. Roosevelt wrote: "I have always felt in him a certain shyness and that has kept him aloof from some Democrats, but now that he will be in close touch with so many of them I am sure they will soon find in him much to admire and love."

Mrs. Roosevelt was probably wrong: the run of Democrats will never get to know Henry Wallace very well. When he stares down at voters waiting for political words, which he essentially despises, he will undoubtedly reflect that they ought to be sitting under shade trees, dreaming just for the fun of dreaming. He has said: "... I believe that most of us, once the opportunity is afforded, will discover within ourselves a variety of stimulating and pleasant things to do." He has listed dreaming as one of the worth-while occupations. To Henry Wallace, campaigning in nightmarish 1940 will not be one of the pleasant things to do.

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