Iowa Hybrid

(See Cover)

After hatching out his Progressive Party in Philadelphia last week, Henry Wallace headed for a hilltop in New York's Westchester County. There, on Farvue Farm, in a large white house overlooking the village of South Salem, he tended his 116 acres of farm land, cultivated his garden, and supervised the care of his 4,000 Leghorns and New Hampshire Reds.

He planned to stay on his hill the rest of the month, in comparative seclusion, coming down some time after Labor Day to hurl himself back into the active campaign. Until then, no doubt, he would do some musing on his future. Henry Wallace, who considers himself a reflective man, had plenty to think about.

He had passed a critical milestone in his life. He was now, at 59, what he had always wanted to be: a presidential candidate. In his own view, he was more than that. He was the only candidate who had the true key to peace & prosperity, the only man who could keep America--and the world--from complete ruin.

But at the very time that he had reached this exalted position, something else had taken place. The real leadership of his party had been openly and boldly taken over by Communists and fellow travelers. Communists well knew that if the indictments against their twelve top leaders resulted in convictions, their party would be seriously crippled. The Progressive Party was an escape hatch.

Wallace, if he was to be believed--and his loyal followers believed him to the hilt--was not aware that this capture had taken place. The U.S. people, most of whom would vote as Republicans or Democrats in November, were not sure, watching Wallace's political sideshow, just what to make of him. Was he a liberal--or a lollipop? Was he Sir Galahad or, as Westbrook Pegler has savagely dubbed him, an old Bubblehead? Was he a true prophet or a sinister Pied Piper?

Somewhere, the Sun. Few men have their roots deeper in their own country than Henry Agard Wallace. If there is such a thing as "authentically American" stock, his is.

Grandfather Henry was one of the nine children of John Wallace, a high-tempered farmer who emigrated from Ireland to Pennsylvania. Eight of the nine children died of consumptive diseases. But grandfather Henry lived to be almost 80--an ordained minister in the United Presbyterian Church, a doer and dreamer, a smoker of Pittsburgh stogies, a man of vast physical bulk, who quit the regular ministry to homestead, later to edit and write for the family's Wallaces' Farmer. He wrote a three-volume story of his life and a robust column, "Uncle Henry's Sabbath School Lesson," which was one of the biggest circulation builders in Midwest journalism. To grandfather Henry, who looked like an Old Testament prophet, the Old Testament stories were as fresh as the morning milk.

Grandfather's oldest son was another Henry--redheaded "Harry," who taught at Iowa State Agricultural College and became Secretary of Agriculture under Harding and Coolidge. Harry's wife, interested in genealogy, dug up the Wallace family coat of arms. It displayed an ostrich about to swallow a horseshoe. The motto: Sperandum est (free translation: Somewhere, the sun is shining).

Seeds & Grass. As a young man, Henry Wallace once wrote: "I have always had a great affection for grass. It seems to stand for quietness and strength." He immersed himself in the world of nature. He was but six years old when George Washington Carver found a haven and a place to study on the campus where Wallace's father taught, and awakened in young Henry an interest in the cross-breeding of plants. At eight, Carver's small disciple started crossing pansies. At 17 he began experiments with corn. This became his life.

In 1916, Wallace was stricken by what doctors said was tuberculosis. He always insisted it might have been undulant fever. He was bedridden for four months. He read the Midwest's mordant iconoclast, Thorstein Veblen. He wrote: "One hundred years from now people will realize that he [Veblen] was one of the few men of the early 20th Century who really knew what was going on." Wallace dreamed of a world properly clothed, properly fed, free from disease.

In 1928, Wallace abandoned the Republican Party and voted for Al Smith. Four years later, with righteous anger in his heart, he watched the evicted farmers trudging the roads of Iowa. He was invited to Hyde Park for a conference with the new Democratic candidate for President. He helped write Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 farm platform. A few months later a triumphant Roosevelt offered the Secretaryship of Agriculture to the somewhat shaggy but also somewhat distinguished 45-year-old Iowa farm editor, statistician and geneticist.

Prophet and Patriot. Perhaps Wallace should have stayed in his own cornfield. In the Midwest he was a vigorous voice, an awkward, shambling speaker and writer but a minor prophet of the farm land. He was a sound scientist and a competent businessman. Out of his experiments with corn grew the Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co., which began to provide him with a sizable income--and still does (he is 1948's wealthiest presidential candidate).

Wallace's colleagues in the New Deal Cabinet later recalled some impressions of the disheveled, brooding Iowan. To Frances Perkins he was a man of "patriotism and nobility of character." Cordell Hull dryly remarked: "He was so active that his tendency at times was to trench on the jurisdiction of his colleagues, including myself." Henry Morgenthau, who fancied himself as a farmer, dismissed Wallace's basic farm proposals as "nonsense." Harold Ickes thought he was consumed by political ambition. Wallace thoroughly annoyed the downright and bullying Ickes, who watched Wallace sitting hunched over at droning Cabinet meetings with his mind on other things. He was "present in the flesh," Ickes reported, "but usually in absentia in spirit."

The public heard about Wallace as the man who established the AAA, ordered the slaughter of little pigs ("You'd think the farmers had raised the pigs as pets," Wallace remarked petulantly). His department set up the Ever Normal Granary and the Food Stamp Plan.

"Dear Guru." But the public also began to hear of an odd-duck Wallace who, in an awkward, headlong way, took up tennis and boomerang-throwing, who Indian-wrestled with an aide in his office between conferences. Before coming to Washington he had left his grandfather's Calvinistic Church, had had a look in at Catholicism and had finally joined the Episcopal Church. As an acolyte in cassock and surplice he regularly served at Mass. But now he had turned to Far Eastern mysticism. He became fascinated with a fork-bearded Russian theosophist named Nicholas Roerich, and later, when he became Secretary of Commerce, sent Roerich to Outer Mongolia to do research in grasses. Roerich was the "Guru" (Spiritual Leader) to whom the now famous "Dear Guru" letters, full of mystical fiddle-faddle, were written. Wallace has never either admitted or denied authorship of the letters.

Wallace became one of F.D.R.'s favorites and, in 1940, his Vice President. The real New Deal was already over. F.D.R., preparing for war, was turning to the right. He saw in Wallace a man who could help him keep the far left loyal to the Democratic Party. He sent him on missions to Central America and China and made his name known the world over.

F.D.R.'s rejection of Wallace as a running mate in 1944 became a blow from which Wallace never recovered. An embittered and disappointed man, he found some small solace in demanding and getting the Commerce job of his old enemy, Jesse Jones. In April 1945, he saw Truman step into the position which he, Wallace, might have had. A year and a half later, confused, defiant and disillusioned, he rushed headlong out of the Democratic pasture and straight into the Communists' outstretched hands.

The Trap. For a long time they had been planning to trap someone of Wallace's stature, but they were not sure just who the quarry would be. They began in Sidney Hillman's C.I.O.-P.A.C., whose simple objective was to make labor's influence felt in the Democratic Party. But the secret aim of pro-Communist operators like Hillman's counsel, John Abt, was to weld radical labor groups, disaffected Democrats and odds & ends of disgruntled Americans into a third party. Obviously, they would need a candidate. Collaborating with the proCommunists were such New Dealers as Beanie Baldwin, a onetime Wallace aide in the Agriculture Department. The Abts and Baldwins formed a cabal of sympathetic minds with a common goal.

After Hillman's death they began to move. In September 1946, they staged the Madison Square Garden rally at which Wallace, pleading for peace, denounced U.S. foreign policy.

For Wallace it was a step from which there was no turning back. In effect he had read himself out of the Democratic Party, leaving Truman no choice but to fire him. The proCommunists did not realize at first what had happened, because Wallace in his speech also lightly rapped Russia; they booed him for that. But by all the evidence, Moscow, more prescient, sensed the prize within its grasp and ordered the U.S. Communists to seize him. Quickly the peace front corrected its faulty line and hailed its new-found hero.

They rushed Wallace around the country on peace rallies. They surrounded him adoringly with an apparatus called the Progressive Citizens of America. Closer & closer became their embrace. Phil Murray and other labor leaders, who had once been more than sympathetic to Wallace, deserted him. His close friend Frank Kingdon, co-chairman of P.C.A., saw what was happening and resigned, stating publicly that the P.C.A. was Communist controlled.

Abandoned by old friends, flattered by new ones, a lonely, sour Wallace went on his erratic way. In July 1946, he had ridiculed formation of a third party as a useless political gesture. But in December 1947, when the P.C.A. made him the formal proposition, he accepted the Third Party candidacy.

Rank & File. Third party movements are a political tradition in the U.S. They were there long before Moscow began to pull its worldwide political strings. They have sprung from countless inspirations. They have been against Masons, against Catholics, against trusts, against the drinking of alcohol. They have been for free soil, for easy money, for government ownership of railroads and communications. They have also championed solid measures which later passed into law: woman suffrage, the graduated income tax, conservation of natural resources, direct election of Senators, minimum wage standards. Sometimes the parties are minuscule, sometimes very sizable.

The Progressives of 1924 polled 4,800,000 votes for "Fighting Bob" La Follette and ran ahead of the Democrats in eleven Western states.

The strength of the Progressive Party of 1948 springs from the same authentic and perennial source. Its rank & file followers are not members of the Communist Party, who at the outside number less than 75,000 in the U.S. Its rank & file are teachers, students, veterans, working men. They are mostly young, with a smattering of Townsendite elders. They are not only the disgruntled and discontented; they are the wistful, the wishful, the hopeful.

They are not necessarily the havenots. But many of them feel that their country somehow owes them something more than they have. They are the wives of veterans who believe that Henry Wallace somehow will provide them with a better house. They are the people who mistrust all successful politicians because they feel that a successful politician must always sacrifice principle. In general, they mistrust success itself.

They are very much a part of the U.S.--which would not be the U.S. if every boy & girl were born either a little Republican or a little Democrat. Some of them, when they are older, will vote a straight party ticket. Some of them never will. They like to think of themselves as independents--independent as a hog on ice. Some of them really are. Some of them think the world is not good enough for them. Some are too good for this world.

The U.S. would be a different and a poorer place without them.

The Figurehead. Henry Wallace is for peace and abundance. So is everyone else. And both peace and abundance are observable phenomena in the U.S. today. Everybody would like to see an improvement in the quality of both peace and abundance. But the Progressives believe that Wallace alone really wants them improved--and wants it badly enough to do something radical about it.

The Progressive Party is thus a hybrid party--its ranks manned by the generous, the idealistic, the disaffected, the independent; its real bosses, who quietly, adroitly lead it by the nose, a small group of Communists and Communist-liners. And as the hybrid figurehead of this aggregation, adored by the majority, steered by the minority, walks helpless Henry Wallace.

He sees no essential inconsistency in his position. He does not see any incongruity in the grandson of Uncle Henry reading with an air of furious sincerity a speech ghostwritten for him by Lewis Frank Jr., the debonair son of a Detroit Christmas tinsel manufacturer. The Frank speeches, so different from Wallace's own rambling style, bristle with Communist cliches, un-deviatingly follow the Communist line.

Sullen Vacancy. Wallace has persuaded himself that only Wallace is honest; that all his enemies are wrong and full of deceit. Perhaps only a dishonest man could think himself so completely honest.

Confronted by proof of his own inaccuracies, as he was in a humiliating press conference at Philadelphia (TIME, Aug. 2), Wallace sags and retreats behind a suddenly sullen vacancy. His carefully manufactured misconception of foreign affairs has led him into statements both dangerous and ludicrous. On a trip to Europe before a British audience he assailed his own nation in these words: "America's main objective was a quick victory followed by a quick return to normalcy. It was the normalcy of selfishness, nationalism and power politics." He blamed U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt and U.S. policy for the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. He said of Jan Masaryk's suicide: "Maybe he had cancer." In all of his speeches, the U.S. is always wrong. He never attacks Russia; Russia, by implication, is always right. His way of solving the Berlin crisis is to give Berlin to the Russians.

Confronted with the charge that the Progressive Party platform is a faithful reflection of the Communists' proposed platform, Wallace says: "Then I'd say that they have a good platform."

Many a political reporter saw and reported the Red seizure of the Progressive Convention at Philadelphia. Wallace did not notice it. Afterwards he said blandly: "I would say that the Communists are the closest things to the early Christian martyrs. But I can truthfully say that the Communists have not come to me, as such. I saw one hurriedly in a railroad station not long ago. I don't recall his name. I told him I believed in progressive capitalism. That stopped him and I haven't heard from the Communists since."

Twofold Tragedy. Until now, many of the faithful members of the Progressive Party have rationalized Wallace's position on Communism and their own embarrassing fellowship with the Communists in the same way that Wallace has rationalized it. There have been signs of restlessness, however. Sooner or later the look of the Third Party's real bosses may repel the sincere non-Communists who are the backbone of the party's voting strength. The bosses may become so obvious that even the blindest Wallaceite will recognize them. Then Wallace will appear to them in the most ignoble role of all: the man who betrayed his friends.

If that happens, where will Wallace be? He could openly and honestly withdraw his candidacy, as predicted by the New York Times's Arthur Krock. But he has not been a man distinguished for moral courage. In 1934, when his Agriculture Department was purged of a group of leftists, he made a brief protest and then sat silently by. Some of the victims were his close associates.When he made charges unsubstantiated by fact against the atomic-energy policy of Bernard Baruch, he first promised Baruch a retraction, then vanished ignominiously. In crises he is apt to be simply in absentia. If his hodgepodge party breaks up he may stay with it officially but spiritually go elsewhere.

But today, when Wallace denounces every criticism as Red-baiting, the Wallace movement is a twofold tragedy. It is the tragedy of Henry Wallace, a weak leader driven by ambition, bitterness and self-delusion into a misconception of the promised land. It is also the tragedy of the sincere people whom he is leading into a wilderness.

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