Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism by Thomas W. Devine (review)

Henry Wallace has enjoyed something of a scholarly revival in the past year. In their scathing critique of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy, The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick position Wallace as a heroic idealist willing to stand up to the anti-Soviet extremism of Harry Truman’s administration. The duo accomplish this goal by whitewashing Wallace’s record, most spectacularly in their treatment of the least defensible act of Wallace’s public career—his response to the Czechoslovak coup, to which Stone and Kuznick devote a grand total of one sentence.

Unlike the propaganda piece from Stone and Kuznick, Thomas W. Devine’s new study of Wallace is a serious work of history. The book seems likely to stand as the definitive account of Wallace’s ill-fated presidential campaign and the ideological and political developments it represented.

Devine notes that the popular image of Wallace has divided into two camps: those who see the former vice president as a prescient critic of the Cold War (Stone and Kuznick obviously represent an extreme version of this view) and those who portray him as at best willfully naïve and at worst a fellow traveler. Devine seeks to fashion a middle ground between the two viewpoints, although the evidence presented in his book veers much closer to the second interpretation than the first. Indeed, the Henry Wallace in the Devine book comes across—in the most charitable possible view—as a figure wholly unqualified for high office, much less service as vice president and secretary of two cabinet departments. To take one of many examples: in October 1945, Wallace asked the first secretary of the Soviet embassy (who doubled as Washington chief for the Soviet foreign intelligence service) to lunch. The then-secretary of commerce described Truman as “a petty politico who got his current post by accident” and urged Moscow to “help” the “smaller group” (p. 16) of Truman advisers, such as himself, who desired better relations with the Soviet Union.

Henry Wallace’s 1948 Campaign is, in many ways, a study of two interrelated phenomena: Wallace’s presidential effort itself; and the activities of U.S. Communists and fellow travelers seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy. The book’s early chapters convincingly argue that the two groups, if for somewhat different reasons, embraced the idea of a Wallace third-party candidacy. In Wallace’s case, his increasingly bitter denunciations of Truman estranged him from Democrats and foreclosed any possibility of an intra-party challenge to the president; by June 1947, Truman led him 71 to 12 percent in a Gallup poll of Democrats. For the Communists, difficulties in expanding their power among labor unions and other key Democratic constituencies made them look elsewhere for influence. They also believed, likely incorrectly, that Moscow desired them to work through a third party. As 1947 turned into 1948, Wallace restricted his pool of key advisers. Although he continued to reach out to former New Dealers (such as Rexford Tugwell) who had once formed his base, he more and more came under the sway of concealed Communists. As a result, although Devine does not portray Wallace himself as a fellow traveler, the former vice president’s public comments increasingly reflected the Communist Party line.

The book features a depressing litany of Wallace statements and actions that read as if they were originally designed in Moscow. Wallace repeatedly suggested that by doing little more than discussing affairs with good will the United States could reach a “complete understanding with Russia.” He suggested that “warlords and money-changers” exercised excessive influence on the Marshall Plan—drawing a rebuke from Eleanor Roosevelt, who commented on the similarity between Wallace’s arguments and those of the Soviet-dominated Communist International. He excused the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia by bizarrely claiming that the U.S. ambassador (who...