The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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business owners whose buy-in he needed to retool the economy, especially as it became clear that the United States would be drawn into World War II. The decision to move Wallace from the Department of Agriculture to the vice presidency was a reflection of the president’s desire to have one of the more left-wing members of his administration at his side, in position as a potential successor. He valued Wallace’s advice and counsel. Yet he also listened to those who warned that Wallace was too idealistic, too mystical, too radical. It was a constant balancing act.
When Wallace was with the president in the same room, the two men maintained a working relationship that was intellectually adventurous and passionate. Wallace often brought reports from a labor rally or a meeting with African-American, Latino or Jewish activists to the Oval Office. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Wallace was an advocate for those whose voices were rarely heard in the corridors of power. The first lady and the vice president served as a counterbalance to those who assumed that the country was comfortably united in a time of war. No, they warned, there were tensions, and they needed to be addressed. When Wallace counseled that the administration needed to provide clarity regarding the purpose of the sacrifices it was demanding from Americans and the shape of its postwar vision, FDR listened. So it was that the president was soon sounding many of the themes Wallace had raised in his New York address.
“The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942—or eventually lose everything,” Roosevelt said on January 7, 1943, in his State of the Union address. “I do not need to tell you that our enemies did not win the war in 1942.” He followed that mordant line by surveying the map of global conflict and vowing to take the war to the enemy. “I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. … But I can tell you that no matter where and when we strike by land, we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly. … Yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and they are going to get it. … Yes, 1943 will not be an easy year for us on the home front. We shall feel in many ways in our daily lives the sharp pinch of total war,” the president warned. But he said the tide was turning in the right direction and, keeping a promise he had made to Wallace two weeks earlier, Roosevelt detailed a vision of the postwar era:
We, and all the United Nations, want a decent peace and a durable peace. In the years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War, we were not living under a decent or a durable peace.
I have reason to know that our boys at the front are concerned with two broad aims beyond the winning of the war; and their thinking and their opinion coincide with what most Americans here back home are mulling over. They know, and we know, that it would be inconceivable—it would, indeed, be sacrilegious—if this nation and the world did not attain some real, lasting good out of all these efforts and sufferings and bloodshed and death.
Referencing his Four Freedoms speech from two years earlier, he told the Congress that
the people at home, and the people at the front, are wondering a little about the third freedom—freedom from want. To them it means that when they are mustered out, when war production is converted to the economy of peace, they will have the right to expect full employment—full employment for themselves and for all able-bodied men and women in America who want to work.
They expect the opportunity to work, to run their farms, their stores, to earn decent wages. They are eager to face the risks inherent in our system of free enterprise.
They do not want a postwar America which suffers from undernourishment or slums or the dole. They want no get-rich-quick era of bogus “prosperity” which will end for them in selling apples on a street corner, as happened after the bursting of the boom in 1929.
When you talk with our young men and our young women, you will find they want to work for themselves and for their families; they consider that they have the right to work; and they know that after the last war their fathers did not gain that right.
When you talk with our young men and women, you will find that with the opportunity for employment they want assurance against the evils of all major economic hazards, assurance that will extend from the cradle to the grave. And this great Government can and must provide this assurance.
I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.
I dissent.
And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.
FDR closed with a rejection of isolationism and imperialism that mirrored much of what Wallace had been saying. “Hitlerism, like any other form of crime or disease, can grow from the evil seeds of economic as well as military feudalism,” the president declared. “Victory in this war is the first and greatest goal before us. Victory in the peace is the next. That means striving toward the enlargement of the security of man here and throughout the world—and, finally, striving for the fourth freedom—freedom from fear.” To that end, FDR proposed a worldview, like that of Wallace, that rejected heavy-handed empire building in favor of diplomacy and cooperation. “The very philosophy of the Axis powers is based on a profound contempt for the human race,” he said. “If, in the formation of our future policy, we were guided by the same cynical contempt, then we should be surrendering to the philosophy of our enemies, and our victory would turn to defeat.”
The War within a War
Franklin Roosevelt’s words echoed those of Henry Wallace on that January day. But as 1943 progressed, it became painfully evident that the administration was deeply divided on the practical questions of how to pursue the war, and the peace.
During the course of 1942 and 1943, Wallace fought inside the Roosevelt administration to advance his views, often with the president’s support but sometimes without it. The bitterest battle—the “war within a war,” as historian Bascom Timmons put it—was with Secretary of Commerce Jesse Holman Jones, a real-estate mogul from Texas whose power inside and outside government was such that FDR sometimes referred to him as “Jesus H. Jones.” In what Wallace biographers Culver and Hyde would describe as “the most celebrated intragovernmental squabble of the era,” Wallace was pitted against a sixty-eight-year-old “fiscal and social conservative with no interest in politics as a vehicle for change.”
Jones had come to Washington as an appointee of a Republican president, Herbert Hoover, yet he had remained to chair the powerful Reconstruction Finance Corporation through Roosevelt’s first two terms. During the war years, he served not only at Commerce but as Federal Loan Administrator, which gave him responsibility over all federal investment agencies. Jones was so used to calling so many of the shots regarding federal finances and priorities that he was sometimes referred to as the head of “the fourth branch of government.” He bristled at FDR’s assignment of key responsibilities to Wallace, who signaled from the start of his term as vice president that he intended to maintain the activist role he had established as head of Agriculture.
Before he was sworn in on January 20, 1941, Wallace had studied the office of the vice presidency, including a 1920 essay titled “Can the Vice President Be Useful?” penned by a failed contender for the job named Franklin D. Roosevelt. As FDR began his third term in the White House, he moved to expand the scope and character of the No. 2 job—which Wallace’s predecessor, Garner, had suggested was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”—by issuing Executive Order 8839 shortly before the U.S. entry into World War II. That order established the Economic Defense Board, which Wallace would chair. After Pearl Harbor, it was renamed the Board of Economic Warfare.
Culver and Hyde note that the position gave the vice president a role in “dealing with a wide range of international economic issues including exports, imports, ‘preclusive buying’ (the purchase of strategic materials in order to keep them out of the enemies’ hands), foreign exchange transactions, international credit and transportation, the control of foreign-owned properties, and patents and all other matters related to foreign economics.” Less than two months after he issued the executive order empowering the new vice president, FDR issued another, creating the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board, where