The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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president as the “American minister of economic defense, and the chief planner of the new world order when the war is over.” In short order, Culver and Hyde recount: “Wallace had become the most powerful vice president in the nation’s history. No vice president had ever wielded such administrative authority, much less a policy voice of consequence. Roosevelt ‘used me in a way which made the office for a time a very great office,’ Wallace later observed.”
The operative words were “for a time.” The vice president was determined to go all out to defeat fascism on the battlefield and in the postwar era—so determined that lines of division quickly developed within the administration.
At every turn, Wallace emphasized the importance of making a win-the-war-and-win-the-peace connection. In an essay he wrote for the Atlantic magazine just weeks before the United States entered World War II, Wallace had argued: “The overthrow of Hitler is only half the battle; we must build a world in which our human and material resources are used to the utmost if we are to win complete victory. This principle should be fundamental as the world moves to reorganize its affairs. Ways must be found by which the potential abundance of the world can be translated into real wealth and a higher standard of living. Certain minimum standards of food, clothing and shelter ought to be established, and arrangements ought to be made to guarantee that no one should fall below those standards.”
That made sense to some key figures in the White House, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who in her 1942 essay “What We Are Fighting For” described the war in the context of “the world struggle of ordinary people for a better way of life” in which “the human beings of the world, regardless of race or creed or color, are to be looked upon with respect and treated as equals.”
There was good reason to believe that Franklin was sympathetic with the message. But FDR’s administration really was that team of rivals, and within it were clear factions that the president welcomed and encouraged as he kept building out a Democratic coalition far broader than any the party had seen before. Wallace positioned himself at one pole in FDR’s big tent. Jesse Jones held up the other pole.
Jones thought of himself as a businessman, not an idealist, and he had nothing but disdain for Wallace personally and politically. He decried “the socialist-minded uplifters and uppity underlings” of the Board of Economic Warfare, and he steadfastly resisted efforts by the vice president and his staff to include “labor clauses” in BEW contracts that called for foreign producers to “maintain such conditions of labor as will maximize production … adequate shelter, water and safety appliances” and fair wage rates. Wallace explained that “greater stimulus” would boost production. The BEW’s blunt-spoken executive director, Milo Perkins, argued, “It isn’t radical to believe that you can get as much in return by increasing the food to a human being as by increasing the food to a mule.”
This emphasis on the condition of workers was indeed seen as radical by the administration’s conservative critics. Ohio Republican senator Robert A. Taft warned about the danger of “setting up an international WPA,” referring to the New Deal’s Depression-era jobs program. Taft and his fellow congressional conservatives found a willing ally in Jones, who, according to Culver and Hyde, “opposed anything that changed the customary relationship between capital and labor.”
As the vice president accumulated more authority during 1942 and early 1943, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on “the crumbling empire of Jesse H. Jones.” But Jones was not about to stand down. He held a trump card: as the Wall Street Journal noted, “Jones still must sign the checks.” This he did slowly—so slowly that Wallace and Perkins began to raise concerns about delays in the acquisition of raw materials needed for the war effort. As Wallace was literally traveling to the jungles of Latin America in search of better sources of everything from rubber to quinine, and as Perkins was identifying cheaper and faster methods for processing and distributing supplies, the pair grew increasingly agitated with Jones. In June 1943, they sent a 28-page complaint to the Senate Committee on Appropriations, which detailed “obstructionist tactics … delay of the war effort … hamstringing bureaucracy and backdoor complaining” by Jones. Wallace warned, “We are helpless when Jesse Jones, as our banker, refuses to sign checks in accordance with our directives” and suggested that the bureaucratic barriers the BEW was running up against were “utterly inexcusable in a nation at war.”
“These,” Jones biographer Steven Fenberg observed, “were fighting words.” Jones accused Wallace of “malice, innuendos and half-truths.” At that point Perkins, always a hotter head than Wallace, let rip. He accused Jones of holding up the acquisition of quinine, used to treat malaria, and adopting a “Rip Van Winkle approach to a commodity that means life or death to our soldiers.” The clash became national news. Jones roused his allies on Wall Street and in the war industries and appealed to conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress, especially fellow Texas Democrats like House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Tom Connally, to support his efforts to rein in the liberals. Jones found willing allies at the State Department, where there were worries that alliances with “old order” leaders like Winston Churchill were being jeopardized by talk of “labor clauses” and Wallace’s assertion that “the new democracy by definition abhors imperialism.”
As the wrangling between Jones and Wallace grew more intense and more public, the president grew more agitated. Roosevelt did not want the differences of opinion within his White House to go public—especially at a critical point in a war that was far from won. So, on July 15, 1943, he issued Executive Order 9361 abolishing the Board of Economic Warfare and transferring its work to a new Office of Economic Warfare, which would consolidate projects previously overseen by Wallace and Jones under FDR’s “fix-it” man, Leo Crowley.
Crowley would soon be heading a powerful agency dubbed the Foreign Economic Administration. A fiercely anti-Soviet banker aligned with Wall Street, Crowley was seen as much more of a Jones man than a Wallace man. So it was fair to say that the decision went to Jones. Indeed, as journalist I.F. Stone observed, “Behind Jones is the State Department, and behind the State Department are those forces, clerical and capitalist, which have no intention of letting this era become, in Wallace’s phrase, the Century of the Common Man.”
Henry Wallace understood now that he was in a fight not just for his own political future but for that of the Democratic Party and, by extension, for the nation in the postwar era.
Wallace did not fear for his relationship with Roosevelt. Even as the dust from the BEW punch-up was settling, FDR assured his vice president, “It is needless for me to tell you that the incident has not lessened my personal affection for you.” Within days, the two men were consulting on what would today be described as “messaging,” framing out the bold themes that Wallace would take on the road as a roving champion of the administration.
Still, there was no denying that Wallace’s authority had been diminished, and within the upper echelons of the Democratic Party there was now open speculation that he would be bumped from the 1944 ticket. In a July 20, 1943, diary entry, the vice president offered a clear-eyed assessment of his relationship with FDR. He had no doubt that the president was “really fond of me except when stimulated by the palace guard to move in other directions.”
So Wallace chose to go around that palace guard. With FDR’s encouragement, he began speaking out against American fascism. Wallace devoted hours, even days, to constructing speeches and articles on the subject. From the start, he distinguished the fascist threat at home from the threat posed by Hitler and Mussolini. He expected to stir controversy. That was the point. Privately, however, Wallace speculated to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that he and his ideas might be swept aside by a rising tide of “bipartisan American fascism.”
Wallace had already suggested, in a March 8, 1943, address at Ohio Wesleyan University, that “we shall decide sometime in 1943 or 1944 whether to plant the seeds for World War No. 3. That war will be certain if we allow Prussia to rearm either materially or psychologically. That war will be probable in case we double-cross Russia. That war will be probable if we fail to demonstrate that we can furnish full employment after this war comes to an end and Fascist interests, motivated largely by anti-Russian bias, get control of our government.”