Science Fair Project Encyclopedia

Science Fair Project Encyclopedia Contents Page

Henry A. Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the 33rd Vice President of the United States.

Contents

Early life

Wallace was born on a farm near Orient, Adair County, Iowa, and graduated from Iowa State College at Ames in 1910. He served on the editorial staff of Wallace's Farmer in Des Moines, Iowa from 1910 to 1924 and was editor from 1924 to 1929. He experimented with breeding high-yielding strains of corn (maize), and was the author of many publications on agriculture. In 1915 he devised the first corn-hog ratio charts indicating probable course of markets. The company he founded during this time is now known as Pioneer Hi-Bred , and is among the most profitable agriculture corporations in the United States today.

In 1933, Wallace was appointed United States Secretary of Agriculture in the Cabinet of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Wallace's father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, had been Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1925.) He had been a liberal Republican but supported Roosevelt's New Deal and soon switched to the Democratic Party. Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture until September 1940, when he resigned, having been nominated for Vice President.

Vice Presidency

Wallace was elected in November 1940 as Vice President on the Democratic ticket with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was inaugurated January 20, 1941, for the term ending January 20, 1945. He immediately set out to counter his predecessor John Nance Garner's claim that the vice-presidency was worthless.

Roosevelt named Wallace chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) in 1941. Both positions became important with the U.S. entry into World War II. As he began to flex his newfound political muscle in his position with SPAB, Wallace came up against the conservative wing of the Democratic party in the form of Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce. The two differed on how to handle wartime supplies.

On May 8, 1942, Wallace delivered his most famous speech, which became known by the phrase "Century of the Common Man", to the Free World Association in New York City. This speech, grounded in Christian references, laid out a positive vision for the war beyond the simple defeat of the Nazis. The speech, and the book of the same name which was released the next year, proved quite popular, but it earned him enemies among the Democratic leadership and among important allied leaders like Winston Churchill.

In 1943 Wallace made a goodwill tour of Latin America, shoring up support among important allies. His trip was a success and helped convince 12 Latin American countries to declare war on Germany.

Wallace was far ahead of his time in trade relationships with Latin America. He convinced the BEW to add "labor clauses" to contracts with Latin American producers. These clauses required producers to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for their employees and it committed the United States to paying for up to half of the required improvements. Not surprisingly, this upset Jones at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Wallace was bumped from the Democratic ticket in 1944, largely due to party concerns over FDR's failing health, Wallace's alleged "communist" beliefs, as well as his unorthodox New Age tendencies. The party would go on to nominate Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman.

Later career

Harry S. Truman placated Wallace by appointing him Secretary of Commerce, where Wallace served from March 1945 to September 1946, when he was replaced by W. Averell Harriman because Truman believed that Wallace was too critical of Truman's foreign policy.

Following his term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace became the editor of The New Republic magazine, using his position to vociferously criticize Truman's foreign policy. When the Truman Doctrine was declared in 1947, he predicted it would be the beginning of "a century of fear". He left that position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American south, however the party's opposition to Truman's hard-line stance against the Soviets brought it into disrepute and its members rejoined the Democrats.

Wallace resumed his farming interests, and was a resident of South Salem, New York. During his later years he was responsible for a number of advances in the field of agricultural science. Among his many accomplishments was a breed of chicken that at one point accounted for the overwhelming majority of all egg-laying chickens sold across the globe. He died in Danbury, Connecticut. His remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa.

Sources

"The Prince of Wallese: Chickens, Communists and Henry Wallace," Times Literary Supplement, 24 November, 2000.
The Life of Henry A. Wallace: 1888-1965

External links

"The Century of the Common Man" - the text of Wallace's 1942 speech.
Henry A. Wallace Center for Agricultural & Environmental Policy
" An Argument for a New Liberalism by Peter Beinart, The New Republic, December 2 2004 - argues that Harry S. Truman's defeat of Wallace in 1948 helped make the Democrats an anti-totalitarian party and that present Democrats are "Wallacite", a term it coins to mean soft on totalitarianism and external threats.

Science Fair Project Encyclopedia Contents Page

03-10-2013 05:06:04
The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details

All Science Fair Projects