Inspired by this thread and the Oliver Stone docs on Showtime, I wanna ask how different the world would be if Henry A. Wallace was FDR’s VP for the 4th term instead of Harry Truman?
Wallace was painted by Oliver Stone to be the EASY favorite going into the Chicago DNC right before FDR’s 4th term election. However, through sketchy back-room deals and some winking and nodding, Henry A. Wallace, everyone’s favorite, got shunned for the completely inexperienced Harry Truman.
Obviously Harry turned the world on it’s head by dropping the bomb and he also shaped much of the post-WWII world. So, I’m wondering if Wallace would basically do the same thing, or if he would’ve handled everything completely different than Truman had.
I can’t say how he would have acted differently in concluding the war but I think his post war priorities would have given more emphasis to civil rights and less to the Cold War. He really hated the double standard of US racism while the country was using Nazi racism as a causus belli. By the time of the Korean War, Wallace was on the same page as Truman as far as the Soviets were concerned, but he may have been more vocal about opposing the scapegoating of American liberals by congress and the FBI than Truman was. Oddly enough, by 1960, Wallace was a Nixon Democrat.
You have to remember that Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces (despite being the grandson of a Missouri Confederate) and that a lot of civil rights legislation simply couldn’t make it through Congress. The question is can Wallace wake up regarding the Soviets before it does much damage (ie does Greece go Communist without American aid for example).
Does anyone know if Wallace ever made statements about the bomb? I assume he’d probably all for it, as was everyone else then, but you never know what he might’ve said to friends or what his deeply held convictions were.
Wallace’s initial friendliness to the Soviet Union would have worn away, as it did in this world, but in the short term, his prestige would have taken a heavy knock, and it’s questionable whether he could have won re-election in 1948. If Wallace had been president after Roosevelt, he would have held FDR’s hard line against renewed French colonialism. DeGaulle’s prediction that France would end up in the hands of the communists if he couldn’t regain Indochina worked on Truman, but Wallace very likely would not have worried about that. Ho Chi Minh would have taken over Vietnam with little fanfare (though Wallace would still have supported South Korea). No Vietnam War, maybe no Nixon in the White House, and therefore no Watergate.
I know this sounds weird, but do you think the progressive “hippy” ideals would’ve been held back since they didn’t have anything to seriously rebel against (READ: VIETNAM)?
If Dewey wins in '48, Earl Warren (probably) doesn’t go to the Supreme Court. It’s hard to imagine how the contentious issues of the Warren Court go without Warren himself. Probably no President Eisenhower either. Warren runs for president in '56.
Given the fact that Wallace’s inner circle was composed almost entirely of Soviet spies and he was, if not an overt agent, certainly very naive about Communism and Moscow, I assume the answer is “the world would be very different, as the entire Northern Hemisphere would be part of a still-extant USSR.”
Well, for one, I was quoting a post that said it was questionable that Wallace would win in '48.
But I do agree with that. Truman barely pulled off an upset; I don’t think Wallace would have been able to accomplish the same. It seems he wasn’t a very good campaigner. His third-party candidacy didn’t have much of an impact.