American Dreamer: The Life of Henry A. Wallace

This is a proverbial "long overdue" biography of Henry A. Wallace and his brilliant yet eccentric Scottish-American family. I did a Web search of Wallace a few years ago and was amazed at the scant result. This rectifies that. Beyond the coverage of his political innocence there is a good recounting of his actual science work. Few politicians actually "do" things beyond speechifying, getting reelected and becoming millionaires at the public trough. Henry, Henry C. and Henry A. Wallace were exceptions. Their philosophic designs for the farmer and state policy were important and Henry A.'s genetic work truly revolutionary. The world would be a different place without it. Not much popular press has been written about American agriculture, I guess because building cars, fighting Hitler, dropping atomic bombs and oral sex in the oval office are more exciting. This book is a good primer in America's great farming history of triumph. To simplify, the American farmer through hard work, good soil and some science grew too much product for his own good...prices essentially fell from 1890 into the 1930's. (World War I was a boom period, but wild fluctuations don't lend themselves to good planning. Under such conditions, planning was about as effective as mule husbandry.) Naturally this hurt most farmers and destroyed more then a few of them. Through government intervention theorized by the Wallace family's agricultural journal and then championed to be public law in Washington by Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. under Harding, then Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. under FDR, this anomaly was reformed. An obvious and wonderful irony is that Henry A. during this fight for state policy, was genetically engineering hybrid corns (and other crops) which hugely increased acre yield! In other words, American farmers were destroying themselves by being too successful and Wallace made them more successful...and viable. I was thrilled too with the description of Henry C.'s Washington sojourn in the 1920's. Historians breeze by that period, summarizing it as: womanizer, feckless Warren G. Harding; indolent, pickle puss Calvin Coolidge; and Depression maker, Let-Them-Eat-Cake Herbert C. Hoover. Obviously no administration sets its goal as venality, so it refreshing to see Harding to be portrayed as a sympathetic proponent of Henry C.'s policy goals and Coolidge to be an activist opponent of them. Hoover simply comes off as a lunk-headed player who was wrong and enamored with his personal successes. Historians have wrongly treated conservative governments as do-nothing when in fact doing nothing often takes as much effort as signing every bill regurgitated by Congress. And Roosevelt was duplicitous, Henry A. believed in mysticism and was a parlor red who would have ruined the country had FDR croaked a year earlier...but that I knew before I read this book. This is a good book about a classic American type.

I enjoyed this detailed account of the life of Henry Wallace. The book does read like a work by David McCullough, but is enhanced by a deep understanding of the culture of Washington. The book gives valuable insights into the practical political forces that shaped the New Deal and the beginning of the Cold War.The underlying premise of this book as that an idealistic dreamer can make a huge difference in the creating and shaping policy in the United States. The co-author of this work is a former Senator from Iowa named John C. Culver. He served one-term in the 1970's. Through Henry Wallace, the authors mount a formidable defense of the ideals of American liberalism.

Rarely have I read such a well-written political biography of a major figure. AMERICAN DREAMER very ably traces the trajectory of Henry Wallace's career from relative obscurity in the Iowa farm belt to its pinnacle in the Vice Presidency, then the fall from grace from Truman's firing of him as Commerce Secretary through the debacle of the 1948 Progressive Party candidacy for President. Especially fascinating are the parts which trace the reasons for FDR's dumping Wallace in favor of Truman in 1944 and Wallace's increasing distance from the American political mainstream, especially after that point. Viewed from the perspective of post-Cold War America, Wallace's views toward the Soviet Union and World Communism seem to have more validity than they did when he expressed them between the end of World War II and the outbreak of the Korean War; but the authors maintain objectivity about Wallace in this regard and rightly suggest how naive or downright subversive some of his political stances seemed at the time. The book is not without its appreciation of the ironies of Wallace's life and career in politics--how a "rock-ribbed Republican" evolved into one of the most radical national politicians of his generation, and how a scientist and businessman who made a minor fortune from the new hybrid strains of corn which he developed came to be regarded as a closet Communist.The main thing that is lacking from this biography is a full picture of Henry Wallace the man. There are a number of hints that his family life following his marriage was rather troubled and unhappy, but his wife, children, and siblings remain on the periphery of the authors' presentation. (For example, it mentions that his oldest son never forgave him for one particular disagreement, but never elaborates or returns to their relationship. His wife was obviously uncomfortable with his entrance into electoral politics, but the book never explores this in any depth.) The book also seems to compress its account of the final 15 years of his life to a snapshot at best; it would have been nice to know more about how he viewed American politics--both national and international--in the years preceding his death, how he felt about his relative anonymity, and whether he ever felt fully vindicated for taking the rather lonely political path he took.As a result, the portrayal of his later life in particular seems to be a bit one dimensional. But these are minor flaws in what is otherwise a captivating biography of a very intricate individual. Most people will learn a lot from this book; I certainly did.

Culver and Hyde have given Iowan Henry A. Wallace the biography that he has deserved. American Dreamer is a captivating story about the New Deal's truest believer and the strongest advocate for the American farmer. Everyone who is interested in American politics in the 20th Century and everyone who is interested in farm economics, farm politics and the revolution in hybrid seed should read this book.

Because I was only 14 at the time of the Progressive Party convention in Philadephia in 1948, the opinion I have held of Henry Wallace ever since is my father's opinion at the time--that Wallace was an unstable, totally impractical mystic, who, if successful in 1948, would have lead the U.S. down the road to socialism. This week I finished the Culver and Hyde book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the 1940's. It is one of the few biographies I have read that has led to a total reassessemt of an historical figure. Wallace was a complex, brilliant, honest man with a fine ear for the finest aspirations of Americans and absolutely no ear for practical politics. Culver and Hyde have given us a page-turner and remarkably objective account of an entire era, and they tell us much about an entire cast of memorable characters, including FDR, Sumner Wills, Jesse Jones, Harry Truman, George Marshall and many, many more.