Transcripts

Remarks

Our subject for this evening is the legacy of Henry A. Wallace as it relates to progressive politics in the United States, and what I wanted to do in the time that I have is to say a little about my view of that legacy, both in terms of its major achievements and in terms of failures and compromises that left an impact on subsequent developments.

As I understand the term "progressive politics," it involves both a belief that the world can be improved through collective action and an effort to build, use, and sustain instrumentalities for doing this. It stands in contrast to a "conservative politics," which is skeptical both of the possibilities of progress and of what can be done through collective action.

In twentieth-century America the notion of betterment usually involved some combination of the advance of democracy, science, morality, and material abundance; and the efforts to realize this included not only attempts to educate and enlighten the citizenry but also exercises in state-building, involving the creation of new bureaucratic and associative institutions, and exercises in party and coalition building, intended to create the necessary political support for building and using the instruments of progress.

. One period when these exercises in civic education, state-building, and political realignment were much in evidence was the era of the New Deal and World War II, the era, in other words, of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. And there can be little doubt that Henry A. Wallace, as Secretary of Agriculture, war administrator, New Deal theorist, and liberal internationalist, was a central actor in these stories.
As an educator of the American public, Wallace produced an impressive array of books, articles, editorials, pamphlets, speeches, and so on, some of which still stand as landmarks in the debates that have surrounded the evolution of American progressivism. One thinks particularly of his America Must Chose in 1934, his Technology, Corporations, and the General Welfare in 1937, his Century of the Common Man speech in 1942, and his Sixty Million Jobs in 1945. In addition, he was clearly one of the major architects of what we think of today as the New Deal state. In essence, the building of the New Deal state involved the addition of new bureaucratic and associative structures for dealing with agricultural maladjustments, labor relations, business abuses, social security, economic stabilization and development, and international security. In each of these areas Wallace was to some extent involved, and with three of them, agriculture, economic stability, and international security, he was very much involved.

As Secretary of Agriculture, Wallace presided over an immense expansion of the Department of Agriculture and the proliferation of a whole new array of agricultural agencies, intended to get American agriculture back on the road to progress. In doing this, it should be noted, he built on an institutional structure that had started taking shape in the late nineteenth century and by 1930 was already the most bureaucratically developed and administratively capable segment of the American government. Some historians, in fact, have argued that Wallace's achievement can be explained largely in terms of the existence of these already developed administrative capacities. But still, the structure in place by 1940 was a remarkable and long enduring achievement. And Wallace, I think, deserves much of the credit for securing the necessary legislation,creating an effective set of administrative mechanisms, maintaining the necessary political support, and finding ways to get around the constitutional obstacles raised by the Supreme Court. As Secretary of Agriculture, moreover, he proved to be a skillful bureaucratic infighter, successfully protecting this new bureaucratic domain from moves for sub-agency independence, calls for greater de-centralization, and encroachments by other empire builders, Harold Ickes, in particular.

This is not to say, however, that this expanded state accomplished all that Wallace desired or that portions of it could not be used for illiberal or unprogressive ends. Wallace's vision of progress included not only the restoration of economic health to commercial agriculture but also an end to rural poverty and the promotion of a vibrant rural civilization with sufficient satisfaction, beauty, and culture to offset the lure of the city. Yet efforts to achieve these latter ends had virtually no success, in part because the methods used to help commercial agriculture tended to worsen the conditions of the rural poor and eventually to bring about a massive depopulation of rural areas and small towns. Theoretically, it might have been possible to keep more people on the land without sacrificing too much in the way of efficiency and consumer welfare. I have long had considerable sympathy for the arguments along this line set forth by Mary Neth in her Preserving the Family Farm. But politically, this would have been exceedingly difficult, and Wallace, I think, was never clear about how it might be done and was partially responsible for closing down what opportunities there were, notably through his acquiescence in the purge of the AAA's liberals in 1934 and in his willingness to allow the alternative approach of the Resettlement and Federal Security administrations to remain a marginal one. After 1935, to be sure, there was growing tension between him and the agricultural establishment, especially the leaders of the Farm Bureau. But his central programs continued to depend upon establishment support, and this kept reform of the agricultural system itself to a minimum.

The other two areas of state-building in which Wallace was extensively involved were those seeking new instrumentalities for securing and maintaining full employment and for achieving a peaceful and progressive international order. As an early convert to Keynesian economics and compensatory spending, he devised and pushed proposals that helped set the stage for the Employment Act of 1946 and the creation of the Council of Economic Advisors. And as an early and persistent critic of isolationism and nationalism, especially economic nationalism, he helped to bring about the diplomatic revolution and creation of new international agencies that accompanied and followed the war. In both of these areas, however, the gap between Wallace's prescriptions and the actual results was far greater than in agriculture. The Employment Act was a pale and emasculated version of the legislation he had hoped to see passed, with the Keynesianism actually adopted turning out to be a commercial variety rather than one that would provide jobs through social improvements. And in the international sphere, his vision of an idealistic internationalism, bringing peace and progress through cooperative arrangements and the spread of the New Deal to the rest of the world, lost out to Cold War realism and its prescriptions for containing the threat of communism. In fighting for these causes, moreover, Wallace seemed to lack the political skills that he had shown as Secretary of Agriculture. Jesse Jones defeated him in the most publicized bureaucratic squabble of the war period, and his campaigns for an idealistic internationalism seemed to lead to one fiasco after another, culminating in the disastrous collapse of his reputation in 1948.

On balance, then, Wallace's legacy for progressive politics was a mixed one. He helped-to define the New Deal and to build important segments of the New Deal state and its ongoing political support. He also left a legacy of progressive thinking and ideals capable of inspiring future reformers. But at the same time, he fought and lost some key battles, the outcomes of which moved American progressivism onto paths that he and many others regarded as less than desirable. This was the case, in particular, with the battles over rural poverty and depopulation, over full employment, and over the kind of internationalism that America should embrace. The degree of responsibility that he bore for these turning points is still debatable. But as Orville Freeman said in 1965, it seems clear that "history cannot ignore him."