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Harry Truman (left) and a Henry Wallace (right) campaign poster with an image of FDR as a shadow during the 1948 Presidential campaign

The Gathering Storm: If we remember anything from the 1948 election, it is probably the image of Harry Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which errantly printed that his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, had won the election when in fact Truman was the victor. But, forgotten by most and unknown to many is what the substance of the 1948 election was really all about and how it served as the last opportunity for the American electorate to turn away from the rigid Cold War policies that Truman had initiated after the close of WW II, beginning shortly after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945. It was not Truman’s Republican opponent however who posed a challenge to his initiation of the Cold War. Indeed, if anything, Dewey and the Republicans wanted an even tougher stand against “Soviet Aggression.” The candidate who challenged Truman and outlined a more sensible strategy for dealing with the Soviets was the long forgotten third party candidate—a true American hero—Henry A. Wallace. Wallace ran on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948 and challenged Truman’s Cold War policies by claiming that the Soviets were more intent on securing their borders and rebuilding their shattered economy than they were in dominating the world through enslavement under Communism. Indeed, Wallace often remarked that we should let each side practice their system of governance and see which one did the better job for its people: a sort of “let the games begin” kind of attitude. Needless to say that did not sit well with the Truman crowd, who wanted a far more reactionary form of blood-letting against evil Communism at home and the Soviet Union abroad as the source of this vile threat to our more natural capitalist instincts.

Who was Henry Wallace? Henry A. Wallace was a pre-eminent figure in the early 1940s. He began his career as a farmer-scientist in Iowa. He had been editor of Wallace’s Farmer, perhaps the most widely read and influential farm journal in the United States that was started by his grandfather. He was the third in a succession of well-known Iowa farmers and showed early, precocious signs of proclivity for plant science. He attended what would become Iowa State University where he came under the influence of George Washington Carver and who helped him focus his passion for developing and testing hybrid corn seed.  As a teenager, Wallace proved, through rigorous, carefully controlled experiments, that the appearance of corn as judged by contests in fairs, was unrelated to the genetic strain of the corn. Before his experiments, it was commonly accepted that these two parameters—genetics and corn vigor were inseparably linked—the gold standard view at the time and the basis of judging corn quality.  But Wallace experimentally demonstrated that the robust, healthy appearance of corn had more to do with its acquired characteristics (through nutrition and hydration) than its genetic programming. In 1926, he started the Hi-Bred Corn Company, later renamed the Pioneer Hi-Bred company whose purpose was to develop and market new high-yield corn seed he had developed years before he became Secretary of Agriculture. His work in this area helped to change the world towards more science in agricultural techniques. The Hi-Bred company was hugely successful, making Wallace and his heirs rich. The new company revolutionized American agriculture and was eventually bought by DuPont for $9.4 billion in 1999. The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) of the United States Department of Agriculture is the largest agricultural research center in the world, located in Beltsville, Maryland, and is named for the most influential Secretary of Agriculture in history.

How Wallace became Secretary of Agriculture under FDR: Although Wallace came from a family of Republicans, he switched his party affiliation when Al Smith ran for the Presidency in 1928 and when FDR ran in 1932,  his popularity in Iowa helped FDR win that state. FDR’s gratitude came in the form of Wallace’s appointment as the Secretary of Agriculture, a position his father had previously under Harding and Coolidge. Henry A. Wallace is generally acknowledged as the finest Secretary of Agriculture in the history of the department and his management was characterized by high efficiency and innovation. Many luminaries worked for Wallace in those days, such as John Kenneth Galbraith. Unlike the other secretaries under FDR, Wallace did not take a chauffeur-driven limousine to  work each day, but favored walking the six mile round trip. He was a physical condition devotee, a good tennis player, boxer and loved hiking. He didn’t drink or smoke and was thus denied the opportunity to close deals and rub shoulders with politicians during the two martini lunches. Wallace served two terms as Secretary of Agriculture under FDR and then served as his vice-president from 1940-1944. It was anticipated that he would also be the vice-presidential choice in the campaign of 1944, which was Roosevelt’s last, but his statements against segregation in the South, and his support for equity of pay, regardless of race or gender and his continued promotion for the 20th century as the “century of the common man” made many Democrats, including many Southern Democrats uneasy and a conspiracy to unseat him in favor of Truman succeeded; FDR, who did not attend the Democratic convention in 1944, agreed to run with Truman instead of Wallace. Needless to say, Wallace was disappointed because he thought he was a shoe-in for the nomination and he was probably a bit shocked to see FDR’s seeming indifference to the selection process. At the time, Truman was a minor Senator from Missouri who had done nothing to distinguish himself and had failed as a small businessman in the private sector. As vice president, Truman was never taken into FDR’s confidence and no one explained to him what his policies should be if he was to continue with the New Deal after the war. Not that it would have made any difference. Although the research program to produce the atom bomb was winding down with the fabrication of a new weapon, Truman was so far out of touch with the FDR administration that when he became President in April, 1945, he didn’t even know about the Manhattan Project to build the bomb. Yet as the new President, he would soon be confronted with the decision whether or not to use the bomb against Japan. But, in fairness to Truman, in the absence of any consultation with FDR, where he might have acquired better judgment about dealing with Stalin and the Russians after the war, left him to formulate his own inner circle of hawks and resolute anticommunists. As a result and quite predictably, Truman would move to the right and surround himself with men who would facilitate his hard-line attitude towards the Soviet Union.

FDR gave Commerce to Wallace: To help patch things up with the liberal democrats, who were disappointed that Wallace had not been named as FDR’s Vice-President in 1944, he told Wallace that he could have any cabinet position he wanted and Wallace chose the Department of Commerce, displacing one of his old nemeses, Jesse Jones, a conservative member of FDR’s cabinet who had objected to Wallace’s idea that workers in South America that were being employed for the war effort by American support, should be paid a liveable wage for their efforts. Jesse Jones objected by calling Wallace a “reckless spendthrift,” so by replacing Jones, Wallace had one less oppositional cabinet official to deal with. But in the Truman administration Wallace became increasingly alienated by Truman’s hard-line attitude towards the Soviet Union. He resigned as Secretary of Commerce in 1946.

Wallace was not afraid of Communism: Unlike Truman, Wallace did not fear Communism; he had resonated with the Russian people when he visited that country in 1944. Indeed, Wallace’s travels during the Second World War (ten days after Pearl Harbor, FDR formed the Board of Economic Warfare and named Wallace to head it; never before or since has a Vice President had so much executive authority) had taken him to many countries, where he assimilated a far more international sense of the global condition than Truman would ever have.  His focus was much more on the people being governed rather than the form of government imposed on them. He always took a keen interest on farm productivity and how it might be improved in each country to feed more people. This is an issue today that has come full circle as we face food shortage problems created by global climate change. The Arab Spring revolt had a lot to do with food price escalation created by food scarcity emanating from a poor wheat crop in Russia.  Food production was a constant theme when Wallace visited other countries. In contrast, Truman’s policies, in part stimulated by America’s development and use of the atomic bomb, began the process that we are only coming to grips with as a nation—to establish American hegemony over Russia: Truman’s rigid, hard-line attitude, allowed him to succeed in dividing the world in two—the Communists and the Capitalists, with the United States as the flag-bearer intent on stamping out the evils of Communism which, according to the Truman doctrine, was a system designed to rule the world, while robbing us of our capitalist pleasures. In the post-war anticommunist fever, it increasingly became a minority opinion that Russia was a country who had lost 27 million of its citizens during the war, with an economy in shambles, destroyed by Hitler’s invading Army. Russia finally won out through a war of attrition against the invading army and improvements in the production of Russian armaments. Though Russia was a World War II victor, the cost was devastatingly high. It also seemed to occur to few in America that Russia was demobilizing rather than preparing for a global conflict. It was America that rattled her sword and talked of war.

To be continued……

RFM

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Henry Wallace Cover of Time Sept 30, 1946

Oliver Stone’s ten part documentary which aired on Showtime, “The Untold History of the United States,” which I have commented on previously, reminds us of a long forgotten missed opportunity to reduce or eliminate the Cold War and perhaps avoid dropping the two atomic bombs on Japan, justified at the time by Truman to save a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick (history professor, American University) collaborated for the series, which hypothesizes that our postwar history might have played out very differently if Henry Wallace had continued to serve as FDR’s running mate and vice president rather than Harry Truman in FDR’s last Presidential run in 1944. Wallace served as FDR’s vice president from 1940-1944 and he was wildly popular with convention delegates at the time of the 1944 Democratic convention. Indeed he was arguably the most popular politician with the exception of FDR himself, both as secretary of agriculture (1933-1940) and vice president. Furthermore, his popularity spread to the international community, in part because he advocated issues that resonated with poor farmers and workers. But party bosses and Southern political leaders did not like Wallace—he represented a nightmare candidate for them, since he had been speaking out against race and gender inequity and was very much opposed to Henry Luce’s (the publisher of Time and Life) idea that the 20th Century should be an American Century fully decorated with American hegemony—Luce favored the formation of the empire we have today, even though those that run it refuse to call it as such.

Henry Wallace was like no other politician in our history. He was an Iowa farmer who carried out scientific experiments related to crop improvements and became secretary of agriculture under FDR, a department he ran with great energy and efficiency. Wallace was undoubtedly the best secretary of agriculture in the history of our country. I planned on writing a post describing my impressions of Henry Wallace, as I am currently reading “American Dreamer: A life of Henry A. Wallace,” by John C. Culver and John Hyde. However writer Peter Dreier did it for me a few days ago in his excellent summary of Henry Wallace posted in Truthout. In reading about Wallace, you cannot help but think how much better off we would be if we could only attract more people like Wallace into politics. He was a bit naive perhaps, but I think our political landscape would be vastly improved with a few more knowledgeable dreamers to replace the overcrowded DC rooms filled with ideologues, lobbyists and outdated Republicans. Wallace came into politics through the back door at a time when science and farming were just beginning to intertwine into a common set of objectives and practices. He not only facilitated this transformation, but he began a hybrid seed company  the”Hi-Bred Corn Company,” which generated more productive hybrid corn seeds, provided financial security for his family, made him rich, revolutionized agronomy and was eventually bought by DuPont in 1999 for $ 9.4 billion. While secretary of agriculture under FDR, he established the school lunch program, food stamps and facilitated better farming practices to avoid wide swings in farm commodity prices. As a farmer, he had been raised to believe that proper farming required cooperative interactions among farmers to succeed. Coming from a traditional Republican family, he broke with this tradition and sided with FDR for the election of 1932. That year the normally Republican state of Iowa went for FDR, who picked Wallace for his secretary of agriculture.

As romantic as we might want to be about Henry Wallace, strongly promoted by Oliver Stone’s documentary, others have been more critical of Stone and Kuznick’s interpretation. Historian Sean Wilentz has accused Stone and Kuznick of “Cherry-Picking our History,” published in the New York Review of Books.  Wilentz points out the downside of Wallace as a politician and challenges the interpretation of Stone and Kuznick. As vice president (1940-1944) Wallace was the presiding officer of the Senate and through his aloof character, and his push to end segregation, he managed to offend almost everyone in that body and, according to Wilentz,  he became a political liability for Roosevelt who migrated to a position of indifference towards him as a running mate. Furthermore, as a candidate for the Presidency in 1948, Wallace allowed members of the Communist party to become entrenched in his organization and even Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out against his candidacy (she had been strongly supportive of Wallace in the FDR administration). The progressive movement was divided on how it viewed the Soviet Union. More romantically inclined liberals saw Stalin as a savior of his country during WWII and were willing to overlook or minimize the brutality of his dictatorship. Other progressives drew the line and could not tolerate the Soviets, not just because of Stalin’s atrocities to his own people–but because they did not see Communism lying within the spectrum of liberalism as a form of government. Indeed, this view of liberalism drew the line on Communism, whereas the more romantic view allowed democracy and Communism to be a continuum at different ends of the political and socioeconomic spectrum. Wallace had adopted the more romantic view of Communism, which he promoted during his 1948 campaign.  Even journalist I.F. Stone wrote in 1948 “the Communists have been the dominant influence in the Progressive Party [referring to Wallace who ran on the Progressive party ticket]…. If it had not been for the Communists, there would have been no Progressive Party.” Henry Wallace eventually separated himself from the Communists, when, in 1952 he wrote “Where I was Wrong” and explained that he had not been properly informed about Stalin’s crimes and concluded “More and more I am convinced that Russian Communism in its total disregard of truth, in its fanaticism, its intolerance and its resolute denial of God and religion is something utterly evil.” Nevertheless, I find Wilentz’s views on Wallace to seriously under represent his contributions to Federal policies, even during and after the 1948 election. Had Wallace been the vice president and ascended to the presidency in 1945, I doubt that we would have had the Cold War and perhaps we would have avoided the use of militaristic prisms that we use to view the world around us today.

This view of the influence of the Communist party in the 1948 election is somewhat narrowly focused by Wilentz’s critique. There were many reasons why the Communist party had followers and one prominent reason related to the Spanish Civil war in the 1930s. The elected government in Spain was besieged by Franco who wanted to establish a fascist state. Mussolini and Hitler supported Franco with men and material and Hitler’s Luftwaffe honed their skills by bombing Spanish cities, including Guernica, which led to Picasso’s famous painting under the same name (displayed at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris). Russia on the other hand supported the government (Republicans), while Roosevelt refused to support them in part because of their alignment with Russia. This led many sympathizers in the U.S. to either join the Communist party and fight with the Republicans in the “Lincoln Brigade” or make donations to the party in support of the Republican cause. Many who joined the Communist party or gave donations would later be black-balled through the machinations of McCarthyism and/or the actions of the House UN-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Thus their support of the democratically elected government of Spain led to their personal ruination once McCarthyism took hold of our national psyche.

The debate about who started the Cold War is as old as the Cold War itself. Could Wallace, as the alternative vice president, elevated to the Presidency by FDR’s untimely death, have changed the course of history and created a different world, one which did not allow the retention of the old colonial systems of Britain and France? Would that have eliminated our future engagement in Vietnam? When we started the war in Vietnam were we merely defending French colonialism? Was Ho Chi Minh a nationalist and not a communist? FDR spoke often of his distaste for colonial rule and Wallace shared in this attitude and no doubt influenced Roosevelt’s opinion on the matter. Wallace was the principle architect of the new deal and continuously emphasized the creation of jobs as a much needed mechanism to avoid militarism after the war. He published a book in 1945, illustrating how the country could create 60 million jobs to transition between a wartime economy and a peace-economy.

I do not believe that Truman really had much choice but to go along with dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Everything I have read points to people like General Leslie Groves, who said they would use the bomb, not to end the war against Japan, but as a warning to the Russians, who had clearly established themselves as a contending superpower in the post-war era. Within the Truman administration you had different opinions as to why we dropped the atom bomb on Japan, but because Truman had control of the bully pulpit, we inherited his interpretation—it was done to avoid shedding more blood by an invasion of the mainland. But, if we hadn’t dropped the bomb, and did as the scientists suggested—share atomic “secrets” with the Russians, then relationships between the two systems would surely have taken a different course, perhaps a vastly different one. I also believe that our adoption of Cold War tactics prolonged the demise of the Soviet Union dictatorship because our confrontational posture fostered the continuation of hardline leadership in the Soviet Union.  And we must never forget that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we came within a whisker of a nuclear war, perhaps followed by a nuclear winter and then surely followed by a long decline in the human condition, if humans even survived such a calamitous event. I do not believe it would have taken much to unwind the militarists who wanted empire over a more peaceful planet. Those that promoted the turn towards militarism after the war were mostly unelected officials, including James Forrestal (a rabid anti-communist who because secretary of defense under Truman and later committed suicide), James Byrnes (a hardliner who became secretary of state under Truman).  The militarists got their way and we continue to have alternative attitudes towards other countries such as China, which is either a military threat and must be contained, or is one of our largest trading partners who happens to own a significant part of our national debt.

I side with Stone and Kuznick: if Wallace had been picked as vice president in 1944, the election of 1948 would likely have been between Thomas Dewey and Henry Wallace and it would have been that election which determined whether the hardline attitude towards the Soviets would win out over the more conciliatory posture that Wallace preferred. The Russians were not a military threat at the end of WW II. Their country had been shattered during the war and they were in the process of demilitarizing to rebuild their country—they lost 27 million people in WW II. Just imagine what we would have done after such a disastrous loss—we surely would have been more focused on repairing our country than conquering new ones. But we would also demand security on our borders, especially since we won the war. Suppose Mexico has been one of the attacking forces aligned against us. After winning the war against them wouldn’t we demand that Mexico become more pacified and neutralized such that they could never again mount an attack against us? That is how Stalin viewed Poland. Russia’s demand for border security is precisely what we would have demanded after such a horrific conflict. In addition, FDR had established a good relationship with Stalin and referred to him as “Uncle Joe.” The documentary films we made during the Second World War, Why We Fight, directed by Frank Capra, eulogized the Russian contribution to the war and helped to establish Russia as an important ally in the struggle against fascism and in the minds of American citizens. If we had more clearly articulated recognition that it was the Russian army that won the war, the Russian army that saved American lives from a more devastating loss of life, we could have helped persuade the American electorate that there was no point in establishing a confrontational policy against the Soviets. We had promised to give $ 6 billion in aid to Russia, which Truman denied them at a point where such aid could have gone a long way to help the Russian people restore their badly torn country.

Truman was far more naive than Wallace about the ingredients needed to successfully steer the nation after the close of the war. Indeed it was Truman’s naivete that led to the Cold War and started us on a pathway to the state of militarism we find ourselves in today. It was Truman who naively got us into the Korean War as he slowly learned that America could never win a land war in Asia. For a more complete description of how Truman’s naivete helped create the Cold War, see here and here. The election of 1948, in which momentum had started to swing towards the attitudes that would cement us into the Cold War, Wallace’s challenge to Truman was the last stage in which we had an open discussion of the Cold War policies generated by the Truman administration before the door slammed on the alternative pathway to avoid the state of militarism that we have inherited from their Cold War policies. Truman stamped the American electorate with his own naive view of the world and sealed forever our reactionary impulses to foreign policy challenges. Although Truman started the process, it was unfortunate to see how easily Americans incorporated “anti-communism” into our national DNA. As one might predict for a country that chooses military might over more peaceful strategies, the slaying of the Communist dragon did not bring us a significant peace dividend. We still insist on American hegemony as our most prominent reflex when confronted with foreign policy challenges.With the invention of cyber warfare perhaps our future battles will take place with software rather than human lives and expensive hardware.

RFM

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Henry Wallace Time Magazine 1946

The cable channel Showtime is currently airing Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States.” This is a ten part series, each of which is one hour, broadcast every Monday; the series is focused on the history of the United States during and after the Second World War. Oliver Stone narrates each episode, but he collaborated with historian  Peter Kusnick to create the series and together they have written a 784 page book “The Untold History of the United States” published by Simon and Schuster.  Kusnick also contributed substantially to the writing for each piece.  Stone and Kusnick have been interviewed on Democracy Now about their collaborative effort and you can learn more about the series by visiting Oliver Stone’s website, where you can also find his response to criticisms of the documentary. The television series consists of collages of old movie reels and images and explores recently declassified documents; it progressively moves through each President of the United States, but begins  with WW II. It is a colossal undertaking and was four years in the making.  My own view of Stone’s series so far (not over yet), is that it more or less represents the history of the United States in the postwar period that we all had to dig out on our own, not the version that we learned through history lessons in public schools and the propaganda movies, documentaries and scare tactics that we went through by learning to hide underneath our school desks during atom bomb air raid practices. As children we learned that we were in a titanic struggle with the Soviet Union and that they wanted to dominate the world with an evil system called communism. The mask of America as the “Shining City on the Hill” comes off in this series and it is hard to imagine trying to put it back on, certainly not until we do some significant repair work. But of course in the aftermath of WW II, we created a city, Washington D.C., whose mission is to continuously promote a delusional  version of postwar America that is quite different from reality (I often think of it as the Washington “Delusional Center” rather than the “District of Columbia”). The most obvious current delusional interpretation relates to our policies in the Middle East, as we align ourselves against the world, but on the side of Israel.

Stone begins the Untold History with the development of the atom bomb and shows footage, new to me, of Robert Oppenheimer preparing for the first bomb test. It is the success of the atom bomb and its use against Japan that Stone attributes to the beginning of the militaristic, security state that we have today, though it was 9/11 that gave us the securitized part. According to Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, who built the Pentagon before he headed the Manhattan project that developed the atom bomb, we used the bomb against Japan, not to force Japan into surrendering, but to show the Russians that we had a big advantage over them through our new military hardware. Groves believed that the atom bomb would give us a lead over the Soviet Union that would last for forty years, while scientists involved in the Manhattan project believed it would only take a few years before the Russians had their own device and they feared that America’s attitude about the bomb (scientists wanted to share the information openly) would lead to a nuclear arms race, which is exactly what happened; since 9/11 we live in fear of a nuclear terrorist bomb threat that we will have to live with, as long as nuclear weapons are around and my own guess is that if a nuclear device is ever detonated in an American city, God forbid, it will probably be one of our own. We have too many.

The morality of dropping the atom bomb on the Japanese is a theme in Stone’s history series. He suggests however that Japan agreed to our “unconditional surrender demand” (there was one condition that we agreed to which was that they could keep their emperor), not because of the two atom bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but because Russia had entered the war against them and they feared that they would be annihilated by the Red Army, which by that time had acquired a reputation as a powerful, invincible military machine. After all, they had single-handedly defeated the vaunted German army.  I have written previously on Oppenheimer and the bomb culture that we unavoidably created through our romantic commitment to the use of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. We are still in the bomb culture mentality we created for ourselves, believing that we are invincible through our impressive military weapons systems, even though experiences such as Vietnam mean we have a hard time proving our military invincibility.

It will come as a surprise for most Americans to acknowledge that it was the Russians who won WW II. The Russian army inflicted more than 90 per cent of the total casualties inflicted on the German Army and the Russian people probably lost more than 27 million who died in their titanic struggle with Hitler’s invading army. It was clear from the beginning that Hitler wanted to wipe the Russians off the face of the earth. In response to the invasion, Stalin moved and recreated industrial cities by dismantling factories and moving them further inland. These efforts recreated an industrial nation that began to manufacture improved tanks and planes that were effective against the Germans. By the time we invaded Europe in 1944, the Russian Army had the Germans retreating back towards Germany and were destroying it in the process. The Sixth German Army led by  Friedrich von Paulus, had already surrendered at Stalingrad (January 1943). If Hitler had not attacked Russia, dislodging him from Europe would have cost far more American lives than what we suffered. According to the Untold History, at one time Russia had to engage 200 German divisions, while the most the allies confronted at any one time was about 10.  While Stalin was involved in a life and death struggle for the survival of his people, Churchill invaded Africa and induced the Americans to do the same, followed by our invasion of Sicily. Churchill continued to postpone plans to invade Europe, perhaps because he was afraid of confronting Hitler’s army given his experience at the beginning of the war, but he also wanted to avoid creating a superpower in the form of Russia at the end of the conflict. Churchill was determined to preserve the British empire and reassemble it after the war. It was Roosevelt that finally forced Churchill to plan and execute the invasion of Europe, and he did so because he felt an obligation to provide some relief for the Russian Army. Roosevelt saw and responded to the terrible suffering of the Russian people, while Churchill saw value in allowing the Russians and the Germans to degrade each other so the Russia would be less effective in projecting hegemonic power at the end of the war.

Truman never acknowledged the Russian effort in winning the war and less than two weeks after FDR died, he became President and started the Cold War by talking sternly to Russian minister Molotov over some of the challenges related to how Russia was handling Poland. Thus it was the Americans that started the Cold War, not the Russians and the real hero who ended the Cold War was not Ronald Reagan, but Mikhail Gorbachev. Had Ronald Reagan agreed to Gorbachev’s proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons, perhaps they would not pose the threat that they do today, a prospect made more horrifying by the events of 9/11.

Stone spends some time early on describing the events of the 1944 Democratic Convention; he emphasizes that if Henry Wallace had been the Vice President to Roosevelt rather than Truman, we would not have had the Cold War and we would not have dropped the atom bomb on the Japanese. Wallace had been Roosevelt’s Vice President from 1940-1944, and next to Roosevelt, he was a very popular Vice President. If his name had been entered appropriately at the convention, he would have won the VP nomination handily. But hardliners in the party insisted on a more conservative Vice President in the 1944 election and as a result, Roosevelt got Truman, whom he never brought into the loop, as he held him with low regard. Roosevelt only lived a few months into his fourth term and Truman suddenly found himself immersed in a set of bewildering decisions, one of which would soon determine America’s future—whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan. Unfortunately, for Truman, this decision was already made for him by the conservatives whose advice and counsel he sought.

Henry Wallace was a progressive, ingenious farmer from Iowa who appreciated science and the arts, was into Buddhism and had a passionate appreciation for what the Russian people had been through during WW II. He expressed the opinion that rather than have a confrontational stand with the Russians, we should live with them peacefully and allow a healthy competition between the two systems to see which one was best. You can imagine how this went over with the capitalists and the Southern Democratic leaders. There are no Henry Wallaces in the Federal Government today. If any did exist, they were expunged by McCarthyism. Stone has a deep appreciation for Wallace and continuously comes back to his theme that if Wallace had become President in 1945, the Cold War and the militaristic society we have become could have been avoided. That much is self-evident given all of the positions that Wallace famously took.

The untold history is well worth watching. Even if you think you know some of the events, you will always learn something new and Stone tries to avoid conspiracy theories, though he leaves the issue of Kennedy’s assassination open to question (don’t we all). It is still astonishing to me, that given the debt we have to the Russians for their role in defeating Germany in WW II, we did not formally recognize their contribution until John Kennedy, as President, addressed their sacrifice and bravery in a commencement speech he gave at the American University in June, 1963, months before he was assassinated.  Of course that speech, one of his best, was given to help promote a peaceful and productive round of nuclear test ban talks, which Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian Premier, had proposed earlier. Oliver Stone’s “The Untold History of the United States” reminds us of this debt, that we have never recognized with sufficient gratitude; we are not talking about communism vs capitalism here, but rather an incredible sacrifice that the Russian people made that directly benefited us in shortening both the war in Europe and the war against Japan. We cannot get our head around 27 million people or the ingenious manner in which they built a new more modern industrial state to confront the German Army, achieved within 2 years after the beginning of the German invasion.

RFM

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