#1581 Henry Wallace and the World That Might Have Been

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

Clay talks with Jeremy Gill of Hays, Kansas, about former Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace served several presidential administrations, some Republican but more Democrat. He was FDR’s New Deal Secretary of Agriculture, then FDR’s vice president in his third term, 1940-1944. The Democrats dropped Wallace as too radical in 1944, nominating Harry S. Truman in his place. So, Truman became the accidental president on April 12, 1945, not Henry Wallace. Wallace ran for the presidency against Truman as an independent in 1948 but lost badly. Wallace was a serious agrarian who experimented with new corn varieties and had a Victory Garden in Washington, D.C., during his tenure as vice president.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone it's Clay Jenkinson this podcast introduction to today's program it's
0:04.6	on Henry Wallace you probably don't really know that name he was one of the four
0:08.5	candidates for the presidency in 1948 that's when Truman defeated Dewey for the presidency.
0:14.7	Truman was being elected in his own right, although the whole country, including everybody
0:19.3	around him and his wife too, Bess, thought that Truman could not win that election but he did
0:23.6	and of course you've all seen the famous photograph Dewey defeats Truman and
0:27.0	Truman grinning about as widely as it's possible to grin. Jeremy Gill is somebody I've met many years ago in Kansas.
0:35.0	He lives out in a part of the world that I have a special fondness for,
0:38.0	Western Kansas.
0:39.0	He's at Hayes, which is a hundred and some miles away from where my daughter grew up in Wallace County, Kansas.
0:46.0	I've been to Hayes and Fort Hayes state a number of times and you go through it all the time when you're leaving Western Kansas for Topeka or Wichita or Kansas City.
0:55.8	I want to really recommend these two books, Dewey defeats Truman, the 1948 election
1:00.1	in the Battle for America's soul by A.J. Bame, I'm going to try to get him on the program.
1:04.3	He also wrote the accidental president, Harry S. Truman in the four months that
1:08.1	changed the world. That's the one I particularly recommend and I came at it via J Robert Oppenheimer.
1:14.0	And what makes Henry Wallace interesting is that he agreed with Oppenheimer.
1:19.0	That our only chance after Nagasaki was to share atomic secrets with the Soviets with everybody to try to forge levels of cooperation and trust and that if we didn't do that a Cold War could be not only calamitous but it could lead to the end of the world.
1:36.0	In other words it might not be our happiest choice to befriend the Soviet Union and to share our secrets with the Russians.
1:43.6	But if we didn't, the world could end.
1:45.7	And Henry Wallace seems to have held something like the same view.
1:50.3	So I find that all fascinating and Wallace had been assigned by FDR to have some oversight on the Manhattan Project
1:58.2	Whereas when Harry Truman became president on the afternoon of April 12 1945 he heard about the Manhattan Project for the first time.
	...

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