Wallace, Henry Agard
Plagued by accusations that he was too friendly toward the Soviet Union, Wallace failed to receive the vice presidential nomination in 1944. In 1945, shortly before Roosevelt's death, he became secretary of commerce. He held that position until Sept., 1946, when he was forced to resign because of his open opposition to President Truman's foreign policy. He then edited (1946–48) The New Republic. In 1948, Wallace helped launch the new Progressive party, which charged the Truman administration with primary responsibility for the cold war. As its presidential candidate that year he polled some 1,150,000 votes (mostly in New York state), but won no electoral votes. Wallace left the party in 1950 after it had repudiated his endorsement of the U.S.-UN intervention in Korea. Retiring from politics, he denounced Soviet communism and returned to the Republican party. Wallace's numerous books on agricultural problems and politics include Agricultural Prices (1920), New Frontiers (1934), The Century of the Common Man (1943), Toward World Peace (1948), and The Long Look Ahead (1960). With E. N. Bressman he wrote Corn and Corn Growing (1923), and with W. L. Brown he wrote Corn and Its Early Fathers (1956).
See biographies by D. Macdonald (1948), E. L. Schapsmeier (2 vol., 1968–70), and J. C. Culver and J. Hyde (2000); R. Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (1947); K. M. Schmidt, Henry Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 (1960); J. S. Walker, Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy (1976); T. W. Devine, Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism (2013).
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