AMERICAN DREAMER: A Life of Henry A. Wallace.

• Author: Roberts, Chalmers M.
• Position: Review

AMERICAN DREAMER: A Life of Henry A. Wallace By John C. Culver and John Hyde Norton, $35.00

THIS IS A MIGHTY BIG (600 PAGE) FIRST-RATE biography, written with fervor but told in the calm of long-ago history (Wallace died nearly 35 years ago) about one of the most intriguing almost-but-not-quite characters in America's twentieth century.

Who was Henry Agard Wallace? Son of a Republican secretary of agriculture, he was an Iowa hybrid corn breeder (who made lots of money from that pursuit) who was tapped, as a Democrat, by Franklin D. Roosevelt to be his first and only agriculture secretary. He was the one who plowed under 10 million acres of growing cotton and slaughtered six million little pigs in a desperate effort to bring farmers out of the depth of the Great Depression. If that were all, we would not have this book. But when FDR decided in 1940 to run for an unprecedented third term, and Vice President John N. "Cactus Jack" Garner would have none of it, the president finally picked Wallace to be his number two.

I still remember the day he became vice president because I covered that event for the now long-dead Washington Daily News. Wallace was late getting to the Capitol, FDR was waiting, the band kept playing. I followed Wallace as he ran up the circular staircase near the Senate wing to reach the inaugural stand on the west front, crying out as he reached the top: "Where is the vice president supposed to go?" Nobody seemed to know, and few cared. Only FDR mattered.

Authors Culver, a former Iowa congressman and senator, and Hyde, a former Des Moines Register reporter, embarked on this love-of-their-lives project a dozen years ago. They have combed the archives, included Wallace's nearly 5,000-page oral history, and put the results in order and in perspective to produce a highly readable and sympathetic biography, but without sparing Wallace's many faults. The low point was his disastrous 1948 presidential candidacy, to which I will return--for therein lies my criticism.

In The Cornfields

The tale begins with agriculture. For Wallace, beginning in high school: "corn became his passion, his cause, the medium of his genius. He knew corn as well as he knew people ..." By 1932, when FDR was first nominated, Wallace was well known. Through Rexford Guy Tugwell (who would be his undersecretary) he met the newly nominated candidate at Hyde Park. It was an instant success. Wallace saw FDR as a man "with a fresh, eager, open mind, ready to pitch...