American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace.

• Author: Sidel, Mark
• Position: Review

AMERICAN DREAMER: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HENRY A. WALLACE. By John C. Culver and John Hyde. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2000. Cloth, $35.

In an era in which American internationalism has once again met American empire on the field of law and politics, Henry Wallace's life and work are instructive. Wallace, one of the great internationalists of his era, was Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Vice President under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1948 presidential nominee of the Progressive Party, and founder of Pioneer Hy-Bred, for decades the world's dominant hybrid seed company (pp. 82, 90). John Culver (1) and John Hyde's (2) new biography of Wallace brings this life before a newer generation of Americans concerned with America's place in the law and political architecture of a world in rapid change and raises new questions about the origins of the role of American legal power in the transformation of law outside our borders.

Henry Wallace's role as a pioneer and defender of an international law and polity based on international organizations and an early concern for a right to development sprang from unanticipated roots. Born in 1888 on a farm in central Iowa, he was an undocumented American of an earlier era, not obtaining a birth certificate until he reached adulthood. Wallace's ancestors and immediate older relatives were farmers, but they were also, crucially, scientists and preachers. Henry Wallace's grandfather, "Uncle Henry" Wallace, was both a corn farmer and one of Iowa's most prominent public citizens and publishers, the mainstay of a family that believed that "man must worship God through service to his fellow man. And the men Uncle Henry cared most about were farmers. Only by creating and sustaining a vibrant agricultural civilization, he thought, could the nation secure its future" (p. 4).

Sustaining American agriculture, not through protectionism and tariffs but through an internationalist, free-trade order, would be a guiding motif of Henry Wallace's life. It remains a leitmotif in the work of America's Midwestern progressives, of every party and political stripe, from Robert La Follette of Wisconsin and Albert Cummins of Iowa to Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who have championed American agriculture and, often more broadly, protected American labor. (3)

Many -- but not all -- have advocated an internationalism that relied on free trade to make America prosperous, and international organizational life, in which America served and often dominated, to govern the world. In turn those progressive internationalists encouraged and strengthened a strikingly powerful, upper-Midwestern, academic streak of internationalism, particularly in the study and advocacy of public international law and human rights, that echoes down to the present at Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and elsewhere. The strength of these Midwestern academic internationalists, so far from America's European- and Pacific-oriented sea borders, owes much to the well-known political leaders of Midwestern progressive internationalism, as well as to an understanding of the global ties to farm prosperity.

The poverty of American farmers, scientific farming, a ministry of "social gospel," and fiery populism against cheap-money banking interests, railroad and manufacturing monopolies, and machine politics were early defining elements in Henry Wallace's life (pp. 5-8, 18). Just before his birth, his grandfather led joint action among Iowa farmers to destroy the Midwestern barbed-wire monopoly, a family lesson in the power of progressive collective will to resolve social problems. But regulatory policies to protect farmers were just as important, Henry Wallace learned at a young age, when his parents left the farm because of plunging commodity returns. "Many years later," Culver and Hyde write, "Henry A. Wallace summed up their plight in a single sentence: `My father ... had started to work farming when prices were higher than when he quit'" (p. 11). Wallace's grandfather, by the late 1890s the foremost agricultural columnist and writer of his day, "editorialized on the evil of monopolies, urged better farm tenancy laws, counseled farmers to refinance their debts, and preached the virtues of [prairie] grass" (p. 20). In all but the last, the role of law in securing the rights of the weak was an enduring theme. (4)

That American interests were only defensible if they were in the broader interests of mankind was another enduring lesson. Wallace's schooling in this particular brand of progressive internationalism began early, when he turned to foreign languages and a high school American history teacher introduced "Senator Albert Baird Cummins's plan for progressive trade practices, the so-called Iowa Idea, and gave young Wallace `some glimmering of the fact that there is such a thing as policy in American history' "(p. 31). At Iowa State University, Culver and Hyde write, William James's essay "The Moral Equivalent of War," "greatly influenced his dedication to the cause of peace" (pp. 31-33). A summer stint as a journalist on his father and grandfather's farmers' magazine, Wallaces' Farmer, during which he traveled throughout the American agricultural west, brought home the value of cooperation. "[L]ack of capital and a crying need for water meant co-operation or leave the country.... All this soon develops in even the most independent of men a consideration for the rights of others and a realization of the benefits to be obtained by working together" (p. 35). His grandfather defiantly summed up the family credo as Henry Wallace graduated from Iowa State, in a way that would echo down through Wallace's private and public lives: "[P]osterity will appreciate the man who does the right as he sees the right, and who has an eye single for righteousness" (p. 36).

Grandfather Wallace was an early source of Henry's opposition to protectionist tariffs and American dominance. The elder Wallace strode into Woodrow Wilson's offices shortly before the United States entered the First World War, anxious to find "a mechanism to control rampant nationalism," and convinced that the only acceptable rationale for America's entry into the war would be the prospects for an international order leading to long-term peace. He proposed "a plan for lasting peace ... [based on] freedom of the seas enforced by an international fleet. Only then could all the nations on earth freely engage in trade without fear of molestation" (p. 42).

But the war struck home as well, with Henry Wallace editorializing about the need to prepare against postwar depression, uncomfortable with "war-driven profits" (p. 45). Law, morality, and internationalism combined in the Wallace family's prewar and early war statements: "Dare we assume that the great Ruler plunges half the world into war, that the other half may profit by the manufacture of war materials and the growing of foodstuffs? Who are we, and what have we done, that material blessings should be showered upon us so lavishly?" (p. 45). And American and internationalist ideals melded in the Wallaces' support for Wilson's entry into the war: "Emperors fight for commercial supremacy, for extension of their domain, for their right to rule. Democracies fight for human liberty, for the rights of man" (p. 46).

In the immediate postwar era, Henry Wallace drew the direct link between an incipient American internationalism and protecting American farmers. He stood apart from other Midwestern progressives who favored tariff protection...