Good Intentions.

• Author: Diggins, John Patrick
• Position: Review

John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 608 pp., $35.

IT WAS ON the day of July 11, 1944 that FDR finally decided to accept the urging of his advisers and dump his vice president. Henry A. Wallace had turned out to be politically incorrect, caught up in his dreams of a better world for the "common man." Perhaps out of affection and respect, FDR would delay informing him of the decision. At the Democratic convention, held in Chicago less than two weeks later, party leaders were stunned when the stadium thundered with the deafening chant, "We want Wallace!" The convention was veering out of control, and party officials feared that if a vote were taken immediately Wallace would be nominated and the plan to replace him with Senator Harry S Truman frustrated. With much jockeying the following day, Truman picked up winning votes on the third ballot and made a short, humble acceptance speech, while behind the scenes Wallace graciously bowed out of the administration.

A month later Wallace met with the President and was asked not to leave Washington since his services would still be needed. Wallace wrote in his diary that Roosevelt told him that he was "four or six" years ahead of his time and that the causes he advocated would "inevitably come." Four years later, the ideals Wallace embraced did indeed stir the nation's imagination when he ran for president as the leader of the new Progressive Citizens of America. The far-reaching Progressive platform of 1948 reads like a harbinger of Lyndon Johnsons's "Great Society." It called for

desegregation of public schools, an end to Jim Crow laws, open housing, national health insurance, equal rights for women, public day-care facilities, the minimum wage for workers, free trade, immigration reform, the direct election of presidents, home rule for the District of Columbia, indemnity for Japanese-Americans, collective bargaining for federal employees, new soil conservation programs, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, full taxation of capital gains, creation of a federal education department, and admission of Alaska and Hawaii to the Union.

The list is impressive, and in American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace authors John Culver and John Hyde have good reason to treat their subject as a prophet as well as a dreamer. Wallace knew where he wanted to take America and even the rest of the world; the problem was that he thought he could bring along the Soviet Union, too. During the Second World War, Wallace told Americans that he could think of no reason why the United States and Soviet Russia would have difficulty understanding one another. Did they not share a common history? "Both peoples were molded by the vast sweep of a rich continent. Both peoples know that their future is greater than their past. Both hate sham." Noting that both peoples hated imperialism as well, Wallace then offered his version of a convergence theory, speaking of "the new democracy" that he believed would emerge m the postwar world:

Some in the United States believe that we have over-emphasized what we might call political or bill-of-rights democracy. Carried to its extreme form, it leads to rugged individualism, exploitation, impractical emphasis on states' rights, and even to anarchy.

Russia, perceiving some of the abuses of excessive political democracy, has placed strong emphasis on economic democracy. This, carried to an extreme, demands...