Henry Wallace Avoids the Cold War
* For dogmatic anti Communists, it has long been an article of faith that the fate of the US and the world was narrowly saved by Truman being president rather than Wallace. But as the section Truman and the Cold War showed, Truman as a president was likely the worst possible choice for the US and the world. More than a few scholars blame Truman's bumbling and rigidity for the Cold War, as much or even more than Stalin.
* There were alternatives. In the 1930’s and 40’s Henry Wallace was the second most popular man in America. First as Secretary of Agriculture, he modernized farming and rescued much of rural America. In 1940 he became Roosevelt's Vice President. Wallace helped convince twelve Latin American nations join the Allies to fight against the Axis, which he saw as a war against racism.
* Wallace was not only strongly anti racist, he was anti colonialist and anti capitalist. He believed in technocracy, the scientific management of government and society. He knew that capitalism is inherently inhumane and inefficient since its central priority is personal profit. His anti capitalism worried business elites. So they convinced Roosevelt to drop Wallace and replace him with Harry Truman, a nobody from a corrupt political machine. The result of that poor choice was a Cold War that did not need to happen and could have led to another nuclear war.
* What rigid anti Communists are often confused about is their belief that anything less than chest thumping and blustery calls for war means one is weak or not sufficiently anti Communist enough. It always was simply a matter of the best strategy. How practical was it to ever propose an invasion of the Soviet Union? Russia had beaten Napoleon and Hitler. The last person to conquer the length of Russia was Genghis Khan, and it took most of his life and slaughter on a scale no sane person would call for.
* Fanatic anti Communists also did not understand or overestimated the power of the USSR. How believable was it ever that the Soviets would conquer the US? How could they hope to cross oceans with a US Navy easily three times that of Soviet strength? How could any invasion of Alaska succeed over a frozen strait with no major ports and some of the highest frozen mountains in the world? Both the US and USSR are essentially unconquerable.
* Some anti Communists even considered, literally, bringing the world to an end. How practical was it to go to nuclear war to stop Communism? Even under the “best” circumstances one is still looking at five million American deaths and, equally important, tens of millions of Russian deaths, most of them innocent victims of Communism themselves. Under the worst circumstances, the extinction of most of humanity is likely. Most nuclear crises were over comparatively minor issues. Would one really want to see a nuclear war over whether Vietnam had free elections, for example?
* Fanatic anti Communists also had (and have) a disturbing lack of faith in democracy. In part they were victims of believing their own propaganda about the power of enemy ideas. In essence, dogmatic anti-Communists believe in an unrealistic conspiracy theory. Communism was not a monolith. They were actually sharply divided among themselves and destined to fall of their own contradictions. (See Section Four.) Those divisions were obvious as far back as the 1920s, but many anti Communists were too ideologically blind to see them.
* Wallace was appointed Secretary of Commerce by Truman, then fired two years later for strongly criticizing Truman's Cold War. Wallace was halfway right in predicting Truman would cause “a century of fear.” The fear was true, but it was for a half century. Wallace formed the Progressive Party which proposed co existence with the Soviet Union as well as civil rights, an end to segregation, government healthcare, and a government run energy industry. On many issues Wallace was amazingly brave and before his time, such as campaigning in the deep south with Black candidates and refusing to speak to segregated audiences.
* Wallace's campaign was sunk by red baiting He was widely accused of being a stooge for Communism because he refused to condemn or force out Communists within his party. He got less than 3% of the vote nationwide, in part because he was barred from the ballot in Illinois. Much was made over Wallace's visit to a Potemkin village in 1944. Soviet generals created a fake village, staffed by prisoners, for Wallace's delegation to visit. Wallace compared the village to those in New England.
* Wallace took the trip with Owen Lattimore, a scholar on Asia later smeared as a Communist agent by Joe McCarthy. Lattimore has been vindicated by scholars, but on Wallace opinions are divided. Two points are important: Wallace's opinion of the Soviets during World War II, when they were US allies against the Axis, was not unusual. Also, Wallace himself later admitted his errors in his book Where I Was Wrong, blaming it on lack of information.
* For had Wallace become president when Roosevelt died, Wallace would have been fully informed on Soviet atrocities instead of having blinders on and seeing the Soviets as a wartime ally. What critics of Wallace often fail to note is something else: Stalin was certainly an irredeemably evil man, but he was not a suicidal one. One year before his death in 1953, Stalin sent the famed Stalin Note. He proposed Germany be reunified as a neutral country. American leaders thought it a bluff and turned Stalin down. Germany would not be one nation again until 1990.
* By the mid 1940’s, Stalin was also very old and sick. All his adult life he was a heavy smoker and drank much hard liquor. In 1945 he suffered a first a mild stroke in the spring and then a massive heart attack in the fall. When he finally died in 1953, the official cause of death was a massive stroke. There are persistent claims and contradictory evidence over whether Stalin was poisoned. In the year before Stalin's death, he purged Soviet Jews with the bizarre claim of the Doctors' Plot, that Jewish doctors were planning to poison top officials.
* Had Wallace been president in 1945, this would have been at the earliest stages of a possible confrontation. Wallace proposed in 1948 accepting Soviet control of Eastern Europe. This wound up happening anyway under Truman. If Wallace had been president, Stalin may ask for a united neutral Germany years earlier, maybe as early as 1945. Wallace would no doubt accept. Germany was one of the central battlegrounds for the Cold War. With a neutral Germany, there are no crises in Berlin, no Berlin Airlift, and no Berlin Wall.
* Another event affected would be the Greek Civil War. After World War II, Communists and other leftists fought against monarchists and militarists. Truman sent aid to the right wing, falsely believing the left was receiving aid from Stalin. With Wallace as president, Greeks decide the outcome of the Greek Civil War, not the US. The left may still lose. But even had they won, these were not Soviet puppets. Most likely, Greece becomes like their Yugoslavian Communist allies, a Communist state but one independent of the Soviets.
* Much of the six to seven million deaths in the Cold War could have been avoided. The long list of countries invaded by the US, or governments overthrown by US troops, the CIA, or military dictatorships supported by the US, would be far less. For not only was Wallace pushing for an end to confrontation with the Soviets, he also opposed colonialism. Wallace would take the side of oppressed people suffering under the failing British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires. These empires may end a few years sooner, and these colonies become independent nations.
* American empire may also come to an end. The Philippines certainly becomes independent immediately, as it did anyway in 1946. Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Samoa may become independent nations. Hawaii only became a US state in 1957 because the UN was pressuring empires to set their colonies free. In the 1940s, most Puerto Ricans still favored independence. That would not change until the 1950s, when the economy became dependent on money sent back by Puerto Ricans living in the US mainland.
* The more skeptical may wonder, what if Stalin does not agree to coexistence? That is certainly possible, that he may take Wallace as weak and try to be more aggressive. But those who imagine the worst, “Oh my God, Commies rule the world!” are paranoid, unrealistic, and do not know their history. Again, the Soviets never had the power to take over the world or even the US. Much of the world only wanted to be free of imperial control, but both Communists and anti-Communists misunderstood anti-colonialism as sympathy for Communism. Even under the worst case scenario, most of the world would never become Communist. And if remote Third World countries went Communist? Could Angola or Laos or Bolivia invade the US? Only the most deluded could imagine so. (See Section One. Reagan actually did.)
* George Kennan, the scholar who created the US strategy of Containment, argued that only certain countries needing to be kept from becoming Communist anyway. These were the nations capable of launching an amphibious attack on the US, namely western Europe and Japan. If non-industrial countries fall to Communism, it was not a threat to the US. Both Korea and Vietnam were not important enough to send in US troops, in Kennan's view. American presidents ignored Kennan's argument, to the tragedy of those peoples and American military who died unnecessarily.
* As said before, with more sources of information, Wallace would understand completely how brutal the Soviet system was. By 1952, he was strongly anti Communist entirely on his own. Likely as president, that understanding comes by 1945 or 1946, much the same as Truman, but without Truman's fear mongering, incompetence, and ideological blindness.
* Wallace as president likely would push for civil rights much harder than Truman. Wallace also would push for government healthcare, over 60 years before Obama, and actual government healthcare, not corporate welfare for insurance companies. Had Wallace succeeded at both, the results would be hundreds of thousands of lives saved a year. A Wallace presidency also likely means that over $7 trillion spent on a nuclear arms race is unlikely.
* Would Wallace be reelected? That is very difficult to predict and depends on how successful coexistence with the Soviets was, as well as the success of civil rights and government healthcare. But it is almost certain that three or seven years of a President Wallace would be far better than a President Truman.