Henry Agard Wallace served as the 33rd Vice President of the United States , the 11th Secretary of Agriculture , and the 10th Secretary of Commerce . He was the presidential nominee of the revived Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election. He strongly supported New Deal liberalism and sought conciliation with the Soviet Union.
The son of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Cantwell Wallace, Henry A. Wallace was born in Adair County, Iowa. After earning a degree in animal husbandry from Iowa State University, Wallace worked as a farmer and as a newspaper editor. He founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, which was very successful and made Wallace wealthy. Wallace helped introduce the use of statistics and econometrics in agriculture. Starting in the 1920s, he explored various religions, becoming interested in theosophy and befriending figures such as George William Russell and Nicholas Roerich.
In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Wallace as his Secretary of Agriculture. Though as a young man he was a Republican, Wallace joined the Democratic Party in 1936. As Agriculture Secretary, Wallace sought to raise farm prices and supported the ever-normal granary concept. Vice President John Nance Garner had broken with Roosevelt, so Roosevelt selected Wallace as his running mate in his bid for an unprecedented third term. The selection of ex-Republican, non-politician Wallace upset many delegates at the 1940 Democratic National Convention; Wallace was nominated only after Roosevelt threatened to decline the presidential nomination. Roosevelt and Wallace won the 1940 election, and Wallace became Vice President. By 1944, Wallace had won over most of the Democratic "rank and file", but some key party leaders wanted him off the ticket. They persuaded Roosevelt to replace Wallace with Harry S. Truman. After Wallace's term as Vice President ended, Roosevelt appointed Wallace Secretary of Commerce in March 1945, and Wallace continued to serve under President Truman after Roosevelt died the following month.
Truman dismissed Wallace in September 1946 after Wallace made several controversial comments. Wallace became the editor of The New Republic and emerged as a prominent critic of Truman's foreign policies. In 1948 Wallace undertook a third-party bid for the presidency as a Progressive Party candidate, calling for universal government health insurance, an end to the developing Cold War, and the abolition of segregation. Accusations of Communist influences and Wallace's association with theosophist figures undermined his campaign, and were based on the closeness with which he hewed to the Kremlin's Party line and the number of Communist Party members and Party-liners manning the machinery of the campaign. Wallace received 2.4% of the popular vote, and Truman prevailed over Wallace, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. After the election, Wallace returned to farming and studied agricultural science. He later published a memoir repudiating his foreign-policy views and supported the Republican Party nominees in the 1956 and 1960 presidential elections. He died in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965.
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7. October 1888 – 18. November 1965
