been heard in space: in 2008, NASA pilot Eric Boe chose it as wake-up music for his crew of astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavor.”
Along with all the accolades it received, however, Wallace’s speech was denounced by those who heard it as a threat to their politics and to their powers. As Wallace continued to speak, and to expand upon his themes, the denunciations grew louder. Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe Luce, a newly elected Republican member of the House of Representatives from a wealthy district in Connecticut, took to describing the vice president’s internationalism as “globaloney,” while Secretary of State Adolf Berle, who was already fretting about the “reds” who might be on the State Department payroll, joked that he had to station policemen around his home when Wallace visited “because of your talk about revolutions.” Sharper reactions came from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, which would soon be devoting editorial after editorial to calling out Wallace’s rhetoric. British prime minister Winston Churchill was reportedly “enraged” by Wallace’s talk of uprooting imperialism and ending empires. Like Churchill, nascent Cold Warriors at home grumbled about Wallace’s inclusion of the Russian Revolution on his list of long-drawn-out people’s revolutions, citing it alongside their complaints about Roosevelt’s willingness to work closely with Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.
But Roosevelt was determined to promote cooperation. “Never before have the major Allies been more closely united—not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims,” he would say before the war was done, as he predicted “the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” Such pronouncements unsettled people like Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist who had become a red-baiting editor of Luce’s Time magazine, and who would eventually make a name for himself by portraying the Roosevelt administration, including the Department of Agriculture that Wallace ran for FDR’s first two terms, as a hotbed of left-wing skullduggery.
Though Luce and Wallace exchanged passive-aggressive compliments after the vice president parried the “America Century” with the “People’s Revolution,” political battle lines were being drawn. Wallace began to argue within the White House for a pushback against what he referred to as “the Time-Fortune-Life crowd” and its allies within the administration. He saw the wartime debate in stark terms, as he explained in a December 28, 1942, diary entry recalling an end-of-the-year meeting with Roosevelt.
“I said there was one group of people in the United States at the present time definitely moving toward producing a postwar situation which would eventually bring us into war with Russia; and another group moving into a situation that would eventually bring us into war with England,” Wallace wrote. “I said the time had come when we must begin to organize skillfully and aggressively for peace. He said he was going to go a long way in his speech to Congress on [January] 7th, that he was going to appeal particularly to the soldier boys, saying that he knew what kind of world they were fighting for; they were fighting for a world in which there would be no more war and in which they as individuals could be sure of a job. He said he was going to put in his speech that he had been advised that it was bad politics to say what he had said, but he felt it was the thing to do anyway.”
Wallace’s personal interactions with Roosevelt were as important as his public pronouncements because, as in all consequential presidential administrations, FDR’s inner circle was both a team of rivals and an ideological battleground. The New Deal coalition that produced four landslide victories for Roosevelt was enormous. It included every region and just about every partisanship. There were Southern Democrats who stood far to the right of most Republicans. There were Northern and Western Democrats who stood to the left of some Socialists. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 on something of a unity ticket, with a Northeastern liberal at the top, paired with Southern conservative John Nance Garner, a wily Texan and former Speaker of the House who was never fully onboard for the New Deal. FDR had a high tolerance for internal conflict and heard his aides out before making decisions. He also followed the news obsessively, taking note of the rise of militant trade unions, political parties like the Wisconsin Progressives and the Minnesota Farmer Laborites and other popular movements that were staking out positions to the left of the Democrats. There is no question that he moved left during the course of his presidency, but it was not a steady process. He would lurch left and then edge back; he would welcome the hatred of the bankers and plutocrats and then meet the investors and business owners whose buy-in he needed to retool the economy, especially as it became clear that the United States would be drawn into World War II. The decision to move Wallace from the Department of Agriculture to the vice presidency was a reflection of the president’s desire to have one of the more left-wing members of his administration at his side, in position as a potential successor. He valued Wallace’s advice and counsel. Yet he also listened to those who warned that Wallace was too idealistic, too mystical, too radical. It was a constant balancing act.
When Wallace was with the president in the same room, the two men maintained a working relationship that was intellectually adventurous and passionate. Wallace often brought reports from a labor rally or a meeting with African-American, Latino or Jewish activists to the Oval Office. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Wallace was an advocate for those whose voices were rarely heard in the corridors of power. The first lady and the vice president served as a counterbalance to those who assumed that the country was comfortably united in a time of war. No, they warned, there were tensions, and they needed to be addressed. When Wallace counseled that the administration needed to provide clarity regarding the purpose of the sacrifices it was demanding from Americans and the shape of its postwar vision, FDR listened. So it was that the president was soon sounding many of the themes Wallace had raised in his New York address.
“The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942—or eventually lose everything,” Roosevelt said on January 7, 1943, in his State of the Union address. “I do not need to tell you that our enemies did not win the war in 1942.” He followed that mordant line by surveying the map of global conflict and vowing to take the war to the enemy. “I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. … But I can tell you that no matter where and when we strike by land, we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly. … Yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and they are going to get it. … Yes, 1943 will not be an easy year for us on the home front. We shall feel in many ways in our daily lives the sharp pinch of total war,” the president warned. But he said the tide was turning in the right direction and, keeping a promise he had made to Wallace two weeks earlier, Roosevelt detailed a vision of the postwar era:
We, and all the United Nations, want a decent peace and a durable peace. In the years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War, we were not living under a decent or a durable peace.
I have reason to know that our boys at the front are concerned with two broad aims beyond the winning of the war; and their thinking and their opinion coincide with what most Americans here back home are mulling over. They know, and we know, that it would be inconceivable—it would, indeed, be sacrilegious—if this nation and the world did not attain some real, lasting good out of all these efforts and sufferings and bloodshed and death.
Referencing his Four Freedoms speech from two years earlier, he told the Congress that
the people at home, and the people at the front, are wondering a little about the third freedom—freedom from want. To them it means that when they are mustered out, when war production is converted to the economy of peace, they will have the right to expect full employment—full employment for themselves and for all able-bodied men and women in America who want to work.
They expect the opportunity to work, to run their farms, their stores, to earn decent wages. They are eager to face the risks inherent in our system of free enterprise.
They do not want a postwar America which suffers
