corner, as happened after the bursting of the boom in 1929.
When you talk with our young men and our young women, you will find they want to work for themselves and for their families; they consider that they have the right to work; and they know that after the last war their fathers did not gain that right.
When you talk with our young men and women, you will find that with the opportunity for employment they want assurance against the evils of all major economic hazards, assurance that will extend from the cradle to the grave. And this great Government can and must provide this assurance.
I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.
I dissent.
And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.
FDR closed with a rejection of isolationism and imperialism that mirrored much of what Wallace had been saying. “Hitlerism, like any other form of crime or disease, can grow from the evil seeds of economic as well as military feudalism,” the president declared. “Victory in this war is the first and greatest goal before us. Victory in the peace is the next. That means striving toward the enlargement of the security of man here and throughout the world—and, finally, striving for the fourth freedom—freedom from fear.” To that end, FDR proposed a worldview, like that of Wallace, that rejected heavy-handed empire building in favor of diplomacy and cooperation. “The very philosophy of the Axis powers is based on a profound contempt for the human race,” he said. “If, in the formation of our future policy, we were guided by the same cynical contempt, then we should be surrendering to the philosophy of our enemies, and our victory would turn to defeat.”
The War within a War
Franklin Roosevelt’s words echoed those of Henry Wallace on that January day. But as 1943 progressed, it became painfully evident that the administration was deeply divided on the practical questions of how to pursue the war, and the peace.
During the course of 1942 and 1943, Wallace fought inside the Roosevelt administration to advance his views, often with the president’s support but sometimes without it. The bitterest battle—the “war within a war,” as historian Bascom Timmons put it—was with Secretary of Commerce Jesse Holman Jones, a real-estate mogul from Texas whose power inside and outside government was such that FDR sometimes referred to him as “Jesus H. Jones.” In what Wallace biographers Culver and Hyde would describe as “the most celebrated intragovernmental squabble of the era,” Wallace was pitted against a sixty-eight-year-old “fiscal and social conservative with no interest in politics as a vehicle for change.”
Jones had come to Washington as an appointee of a Republican president, Herbert Hoover, yet he had remained to chair the powerful Reconstruction Finance Corporation through Roosevelt’s first two terms. During the war years, he served not only at Commerce but as Federal Loan Administrator, which gave him responsibility over all federal investment agencies. Jones was so used to calling so many of the shots regarding federal finances and priorities that he was sometimes referred to as the head of “the fourth branch of government.” He bristled at FDR’s assignment of key responsibilities to Wallace, who signaled from the start of his term as vice president that he intended to maintain the activist role he had established as head of Agriculture.
Before he was sworn in on January 20, 1941, Wallace had studied the office of the vice presidency, including a 1920 essay titled “Can the Vice President Be Useful?” penned by a failed contender for the job named Franklin D. Roosevelt. As FDR began his third term in the White House, he moved to expand the scope and character of the No. 2 job—which Wallace’s predecessor, Garner, had suggested was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”—by issuing Executive Order 8839 shortly before the U.S. entry into World War II. That order established the Economic Defense Board, which Wallace would chair. After Pearl Harbor, it was renamed the Board of Economic Warfare.
Culver and Hyde note that the position gave the vice president a role in “dealing with a wide range of international economic issues including exports, imports, ‘preclusive buying’ (the purchase of strategic materials in order to keep them out of the enemies’ hands), foreign exchange transactions, international credit and transportation, the control of foreign-owned properties, and patents and all other matters related to foreign economics.” Less than two months after he issued the executive order empowering the new vice president, FDR issued another, creating the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board, where Wallace, again as the chair, would be in charge of speeding the delivery of arms and other materials to allies in Europe. The Des Moines Register described the vice president as the “American minister of economic defense, and the chief planner of the new world order when the war is over.” In short order, Culver and Hyde recount: “Wallace had become the most powerful vice president in the nation’s history. No vice president had ever wielded such administrative authority, much less a policy voice of consequence. Roosevelt ‘used me in a way which made the office for a time a very great office,’ Wallace later observed.”
The operative words were “for a time.” The vice president was determined to go all out to defeat fascism on the battlefield and in the postwar era—so determined that lines of division quickly developed within the administration.
At every turn, Wallace emphasized the importance of making a win-the-war-and-win-the-peace connection. In an essay he wrote for the Atlantic magazine just weeks before the United States entered World War II, Wallace had argued: “The overthrow of Hitler is only half the battle; we must build a world in which our human and material resources are used to the utmost if we are to win complete victory. This principle should be fundamental as the world moves to reorganize its affairs. Ways must be found by which the potential abundance of the world can be translated into real wealth and a higher standard of living. Certain minimum standards of food, clothing and shelter ought to be established, and arrangements ought to be made to guarantee that no one should fall below those standards.”
That made sense to some key figures in the White House, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who in her 1942 essay “What We Are Fighting For” described the war in the context of “the world struggle of ordinary people for a better way of life” in which “the human beings of the world, regardless of race or creed or color, are to be looked upon with respect and treated as equals.”
There was good reason to believe that Franklin was sympathetic with the message. But FDR’s administration really was that team of rivals, and within it were clear factions that the president welcomed and encouraged as he kept building out a Democratic coalition far broader than any the party had seen before. Wallace positioned himself at one pole in FDR’s big tent. Jesse Jones held up the other pole.
Jones thought of himself as a businessman, not an idealist, and he had nothing but disdain for Wallace personally and politically. He decried “the socialist-minded uplifters and uppity underlings” of the Board of Economic Warfare, and he steadfastly resisted efforts by the vice president and his staff to include “labor clauses” in BEW contracts that called for foreign producers to “maintain such conditions of labor as will maximize production … adequate shelter, water and safety appliances” and fair wage rates. Wallace explained that “greater stimulus” would boost production. The BEW’s blunt-spoken executive director, Milo Perkins, argued, “It isn’t radical to believe that you can get as much in return by increasing the food to a human being as by increasing the food to a mule.”
This emphasis on the condition of workers was indeed seen as radical by the administration’s conservative critics. Ohio Republican senator Robert A. Taft warned about the danger of “setting up an international WPA,” referring to the New Deal’s Depression-era jobs program. Taft and his fellow congressional conservatives found a willing ally in
