An old post of mine:
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(1) Wallace as VP would probably not be enough to defeat FDR but Wallace would have to handle the "Guru Letters" more intelligently than he did when they were brought up in 1948 in OTL. (In 1940, they never became an issue, supposedly because FDR warned the Republicans that if they brought the letters up, *he* would bring up Willkie's affair with Irita Van Doren. AFAIK, Dewey would not have been vulnerable to that kind of blackmail...) See my post at
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...hrow-dewey-the-election.437434/#post-16551642
(2) Although many people assume that Wallace would not have used nuclear weapons against Japan, in fact he never criticized Truman's decision to drop the bomb.
"'I just don't remember how I felt at the time,' Wallace later commented. 'Perhaps these massive events maybe numbed me — I just don't know what it is.' He was 'terrifically interested' in the atomic bomb project, he said, but his primary concern, was 'that the darn thing went off.'
"To his credit, Wallace did not criticize — either then or later, publicly or privately — Truman's decision. Present at the inception of the project, Wallace had helped persuade Roosevelt 'it was something to put money into.' To have second-guessed Truman when the weapon was actually used would have been intellectually dishonest..." John C. Culver and John Hyde,
American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace, pp. 396-7.
https://books.google.com/books?id=rgp2CQAAQBAJ&pg=PA396
(3) On relations with the USSR: As I have said before, I am not sure whether it is fair to judge what Wallace would have done as president with the positions he took in OTL in his 1948 campaign. By then, he was almost entirely dependent on the Communist Party, the left wing of the CIO, etc. for support (practically all mainstream liberals having come out against his candidacy); moreover, he had been embittered by first having been dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1944 and then being fired as Secretary of Commerce in 1946. This bitterness led him to gradually see himself as the only defender of "peace" and his opponents as "warmongers." If you look at the Madison Square Garden speech of September 1946 which got him fired, it was considerably more balanced than his position of two years later. He basically was arguing for a spheres-of-influence arrangement with the USSR. At one point, he said "We may not like what Russia does in eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation, and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States." When the (predominantly left-wing) audience started hissing, he said "Yes, I’m talking about people outside of New York City when I talk about that, and I think I know about people outside of New York City. Any Gallup poll will reveal it – we might as well face the facts." He added that "The Russians have no more business in stirring up native communists to political activity in western Europe, Latin America, and the United States than we have interfering in the politics of eastern Europe and Russia."
http://www.jahrbuch2002.studien-von-zeitfragen.net/Weltmacht/Way_to_Peace/way_to_peace.html
One thing that has led to misunderstandings of the speech is that Wallace (because his radio time was running out, he said--but perhaps because he didn't like the boos he was getting from the leftists in the audience) decided to leave out some of the most anti-Soviet statements he had prepared, notably a reference to "native communists faithfully following every twist and turn in the Moscow party line" and that "the Russians should stop teaching that their form of communism must, by force if necessary, ultimately triumph over democratic capitalism..."
https://web.archive.org/web/20171007031628/http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/haw28.htm
Yet even with the omissions, Wallace's speech was at first severely criticized in the
Daily Worker: "He advanced views...which covered up American imperialism's aggressive role." (Quoted in David Shannon,
The Decline of American Communism, p. 119.) It was only after Truman fired Wallace that the Communists found the speech praiseworthy...
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Another old post of mine:
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One thing to remember about Wallace: He was not essentially radical, nor was he *always* a favorite of the Communist Party. On domestic policy, during the 1930s he tried to steer a middle course between the conservatives in the Agriculture Department (who thought the Department's task was to shore up farm prices, period) and the radicals interested in social change (who included Communists like Lee Pressman but also anti-Communists like Jerome Frank). Eventually he acquiesced in the firing of the radicals.
On foreign policy, he opposed recognition of the USSR in 1933. And note the testimony of longtime liberal attorney Gardner ("Pat") Jackson in an article critical of Wallace in the August 1948 *Atlantic*:
"In several of his speeches [in 1948] he has played upon the evil of the Franco dictatorship in Spain and what he says is this country's encouragement of it through trade and diplomatic relations. During the Spanish civil War, as I came to know well while trying to help Loyalist Ambassador de los Rios, Wallace was the least responsive of the cabinet members who were approached to exercise influence on specific problems in behalf of the Loyalist government, such as arranging the servicing of that government's funds in New York City and the campaign to have the arms embargo lifted. His attitude was in sharp contrast to that of Secretary Morgenthau and Secretary Ickes. Wallace apparently did not then see Franco as the menace he now considers him."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1948/08/henry-wallace-a-divided-mind/306029/
Also, from late 1939 to June 22, 1941, Wallace as much as FDR was attacked by the Communists as a "warmonger."
After June 22, 1941, of course, Wallace became more friendly to the USSR. Yet this was hardly unusual, and if Wallace was slower than others to discard illusions about the USSR, I wonder how much of this was because after 1944 Wallace resented having been pushed aside in favor of Truman and therefore convinced himself that Truman's increasingly antagonistic position toward the USSR was a betrayal of FDR's policies. In short, I'm not sure if Wallace's views in, say, the 1948 campaign (when he was dependent on the Communists and their allies for manpower, etc.) would necessarily indicate how he would act toward the USSR in the war and postwar period in the event that he became president after an early death of FDR.
