If Henry A Wallace became president in 1945...?

Here's a question I hope for American politics experts !

If FDR's running mate in 1944 had remained Henry A Wallace, then on FDR's death in 1945, Wallace would have become President

Who would have been next in line ? According to what information I can find, prior to the 1947 Presidential Succession Act this would have been the US Secretary of State - yes ?

However, who would this have been if it was an FDR-Wallace ticket which won the election in November 1944 ?

I can see Cordell Hull was Secretary of State from 1933 until November 1944, when some chap I'd never heard of, Edward Stettinius Jnr becomes Secretary of State, but only holds this position from December 1944 to June 1945 - why ? Did Truman sack him ? If so, would Wallace have found him more amenable ? Or with Wallace on the ticket rather than Truman, would Hull have remained Secretary of State beyond 1944 ?

Alternatively, perhaps, with an FDR-Wallace ticket, would Hull have still been replaced (was he ill ?), but by someone other than this Stettinius chap ?

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Wikipedia says the following (and the National Parks Service, for whatever godforsaken reason, backs them up on the first paragraph):

In November of 1944 Stettinius succeeded Secretary of State Cordell Hull due to Hull's poor health.

As Secretary, Stettinius made the decision to return a Russian codebook, found in Finland, to the Soviet Union. This hampered US efforts to decode Russian cables, many of which, when later released, provided information about the widespread penetration of Soviet agents into senior US Government positions. The reasons for this act are not clear. (Non wikipedia source is Chasing Spies: Chapter One)

Soon afterward, Stettinius resigned as Secretary of State to become the first United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Stettinius resigned from this position in June of 1946, after which he became critical of what he saw as Truman's refusal to use the UN as a tool to resolve tensions with the Soviet Union.

(National Parks Service, as regards the above paragraph, says this instead:

Stettinius was present at the UN's official founding, on June 26, 1945, and resigned his office the following day. President Truman had made clear to Stettinius that he wanted his own candidate, James Byrnes, to head the State Department, and offered him the position of U.S. representative to the UN. Stettinius accepted, and led a distinguished American delegation to the first UN General Assembly.)

----------

As regards the possibility of him being a Soviet spy:

Evaluation of item 1. There is convincing evidence linking Hiss to GRU in the mid-1930s. There is no evidence linking Wilder Foote or Edward Stettinius to GRU in the 1930s.

Stettinius and item 2. There is no evidence linking any of Edward Stettinius’ family to Soviet espionage.

Stettinius and item 3. While Stettinius was Under Secretary and then Secretary of State, there is no evidence of his having any special interest in military information.

[…]

It goes on for a while. Scholarly paper on the identity of Soviet Agent 'Ales'

-------

I imagine Wallace would be fine with Stettinius, but if he really wants his own guy Stettinius would likely go the UN as per OTL.
 
A real mess!

Why?

Does Wallace die or get impeached?

'Cause if he gets impeached (by McCarthyites), and he leaves Stettinius as Secretary of State, that is, he doesn't care about the Russian code book, would Stettinius then have gotten impeached too? Then who is next in line? (I noticed that there is a lot of cabinet shake-ups then).

Anyway, it's great potential for a real mess of a constitutional crises.
 
I don't think Wallace would appoint James Byrnes as Secretary of State. So if Wallace is removed by impeachment. It is an unknown who would be president.
 
Why?

Does Wallace die or get impeached?

'Cause if he gets impeached (by McCarthyites), and he leaves Stettinius as Secretary of State, that is, he doesn't care about the Russian code book, would Stettinius then have gotten impeached too? Then who is next in line? (I noticed that there is a lot of cabinet shake-ups then).

Anyway, it's great potential for a real mess of a constitutional crises.
He would need to win in 1948 to get impeached by McCarthyites, and I don't think that's very likely. You'd likely see him buried by Dewey.
 
I don't think Wallace would appoint James Byrnes as Secretary of State. So if Wallace is removed by impeachment. It is an unknown who would be president.
Wallace had significant disagreements with Byrnes. Among his last political remarks, written as a note to nobody in particular as he was dying of ALS in the 1960's was the line "The policies of Truman and Byrnes may yet bleed this country from every pore."
Sicarius said:
He would need to win in 1948 to get impeached by McCarthyites, and I don't think that's very likely. You'd likely see him buried by Dewey.
Actually, Wallace taking the Dems leftward could result in Taft getting the nomination and victory. Of course, with Wallace or Taft, the Cold War might be a lot weaker, between Wallace's wanting to continue ties with the Soviets and distrusting the colonial powers of Britain and France, and Taft's distrust of entangling alliances. NATO could be a European organization (with maybe Canada), and thus less need for the Warsaw Pact, less tensions between the Soviets and US... less US debt...you get the picture.
 
John Culver's biography of Henry Wallace, "American Dreamer" is a good read about this pivotal figure not much is otherwise covered. Wallace was born and raised a Republican, his father was Sec. of Agriculture for Harding and Coolidge, his grandfather a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and he joined FDR's cabinet as a token Republican, by many rankings the only effective cabinet member as Secretary of Agriculture. Dwight Eisenhower's brother Milton was his right hand man there and would have likely helmed Ag or another key role in a Wallace administration. Jimmy Byrnes was a political enemy of Wallace's as were many of FDR's team and Sec. of Commerce Jesse Jones (also a Republican, Texan) was a quite hostile rival.

Wallace was an early advocate for the United Nations and likely would have defused the Cold War (a key USDA aide who was a Communist agent had helped filter what Wallace learned for years, just as Undersecretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, FDR Aide Lauchlin Currie, and others had manipulated FDR. As President Wallace would probably have been informed of what the Army Signal Corps had been working out of the Soviet embassies coded communications (Project Venona) which they'd broken in 1943, so that would make a sharp turn in Wallace's behavior...and probably trigger what's called "McCarthyism" by the left in expunging the 300 or so Soviet agents in the U.S. government at the time that the Army Signal Corps codebreaking identified. That would be a big POD.

Wallace had a significant interest in poverty alleviation, taking the the USDA into rural development, ending rickets, rural electrification and rural telephone service, etc. and that would be expected to be a significant part of his peace-time agenda, particularly in the Southeast which he'd toured extensively (and gotten his initial interest in ag research when George Washington Carver stayed at his family farm during Henry's boyhood.

Wallace was unusually enlightened about race for the era and the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's would likely have been considerably telescoped with whatever power he assembled in Congress and the Supreme Court (potentially he would have been like Jimmy Carter in that respect, a moralist shouting among the amoral.)

Wallace spent a lot of time in South America during the war as Vice President working to keep those countries in the Allied camp and supplying key materials, teaching himself Spanish in the process. He'd toured Russia in the 1930's, albeit seeing Potemkin villages, but he'd still have been the first widely traveled President since Herbert Hoover and that would affect foreign diplomacy and especially trade and foreign aid in rebuilding after the war. Culver's book suggests much of what became known as the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe were actually Wallace's ideas, frequently presented and developed throughout the war (Wallace was Secretary of Commerce from 1944 on after being Vice President so by 1945 in OTL or ATL, he'd been at Cabinet level for 13 years continuously which is very rare experience.)

Wallace was a research scientist himself (genetics, botany, agronomy, soil science, statistics, economics) , Pioneer HyBrid seeds, the first hybrid crop seeds, were one of his side projects, and Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, Thomas Jefferson are the only Presidents I can think of with substantial hard science training and lifelong interests. He would have collaborated more readily than Truman with Vannevar Bush in developing the federal labratories system, the National Science Foundation, DARPA, etc. after the war so that would have been a few years jump but with more funding and smarter management. Where that would have taken us is hard to guess.

Wallace would have been considerably more flexible than FDR about "unconditional surrender" in the waning months of the war, maybe a negotiated peace would have come about a few weeks earlier in Europe or in the Spring instead of the Summer of '45 with Japan. Wallace, unlike Truman, had been part of the Manhattan Project oversight committee since it's inception as well as heading raw materials sourcing for war production while Vice President so his perspective would have been far different from Truman who had seen wartime artilleryman service in France and spent World War II uncovering fraud in war production contracts/plants in the Senate. Wallace deferring to George Marshall on the war would have been more likely with the big POD's being dealing with post-war Europe and Uncle Joe whom Wallace had met in the 1930's while Truman of course had not.

I think the key POD question is if Wallace continued to be successfully managed by a Soviet handler on the policies towards Russia, as FDR had been, or would have somehow broke free (with the Army Signal Corps' irrefutable proof as opposed to say J. Edgar Hoover's suspicions.) He came extremely close even in the course of the Democratic National Convention to remaining FDR's VP for the 1944 election (Jimmy Byrnes probably did the most to torpedo that in last minute machinations as he had quite considerable informal power in the administration at that time with FDR's congestive heart failure leaving him able to work, sorta, a few hours a day by that point (see Thomas Fleming's excellent "The New Dealer's War."

It's odd that in both World Wars by the last year both Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt were nearly or fully incapacitated to an extent their staffs and families worked very hard to conceal despite it certainly being time for the Vice President to fully assume the office. Wrapping up the war with a drifting, unconscious President and advisors making the decisions, like the in movie "Dave", really makes you wonder about who made the decisions and how many POD's are buried there. :confused:
 
Then who is next in line? (I noticed that there is a lot of cabinet shake-ups then).

The Secretary of the Treasury is next. That would be Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary since 1934, since he probably won't resign under Wallace as he did under Truman. He'd be the first Jewish President. His aide, Harry Dexter White, was, of course, a Soviet agent.
 
Actually, Wallace taking the Dems leftward could result in Taft getting the nomination and victory.
I won't commit to an opinion on Taft getting the nomination either way, but assuming he does, it will have very interesting effects on the south in US politics. If you assume also Wallace gets the Dem nomination, you could very well see some southern states break Republican and start the party shift decades early.

EDIT: If Taft actually wins in 1948, we can probably count Eisenhower out - he wouldn't be able to run until 1956, and with his age, health, and the fact that he'd have been out of the spotlight for around a decade, probably no deal there. So you have the most conservative Republican President you could get in that era replacing a fairly moderate one, plus the worst elements of the segregationist south. All that added to OTL's already fringe and John Birchy GOP of the late 50s/early 60s and you've got some interesting stuff.

EDIT2: Actually, without Ike in the mix, you don't have the JBS claiming he was a communist puppet, which probably gives them a couple more years of credibility in the mainstream-ish conservative movement.
 
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Might Eisenhower run for the Democratic nomination in 1952 if Taft wins in '48? IIRC some Dems tried to get Eisenhower to run in '48 to replace Truman.
 
Might Eisenhower run for the Democratic nomination in 1952 if Taft wins in '48? IIRC some Dems tried to get Eisenhower to run in '48 to replace Truman.
It's not impossible, he certainly could have had the nomination easily if he wanted it, but there's zero indication he ever considered it whatsoever. People thought Ike might be a Dem because had never said he wasn't, not because he ever said he was. I believe he was a lifelong Republican.
 
There we go again with President Henry Wallace. We have so many threads on this.

I've never actually seen a "WI Wallace were President?" thread. The possibility comes up a lot because of course the man actually was VP.

The OP's specification of succeeding FDR in FDR's fourth term is a challenge due to the political opposition to Wallace. But I think clearly the man had a shot at a second term as VP, and if he got it, he'd surely be President within a year.

Now, WI FDR died a year or more earlier? That's not unlikely at all. I don't know about the chances of his medical conditions killing him that much earlier, but they seem fair. Also as President during WWII, he took a number of risks, in order to be able to meet in person with other Allied leaders. What if his plane went down on the way to Casablanca? WI he picked up some disease while attending these meetings that worsened his medical problems and killed him before the election of 1944?

Then again Wallace would indeed be President. I think he'd do a credible job leading the nation during the rest of the war, and would thus very likely go into the '44 election as a surefire win, thus be President for at least 4 years and change, barring of course accidental death, assassination, resignation or impeachment. I don't think the latter two would be in the cards no matter how angry various segments of the populace might get at some of his more visionary stances, and as suggested upthread there's a fair chance he'd moderate some of those once actually in office.

It's a common theme because it is a very likely alternate timeline, one which would surely present some very interesting differences from the OTL Truman years. Whether these would be "interesting" in the Chinese sense or in the "cool!" sense depends on one's political perspectives of course; my confidence he'd be on the whole a good President is only boosted by Montanian's summary of Culver's biography. There's a lot of stuff in there I did not know, so thanks Montanian!
 
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