Wallace's World, a Mini TL

Teleology

Banned
Republican Thomas E. Dewey was elected in 1948, predictably breaking Democratic hegemony that had lasted since 1933. The leader of the Liberal wing of the Republican party, Dewey an internationalist and more socially liberal than some economically liberal and politically internationalist Republicans (as shown in the debate against Stassen, the Liberal Republican and UN involved wunderkind who recommended banning the Communist Party, to which Dewey won the debate in the eyes of most by replying famous "you can't shoot an idea with a gun"). The 1946 elections left the Republicans in complete control of the government, with majorities in both the House and the Senate along with Dewey in the White House. However Dewey and the Liberal wing were intent on keeping most of the New Deal programs. The one significant New Deal institution they did not maintain were the war time wage increases mandated by the Roosevelt government and kept by Truman. Most speculated at the time that with a Republican Congress not even Truman would have been able to justify keeping those war time controls on wages (this is the point of divergence: in our history the wage increases were responsible for the immediacy of the middleclass boom, whereas with only other components such as the GI Bill's subsidies for higher education the creation of a large middleclass will be postponed and altered).

In those post-war conditions, with internationalist Republicans and a President determined to counter Soviet power by winning hearts and minds in charge of the country; Henry A. Wallace, former Vice President under FDR (between Garner and Truman), began a movement that would change America.

Wallace had been Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1940, Vice President of the United States from 1941 to 1945, and Secretary of Commerce from 1946 until Dewey assumed office and replaced him in order to fulfill promises made to other Republicans for their support of the Liberal Wing.

Wallace was considered naively pro-Soviet, even by American socialists like Norman Thomas, and because those who wanted to appear moderate by nominating a non-Socialist like Wallace and those who wanted to avoid being associated with the Soviet Union through Wallace couldn't work together the proposed 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign had never materialized (another POD, in our history Wallace did run as the Progressive candidate but recieved no electoral votes unlike Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, and was ridiculed for his mystical beliefs in the press in the process). However, due to his work as Secretary of Agriculture, he was considered a hero to many American farmers and was, as his securing of the Commerce position after being dropped from th Democratic ticket shows, in some ways a savvy Washington insider despite his unflattering associations with Communists and the guru Nicholas Roerich.

It was from this situation in 1948 that Wallace founded one of the most influential political pressure groups and lobbying organizations in American history; the Salem Institute. With huge initial support from farmers worried that the Republicans would take away their subsidies, Wallace used his contacts in the magazine world from his early professions as an editor to create a mass media machine to promote and support farmer's issues and agricultural science all over America. By advocating scientific and industrialized farming methods impressed into him by the Soviet Union, without any of the accompanying collectivization (with more time spent among farmers as in his youth making him realize how unpopular the idea would be), he managed to secure major donations to the Institute from the manufacturers of agricultural equipment. The advances made by Institute initiatives in agricultural science created a similar arrangement with the food industry and the transportation interests that profited primarily from the transit of food across America. This made the apolitical Institute, which advocated farmer's issues and agricultural science without extended ideological trappings, a powerful thinktank and lobbying group.

Wallace's reconciliation with the anti-Communist Progressives and socialists would occur later in the 50's when the Soviet Union betrayed the United Nations, in which the Dewey administration had invested much support and effort, over the spread of Communism in Korea. Wallace and the socialists agreed, with the majority of Americans, that the Communists were not acting in good faith; compared to the United States' own commitment to international democracy as shown by recognizing the independence of Vietnam in 48 and using UN pressure to get the French to leave the former colony. This not only put industrial progressives and socialists in the corner of Wallace's agrarian Institute but also synchronized Wallace's opinions with that of most Americans for the first time in his politically active life.

From that point until his death in the 1960's, Wallace would use the much expanded Institute as a platform for his now popular political ideas; with Institute-backed newspapers and periodicals like the New Republic supporting the worldwide spread of democracy against colonial and communist dictatorships, as well as branching out from agricultural to labor issues as well. This segued into the Civil Rights movement crystalizing under the Institute's wing; someone who had great credibility speaking out against racial violence as Vice President, it was part of Wallace's final legacy to combine not only the farmer and labor movements of Cold War America but also the movement against racial prejudice and against colonialism (Western or Communist) in the third world.

Of course, this expansion of the Institute's umbrella of political, economic, and media organizations was only one half of Wallace's final legacy before his death.

Post-war America was very prosperous, but it was still a blue collar nation of industrial workers and farmers. The middleclass would not really begin to form until the later 1950's due to educated white collar workers thanks to the GI BIll's educational provisions, and it would develop slowly. The possibility of expansive suburbs and white flight never materialized; most Americans in the post-war era either lived on farms and small towns or in the cities. With the increasing number of people, population pressure became a problem and it seemed that industrial production to match the need for employment and the need to spread out the population would have to encroach into the realm of the farmer. With a massive outcry against the perceived attack on America's farmland in the name of "dark satanic mills" (to quote the English Romantic William Blake), the US government and private sector largely adopted scientific planning measures proposed by groups such as Wallace's Salem Institute and the Technocratic Foundation. Planned communities and industrial parks, meant to maximize space in the cities and minimize impact on the land in rural areas, were a success; but they did little to change growing public resentment of urban life on one hand and the desire to move away from their home town and embrace their pioneering spirit on another.

The solution to this public discontentment was Wallace's final and most unlikely legacy.

In the final years of his life, his personal sense of mysticism resurfaced (never as brutally crushed in this world as in ours due to him not running for president in 1948 and thus his connection to the guru Roerich never being publicly ridiculed) and despite the cries from his staff nothing could stop him from letting it heavily color Institute publications and talking points. In this way before his death he spread his strongly felt sense of Naturalism (this world's term for something like a cross between environmentalism and the New Age movement) to many in his nationwide, and in fact international, movement. Naturalism would be considered by later writers examining the period to be something many Americans embraced to find their own reason for being in the previously sterile planned communities of the Post-War Era.


In the 1980's, twenty years after his death, Henry A. Wallace's movement would go from one institute and then a vast but loose collection of groups to being unified into a major American political party, with it's own affiliated parties in other nations.
 

Teleology

Banned
To compare ideas and assumptions, what would some of you think that the party inspired by Wallace and the various organizations and ideas my What If? proposes he might have left behind might have been like when founded in the 80's and might be like in the modern day?

I have my own ideas, but I would like to hear some of yours so we can then compare thoughts on matter.
 
Nice to see a world where Wallace's true self shines through, For All Time was really unfair in that sense. :p
 
Nice to see a world where Wallace's true self shines through, For All Time was really unfair in that sense. :p
I was about to say the very same. I am thrilled to see a TL featuring Henry Wallace which does not end like For All Time. I'll definitely be watching this to see where you go with it. This Wallace is a very interesting man, unfortunately not featured enough in alternate history.
 
I was about to say the very same. I am thrilled to see a TL featuring Henry Wallace which does not end like For All Time. I'll definitely be watching this to see where you go with it. This Wallace is a very interesting man, unfortunately not featured enough in alternate history.

Unfortunately his reported pro-Soviet stance in OTL has apparently doomed him to either be seen as either incompetent or an all out appeaser, neither of which is true. :(
 

Teleology

Banned
Funny that despite not being a socialist he was seen as too pro-Communist by American socialists like Norman Thomas. But if he can stay out of the limelight, post VP wise, until the Soviets betray the UN (the Korean War made him into an anti-communist) then in his old age he can speak out politically after theoretically having built this large organization I propose him building.
 
Would someone mind please giving me the gist of what this For All Time is about? I don't recall that particular TL.
 
Would someone mind please giving me the gist of what this For All Time is about? I don't recall that particular TL.
Roosevelt dies in late December 1941, leaving Henry Wallace president of the United States. Bad things happen everywhere in the world, forever.
Some highlights: Robert Taft wins in '44, America becomes isolationist again after WWII ends c. 1946. D-Day fails, but Germany falls in the end and France becomes a fascist state under Francois Darlan. Soviets have successes everywhere, no Marshall plan, western Europe remains poor. US involved in war in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, etc. Race war spirals out of control, into the abyss.
It gets worse - by the 1970s, Jim Jones is president of the US, Communist China and Korea have been nuked to kingdom come, AIDS is rampant in the Soviet Union, France collapsed after the civil war which followed the cannibalistic rule of Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa. England secedes from the United Kingdom, Salazar nukes Spain, the Soviets nuke Egypt (btw Israel was strangled in the cradle), the US nukes Argentina, the French ethnically cleanse Algeria.

Honestly, by the end you'll be reaching for the prozac. It is one of the best TLs out there, though. Very well researched.
 
This TL is amazing so far. As a fan of Henry A. Wallace, I was thinking of a Wallace TL where after Truman kicks him out, Wallace returns (mostly) to agriculture. You probably know more about the history involved, so you might be better to write it.
A few thoughts:
-Wallace was a major proponent of scientific agriculture before the Communists.
-If this is a primarily agricultural movement, Wallace didn't need the New Republic- he was still on leave from Wallaces' Farmer, the magazine founded by his grandfather. (TNR may become part of the movement anyway, though...)
-Naturalism sounds fascinating. Wallace was somewhat of a mystic, though there were strong undercurrents of Christianity in his life. Is Naturalism primarily a Christian movement, or is it more ecumenical?
-Wallace was a pioneer (no pun intended) in the hybridization of seed. However, he also favored the retention and study of other varieties. How would this impact the biodiversity of America's crops and farm animals?
-Wallace IOTL performed experiments with radioactive fertilizer and similar things. Will this be encouraged in this TL? What will result? (I'm unsure how this worked IOTL...)
-Who will Dewey's Agriculture secretary be?

Incidentally, I have two ideas for spinoff bits- one in which Wallace's influence would change a religion in some ways, while the other would have him changing the face of Walt Disney World...
 

Teleology

Banned
Well in OTL after his public embarassment over the Dear Guru letters and his angry denouncement of Nicholas Roerich, he became an episcopalian, so assuming a devout Christian who also believes in mysticism to a certain degree is not unreasonable in terms of Wallace.

I like the idea of Wallace being a bigger part of the OTL Green Revolution of the 60's right before his death and in terms of biodiversity, a national seed bank named after him would be cool; and perhaps some sort of international program, ala Atoms for Peace, to preserve crop diversity all over the world by establishing seed banks in third world agricultural countries?

With any sort of scientific thinktank there are going to be some dead ends that hopefully valuable information is learned from, so radioactive soil might be one of those.

And while a good point about Wallace's Farmer, the idea is that his eventual anti-communism before his death merges the progressive/socialist movement with his agricultural one in many ways.

See, with the POD the farmer and the factory worker are both more important, stronger, because there is a lessened middleclass boom. You don't have a ton of people becoming white collar and moving to the suburbs all at once. Which is why urban planning and the planned expansion of industrial parks into rural areas without disturbing farmland gets to be a big deal.

Without the "every family with a house, yard, and a car" level of prosperity and instead more of a well-fed hardworking factory worker and farmer America for the most part, people have less of our timeline's classic American spirit of long highway drives and constantly moving out to further and further suburbs. Instead, in meticulously planned communities trying to deal with expansion and crowding in a scientific manner, the individual is left to find fulfillment internally.

It's my belief that some of the driving forces behind consumerism are common house and car ownership. Minimize that, keep more people on the farm or in the city working at factories, and they might feel more of a need for spirituality and romanticism in their lives.

So a somewhat more scientific and agricultural-industrial America, an America that never loses sight of production in favor of commerce, an America that never really goes white collar; the idea is that in such an America the land and the mystical become even more important as technology isn't this liberating individual force of private handgun ownership and personal automobiles but instead is kind of this sterile technocratic thing expanding crop yield and making it so workers can live near to the factories and thus save in transportation costs.

Without the liberation coming from technology, people might become less consumerist and instead sate their desire for individuality and for more meaning and expression through a search for inner meaning. Mass movements, religions, philosophy, media might all become more important more quickly in this timeline's America.

In short, it is a somewhat more Sovietized America, now that I think about it, ironic as that's not the machinations of Wallace as much as what I think a only semi-New-Deal Era might have been like (though I am highly prejudicial in this area).

A more blue collar America with a Green/Romantic movements sort of hybrid political party emerging in the 80's.

Henry Wallace as a modern day Transcendentalist?
 
Roosevelt dies in late December 1941, leaving Henry Wallace president of the United States. Bad things happen everywhere in the world, forever.
Some highlights: Robert Taft wins in '44, America becomes isolationist again after WWII ends c. 1946. D-Day fails, but Germany falls in the end and France becomes a fascist state under Francois Darlan. Soviets have successes everywhere, no Marshall plan, western Europe remains poor. US involved in war in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, etc. Race war spirals out of control, into the abyss.
It gets worse - by the 1970s, Jim Jones is president of the US, Communist China and Korea have been nuked to kingdom come, AIDS is rampant in the Soviet Union, France collapsed after the civil war which followed the cannibalistic rule of Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa. England secedes from the United Kingdom, Salazar nukes Spain, the Soviets nuke Egypt (btw Israel was strangled in the cradle), the US nukes Argentina, the French ethnically cleanse Algeria.

Honestly, by the end you'll be reaching for the prozac. It is one of the best TLs out there, though. Very well researched.

Not to mention that Rock Hudson and Charles Manson were both elected Governor of California, most of the wealthy businessmen from Texas fled to Iceland and outnumbered the indigenous Icelandic population (George H.W. Bush became Prime Minister of Iceland and Ron Paul became Finance Minister), and the Paris Commune won the French civil war.
 

Teleology

Banned
Cesar Estrada for President, Charles Redford Jr. for Vice President

The first presidential election ticket of the Improvement Party, in the 1984 Election.
 

Teleology

Banned
Name: Improvement Party
Nation: United States of America
Founding: 1983
Ideology: Living Issues (agriculture, labor, human rights, community planning, genetics legislation), International Democracy


Overview: Founded in 1983 from the network of organizations left by Henry A. Wallace, which started with farmer's issues and agricultural science and expanded outwards, becoming an umbrella for a new breed of postwar Leftism of anti-Soviet pro-UN mold; including the Civil Rights movement, the Labor movement, and the mystical philosophy called Naturalism (an equivalent to the New Age movement, blending individualism and environmentalism in a way considered rooted in the Transcendentalism of the 19th century). Their first presidential ticket, Cesar Estrada/Charles Redford Jr., in 1984 was unsuccessful but garnered the party international attention.
 

Teleology

Banned
To pick this up and dust it off, for starters I think I'm going to go with "Neo-Transcendentalism" over Naturalism, for terminology.

I'm pretty solid on the name Improvement Party though (opinions?), since it manages to sound like something new rather than using the same old "progressive" "social democrat" "green" labels.
 
I do have a few ideas for this timeline- one which would have Wallace influencing Disney, and the other would have him influencing Ezra Taft Benson. Would you be open to including them in here?
 
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