What if Wallace had been the vice president in 1944 instead of Truman?

[lucasliso]

What if the Vice-Presidentail nomination in 1944 had gone to Roosevelt's current vice president at the time, Henry A. Wallace, instead of Harry S. Truman?
Thus causing that Wallace would be President after Roosevelt's death.

What differences would there had been in the conclusion of the war, the negotiations with the defeated powers AND the allies (especially the Soviet Union). What would have been the most notable changes in the US national and foreign policies in both the short term and long term?

 

[David T]

For Wallace to remain on the ticket is unlikely, given FDR's knowledge of the "Guru Letters", the opposition of not only southerners but northern big city bosses to Wallace, etc. But let's say he does remain, FDR wins, and then dies on schedule. What then?

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/20170504230423/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...

 

[1940LaSalle]

Long story short: Wallace has a tumultuous partial term in which he's continually at loggerheads with Congress, getting only the most innocuous measures through. The "Dump Wallace" move in the Dems has a full head of steam by 1948. William Douglas, using Hughes' 1916 precedent, resigns from the Supreme Court to run for president and gets the nomination, edging out Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, taking Alben Barkley as his running mate. The GOP marches on pretty much as IOTL, putting forward a Dewey / Warren ticket. Enough people are soured on the Democrats (Wallace has a sizable negative halo) that Dewey wins reasonably comfortably.

Truman continues as senator from Missouri, and becomes known for being a watchdog on the Dewey administration. Douglas accepts the position of dean of the law school at the University of Chicago. Wallace, denied the 1948 Dem nomination, sits out that election and becomes a professor of international relations at Harvard. Attempts to get a presidential run in 1952 never get off the ground, and Wallace is effectively out of politics thereafter.

 

[The Red]

Wallace, denied the 1948 Dem nomination, sits out that election

I don't see why he wouldn't make his own party and run like in real life. Truman notes in his autobiography that Wallace was convinced that there was a large amount of support for his ideals amongst the general public and that he could galvanise that support to take the White House. If he's already in the White House and he's suffered three years of congressional obstruction then surely it would be even more likely for him to want to run?

 

[1940LaSalle]

I don't see why he wouldn't make his own party and run like in real life. Truman notes in his autobiography that Wallace was convinced that there was a large amount of support for his ideals amongst the general public and that he could galvanise that support to take the White House. If he's already in the White House and he's suffered three years of congressional obstruction then surely it would be even more likely for him to want to run?

You're suggesting a sitting president with a rather small power base in the electorate to begin with is going to bolt from his own party (nominally at least) to form a third party? Unprecedented, and an act of monumental ego. If he did that, people would see the Dems as in even more disarray than they would be otherwise, and would be even less likely to vote for either Douglas or Wallace.

Also, don't forget that IOTL, Wallace didn't have enough support to gain a single electoral vote (OK, he was fighting both Truman and Dewey in the north, where he had even a ghost of a chance).

 

[GeographyDude]

. . . the allies (especially the Soviet Union). . .

Wallace might end up actually being harder on the Soviet Union, because a person who has a semi-love affair which crashes may be harder than a person who never had said love affair in the first place.

And then everyone, let's give Wallace credit for a little political savvy. He was Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to '41 and I think kind of a central player in the New Deal.