WI: Wallace Instead Of Truman

If Wallace remained FDR's VP, how would he be as president?

  • Better than Truman

    Votes: 1 6.3%
  • Good, though not as bad as Truman

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Hotly contested in ranking

    Votes: 5 31.3%
  • A total mess

    Votes: 10 62.5%

  • Total voters
    16
Henry Wallace was the vice president for FDR until just a few months before FDR died. He's somewhat controversial for how pro-Soviet he was, and he was kind of a weirdo. However with the benefit of hindsight, I'm interested to know what kind of president he would've been, would he really have been a disaster or would he have been great? Or somewhere between the two? It would certainly be interesting to know how he'd handle things in Truman's place. Of course, I don't have any illusions he'd win election in his own right barring a miracle, so who the Democrats would pick instead would be interesting.
 
I don't know that much about the guy personally, but something tells me that once he got into power, he'd drift rightward, at least on foreign policy. The current occupant of the White House(during the primaries, a self-announced neutral on Israel/Palestine, ruminated about removing US troops from around the globe, etc) might provide an example of how a renegade behaves once he's surrounded by the cigar-chomping generals and Foggy Bottom hardnoses.

At most, I think you might see a President Wallace going for more of a containment, rather than a victory, strategy, against the USSR(the George Kennan view, I think?). In real life, Wallace supported the Korean War, a mere couple of years after his '48 run, so I suspect being in the White House would make his conversion even more urgent.
 
Wallace would likely drift rightward in regards to foreign policy, sure, but could he have decided not to support the more stringent containment policies of France and Britain, such as vetoing the recolonization of Indochina or the partition of India?
 
An old post of mine:

***

(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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