A book note from Gene TeSelle

[1-29-01]



A new book by John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), offers a good opportunity to reconsider the political dilemmas of the Thirties and Forties. It is especially helpful for those of us who were coming to maturity during those decades and experienced all those dilemmas personally.

Wallace was not only the originator of hybrid corn and the Green Revolution. He was perhaps the chief embodiment of the New Deal, and he had immense popular appeal (that's why F.D.R. picked him as Vice-Presidential candidate in 1940). This also meant that he aroused hostility from big city bosses, Southern Democrats, and conservative Catholics within the Democratic Party (that's why F.D.R. dumped him in 1944). Also from industrialists, conservative Republicans, the military, the State Department, and the F.B.I. Also, as the Second World War came to a close, from champions of the British and French Empires.

The tragedy of the years 1945-1948, in hindsight, is that Wallace, who always identified his own program as "liberalism" (it was a loaded term even then, and it meant something quite different from Communism) failed to detach himself sufficiently from Stalinism and from the manipulative tactics of American Communists, which had already turned off many activists. Wallace's Midwestern ways did not fit in with Eastern sophistication and tough-mindedness, and at times he was naive about both Communism and American political realities. Yet he tried to build a broad coalition that would maintain the New Deal agenda and work through the United Nations.

The "realists" and anti-Stalinists in turn failed to detach themselves sufficiently from the forces of reaction at home and abroad. (Perhaps the most damning--and prophetic--evidence is George Kennan's secret memo of 1947 saying that the U.S., with 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population, had to maintain this position of disparity without detriment to national security. Reinhold Niebuhr, an adviser to his Policy Planning Staff, must have read it and gone along with the policies that it implied.) Anti-Stalinist liberals in the Democratic Party helped open the door as early as 1947 to the investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee and then by Senator Joseph McCarthy; the hearings were then used to taint and discredit nearly all liberal and progressive movements.

If we seek to explain the tragic disputes among American progressives during the Thirties and Forties, and again during the Sixties, it looks as though they were the result of factional attempts at monopoly control. Precisely when there are vigorous popular movements and appealing programs, those who have strong "control needs" will be tempted to jump in front of the parade for their own aggrandizement, and those who are turned off by them may be tempted in turn to make self-defeating alliances.

Several neo-conservatives whom I know became that way when, in the overheated atmosphere of the late Sixties and early Seventies, they were trashed by students. They have spent the rest of their careers getting even. It's not an especially noble way to spend the prime of one's life, but it's understandable, and in some cases it has paid off very well. Let's hope we can learn from the mistakes of the past and do better.

Those of us who are on the "liberal left" have seen dozens of kinds of nonsense among our companions. Rather than scoff at it or go off to march in lock-step with reactionary movements, the best course is just to ignore inappropriate behavior and keep moving in the same direction.

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