Man with a Hoe

From the hospital bed where he lay dying last month, Henry Wallace wrote a last letter to a 16-year-old grandson in Colorado. "I like your appreciation of the mountains," he said. "They are made for your nose and my nose, for your eyes and my eyes. There are so many new experiences in life. Life is a serious thing for some people, but it can also be joyous if lived with common sense."

Henry Agard Wallace's life was not a singularly joyous one. Nor, despite exceptional intelligence and roots planted deep in Iowa soil, had it always been governed by common sense. Yet when the former Vice President died in a Danbury, Conn., hospital last week at 77, consumed by a rare, wasting neuromuscular ailment known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, his ideas and ideals had long since been woven into American life, his grand illusions all but forgotten. In the 17 years since he campaigned for the presidency as a candidate and captive of the Communist-dominated Progressive Party, Wallace had retreated into obscurity so all-enfolding that few Americans were aware that one of the most controversial figures of their time had been suffering from an incurable disease for more than a year.

Strawberries for Cash. In appearance and manner, Wallace was the prototypical Midwesterner. From the rebellious shock of hair to the scuffed shoes, he looked like the perennial farm boy. Yet behind the craggy, Scotch-Irish face and diffident blue eyes lurked a bewildering blend of intellectual acumen and messianic wrongheadedness.

He was a brilliant plant geneticist whose hybridizations left his fellow Americans with infinitely improved strains of corn, juicier, hardier strawberries, and hens that would lay more eggs on less feed. Only last March he was in the Dominican Republic trying to introduce strawberries as a badly needed cash crop.

From God to Government. Midwestern farmers still shake their heads over his program to raise hog prices by killing off millions of piglets. His later proposal to export farm surpluses to needy countries earned the derisive label of "milk for Hottentots." Nonetheless, Wallace had a profound understanding of farm economics at a time when U.S. agriculture was widely regarded as God's concern, not the Government's.

As a passionate humanitarian and New Dealer, Wallace initiated many radical policies that have long since been accepted as routine functions of Government: distribution of surplus food to the needy, price supports for key crops, production controls, federal management of U.S. agriculture. Many of his phrases ("the ever-normal granary," "the century of the common man") entered the language, as his agricultural schemes left their imprint on the land.

Sonic Barriers. Largely as a result of Wallace's advocacy, the "farm problem" of today is vastly different from the cruel paradox of the Depression, when farmers went broke amid bounteous production. Today, despite ever more plentiful crops, the efficient farmer is assured of a decent living, contributes his buying power to the economy and his output to the hungry of the world. He may be part of a "permanently subsidized peasantry," as Charles Shuman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, insists, but he stands tall on his land.

To many of his generation, Henry Wallace was the Paul Bunyan of his age. Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran, a fellow New Dealer, said: "Every time you ride or fly over this country and see the condition of the land--the plowed contours, the bulging granaries, the neat, productive look--you think of Henry Wallace. He saved the land and then made it possible for this nation to feed the whole world."

Yet--though he shunned liquor and tobacco--Wallace sounded at times as if his visions were hashish-fed. "At a certain point," wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Coming of the New Deal, "his mind seemed almost to break through a sonic barrier and transform itself so that hardheaded analysis passed imperceptibly into rhapsodic mysticism." A Presbyterian, he flirted with an exotic cult led by a White Russian charlatan, served as an acolyte in the Episcopal Church and bombarded Roosevelt with allegorically couched advice on foreign policy. And, despite his closeness to the land and his concern for those who live by it, even overcoming his early abhorrence of Communism, Wallace came to defend Stalin's brutal collectivization of Soviet agriculture as a great humanitarian venture.

Out-Husking Willkie. Republican by inheritance and initial choice, Wallace was the son of Henry C. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture under Harding and Coolidge, ran the prosperous family weekly Wallace's Farmer (motto: "Good Farming, Clear Thinking, Right Living") and the Hi-Bred (a play on hybrid) Corn Co. Believing, correctly, that the farm depression would drag down the entire economy, he later enlisted in Franklin D. Roosevelt's first brain trust. Wallace wrote F.D.R.'s farm plank in 1932. Then he assumed the herculean task of implementing it as Agriculture Secretary during the first two Roosevelt administrations.

In 1940, as war approached and Wallace outgrew an instinctive isolationism, Roosevelt--who was anxious in any case to dump curmudgeonly old John Nance Garner as his two-term Vice President--chose his Agriculture Secretary for the vice-presidential nomination. To party strategists, Henry Wallace was the only man who could out-husk Wendell Willkie in the corn belt--and they were right. As Vice President, he headed the wartime Board of Economic Warfare, traveled to Russia, China (where he taught peasants how to use hoes Western-style) and other Allied countries, participated from the beginning in the development of the atom bomb. But he also made many important enemies within the Democratic Party, especially among Southerners and big-city bosses. They prevailed on Roosevelt in 1944 to let the convention drop Wallace in favor of Harry Truman. Wallace became Secretary of Commerce in 1945, and soon proved how right, or how lucky, the Democratic chieftains had been.

Pravda's Favorite. Wallace, who had little rapport with Truman, clung to his practice of speaking out on foreign affairs. As the shadow of Soviet imperialism lengthened over Europe, he advocated a conciliatory line toward the nation's wartime ally. On Sept. 12, 1946, he made a celebrated speech condemning the Administration's hardening attitude toward the Soviets at the very moment that the U.S. was sparring with Stalin over Europe's post-war boundaries. Infuriated by Wallace's intrusion, which suggested that the U.S. was disunited on the Cold War issues he was negotiating, Secretary of State James Byrnes protested loudly from Paris. Though Truman had been given a copy of the speech in advance, he fired Wallace.

In 1948, after a stint as editor of the New Republic, Wallace was wooed and waylaid by the hard-eyed opportunists of the Progressive Party. Though never a Communist himself, he accepted Communist help, he said, because "I will not repudiate any support which comes to me on the basis of interest in peace." But from the start of the campaign it was plain that the Progressive leadership was interested solely in exploiting Wallace's popular appeal. They had a willing figurehead. As Wallace stormed across the land, condemning the Marshall Plan, aid to Greece and Turkey, and U.S. resistance to Soviet pressure on Berlin, he became Pravda's favorite American. Wallace won only 1,157,000 votes out of 49 million, trailed Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey and Strom Thurmond. He carried not a single state.

Prophets' Dream. Wallace finally bowed to reality in 1950, when the Communists invaded South Korea. He broke with the Progressive Party, advised the U.S. to rearm "as fast as possible," and became "convinced that Russia is out to dominate the world." In the years of cold war and domestic affluence, he became a forgotten figure. He spent his last years on his 115-acre experimental farm, Farvue, in New York's Westchester County, rising at 4 a.m. each day to work with his plants and to write. Mellowed in retirement, he quietly accepted an invitation to John Kennedy's inauguration, though he had supported Richard Nixon in the election. One thought he kept with him from the ill-fated 1948 campaign. "The American dream," he said then, "is a dream of the prophets of old--the dream of each man living in peace under his own vine and fig tree." It was a dream that Henry Wallace helped fulfill for every American who lives by the soil.

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