Once In a Lifetime

In an article titled 10 Reasons I'm Only Voting for Bernie Sanders and Will Not Support Hillary Clinton, Huffington Post author H. A. Goodman gives as his tenth reason for voting for Bernie , Bernie 

Sanders is a "once in a lifetime candidate."

 I could not agree more. However this declaration reminded me of an earlier such opportunity the American people had and the consequences of electoral defeat.

In the 1944 election we lost a “once in a lifetime” presidential candidate. Henry A. Wallace was Vice President, chosen for that office by Franklin Roosevelt because of his stellar performance as FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture and Wallace’s popularity therein during the agricultural crises of the 1930’s such as the dustbowl and massive soil erosion.

As an example, Wallace and other soil scientists knew that soil erosion was due, in substantial measure, to the American farmer’s practice of plowing in straight furrows, which let rainwater run straight down the sides of hills resulting in soil erosion. Contour plowing, following the contour of the land, would greatly reduce this runoff. When Wallace tried to persuade American farmers to adopt contour plowing he and his scientists were scoffed at. These farmers knew from long tradition that the straight row was the way plowing should be done. Indeed farmers evaluated each other in term so the straightness of their furrows.

So Wallace took a piece of land of common fertility, contour plowed it and planted his corn. His crop of corn that fall was so much greater than that of adjacent fields that farmers began to adopt contour plowing. This is an example of Wallace’s way of administrating. Rather than ordering farmers to change a deeply rooted traditional practice in order to prevent an ever increasing loss of arable land, he chose to persuade by example.

Wallace was a visionary who revolutionized agricultural practices in this country and enjoyed wide respect in Europe and Russia. He was one of the world’s most renowned agronomists, especially in hybridization. He was a noted mathematician. Most importantly, his view of the post-World War II world was people-focused. Unlike Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, who declared that the 20^th century would be the American century, Wallace in one of his most famous speeches declared and demonstrated why the 20^th century would be the century of the common man.

One more observation; Henry Wallace was a man of peace. War was an absolute last resort. To confirm this one need only read his speech titled The Way To Peace, delivered in late 1946 as he saw the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR starting to take shape. About the time Churchill was delivering his March 1946 Iron Curtain speech, soaked in hostility, Wallace was delivering a speech on how to obtain peace. Interestingly, Wallace began his speech by observing that war prompted a lot of excitement in human beings. Peace did not. There were, for example no parades celebrating peace as there were celebrating war. How many politicians would have begun a speech on peace by observing a fundamental conflict in human nature, especially, at a time so proximate to the most destructive war mankind had ever seen and the looming prospect of conflict with the Soviet Union.

Given the above characteristic, and many more such in a Vice President, why did Roosevelt select Harry Truman to be his running mate in the election of 1944? In what documentary film maker Oliver Stone called Roosevelt’s worst decision, FDR succumbed to pressure from the business segment of the Democratic Party that feared a Wallace presidency, should FDR’s illness prove fatal, because of Wallace’s efforts to revitalize a somewhat moribund New Deal. Southern Democrats were also well represented in those who pressured FDR to dump Wallace for the little known and administratively inexperienced Harry Truman.

As Peter Dreier portrays in his Truthout article titled Henry Wallace, America's Forgotten Visionary, the consequences of the decision to replace Wallace resulted in  the dropping of the atomic bombs, which Wallace would never have done (see Henry Wallace Would Never Have Dropped the Bomb on Japan by Robert L. Baker in the Executive Intelligence Review) and the pursuit of a Cold War with the Soviet Union, which Wallace would not have pursued. I strongly recommend reading the Henry Wallace, America's Forgotten Visionary article to get a clear understanding of how deeply politics can matter.

My primary objective in writing the above account of Henry Wallace’s virtues and fate is to draw attention to the analogy it has to our current situation and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

In Sanders we have a “once in a lifetime” candidate. The Democratic Party establishment, especially its business sector, not to mention the corporate media, is trying to suborn Bernie’s candidacy. We are faced with an entangled web of Middle East wars, the prospect of endless war and the militarization of domestic policing that it has spawned. As post World War II America and the world so badly needed Wallace so we equally need Bernie Sanders.  We must recognize the gravity of our situation and the imperative of getting Bernie elected. This time we must not let it end in failure.

Bob Newhard