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From New International, Vol. XIV No. 3, March 1948, pp. 94–95.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth
by Dwight Macdonald
Vanguard, N.Y. 1948, 188 pp., $2.50
Macdonald’s book, a development of his two articles in Politics magazine, is certainly one of the best pieces of political journalism turned out in a long time. As far as it goes, it is comprehensive: all the material one might want on Wallace’s personality is here gathered between two covers and ordered into simple, useful form. It is annihilating: Macdonald has a good eye for the ridiculous and the absurd. Especially good are the paragraphs of semantic dissection in which Wallace’s rhetoric is torn to bits. (“Wallese” is spoken in a “region of perpetual fogs, caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier.”) And, what is so rare in political journalism these days, it is extremely well written: fast, wicked, not above some good joke-making (Wallace is a “global backwoodsman”).
The book, in fact, is enthusiastically recommended as a “must” for reading. It has to be added, however, that more should not be expected of it than the author apparently set out to do. There is little about Wallace’s policies as AAA administrator or the meaning of the AAA program. Macdonald never attempts any sort of correlation between Wallace’s personal activity and the social structure (class relationships) of American capitalism. (While I am aware than it is not enough merely to label Wallace a “petty bourgeois,” nevertheless a real political study of Wallace would have to make some correlations of this sort.) There is hardly any discussion of the economic meaning of Wallace’s back-to-small-business program. And so on.
What it adds up to is that most of the opportunities have been missed (at least, not taken) for interpreting Wallace’s apparently personal contradictions as reflections of the contradictions of a social system which could give rise to such a character and lift him to social prominence. The material at hand simply cries out for this kind of treatment. If the ordinary reader will leave the book feeling that Wallace has been shown up to be mainly a bumbling idiot, I am not sure that full justice has thereby been done to the victim. The author, as a sort-of-socialist himself, would also have accomplished something else by a broader treatment: the book’s dominant effect would have been more than simply anti-Wallace, especially in the midst of an election campaign where pure-and-simple anti-Wallacism is objectively pretty much a boost for the Democratic camp. When the original articles appeared in Politics, the context of the magazine was perhaps sufficient to take care of this one-sidedness; in the form of a much more widely circulated book, a few parenthetical remarks hardly suffice.
But confronted with such a lively, informative and topical journalistic job, it is perhaps captious to complain that something more serious was not attempted with the subject. Macdonald’s book has its own value, precisely because of its limited scope. It helps to fill in a corner which Marxist social analysis rarely bothers to link up with its own basic exploration of social forces and motivations: the human-individual form and appearance through which social forces act.
In this sense Wallace is a rich subject for study. That Wallace really believes himself at the head of a great crusade, a Gideonite army, that he sees himself as leader rather than led, is a conclusion readily drawn from Macdonald’s book. Precisely because of his lack of self-awareness, Wallace personifies a prevalent type of mentality. For all his wide reading and scientific interest, he is basically anti-intellectual. His mind is pure fuzz except when confronted with a technical problem. He personifies the typical “engineer mentality” of wide strata of the American lower middle class, but with a basic duality; as David Bazelon has written, “Where technique does not suffice, Wallace fills in with religion ... Wallace’s self-reliance, his sense of power, proceeds from his technical capacity; his moral nature ... from religious feeling. He has been unable to bring these two points of view together in any rational framework.” Between these two, so often divergent, strands of his thought there is an appalling wasteland of murk, fog, bluff, cowardice and stupidity – thoroughly explored by Macdonald.
When Wallace took a trip through Siberia in 1944, he made a speech in Irkutsk declaring that “Men born in wide, free spaces will not brook injustice and slavery. They will not even temporarily live in slavery.” Irkutsk happens to be a center of the slave-labor system of Siberia and Wallace’s audience must have included the wardens of those camps.
This is the perfect image of Henry Wallace: vague rhetoric about “wide, free spaces” spoken in friendly fashion to the keepers of the ghastliest slave system of modern society. Can one imagine a deeper split in human consciousness? Could the Stalinists have found a more perfect candidate?
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