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In Rome, Ceres was the goddess of grain. In the U. S. she is a goddess of politics. This year both major parties picked the Vice-Presidential candidates to appeal to farmers—McNary because his farm bill (for export subsidies) was the unfulfilled hope of farmers, Wallace because his AAA at last brought farmers cash in the depths of Depression. But having made sacrifices on the altars of Ceres, politicians still could not tell whether the offerings would prove acceptable, or whether Henry Wallace would be as attractive to farmers as a potential President as he was as Secretary of Agriculture.
Mystic. Henry Wallace appeared in Washington in the early days of the New Deal like a Will Rogers of the intellectuals. His reddish-brown hair stood perpetually on end, his hat was always worn on the back of his head, his clothes were almost ostentatiously untidy and the knot in his tie always stopped, as if it had met an immovable object, about an inch below his collar. He studied his shoelaces while he talked, or, seated behind his desk,, propped his feet on his wastepaper basket and held forth on the intricacies of the farm program.
There was no pose in the Wallace manner. Henry Wallace was no farmer, and Washington well knew his story—how the grandson of the founder of Wallaces' Farmer, son of Warren Harding's Secretary of Agriculture, had grown up among agricultural theoreticians and politicians, how he had painstakingly conducted experiments that led to the commercial development of Professor Shull's discovery of hybrid corn,* how, taken by Henry Morgenthau to Candidate Franklin Roosevelt, he had ticked off the things he would say if he were appealing to the farmers, how Franklin Roosevelt had followed his advice and seen the rousing response it got.
Washington learned more slowly to know the other Wallace, the constant reader—of Robert Frost, the Bible, Tom Paine, Rousseau. St. Augustine, Adam Smith. Darwin, Karl Marx—who believed that Das Kapital, more than any other book, had shaped the mind of the modern world. It did not know his ascetic habits—his vegetarian diet of lettuce leaves, cottage cheese, crackers, milk, fruit—or the food experiments he had conducted as a young man, when he fasted for a week to observe the effects, and once fed himself solely on a diet of popcorn and milk to see how little a man could live on. It did not know his relaxations—driving fast at night to clear his mind of the pressures of office; getting up at 5:50 a.m. to play a sweating, awkward game of tennis; playing with astrology and numerology as a hobby, as he had once begun his corn breeding. Used to his vagaries, Washington was not surprised when he took up boomerang throwing, but predicted that it would not last because it was not active enough for so restless a physical and intellectual exerciser.
Least of all did Washington see Wallace the mystic, the author of Statesmanship and Religion, a Presbyterian who became an Episcopalian, who sang lustily at service, and whose hard-boiled campaign managers worried lest he go on a religious spree. No deep internal struggle foreshadowed Henry Wallace's mysticism. Wallace was religious by temperament, with a calm, measured look that his friend Grant Wood (who drew the cover of this week's TIME) caught in his portrait.