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The Alternatives. Were these, in fact, the only alternatives? Certainly there were serious proponents of another point of view, outside the limits of Wallace's peculiar brand of emotional logic. One of these proponents was the U.S. State Department. Byrnes's position is that war is not necessarily inevitable, even if the U.S. fails "to get along with Russia." In Byrnes's words it is the position of "patience as well as firmness." The potential reward is Russian respect for U.S. democracy, freedom of choice for the small nations and in some distant future, perhaps, the collapse of Russia's unnatural totalitarian scheme. This position implies a political conflict which can conceivably be waged and won without recourse to war. The policy risks war—as any international policy does—but the risk is not the same thing as inevitability.
There is also the position held by some pessimistic Americans—and possibly held also by the Kremlin—that war is inevitable no matter what the U.S. does. In that case there is nothing to do but arm for war.
But these other alternatives, one so risky, the other so filled with doom, seemed poor payment to the Western World for the blood, sweat and tears of a war just ended. Henry Wallace has minted a brighter coin. Russian Communism and the free-enterprise system, he said, could live "one with another in a profitable and productive peace." U.S. democracy and Russian Communism could divide the world into spheres of influence and get along. Wallace offered "peace for our time." The coin was bright, but it had a faintly familiar and counterfeit ring.
Out of the Past. In 1940 another American idol had proclaimed: "Cooperation is never impossible when there is sufficient gain on both sides." It had taken some Americans quite a while to find out that Charles Lindbergh was offering them a counterfeit.
Like Lindbergh, Wallace is also an earnest and sincere man and, in a number of respects, also a symbol. Americans rarely know their Secretary of Commerce, but they know Wallace—or think they do. Everybody knows a little bit about him, but very few know the complete man. In the aggregate they admire, respect, hate or ridicule him. Almost all are either puzzled or dismayed by him, and wonder how he ever got to Washington—forgetting that he would probably never have been there except for Franklin Roosevelt's penchant for collecting men of all shades, types, opinions and personalities, including the curious.
Henry Wallace came from Iowa, where he was the editor of Wallace's Farmer, the journal founded by his Republican grandfather. He was friend and spokesman of the men of the soil, the exponent of scientific farming. He was a dreamer, and a scientist who developed a hybrid corn. Franklin Roosevelt made him his Secretary of Agriculture and he went to Washington —a shy, humble man with a cowlick, who once put himself on an exclusive diet of soybeans just to prove a point. He proved that soybeans are not enough.