PARTISAN REVIEW
and has hauled up a mass of illogicalities and contradictions. Thrown
together in a sprightly volume, these make entertaining, if not always
enlightening, reading. Here are illustrations enough of the vagueness
of the Wallace thinking, of the lack of consistency in the inan, of his
tendency to compromise, of his ignorance, of his downright gullibility.
And the whole is set forth in the spirit of good, clean, malice. One
could compile an index of the people Macdonald dislikes simply by
tabulating the characters with whom Wallace is compared: Woodrow
Wilson, Bruce Bliven, Hitler, Herbert Hoover, Eric Johnston.
But not all this heat is productive of light. Macdonald is so eager
to get Henry going and coming, to fall upon his victim from both flanks,
that he neglects to make sure of the ground from which the attack is
launched. No one is likely to come away from the book a Wallace
admirer; but neither will many lay it down with an understanding of
what made the man or the myth, of why Wallace thinks and acts as
he does, of the nature of his following and of his undoubted political
appeal.
Macdonald's attitude towards his subject is, at root, ambivalent.
On the one hand, Wallace is regarded as a rather pathetic figure, a
person "of decent instincts and intellectual ability," perverted by am–
bition and political life. At the same time, constant reiteration pounds
home the fact that the one-time vice-president is a cipher, an eidolon
created by the liberal journals in their own image. I will not say that
the two positions are essentially incompatible. But this book does noth–
ing to reconcile them.
One difficulty lies in the fact that Macdonald writes as if a myth
were not a real thing. Yet whether the image of the exponent of the
common man is enshrined only in the hearts of the few hundred thou–
sand readers of the
Nation,
the
New Republic,
and
PM
as we are told
here, or whether, as recent events indicate, that idolatry is far more
widespread, it is real, and it is related to Wallace's personality and
ideas.
It
is, for instance, hard to imagine the same niche occupied by
Harold Ickes or Leon Henderson, figures which superficially would
appear more to the tastes of the liberal editors.
The ease with which Wallace falls into contradictions and incon–
sistencies is significant and understandable. After all, his political career
is blanketed by the New Deal and the War, periods of monumental
intellectual confusion when he shared the stage at one point or another
with such other liberals as Donald Richberg, General Johnson, Senator
Ball, and Wendell Wilkie. But the readiness with which the man trimmed
his sails to the prevailing winds of the times ought not to blind us to
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