PARTISAN REVIEW
the more critical circumstance that there is a central core to his social
and political conceptions.
His essential conservatism reaches back to the Iowa backgrounrl.
Here Macdonald, fortunately, does not fall into the "heir of the popu–
lists" error; but he might have pointed out that Wallace's America
was also William Allen White's America, a wonderful realm where
self-interest was elevated to a principle and labeled
progress.
This was
the ·land of the four-hundred-acre farmers, where reform meant higher
income and lower costs for everyone. Efficiency, science, planning are
perfectly compatible with that goal. The antitrust element was, by
contrast, for a few years, an incidental by-product of the local situa–
tion. Hostility to big business was never as real as envy on the part of
smalltime imitators, imitators whose folk heroes were Henry Ford and
John D. Rockefeller.
It
is from the perspective of such a position that Wallace regards
foreign policy. I do not know that he has deviated significantly from
the line he laid down, as far back as 1934, in
America Must Choose,
which is basically one of self-containment in the interests of agriculture.
Even his one world phase ( 1942-45) involved all sorts of tortuous quali–
fications toward that end.
Shortly before his political career began, Wallace's point of view
was complicated by a religious experience. Of its precise nature we know
little; to speak openly of the religion of a public figure in the United
States is little short of an indecency. But not long after 1930, Wallace
spent some time in Europe, his family met with financial reverses and
lost control of its paper, and he himself passed through an emotional
and religious crisis that
t~ok
him out of the ancestral Presbyterian
church and made him a devout Anglo-Catholic. To Macdonald the
conversion is simply another sign of Henry's queerness, in a class with
his interest in diet; indeed the affair gets less space than the dubious,
but juicy, Zenda letters. Yet these religious beliefs have an ideological
content, not without relevance to the man's conception of history and
of his own destiny.
In these ideas is the proper point of departure for an inquiry
into the nature of the unlikely symbiosis between the man and the forces
which now support him. How do the Wallace ideas and the Wallace
personality thrive in the American political scene? What are the organic
elements in the soil that nurtured the myth? Analysis would reveal
the sources, a seeming absence of alternatives and a dangerous hope–
lessness, product of repeated betrayals.
Oscar Handlin
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