Angelenos are in for a treat. Some little-known but extraordinarily-consequential history is being presented in an absolutely riveting 50-actor immersive play aptly titled “Convention,” which opened at Hollywood’s Industry Loft on October 16.
The play asks the audience to imagine how different — how much better, more peaceful, and more prosperous — the world would have been if there had been no atomic bombings in World War II and no Cold War; if we had ended colonialism in 1945 and France and the U.S. had never invaded Vietnam; or if women’s rights and civil rights had flourished in the immediate postwar period.
This may seem like far-fetched speculation today, but most Americans would be surprised to learn how close we may have come to such a different outcome.
The show turns on the moment, 82 years ago, when former Secretary of Agriculture and then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace came within a hairsbreadth of getting the Democratic renomination for vice president. Therefore, if not for a determined Democratic party machine, Wallace would have become president on April 12, 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt passed away, having won reelection for an unprecedented fourth term barely five months earlier.
Sadly, Wallace, a true visionary, has largely been expunged from American memory. Historian Arthur Schlesinger insisted that Wallace, an Iowa corn geneticist, had been the “best secretary of agriculture this country has ever had.” He certainly managed to rescue the devastated agricultural economy during Roosevelt’s first New Deal term. When Democratic Party “bosses” refused to put Wallace, who hailed from a prominent Republican farm family, on the ticket as vice president in 1940, Roosevelt threatened to turn down the nomination, and the party bosses yielded.
As vice president, Wallace famously championed the anti-imperialist, pro-working class “century of the common man,” which he opposed to Henry Luce’s vision of a U.S.-dominated “American century.” Despite entertaining such radical views, Wallace’s popularity soared. When time came to nominate the next vice president at the party convention in July 1944, Wallace had the overwhelming support of national Democrats, as evidenced in a Gallup Poll released the first day of the convention showing that 65% of Democratic voters wanted him back on the ticket. Only 2% preferred Missouri Senator Harry Truman.
But this time the conservative and often corrupt party bosses demanded their pound of flesh. Roosevelt was too weak and near death to fight for Wallace the way he did in 1940, much to the chagrin of Eleanor and the Roosevelt children. In the end, the president acquiesced to the bosses’ demand that he dump Wallace.
Still, the outcome was far from determined. At the convention, Wallace’s seconding speech for Roosevelt triggered a wild, spontaneous, prolonged demonstration. Florida Senator Claude Pepper realized that, if he could fight his way to the microphone and place Wallace’s name in nomination, Wallace would sweep the convention. With Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly and party head Robert Hannegan screaming for adjournment, their handpicked chair Samuel Jackson announced a motion to adjourn. Despite the overwhelming majority of delegates shouting their opposition, Jackson said the motion passed and the convention was ended for that evening. He later admitted that he was under strict orders not to let Wallace be nominated. When the gavel landed, Pepper was only five feet from the microphone.
Had he taken the extra step and nominated Wallace in the midst of that frenzy, history could have been fundamentally different. The Cold War and the nuclear arms race may well have been avoided. Instead, the bosses regained control. The deals kicked in and Truman secured the nomination.
Roosevelt begged Wallace to remain in the cabinet, and Wallace became secretary of commerce. From that position, Wallace, soon the last surviving New Dealer in the Truman inner circle, waged a tireless and often lonely fight to persuade Truman to abandon his confrontational stance toward the Soviets and seek peaceful coexistence. He repeatedly implored Truman to understand how American actions around the world — including the U.S. monopoly and testing of atomic bombs, skyrocketing military spending, and expanding global network of military bases — looked to the Soviets, who had just lost 27 million people and much of their economy defeating the Nazis.
While Wallace’s importuning initially influenced the president, the preponderance of Cold Warriors who surrounded Truman ultimately prevailed, and Wallace’s sage counsel went unheeded.
Roosevelt family members and their allies in the still-powerful progressive wing of the party continued to support Wallace, but his outspoken opposition to the burgeoning nuclear arms race and to the demonization of America’s erstwhile Soviet allies was more than Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, and other anti-communist hardliners could countenance.
On September 12, 1946, Wallace delivered an impassioned speech before 20,000 people at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a speech that Truman had explicitly approved and one whose message is needed as much today as it was 80 years ago. “Tonight I want to talk about peace,” he said, warning that “he who trusts in the atom bomb will sooner or later perish by the atom bomb.” He deplored war-inducing “oil rivalries” and rejected “this war-with-Russia talk” as “criminal foolishness.” Eight days later, Truman fired him, and the dream of a peaceful world faded.
That night, Wallace told a national radio audience, “Winning the peace is more important than high office…The success or failure of our foreign policy will mean the difference between life and death for our children and grandchildren…It may mean the difference between the existence and the extinction of man and of the world.”
Somehow, often more by luck than by statesmanship, we’ve so far managed to avoid Wallace’s worst fears. But with increased saber-rattling and a growing threat of nuclear war, there is no guarantee our luck won’t run out.