“The Cornfield Prophet” Henry A . Wallace, known for his pioneering work in agriculture, was a progressive statesman who championed the “Century of the Common Man.” A heartbeat away from the presidency for four years as FDR’s vice president, his supporters viewed him as the torchbearer for the New Deal, while opponents dismissed him as a Communist sympathizer.
A Des Moines Register poll from 1999 ranked Wallace the “most influential Iowan of the 20th century.” Part of his nuanced and complex legacy, and what is largely forgotten — or deliberately ignored — was his remarkable perception of the rise of fascism. His early forecasts have proven to be deadly accurate.
“My grandfather acknowledged the great difference between American fascists and other countries’ murderous authoritarians,” Wallace’s grandson, Henry Scott Wallace, wrote in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. “The American breed doesn’t need violence. Lying to the people is so much easier.”
As the world watches the blitzkrieg of assaults on human rights in the second Trump regime, fewer Iowans remember Wallace or his warnings of a world on the brink of disaster.
In his 1974 book, A History of Iowa, University of Northern Iowa history professor Leland Sage wrote, “the history of American agriculture could be written in the form of a biography” of Henry Agard Wallace, who was born on his father’s farm near Orient, Iowa in 1888.
In addition to farming, Wallace’s father, Henry C. Wallace, taught dairy science at Iowa State University, before leaving for Washington D.C. in the 1920s to serve as Secretary of Agriculture in the presidential administration of Republicans Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Wallace’s grandfather, Reverend Henry Wallace — “Uncle Henry” — was a Presbyterian minister and founder of Wallaces’ Farmer magazine.
While he was at ISU, Henry C. Wallace befriended George Washington Carver, a student who would go on to national fame as a pioneering agricultural scientist and educator. During walks with his friend’s son through the meadows of Ames, Carver would teach a young Henry A. Wallace about botany. These lessons from Carver — born into slavery before becoming ISU’s first Black student in 1891 — made a deep impression.
Henry A. Wallace became an agricultural innovator himself, developing one of the first hybrid seed varieties. In 1926, he co-founded the Hi-Bred Corn Co. in Des Moines. The company was later renamed Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co., became an important part of American farming, and would eventually be sold to Du Pont in the late 1990s for billions. Hybrid seeds existed long before Wallace, of course, but his far-reaching vision for their potential helped usher in an agricultural revolution.
The precarious prosperity of the “roaring ’20s” came to an abrupt end in October 1929, with the crash of the stock market. The economic collapse that ensued was felt far beyond Wall Street. From 1929 to 1932, net farm income dropped by two-thirds as increased production ran into falling prices. In Iowa, thousands lost their land and livelihood, devastating the Hawkeye State. In just two years, one of every eight farms in Iowa County was auctioned off. The farming crises in the country escalated as droughts from lack of rainfall plagued the east and then the Great Plains, culminating into the Dust Bowl.
Furious at Republican administrations for their failure to effectively address the farming crises, Wallace broke ranks with the Republican Party in 1932 and endorsed Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president over Republican incumbent, and Iowa native, Herbert Hoover. Wallace even blamed President Hoover siding with big business over farmers for his father’s premature death from stress.
After Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the November election, he appointed Wallace to his cabinet as Secretary of Agriculture. He immediately began to focus on solutions to crises besetting rural America, implementing commodity price supports to aid struggling farmers and creating soil conservation programs to help restore depleted farm fields. New Deal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., would later praise Wallace as “the best Secretary of Agriculture the country ever had.”
But Wallace’s influence went beyond his official role, and as fascists and Nazis amassed power in Europe, he became an outspoken opponent of those violent movements and tyrannical regimes.
Fascist sympathies festered in the United States throughout the 1930s. As in European countries, there was widespread support for the Nazis among the American ruling class, who admired the Nazis for crushing communists and other working class radicals.
Newspaper barons like William Randolph Hearst, Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune‘s Robert McCormick routinely attacked New Deal programs as “un-American,” while also railing against immigrants and organized labor. Meanwhile, automobile tycoon Henry Ford spread antisemitic propaganda with his Dearborn Independent newspaper.
On Feb. 20, 1939, the German-American Bund hosted a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which was attended by 20,000 people. Promoted as a “Pro-America Rally,” the stage featured a towering portrait of George Washington with so-called American Patriots singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” some of them wearing Nazi uniforms, hoisting banners emblazoned with swastikas and throwing their arms up in what Elon Musk might call a “Roman salute.”
Organizations like the American Liberty League, the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution and the Sentinels of Liberty, which branded the New Deal as “Jewish Communism,” may have been at the fringes of American politics, but they did receive quiet funding from members of some of the wealthiest American families, including the Du Ponts, the Mellons and the Rockefellers. In 1933, there was even an inept conspiracy with connections to major corporations aimed at staging a coup to replace FDR with USMC Gen. Smedley Butler. It collapsed when conspirators approached Butler, who rejected their idea and alerted the authorities. (See Jonathan Katz’s 2023 biography of Butler, Gangsters of Capitalism, for details on what’s known as the “Business Plot.”)
Wallace officially switched to the Democratic Party in 1936, and was selected as Roosevelt’s running mate at the 1940 Democratic National Convention. He would become the public face of American antifascism as a goodwill ambassador and public speaker.
“Fascism is a worldwide disease,” Wallace warned. “Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.”
Almost a year after Roosevelt won his third term as president, with Wallace replacing John Nance Gardner as vice president, Charles Lindbergh arrived in Des Moines. Lindbergh, still an international hero for his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, was invited to deliver his Sept. 11, 1941 speech by the Des Moines chapter of the America First Committee, an isolationist group.
Around 8,000 people filled the Coliseum on Locust Street to listen to Lindbergh call for America to stay out of the world war that begin with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Lindbergh vented his antisemitic views, attacking Jewish Americans and claiming the “greatest danger to this country lies in their ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
This message was met with a chorus of national outrage. Among the critics were editorial writers at the Des Moines Register, who wrote, “To single out the Jews was the most irresponsible and deplorable thing that could be done.”
Lindbergh and America First’s campaign for neutrality imploded once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, drawing the U.S. into the war.
The following year, Wallace gave a speech that resonated widely and was later expanded into his book, The Century of the Common Man.
“Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,'” Wallace said, taking aim at Time magazine publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 declaration that the 20th century was “the American Century.” “I say that the century on which we are entering — the century which will come into being after this war — can and must be the century of the common man.”
Wallace was a popular speaker, and made several speaking tours as vice president. In April 1944, following one of his speaking tours, the New York Times asked Wallace to define fascism. He responded with an op-ed, “The Danger of American Fascism”, describing a person “whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.”
Three months later, at the 1944 Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago, party leaders opposed to Wallace’s progressive stances engineered his removal from the ticket, replacing him with Sen. Harry S Truman of Missouri. Truman had gained a national profile as chair of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, holding hearings that exposed wartime profiteering by defense contractors. A product of Kansas City’s machine-style politics, Truman was an appealing candidate to conservative Democratic leaders. The party’s progressive wing called Wallace’s ouster “a coup,” but lacked the votes or influence to stop it. After Wallace finished his term as vice president, FDR appointed him Secretary of Commerce.
Roosevelt died during his fourth term on April 12, 1945, and Truman was sworn in as president. Wallace continued in his role at the Commerce Department, but differences between Truman and Wallace continued to grow — especially after the Cold War began, and Truman adopted a confrontational foreign policy and instituted a loyalty program for federal government employees aimed at removing “subversives” and broad categories of people deemed security risks.
Matters came to a head in September 1946, when Wallace gave a speech in which he criticized Truman’s foreign policy, saying “we should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States.” Truman demanded Wallace resign. He did.
The president issued a statement saying foreign policy was “the most important question confronting us today,” and “the Government of the United States must stand as a unit in its relations with the rest of the world.” Truman added, “I deeply regret the breaking of a long and pleasant official association, but I am sure that Mr. Wallace will be happier in the exercise of his right to share his views as a private citizen.”
Wallace did continue to share his views, both as the editor of The New Republic and through his work with the Progressive Citizens of America. In 1948, he launched a campaign for president as the candidate of the recently formed Progressive Party.
Although the 1948 election was dominated by the Democratic Party, with Truman running as the incumbent, and the Republican Party, which fielded New York Gov. Thomas Dewey as its candidate, it was a four-way race. In addition to Wallace and his Progressive Party, there was also Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the candidate of the Dixiecrats, a splinter group of southern Democrats dedicated to preserving Jim Crow policies.
“There is no real fight between a Truman and a Republican,” Wallace declared when he announced his candidacy. “Both stand for a policy which can lead to war in our lifetime and make war certain for our children. The American people must have more than a choice between evils. They must have a chance to vote for the greatest good for the greatest number.”
The donkey and the elephant go ’round and ’round on the same old merry-go-round.
Progressive Party campaign song for Henry Wallace
As a candidate, Wallace championed civil rights, labor rights, women’s rights, and peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union. His running mate, U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor from Idaho — a former Democrat known as “the singing cowboy” — was equally committed to civil rights. In May 1948, Taylor attended the Southern Negro Youth Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was beaten and arrested by police after refusing to follow local laws on racial segregation.
Campaigning throughout the Midwest and the Deep South, Wallace and his supporters constantly faced attacks from racists and anticommunists armed with baseball bats, shotguns and Molotov cocktails. Back in Iowa, Wallace was barred from campaigning on the University of Iowa campus.
“The state board of regents had put the no-candidates rule into effect,” in which “major presidential candidates were prohibited,” from speaking on campus, George Mills, who covered politics for the Des Moines Register at the time, later wrote in his book, Rogues and Heroes from Iowa’s Amazing Past.
Wallace moved the rally to a local park where nearly 3,000 people gathered, the majority of whom were students. He asked the audience, “Is it the desire of the board that you graduate without ever having met a practical political fact?”
Eggs were thrown, missing Wallace but striking a reporter and a child. Police ticketed Wallace’s car for unlawful parking.
Even though Wallace, who described himself as a “progressive capitalist,” had long been smeared as a communist or communist dupe, he nevertheless decided to accept the endorsement of the Communist Party, USA. Wallace was critical of the party, but maintained that they had the right to participate in American politics.
Truman seized on the Communist Party endorsement, and in a campaign speech in New York on Saint Patrick’s Day, he declared, “I do not want and will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his Communists. If joining them or permitting them to join me is the price of victory, I recommend defeat. ”
Wallace finished fourth in the November 1948 presidential election, winning only 2.4 percent of the popular vote.
After his defeat in 1948, Wallace largely withdrew from electoral politics, but he remained active in civic affairs, promoting the progressive causes he believed in until his death in 1965. He turned his attention back to agriculture, establishing an experimental farm on an estate he purchased near New York City, where he worked on ways to increase the number of eggs produced by chickens. He wrote books and pamphlets on agriculture during his later years. Appropriately for an Iowan, one of the books was a history of corn.
Stricken with ALS, Henry A. Wallace died at the age of 77 at his New York estate. In accordance with his wishes, Wallace’s cremated remains were buried in Des Moines’ Glendale Cemetery.
Throughout his political career, and especially once the Truman administration began to create the national security state, Wallace remained concerned about authoritarian tendencies in American politics.
“American Fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery,” he wrote in his 1944 New York Times op-ed.
Despite his political defeats, Henry A. Wallace never gave up on humanity or his dream for the future. He believed humanity could build a better tomorrow, free of hunger, poverty and war.
“Ideas, I sometimes think, are a good deal like seeds,” he mused, drawing on his agricultural background in a radio talk at the beginning of his presidential campaign. “For a time, they lie inert and then they quicken with life. Ideas, like seeds, send out roots that grope in the darkness unseen and then irresistibly upward into the air and sunlight.”
A shorter version of this article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue — a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
