When FDR Dumped Wallace

 Wallace helped Roosevelt carry the Midwest and win an unprecedented third term. As vice president, however, Wallace alarmed his boss with his admiring view of the Soviet Union’s domestic policies. 

Had the Democrats not dumped Wallace in 1944 for Harry Truman, history might have turned out quite differently.

How this counterfactual history came close to happening, and how it was prevented, is the subject of Benn Steil’s definitive account, “The World That Wasn’t.” 

Mr. Steil, the author of admiring volumes on the Bretton Woods economic settlement and the Marshall Plan, dismisses previous Wallace biographies as unduly sympathetic and expresses no regret at Wallace’s vice-presidential ouster.

t bears keeping in mind, though Mr. Steil doesn’t emphasize it, that Roosevelt’s July 1940 decision to make Wallace vice president came at a parlous time. This was 11 months after the Hitler-Stalin Pact and a month after the fall of France; Hitler and Stalin controlled or were threatening to absorb vast expanses of the Eurasian landmass. 

Roosevelt, eager to aid beleaguered Britain, knew that he was opposed by Communists on the left and Midwestern isolationists on the right. Wallace, as an exponent of “economic democracy” and central planning—and as an agriculture expert from Iowa—had potential appeal to both groups.

FDR was happy to send Wallace off on lengthy trips to nonstrategic locales, including 40 days in Latin America in early 1943 and to Siberia and China for 51 days in mid-1944. 

At home, Wallace’s political usefulness had waned. American aid to the Soviets after Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 meant that FDR had no more enemies on the left. 

Pearl Harbor in December 1941 ended Midwest isolationism.

WSJ 5 January 2024

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-world-that-wasnt-review-when-fdr-dumped-wallace-9f93bb24


Virtual History: Alternatives And Counterfactuals by Niall Ferguson

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2020/09/virtual-history-alternatives-and.html


List of alternate history fiction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_history_fiction



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