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 threate...