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In a 2012 “documentary” film and book titled The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone contended that there would have been “no Cold War” had Henry Wallace, FDR’s third-term vice president, not been forced off the ticket by reactionary Democratic Party leaders in 1944.[1] Wallace, rather than Harry Truman, would have become president on FDR’s death the following April, and would, Stone claims, have successfully pursued a policy of peace.
Based on a multitude of primary-source accounts of the nomination battle between Wallace and Truman, and my review of the careers of all 1,176 Democratic convention delegates, who Stone (and others) have alleged were bribed with ambassadorships and the like, I can safely conclude that this was no case of a “stolen election”—Truman won fairly and convincingly.[2] But this paper will look at the much more compelling and interesting question—which has been raised not just by the polemicist Stone, but by serious scholars—of whether the Cold War was avoidable with a different American president, pursuing very different policies. In the case of a Wallace presidency, we know that there would been no Truman Doctrine, no Marshall Plan, no NATO, no West Germany, no western European integration, and no policy of containment. All of these initiatives, foundational to what has been called “the American Century,” Henry Wallace denounced as imperialistic and unjustifiably hostile to the Soviet Union.
Wallace’s Beliefs
With utter conviction, Henry Wallace believed that friendly, trusting cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was essential to spreading global peace and prosperity after the Second World War. He also believed that the fault for rapidly deteriorating relations between the two great powers after the February 1945 Yalta conference lay primarily with the United States (and Great Britain), whose original sin was to oppose the Bolsheviks’ rise to power after 1917. Wallace, a deeply religious man, abhorred Communism as a misguided godless ideology, but admired major elements of Soviet planning, such as agricultural collectivization, on the grounds that they were, to his mind, being driven by technocrats in the interest of advancing industrial progress and “economic democracy.” He was convinced that building a global “Century of the Common Man” required a blending of American political democracy with the Soviet economic version.
Though Wallace was a brilliant agricultural geneticist, who with great insight and persistence revolutionized the development of superior strains of crops, he was also fascinated, throughout his adult life, with what he considered alternative ways of “knowing.” These included astrology, theosophy, and mysticism. He defended these interests on the basis of the writings of the neo-transcendentalist psychologist and philosopher of religion William James—highly controversial writings about the rationality of “belief.”
James was not interested in whether Jesus was the messiah, or whether the Jews were chosen. For James, a “true” belief was one that was useful to the believer. It was neither necessary nor useful to inquire as to whether a belief was true in the sense that it corresponded to some objective external reality, since that might be unknowable. It was necessary only to ask whether the belief had practical value for the believer here and now, which in turn depended on the use to which he or she put it. This conception of truth derived from the tenets of the pedigreed philosophical program of pragmatism.
Since much of what we require to make sense of the world is simply not available to us, it was, James argued, only rational to evaluate a belief based on whether it helped the believer to cope effectively.[3] Understanding “true” belief as being a property of the believer, and not something that could necessarily be shared by others, may not be commonplace. Yet for those like Wallace, who internalized it, pragmatism freed them to examine spiritual systems and to reserve judgment until their effect on one’s ability to navigate the world could be evaluated. Wallace embraced James’s controversial argument that it was often rational to believe without evidence, for the reason that access to evidence may first require the adoption of certain beliefs.[4] As a political figure, particularly at the apex of his career, Wallace would elevate James’s “beliefs about beliefs” to a central place in his quest to transform not just the content of American foreign policy, but the very way in which America conducted diplomacy. He would never, however, take to heart the philosopher’s warning: that whereas “we have the right to believe” without evidence, we do so “at our own risk.”[5]
Wallace believed that peace with the Soviet Union would come naturally once Joseph Stalin and his government saw that American leaders truly believed in it—and set policy as if they believed it. In Jamesian fashion, Wallace did not claim to have evidence that the Soviets would pursue peaceful policies if America did—that is, if it abandoned its overseas air bases, withdrew its troops from Asia, put its atomic bombs into UN escrow, and foreswore military and financial support for Greece, Turkey, and nationalist China. Running for president as the Progressive Party candidate in 1948, Wallace explained that “you get peace by preparing for peace rather than for war.”[6] That is, peaceful behavior begets peaceful behavior in others. He thus denied any legitimate role for military readiness or deterrence, contravening a basic tenet of thinking in international relations. As observed by the scholar Hans Morgenthau, “the political aim of military preparations is . . . to make the actual application of military force unnecessary by inducing the prospective enemy to desist from [its] use.”[7] Consistent with Morgenthau’s thinking, Wallace had, in 1940, under the banner of “total preparation,” defended the buildup of American naval and air force bases in the Western Hemisphere. “If we are properly prepared, we shall not have war on this hemisphere.”[8] His post-war political thinking therefore deviated radically not just from conventional thinking, but from his own pre-war expressions of it.
A few months after Wallace announced his candidacy for president, the U.S Representative on the new UN Commission on Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had staunchly opposed his removal from the ticket in 1944, wrote that Wallace was now “doing more wishful thinking than realistic facing of facts.” The Soviets, she said, “understand strength, not weakness.”[9] After garnering barely a million votes, and no electoral votes, in the 1948 election—coming in fourth behind Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond—Wallace became a political irrelevance to both the Soviets and the American Communists. Stalin and six other Politburo members handling major foreign policy decisions voted in January 1949 to cease contacts with him.
With the advent of the Korean War in June 1950, however, Wallace found a convenient pretext to assert that the break with Moscow was his own doing. Wallace condemned the Soviets for precipitating the North Korean invasion, and resigned from the Progressive Party. Stalin, he asserted rightly (though without the documentary evidence we have now), precipitated the invasion to incite war between the United States and China. He was now, he said in December, “convinced that Russia is out to dominate the world.”[10]
In 1952, he wrote a piece in the New York Times entitled “Where I Was Wrong,” in which he confessed his failure to see “the Soviet determination to enslave the common man morally, mentally, and physically for its own imperial purposes.” Though he had in 1948 blamed the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia on the U.S. ambassador and “rightists” in the Czech government, he now regarded his earlier defense of Prague’s “Moscow-trained Communists” as “my greatest mistake.”
In a New York Times interview eleven years later, he went further. “I was mistaken,” Wallace confessed, “in my estimate of the Russians’ intentions. I believed then that Stalin was prepared to be the kind of partner in peace that he had been in war. I believed that, if we could overcome the Russians’ centuries-old distrust of Western imperialism and their later fear of Western capitalism, they would collaborate in the rebuilding of a truly democratic world.”[11]
These were remarkable admissions, unacknowledged by Stone and other prominent Wallace acolytes, that he had been unjustified in blaming the United States for what he had previously termed “defensive” acts of Communist aggression and expansion. “[W]e can do a great deal to end any abuses on [Russia’s] part,” he had said in 1947, “through economic assistance and sincere pledges of friendship with the Russian people.”[12] Still, in spite of his now condemning “Russian Communism” as “something totally evil,” he maintained, illogically, that “the whole course of history” would have been different had Roosevelt “remained alive and in good health”—as if Roosevelt could have vanquished “evil” with unilateral disarmament and words of peace.[13]
Soviet Beliefs
On Wallace
The Soviets began paying keen attention to Wallace in 1942, when Andrey Gromyko, then counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington, learned, and independently corroborated, that Wallace had defended the Soviet invasion of Finland three years prior. Gromyko cabled the information to Moscow, stressing that Wallace was “the most probable Democratic Presidential candidate” in the 1944 election.[14]
In late May of 1944, less than two months before the Democratic convention at which Truman would replace him on the ticket, Wallace began a four-week tour of Siberia—a tour mischievously suggested by FDR after refusing Wallace’s request to visit Moscow. The Soviets, at great cost, constructed a Potemkin continent for him, disguising labor camps and shepherding him, under intensive NKVD watch, through suddenly stocked stores, enterprises newly staffed by Communist officials, and concerts performed by political prisoners. Despite the vice president’s glowing praise for Stalin’s accomplishments in Asia, intelligence agents stole and copied his diary—before confirming for Moscow that his public sentiments appeared genuine.
Wallace went on to meet with Chiang Kai-shek in Chunking, where the Soviets spied on him intensively. They discovered that Wallace had, outside earshot of his State Department minder, urged Chiang to make territorial and commercial concessions to Moscow to smooth relations after the war. The intelligence find naturally went up to Stalin. The Soviets interpreted Wallace’s extraordinary unauthorized intervention as a sign that the U.S. administration would give them a free hand in Manchuria, leading to rapacious nine-month occupation of the region from August 1945 to May 1946. By the end of that occupation, Mao’s forces were able to use it as a base to defeat Chiang’s Kuomintang and unify the mainland under Communist control.
In perhaps the most concise summary of Soviet views of Wallace, assistant foreign minister Andrey Vyshinsky, lead prosecutor at the notorious Moscow show trials of 1934 to 1938, reported to Stalin in October 1947, after meeting with Wallace at the Soviet consulate in New York, that the soon-to-be Progressive Party presidential candidate was both “sympathetic to us” and “somewhat naïve.”[15] In March and April 1948, Wallace would meet secretly with Gromyko, now UN ambassador, to plead for Stalin’s endorsement of his peace ideas—ideas that Wallace said that Stalin could draft for him. Yet the Soviets would still not accept his sincerity. Gromyko cabled Moscow that Wallace’s thoughts on disarmament were, lamentably, “much like the official position of the Americans and the British, who consider trust a prerequisite for disarmament.” The Soviets were demanding immediate American nuclear disarmament, while rejecting their own participation in any international inspections regime; neither trust nor verification were to be part of the equation. The Soviet treatment of Wallace, their most consistent and genuine friend in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, bore out George Kennan’s quip, in 1946, that even if the United States were to disarm entirely, deliver its “air and naval forces to Russia,” and resign “powers of government to American Communists,” the Soviets would still smell a trap.[16]
The wider point is that the Soviets never showed the slightest regard for Wallace’s Jamesian belief in world peace. Wallace was an avowed capitalist (albeit one with an aberrant love of planning), and part of an imperialist establishment with which peace was only possible as a temporary political expedient. To be sure, Stalin would have welcomed a Wallace presidency, but not because it would have reduced the need for expanded frontiers in eastern and central Europe and northeast Asia, or rapid development of an atom bomb. Though Wallace insisted publicly that Stalin wanted peace “above everything else,” and that Soviet policy was directed at “the achievement of economic and social justice,”[17] the truth was quite different.
On Imperial Expansion
“I saw my mission in extending the borders of our Motherland as far as possible,” Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s longtime foreign minister, would explain in retirement. “It seems, Stalin and I, we coped with this task pretty well.”[18] In Russian security thinking, there was never a meaningful distinction to be drawn between offense and defense. With a western border stretching thousands of miles through unprotected plains, defense always required, in their view, extending Russian domination further into new “buffer” zones. Stalin and Molotov would therefore have welcomed a Wallace presidency not because it meant “peace” but because it would have lessened American resistance to Soviet expansion.
Particularly telling is Molotov’s explanation of why Moscow abandoned territorial claims on Turkey and withdrew its 300,000 troops from the country’s borders in 1946. “It was a good thing we retreated in time,” he said, referring to Truman’s warnings and show of naval force in the region. “Otherwise it would have led to a joint [Anglo-American] aggression against us.” It was not American disarmament, military retrenchment, and pledges of peace that saved Turkey, but rather American resolve.[19] Yet Wallace opposed financial and military aid to Turkey in 1947, declaring blithely that “there is no Communist problem in Turkey.”[20]
In Greece, where there was most assuredly “a Communist problem,” Wallace opposed aid on the grounds that “Truman’s policy will spread Communism.” Each Communist death “by American bullets,” he said, would bring forth ten more Communists.[21] Yet by October 1949, thanks to U.S. aid, the Communist guerillas would be defeated. And in February 1952, Greece would become a member of the new U.S.-led NATO security alliance. Stalin stayed out of the Greek civil war, and scolded the Yugoslavs to do so as well, not because of American peace pledges, but because he knew that Truman would not let the Communists win. “”[D]o you think that . . . the United States, the most powerful state in the world,” he scolded Yugoslav diplomats in early 1948, “will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense!”[22]
In Germany, the heart of the early Cold War conflict, Wallace opposed the creation of a separate democratic state in the west. Whereas Wallace believed that division of the country would lead to war with the Soviets, division in fact prevented it, as neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could countenance a united Germany being an ally of the other. Stalin’s determination to dominate a unified country is clear. “All of Germany must be ours,” he told Bulgarian and Yugoslav leaders in 1946. “That is, Soviet, Communist.”[23]
In June of 1950, Stalin gave North Korean leader Kim Il-sung permission to invade the South, and urged Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung “to immediately concentrate nine Chinese divisions on the Korean border for volunteer action in case the adversary crosses the 38th parallel.” He pledged “to provide air cover” to protect them.[24] His secret aim, Stalin explained to the Communist Czech president Klement Gottwald, was to “pull China into the struggle” and force the United States to “overextend itself.” This would “provide the time necessary to strengthen socialism in Europe” and “revolutionize the entire Far East.”[25] These were hardly the words of a Soviet leader who, in Wallace’s eyes (until 1950), “really wants peace,” and was only reacting to American aggression.[26] Wallace concluded in 1952 that, “knowing more about Russia’s methods,” it had been “a serious mistake when we withdrew our troops” from the region in 1949—a withdrawal he had back then deemed essential to promoting world peace.[27] He further explained that “Russian aggression” had caused him to reverse his opposition to the atom bomb. Korea, he explained, now “justified” holding on to it.[28]
On Atom Bomb Development
On June 14, 1946, Bernard Baruch presented the U.S. atomic regulation plan to the new United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC). Andrey Gromyko countered with the Soviet plan five days later.
The two plans were fundamentally different. The United States wanted internationalization of atomic energy control, but insisted on effective machinery for inspection and enforcement before giving up its bombs or the industrial technique to make them. The Soviets held that international inspection would constitute intolerable interference into national sovereignty. They wanted immediate American disarmament, and violations of any future treaty subject to remedy only by approval of the Security Council—and even then, only in cases involving “aggression.”[29] This framework appeared to give Moscow carte blanche to develop and deploy atomic bombs while America disarmed. Even if the Soviets were to use such bombs for “aggression,” they could veto any punishment.
Wallace, as Commerce secretary, had, in a July 23 letter to the president, attacked the U.S. atomic plan for its “fatal defect . . . of requiring other nations to enter into binding commitments not to conduct research into the military uses of atomic energy and to disclose their uranium and thorium resources while the United States retains the right to withhold its technical knowledge of atomic energy until the international control and inspection system is working to our satisfaction.”
“Is it any wonder,” Wallace asked rhetorically, “that the Russians did not show any great enthusiasm for our plan?” He predicted that the Russians would now “redouble their efforts to manufacture bombs,” and “may also decide to expand their ‘security zone’ in a serious way.” Such aggressive efforts would then be the fault of the United States.
But Wallace (or, rather, the Soviet agent who had drafted his letter—Harry Magdoff) had grossly mischaracterized the U.S. plan. Rather than the various stages of disarmament and information-sharing being set according to U.S. whim and diktat, as Wallace had charged, Baruch’s proposal called for staged action according to “pre-arranged schedules.” This structure was precisely what Wallace was urging.
Wallace’s mischaracterizations were clearly taken from an article in the June 24 issue of Pravda, in which the Soviet journalist Boris Izakov charged, with no basis, that “the U.S. government [was] likely counting on determining on its own discretion the terms within which it will permit the international agency—‘in successive stages’—to take a peek at [its atomic] secrets.” It was, Izakov wrote, expecting “all other nations [to] show blind trust in [its] intentions.”[30]Wallace had, in fact, discussed the Pravda “atomic blast” with the Times’s Felix Belair back on June 25, and referred to it in his July 23 letter to Truman.
The resemblance between the Pravda and Wallace critiques of Baruch is uncanny. Wallace had simply accepted a Soviet caricature of U.S. policy as accurate, and had not even bothered to speak with his own country’s U.N. delegation before sending his letter to the president.[31] Once confronted with clear evidence from Baruch that his claims were inaccurate, however, not to mention damaging to the credibility of U.S. negotiators, he might have been expected to concede his mistakes. Instead, he chose to reiterate his original position—that is, Pravda’s position.
Wallace’s July 23 letter had also offered a muddled defense of Gromyko’s counterproposal. The Soviets wanted the United States to destroy all stocks of atomic weapons, finished or unfinished, within three months of an agreement’s signing. In this respect, at least, according to Wallace, Moscow’s plan “goes even further than our[s]” toward international control of atomic energy.
But this assertion was nonsensical, since Moscow’s plan contained no provision for international inspection and no mechanism for punishing violations. What Wallace had not understood was that completing a Soviet bomb had, since Potsdam, become Stalin’s overriding national objective. “International” control—which Stalin understood to be synonymous with American control—could not have been of less interest to him.
The purpose of the Gromyko plan, unveiled in June 1946, was, the State Department’s George Kennan argued, to exploit “the merciless spotlight of free information” in America to compel U.S. disarmament while the Soviets “proceed[ed] undisturbed with the development of atomic weapons in secrecy.”[32] For Washington, therefore, any credible international plan to eliminate the weapons had to manage the processes of disarmament, inspection, and control simultaneously.
Underscoring the seriousness with which the Baruch plan took the integrity of such efforts, it required the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to renounce their vetoes with respect to any agreement. This provision was meant to ensure that no U.N. member could stymie the legitimate sanctions authority of the new atomic control agency. But the Soviets refused to accept any weakening of veto rights. To do so, Izakov wrote in Pravda, would mean “renouncing their sovereignty . . . in favour of the USA.” Wallace, notably, defended the Soviets by arguing that the veto was “completely irrelevant,” since the treaty signatories could simply declare war on a violator. Yet this point underscored that no action short of war—war unsanctioned by any international authority—would be available to the signatories if a Security Council veto could block enforcement or punishment action.
The New York Times concluded, charitably, that the “vagueness” of Wallace’s attack on U.S. policy reflected a failure to “fortify his idealism with the necessary facts.” Moreover, in being “unpardonably careless with the deadly fireworks of atomic policy,” he had undermined prospects for success in critical and delicate negotiations.[33] What even Baruch had not understood at the time, though, was that these negotiations never stood any practical chance of success.
On June 21, 1946,[34] two days after Baruch presented his plan to the UNAEC, former NKVD head Lavrenty Beria, now supervising the Soviet bomb project, submitted to Stalin for approval a draft decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR to begin actual production of atom bombs—the first one to be ready for testing by January 1, 1948 (too optimistic by twenty months).[35] All technical hurdles had been surmounted. Stalin was now sure he had his bomb in sight, and so his diplomacy aimed at pressuring the United States to disarm while spinning out U.N. negotiations until it could be completed.
The appointment of the relentless Gromyko as Soviet representative to the UNAEC was central to carrying out the strategy of badger and delay. “[T]he American project [remains] unacceptable in substance,” according to instructions he received from the Soviet Foreign Ministry on December 27, 1946.[36] “For tactical reasons,” however, “we believe that it is necessary not to decline discussion, but to suggest its discussion point by point, simultaneously insisting on introducing amendments. Such tactics are more flexible and may give better results.” By rejecting Soviet counterproposals, the Americans would “bring odium on themselves for the break up.”[37]
That, however, would not happen. On December 30, Baruch, with Truman’s backing, demanded that the UNAEC vote. It went 10–0 in favor of the United States, with abstentions by the Soviet Union and Poland. The Soviet proposals of 1947, following a joint statement by Canada, China, France, and the U.K. condemning them, would be officially rejected on April 5, 1948, by a vote of 9–2.[38] The Soviets got their stalemate, but failed to achieve any propaganda victory.
It may be argued that since nothing like the Baruch plan could ever have secured Soviet support, given Stalin’s determination to build the bomb, Wallace’s attack on it did little damage.[39] The plan, however, represented a sincere and serious approach to marrying disarmament with a robust inspection regime, one widely supported by top peace-loving, internationalist-minded American scientists, as well as prominent liberal political figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt. As such, it deserved better than the glib treatment to which Wallace had subjected it.[40] At the very least, Wallace, by parroting Pravda and discrediting Baruch’s efforts among many progressives, only helped the Soviets escape their share of responsibility for the horrific atomic arms race that followed.
So Was the Cold War Inevitable?
In short, Wallace’s Jamesian belief in peace was gravely misguided. From what we today know of Soviet ambitions in the early postwar years, a Wallace presidency could only have resulted in a delayed Cold War—delayed, that is, until November 1948, at which time he would almost surely have been defeated in an election. Wallace himself doubted he could have swung Congress or “public opinion” in his favor. “[I]t is a very grave question whether I would have been [elected] with the tactics that I would have used in order to preserve the peace,” he reflected in retirement. Most likely, he concluded, “I was done a very great favor when I was not named in ’44.”[41]
In any case, a delayed Cold War would have come at great cost to U.S. security and economic interests. A failure to resist and deter Stalin would likely have meant Soviet domination of northern Iran, eastern Turkey, the Turkish straits, Hokkaido, the Korean Peninsula, Greece, and all of Germany. Stalin, contrary to Wallace’s professions of belief, coveted these territories, and never valued peace for its own sake. As Churchill said in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946, Stalin did not desire war but “the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of Soviet power and doctrines.”[42] And so he valued the occasion that a passive United States would have afforded him to expand his empire. In light of both Russian history and geography, one may choose to characterize Soviet expansionism as either opportunistic offense or pre-emptive defense, but expansionist probing and penetration was inevitable—whoever was in the White House.
Benn Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century.
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Baldwin, Hanson W. “Atomic Energy Control: The Points in Dispute.” New York Times. October 6, 1946
Batiuk, V.I. “Plan Barukha i SSSR”—Kholodnaia Voina. Novye podkhody. Novye dokumenty. Moskva: Institut Vseobshchei istorii RAN, 1995. (Batiuk, V.I. “The Baruch Plan and the USSR,” in The Cold War. New Approaches. New Documents. Moscow: The Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1995.)
Blum, John Morton (ed.). The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
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Feinberg, Alexander. “Contrasting Views on Russian Moves.” New York Times. March 20, 1946.
Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS]. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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Grieder, Peter. The East German Leadership, 1946–73: Conflict and Crisis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000
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Izakov, Boris. “Mezhdunarodnoe obozrenie.” “Pravda,” 24 ijunia 1946. (Izakov, Boris. “International Review.” Pravda. June 24, 1946.)
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——— . The Will to Believe. New York, London, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, 1896 [1912]
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Mal’kov, V.L. “Igra bez myacha: sotsial’no-politicheskii kontekst sovetskoi ‘atomnoi diplomatii’ (1945–1949).” Holodnaia voina 1945–1963. Istoricheskaia retrospektiva: Sbornik statei pod red. Jegorova, N.I., Chibarian, A.O. Moskva: OLMA-Press, 2003. (Malkov, V.L. “Off the Ball Game: Social-Psychological Context of the Soviet ‘Atomic Diplomacy’ (1945–1949).” In The Cold War 1945–1963. Historic Retrospective, edited by N.I. Jegorova and A.O. Chubaryan. Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2003.)
Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Brief Edition. Revised by Kenneth W. Thompson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948 [1993].
New York Times. “Wallace Says U.S. Force Should Quit Iceland Base.” March 22, 1946.
New York Times. “Text of Secretary Wallace’s Letter to President Truman on U.S. Foreign Policy.” September 18, 1946.
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New York Times. “Some Facts for Mr. Wallace.” October 4, 1946.
New York Times. “Baruch vs. Wallace.” October 6, 1946
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Phillips, Cabell. “At 75, Henry Wallace Cultivates His Garden.” New York Times. October 6, 1963.
Pigliucci, Massimo. “The Ethics (or Lack Thereof) of Belief.” Philosophy as a Way of Life (blog), August 31, 2022.
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Schapsmeier, Edward L., and Frederick H. Schapsmeier. Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: The Agrarian Years, 1910–1940. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968.
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Stone, Oliver, and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, New York: Gallery Books, 2012.
Wallace, Henry A. “The UN and Disarmament.” The New Republic. December 23, 1946.
——— . “The Fight for Peace Begins.” The New Republic. March 24, 1947
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——— . “Where I Was Wrong.” The Week Magazine. September 7, 1952.
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[1] Stone and Kuznick (2012).
[2] See chapter 8 of Steil (2024).
[3] See, in particular, James (1902).
[4] James (1896 [1912]): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm. For an excellent critique of James’s “ethics of belief,” see Pigliucci (August 31, 2022): https://philosophyasawayoflife.medium.com/the-ethics-of-belief-f1d459c572e3.
[5] James (1896 [1912]).
[6] Wallace (January 5, 1948).
[7] Morgenthau (1948 [1993]: 34).
[8] Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier (1968: 259).
[9] January 2, 1948, “My Day” by Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, George Washington University. Roosevelt (1999: 245). Devine (2013: 68).
[10] New York Times (December 4, 1950).
[11] Phillips (October 6, 1963).
[12] MacDougall I (1965: 170-171).
[13] New York Times (March 18, 1952). Wallace (September 7, 1952).
[14] A. Gromyko, “Record of conversation with Counsel (in the rank of Minister) of the Mexican government in Washington—Don Louis Quintanilla,” September 30, 1942, AVP RF, Fond 0129, op. 26, P 143, file 2, p. 27. A. Gromyko, Counsel, Soviet Embassy in the USA, to A.Ja. Vyshinsky, Assistant People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, November 13, 1942, AVP RF, Fond 0129, op. 26, P 143, file 6, p. 28 (NKID US Department entry stamp—January 23, 1943).
[15] “Record of conversation of Assistant Foreign Minister A.J. Vyshinsky and V.A. Zorin with US politician H. Wallace on Soviet-American relations, New York, October 14, 1947, Top Secret,” RGASPI, Fond 82, op. 2, file 1308, p. 68. L. Baranov to M. Suslov, February 27, 1948, RGASPI, Fond 17, op. 128, file 1138, p. 59.
[16] The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State, March 20, 1946, in FRUS, 1946, VI: 721–23.
[17] Feinberg (March 20, 1946). New York Times (March 22, 1946).
[18] Chuev (1991).
[19] Pechatnov and Edmondson (2001: 119).
[20] Wallace (March 24, 1947).
[21] Wallace (January 5, 1948).
[22] Djilas (1962: 141)
[23] Grieder (2000: 12); Djilas (1962: 139); Pechatnov (2010: 103); Pechatnov and Edmondson (2001: 109).
[24] Filippov [Stalin] to Soviet ambassador in Peking for Zhou Enlai, July 5, 1950—RGASPI, Fond 558, op. 11, file 334, p. 79.
[25] Filippov [Stalin] to Mikhail Silin, Soviet Ambassador in Prague, for passing the message orally to Klement Gottwald, August 27, 1950, Wilson Center Digital Archive, referring to a still classified file in RGASPI, Stalin Papers, Fond 558, op. 11, file 62, pp. 71–72.
[26] Wallace (December 23, 1946).
[27] Wallace (September 7, 1952).
[28] New York Times (August 11, 1950). See also Correspondence from Henry A. Wallace to Wayne T. Cottingham dated September 11, 1950, Henry A. Wallace correspondence [reel 47], August 1950–January 1951—Ia47-0439–Ia47-0440, Henry A. Wallace Collection, University of Iowa.
[29] Gerber (Winter 1982). Hamilton (September 20, 1946).
[30] Izakov (June 24, 1946) (italics added).
[31] Krock (October 4, 1946). Blum (1973: 581–82).
[32] Memorandum for Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, July 18, 1946, in FRUS, 1946, I: 861–62.
[33] New York Times (October 3, 1946). New York Times (September 18, 1946), “Text of Secretary Wallace’s Letter to President Truman on U.S. Foreign Policy.” New York Times (October 4, 1946). New York Times (October 6, 1946). Krock (October 4, 1946). Baldwin (October 6, 1946).Izakov (June 24, 1946).
[34] It may have been shortly before June 21, 1946, but no later than that date.
[35] The letter of L.P. Beria to I.V. Stalin, submitting for [his] approval the draft of the Decision of SM [Council of Ministers] of the USSR, “On the plan for the development of works of CB [Construction Bureau]-11 under Laboratory No. 2 of the AN USSR Academy of Sciences of the USSR,” no later than June 21, 1946. Strictly Secret (Special File), referring to Ryabev II (1999: 432–34); sourced from AP RF, Fond 93, file 99/46, p. 20.
[36] Malkov (2003: 311)
[37] Soviet-American Relations VI (2004: 356–57).
[38] Goldschmidt (March 1986: 62–63).
[39] For a Russian (post-Soviet) statement of this position, see Batiuk (1995: 85–98).
[40] Gerber (Winter 1982) argues, unconvincingly, that Baruch’s position was so unyielding that it never represented a credible effort to reach agreement with the Soviets. But Baruch was always willing to negotiate within the confines of the U.N. General Assembly’s mandate to the UNAEC, to which the Soviet Union subscribed, which included setting up “effective safeguards” to prevent the misuse of atomic energy. The Soviets never made a counterproposal which encompassed such safeguards.
[41] Reminiscences of Henry Agard Wallace, CCOH, pp. 4567–70.
[42] Churchill, speech, “Sinews of Peace,” March 5, 1946: https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/sinews-of-peace-iron-curtain-speech.html.