Message to the Faithful

For two weeks Henry Agard Wallace heard jubilant conservatives and doleful progressives pronounce the New Deal dead (TIME, July 26).

The U.S. was eying its Vice President curiously. Here was a man in a position paralleled only once in U.S. history.* He had, in effect, been heavily repudiated by the only man above him, the President. But in all the Administration, he was the only man who could not be summarily fired by the President. He could be, if he chose, utterly careless of party obedience, particularly if party obedience now meant subservience to such Southern conservatives as Jesse Jones, for whom he had always had an intellectual's contempt.

He had no political future to risk; apparently the President, as he rapidly discarded the New Deal, had discarded Henry Wallace, too.

Further, Henry Wallace might now, if he chose to, and had the ability, make himself a rallying point for the thousands of disgruntled progressives in the Democratic Party who appear to be losing faith in Mr. Roosevelt as a domestic leader.

For such reasons--and out of mere curiosity to see what a repudiated Vice President would do next--the U.S. watched Henry Wallace in Detroit this week. They saw him, in the fightingest phrases of his 54 years, speak his own continued faith in the New Deal.

To reporters gathered in his Detroit hotel room, Wallace predicted: if control of the Democratic Party becomes a struggle between the "progressive element" and the conservatives, "I am confident the people will take care of that." Next day, the gangling, shy Vice President mounted the platform at the Michigan State Fair Grounds before an overflow crowd of 15,000. First he paid a curiously qualified tribute to Franklin Roosevelt:

"I have known the President intimately for ten years and in the final showdown he has always put human rights first."

"There are powerful groups who hope to take advantage of the President's concentration on the war effort to destroy everything he has accomplished on the domestic front. . . . Inevitably [they will] be exposed to the public eye."

Then he spoke, belligerently:

"Too many corporations have made money by holding inventions out of use, by holding up prices and by cutting down production. . . . I believe in our democratic, capitalistic system, but it must be a capitalism of abundance and full employment. If we return to a capitalism of scarcity . . . the returning soldiers and displaced war workers will speak in no uncertain terms. . . . Too many millions of our people come out of the dark cellars and squalor of unemployment ever to go back."

> "We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home. . . . We cannot plead for equality of opportunity for peoples everywhere and overlook the denial of the right to vote for millions of our own people."

> "There are midget Hitlers here who continually attack labor. There are other demagogues, blind to the errors of every other group, who shout, 'We love labor, but. . . .' Both the midget Hitlers and the demagogues are enemies of America."

> "Imperialistic freebooters using the United States as a base can make another war inevitable."

> "The world is a neighborhood. We have learned that . . . the jobless in India are related to the unemployed here. The Postwar Problems Committee of the National Association of Manufacturers (business men all) has wisely declared that increased production in other countries will not reduce living standards in the United States. Those twisters of fact who shriek that your Vice President is a wild-eyed dreamer trying to set up TVA's on the Danube and deliver a bottle of milk to every Hottentot every morning should read that report."

Coming at a time when a fourth-term drive was widely accepted as certain,* Wallace's speech was something more than a personal declaration. Spoken by the man who has become the symbol of unbending New Dealism in the shifting winds of Washington, it might also be taken as a message from Mr. Roosevelt to his disgruntled New Deal following: though he smites them hip & thigh, he still loves them. And loyal Henry Wallace, smitten hip & thigh himself, still loved his chastener. But as for his troubled followers, where could they go now, within the Democratic party?

* In 1831 President Andrew Jackson broke with Vice President John Calhoun, drove all Calhoun followers out of the Cabinet. But the two had never been close as friends or as political thinkers.

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