What Is Henry Wallace?

HENRY WALLACE (187 pp. -- Dwighf Macdonald--Yanguard ($2.50).

The political activities of Henry Wallace frighten the Democratic bosses, delight the Republicans, and frequently puzzle both. To Author Dwight Macdonald they are the natural antics of a split persornality who has gained a confused following by making a cult of confusion. Macdonald's subtitle is The Man and the Myth, and of the two he finds the myth more interesting and more important.

The two Wallaces he has drawn (and quartered) "would find it difficult to live inside the same house together, let alone inside the same skin. . . . Henry Wallace No. 1 is a mystic, an amateur of esoteric doctrines. . . . Henry Wallace No. 2 is an opportunist, adapting himself to the pressures of the moment, ready to forswear his deepest convictions for immediate gain. . . . Wallace can only alternately express the two sides of his nature, thinking one moment like a Tibetan seer and the next like a cost accountant, acting one moment like St. Francis of Assisi and the next like Boss Hague."

Boxing the Compass. "Wallace," says Macdonald, "never analyzes a problem: he barges around inside it, throwing out vague exhortations." The reason, he thinks, is that "Wallace wants to be loved, and followed by everybody, just as he wants to believe every doctrine all at once." For much the same reason "Wallace's words don't spring, they don't leap, they don't even stumble; they just ooze ... his writing is that of a sick and troubled man, a man not at peace with himself. . . ." Macdonald thinks that Wallace's behavior in the 1932 campaign was typical of the man "boxing the political compass in true Wallacian style: a registered Republican, he gave money to the Socialists and voted with the Democrats."

Why has Wallace become an apologist for Stalinism? Macdonald concludes that "a large power-mass like the Soviet Union exercises a tremendous gravitational pull on an erratic comet like Henry Wallace. ... It is not true that Henry Wallace is an agent of Moscow. But it is true that he behaves like one. . . . Wallace has made a career by supplying to the liberals a commodity they crave: rhetoric which accomplishes in fantasy what cannot be accomplished in reality."

Perpetual Fogs. Macdonald has a few pages of fun with "Wallese," the language spoken in "Wallaceland . . . the mental habitat of Henry Wallace plus a few hundred thousand regular readers of the New Republic, the Nation and PM. It is a region of perpetual fogs, caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier." Wallace is loaded with "ritualistic adjectives" like "forward-looking," "freedom-loving," "clear-thinking." Such lingo, delivered with the "expansiveness of a Messiah," is just what it takes to make his followers accept Wallace "on his own valuation as a lover of peace who is trying to find a way to avoid World War III."

Yaleman Dwight Macdonald once worked for Macy's department store and later at FORTUNE, became an editor of Partisan Review during its Trotskyist days, now gets out a magazine called Politics whenever he feels up to it. Obviously no dispassionate critic of Wallace, he lambastes him with relish, but often with a kind of recklessness that creates sympathy for the victim. For all its sarcasm and invective, however, Henry Wallace has a free-wheeling frankness that is the product of an independent and irreverent mind.

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