Day: December 17, 2025

Historian Benn Steil’s talk to the Greenwich Retired Men’s Association reexamined Henry Wallace, portraying him as a brilliant but politically unsuited agricultural innovator and mystic whose defeat as FDR’s 1944 running mate cleared the way for Harry Truman’s presidency and a very different postwar order. Steil highlighted Wallace’s entanglements with mystic Nicholas Roerich, his credulous praise of a staged tour of Stalin’s Gulag, and his alignment with Soviet aims in Manchuria, all of which fueled Democratic leaders’ fears that he was too close to the Soviets. Drawing on Russian and FBI archives, Steil argued that a Wallace presidency, given his reliance on Soviet-linked advisors and CPUSA-backed 1948 campaign, could have left the United States strategically disadvantaged in the early Cold War, even as Wallace later broke with Communists and backed Republicans like Eisenhower.