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The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century Hardcover – January 9, 2024

by Benn Steil (Author)

4.3 67 ratings

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From the acclaimed economist-historian and author of The Marshall Plan comes a dramatic and powerful new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace—a perspective that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War.

Henry Wallace is the most important, and certainly the most fascinating, almost-president in American history. As FDR’s third-term vice president, and a hero to many progressives, he lost his place on the 1944 Democratic ticket in a wild open convention, as a result of which Harry Truman became president on FDR’s death. Books, films, and even plays have since portrayed the circumstances surrounding Wallace’s defeat as corrupt, and the results catastrophic. Filmmaker Oliver Stone, among others, has claimed that Wallace’s loss ushered in four decades of devastating and unnecessary Cold War.

Now, based on striking new finds from Russian, FBI, and other archives, Benn Steil’s The World That Wasn’t paints a decidedly less heroic portrait of the man, of the events surrounding his fall, and of the world that might have been under his presidency. Though a brilliant geneticist, Henry Wallace was a self-obsessed political figure, blind to the manipulations of aides—many of whom were Soviet agents and assets.

From 1933 to 1949, Wallace undertook a series of remarkable interventions abroad, each aimed at remaking the world order according to his evolving spiritual blueprint. As agriculture secretary, he fell under the spell of Russian mystics, and used the cover of a plant-gathering mission to aid their doomed effort to forge a new theocratic state in Central Asia. As vice president, he toured a Potemkin Siberian continent, guided by undercover Soviet security and intelligence officials who hid labor camps and concealed prisoners. He then wrote a book, together with an American NKGB journalist source, hailing the region’s renaissance under Bolshevik leadership. In China, the Soviets uncovered his private efforts to coax concessions to Moscow from Chiang Kai-shek, fueling their ambitions to dominate Manchuria. Running for president in 1948, he colluded with Stalin to undermine his government’s foreign policy, allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech. It was not until 1950 that he began to acknowledge his misapprehensions regarding the Kremlin’s aims and conduct.

Meticulously researched and deftly written, The World That Wasn’t is a spellbinding work of political biography and narrative history that will upend how we see the making of the early Cold War.

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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Timely, riveting . . . Historian Benn Steil’s new biography should be read right now.” —George F. Will, The Washington Post

“American history—and world history—could have turned out very differently if just a few things had gone the other way. Most notably, the U.S. after World War II might have pursued a pro-Soviet foreign policy, consigning Europe to Communist control, if President Franklin Roosevelt had died in the middle of his third term or if the 1944 Democratic National Convention had not dumped Vice President Henry Wallace for Harry Truman. 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.” —Wall Street Journal

“A groundbreaking biography . . . Benn Steil comes closer than anyone before him to unraveling the enigma of this visionary hybrid of feeling and fact.” —Richard Norton Smith, Washington Free Beacon

“Benn Steil’s new book, The World That Wasn’t, demonstrates that Wallace would not have saved the United States from a rivalry with the Soviet Union. . . . But Steil highlights a larger lesson: It takes two to make peace. Through diplomacy, states can resolve conflicts, but if one actor will not relent, the options are appeasement or confrontation, not real peace.” —Washington Examiner

“A brilliant and fascinating story of a charismatic and well-meaning leader undone by Soviet propaganda. The nation was lucky to have Harry Truman in position as VP when FDR died—but it was a near run thing. Exceptional history, engrossing story telling.” —Admiral James Stavridis

“A rigorously researched and revelatory new Wallace biography.” —New York Journal of Books

“Benn Steil’s engrossing account of Wallace’s life and career is a timely cautionary tale and a masterpiece of 20th-century American history. It is the definitive biography of Henry A. Wallace, and all the previous hagiographies can finally be consigned to the irrelevance they so richly deserve.” —Ronald Radosh, Quillette

“A meticulous biography of Henry Wallace . . . Drawing on new materials from FBI and Soviet Union archives, Steil paints a vivid picture. . . . This is a rewarding dive into the inner workings of mid-century American government.” —Publishers Weekly

“Steil deftly sorts through [the layers of legend] to distinguish truth from fiction. . . . A welcome reconsideration of a much-misunderstood but important figure in American politics.” —Kirkus Reviews

“One of the strangest characteristics of Cold War historiography is the frequency with which Henry Wallace and hagiography have accompanied one another. ‘If only Wallace, and not Truman, had succeeded FDR,’ the argument runs, ‘the Cold War would never have happened.’ No Wallace biographer, until now, has made a serious effort to assess that claim, not only on the basis of the Wallace papers but also documents from ‘the other side’ that the end of the Cold War made available. With The World That Wasn’t, Benn Steil has risen triumphantly to that challenge: his book is equally important for what it tells us about our past, and for what it may imply about our future.” —John Lewis Gaddis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of George F. Kennan: An American Life

About the Author

Benn Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, winner of the New York Historical Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History and the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon Award. His previous book, the prizewinning Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, was called “a triumph of economic and diplomatic history” by the Financial Times, “a superb history” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the gold standard on its subject” by The New York Times. He lives in New York with his two boys.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster (January 9, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 704 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982127821
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982127824
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.28 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 2 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #80,485 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #51 in Globalization & Politics
- #407 in Political Leader Biographies
- #603 in United States Biographies

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Harvey Klehr

A near-miss for American democracy

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2024

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Ben Steil has written a brilliant and revealing account of a man who came very close to becoming president of the United States. Had Henry Wallace not been forced off the Democratic ticket in 1944, he would have succeeded FDR after he died in office. That would have been a disaster for America. As he makes crystal-clear, Henry Wallace was a deeply flawed and credulous man who attached himself to a guru who created a cult of true believers. He later allowed himself to be taken in by Soviet officials who manipulated him during a visit to the Gulag- he actually believed their claims that the prison camps he visited were model cities. He then surrounded himself with communists who manipulated his 1948 presidential campaign. Steil 's research is impeccable and his writing is graceful. A must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century American history.

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Well researched, well argued, well written

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2024

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Impressive documentation. A much needed correction to the many romantic depictions of Wallace as the idealist who would have prevented the Cold War. Steil writes well and argues his case very well with ample research in archival records.

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M. Pope

Very thankful that Harry Truman replaced Henry Wallace on the Democratic Party ticket in 1944

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2024

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Henry Wallace may have been a brilliant agriculturalist, but he was both naive and duplicitous as a politician. After he was dropped from the Democratic Party ticket in 1944 in favor of Harry Truman, he moved further to the left than he had before, surrounding himself with men and women whose allegiance was more to the Soviet Union than to the United States.

Increasingly, most voters in the United States recognized Wallace's tendencies, but Wallace never seemed to entirely grasp why more people did not accept his Utopian beliefs. Several reviewers have criticized Steil's book as a "right-wing hit job," but the book is thoroughly researched and footnoted, and given the fact that Steil's employer (the Council on Foreign Relations) is hardly "right-wing," it appears the negative reviewers are more disappointed with the facts Steil brings out than anything else. The book focuses on Wallace's political history, and while he may have been, as said earlier, a brilliant agriculturalist, he had no business holding crucial positions in the federal government, and we are fortunate that the Democratic convention of 1944 chose Harry Truman as the man who would succeed FDR only a few months after he began his fourth term as President.

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David Wallace Douglas

“A Prosecutorial Screed Rather Than A Political Biography”

Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2024

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I write as a grandson of Henry Wallace, the subject of Benn Steil’s “The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century.”

I’ve appreciated Benn Steil’s writing on Bretton Woods, but I’m disappointed that a book with significant flaws, and such a clear ideological trajectory, could be marketed as a “political biography.”

Mr. Steil makes clear that he set out to rebut claims of several recent historians and writers (including Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick in “The Untold History of the United States”) that a Wallace Presidency in 1945 might have avoided the Cold War. As Mr. Steil acknowledged at his book launch, “I would not have written the book if Oliver Stone had not made his documentary.”

It’s likely a book will veer off course in terms of historical accuracy when launched with such a targeted agenda, and “The World That Wasn’t” proves to be more of a prosecutorial screed than a political biography (much less the “definitive” biography, which in any case was already written by John Culver and John Hyde and titled “American Dreamer.”)

Some reviewers on this Amazon website remark with astonishment that Henry Wallace rose as high as he did. Their mystification is not surprising given their knowledge of Wallace derives from Benn Steil’s skewed account. But those who actually worked with Henry Wallace in the 1930s and 1940s found him remarkably effective. Franklin Roosevelt, who knew him rather better than Benn Steil, considered his Secretary of Agriculture’s common sense and progressive vision so sound that he made his third term contingent on Henry Wallace being Vice President. Wallace’s VP record impressed his contemporaries enough that, according to a Gallup poll on the eve of the 1944 Convention, 65% of Democratic voters expressed preference for him to be VP again (as did FDR publicly himself).

I knew Henry Wallace. He died when I was 16, and I saw him in hundreds of interpersonal settings with his friends and family. “The World That Wasn’t” could be better titled “The Henry Wallace That Wasn’t.” When it comes to a description of Wallace as a person and his political career, Mr. Steil uses several tactics that make his book an example of character assassination:

To make a case that Henry Wallace’s judgment would have disqualified him for dealing prudently with the USSR postwar, Steil uses several misleading techniques:

--The approach used throughout the book is to focus readers’ attention on incidents (or speculations) that put Henry Wallace’s political career in a negative light while skimming over his legacy of pragmatism and success. This 512-page “political biography” allots just 20 pages to half that political career (Henry Wallace’s two-terms in the Cabinet as “the best Secretary of Agriculture the country has ever had,” in Arthur Schlesinger’s opinion) while devoting the book’s longest chapter--62 pages--to Secretary Wallace’s support for, and later denunciation of, a Russian mystic who led a failed plant-hunting expedition in Central Asia.

--While praising my grandfather for his brilliance with plants, Mr. Steil gives short shrift to achievements inconsistent with the book’s agenda. Henry Wallace was a capitalist, not a socialist, and called himself a progressive capitalist all his life. But lest his strong preference for capitalism over Marxism conflict with the author’s occasional red-baiting, the biography restricts Henry Wallace’s creation of one of most successful agricultural companies in American history, still thriving after a hundred years, to less than a paragraph. Similarly, the tome omits any mention that Nobel-prize winner Norman Borlaug credited Wallace for helping to launch the Green Revolution that would eventually save a billion lives.

--Throughout the book Mr. Steil overstates Wallace’s support for the Soviet Union’s economic and agricultural systems, and particularly during the war years. Steil gets the date wrong for Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain speech (“As Churchill said in his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of March 5, 1944” pg. 3,) but that inadvertent proofreading mistake illustrates well that what people said when they said it matters. In the same way that Churchill (along with FDR and Allied leaders) had only fulsome praise for Russia and its murderous dictator in March 1944, many of Wallace’s supportive remarks about the USSR during World War II trace back to support for an indispensable wartime ally.
Wallace praised strides made in Russian agriculture but was appalled by the brutality used to collectivize Russian farmers and urged FDR not to recognize the USSR in 1933. The book’s portrait of Wallace as enamored with Soviet agricultural improvements in the 1940s understates his continuing recognition of the inherent weaknesses of the Soviet system and overlooks entirely Wallace’s disapproval of Stalin’s disastrous agricultural advisor, Trofim Lysenko, known for rejecting Mendelian genetics. (During the book launch, Steil was asked by an audience member in the Q&A, “What was Henry Wallace’s opinion on Lysenko, Stalin’s favorite geneticist?” Benn Steil, baffled by the question, responded, “What is Lysenko?”)

--The book has copious citations, but Mr. Steil’s most sweeping indictments lack documentation as he wades into speculative conclusions, often framed as Wallace ‘would have done this,’ ‘would have appointed these men’ ‘surely knew’ or ‘must have known.’ When it comes to venturing into alternative history, Mr. Steil writes confidently, with rarely a glance at a subjunctive verb.
One notable paragraph, after mentioning that Wallace would have become president at FDR’s death had he remained on the ticket, segues into this statement: “With Henry Wallace in the White House, there would have been no Truman Doctrine. No Marshall Plan. No NATO. No West Germany. No policy of containment. All these initiatives, foundational to what has been called ‘The American Century,’ Henry Wallace opposed.”
Apart from Mr. Steil’s certainty in describing a counterfactual scenario, a more misleading tactic is his sleight-of-hand with dates. He starts his paragraph at the time of FDR’s death, when none of these initiatives existed to be opposed in the first place. Historians favorable to Wallace envision what his presidency might have accomplished beginning then, in April 1945, before US-USSR relations had calcified. Wallace’s gradual opposition to such initiatives as containment and the Marshall Plan was not to what they originally hoped to achieve but to how he felt they were eventually manipulated, with their final incarnations serving to exacerbate the Cold War.

--Despite the expansive “World” in its title, the book’s post 1945-counterfactual scenario has little interest in imagining much beyond the US-USSR relationship. Given that binary focus, Steil ignores a host of international and domestic scenarios that place Wallace in a positive limelight, among them his stands against colonialism and segregation.
Wallace was an internationalist, popular in many parts of the world because of his wartime speeches enunciating the importance of political freedom and human dignity. Readers expecting to glimpse what a postwar-Wallace Presidency might have wrought in other international relations (such as improving trade, strengthening the UN, extending political and religious freedom) will need to look elsewhere. Wallace’s forthright anti-colonial stand, had it been expressed from the bully pulpit of the Oval Office, might have affected US policy toward France’s hold on Vietnam and Britain’s control of its imperial colonies (the key reason British diplomacy did all it could to keep Wallace off the 1944 ticket). The benefit accruing to the US’s stature--not to mention an earlier emancipation for colonial subjects--is one positive scenario omitted from Steil’s speculative history.
On the US domestic front, even detractors of Henry Wallace extol his courageous campaign in 1948 through the South, refusing to speak in segregated venues, being pelted by eggs with some followers beaten. While Steil cannot ignore that campaign, his counterfactual history has no space to imagine what a Wallace Presidency might have meant for accelerating desegregation in the United States, not to mention improving broader civil liberties, equal pay for equal work and environmental sustainability. These and similar policies, now largely integrated into the fabric of American life, reflect favorably on Wallace’s political vision and are omitted from “The World That Wasn’t”’s narrow lens.

Henry Wallace changed his opinions over time as new evidence came to light, and he admitted mistakes particularly during his 1948 run for President, but his bedrock beliefs in progressive capitalism and Judeo-Christian values anchored his life, enabling him--when he actually held political power--to implement decisions that usually turned out to have long-term significant benefit to America and its citizens. When he died in 1965, the then-Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, remarked: “No single individual has contributed more to the abundance we enjoy today than Henry Wallace.”

Early in “The World That Wasn’t” Mr. Steil writes, “Besides being a compelling focal point for counterfactual history, Henry Wallace is a fascinating human being—one who has been incompletely, and often inaccurately, portrayed by his chroniclers.”

I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Steil should now number himself among those chroniclers.

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William A. Thayer

Incredibly well researched

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2024

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Tremendous research. Gives a good glimpse of the New Deal. The two big parts were agriculture (Wallace) and industry. Wallace definitely had a rosy view of the Soviet Union and Stalin.....huge mistake.

Benn Steil's book on Harry Dexter White is also really well written.

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Sean D.

Outstanding and Well Written Work

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2024

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Highly recommend. To some, Wallace may seem to be a tertiary figure in American political history; a figure best known for his oddities and the lionization bestowed on him posthumously by Oliver Stone and others. Wallace is perhaps best known for nearly being President, following his removal from the ticket in 1944. The real Wallace, Stiel notes, was an important figure in modern American political history. This book is exhaustively researched, fair and compelling. Contra to some reviewers on here, Stiel is not “anti-Wallace”—indeed he shows himself to be quite capable of praising the man’s strong suits and accomplishments. But the author is also, thankfully, not out to push some fantastical narrative. The writing is superb and, despite its length, the book reads very well well. This is an excellent book on an extraordinary man who lived during extraordinary times, shaping them—or often trying to—for both the better and the worse.

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michael Billington

A different view of Henry Wallace..

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2024

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Most of my knowledge regarding Henry Wallace came from watching the Oliver Stone documentary and reading the book that accompioned it 'the untold history of the united states'. Alongside this any biography of FDR includes discussion regarding the decision to change Wallace for Truman in 1944.

This biography provides more detailed and rounded deptictions of the man himself obviously but also the people and views he associated with during his time as secretary of Agriculture and Vice President. Some people may find this book to be a reitieration of old conservative complaints regarding Wallace, this reader found it a good counterweight to the often utopian view that a Wallace presidency would have prevented the cold war.

But it is well written, if a bit dry at times due as much to the subject matter such as Wallace's obsession with perfecting corn, no offence to any farmers intended. Overall a good book about an individual who was far more complicated than I had previously been aware off.

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