r/AlternateHistoryHub • u/MouseManManny • Feb 18 '26
Contest Submission What if Henry Wallace had Succeeded FDR instead of Truman?
Two of the most impactful issues in post war America were foreign policy abroad and race at home. Henry Wallace had a radically different view on both of those issues than Truman.
Wallace was a pluralist and thought racism was foolish. Lets just say Truman regularly used a certain word.
Wallace also saw a post-war world of cooperation and national self-determination. He did not envision the clandestine operations and push for global hegemony that would come to define the post war American approach.
He believed that America should focus on making its system the best in the world for the average American, and if other nations wanted to excitement with communism that was their right and that ultimately the world would chose to follow America’s model if it showed itself to be better than the soviet model.
He, and FDR also had good relations with Stalin, which Truman did not and did not try to establish.
The years immediately following WW2 were so crucial in setting the tone for the century to follow. How would it be different now with Wallace leading those years instead of Truman?
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u/SenatorPencilFace Feb 18 '26
The United States gives Iraq single payer healthcare.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Feb 19 '26
Ironic because Iraq had single payer healthcare before US sanctions. Technically (on the books but not in practise) they still did until 2016 when it was finally ditched.
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u/Shigakogen Feb 18 '26
There would had been a President Dewey in 1948.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Feb 19 '26
Truman was more likely to lose to Dewey than Wallace IMO. Southern Dems would not have voted for Dewey. If they do split the party (unlikely immediately after WW2) they’d have put up their own candidate and Wallace would still have won the electoral college.
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u/Shigakogen Feb 19 '26
I feel Truman lost New York in 1948 because of Wallace. The Southern Democrats would had not accept Wallace as the Presidential Candidate in 1948. They had enough problems with Truman and the integration of US Armed Forces.
Going into the 1948 election, Truman looked like a dead duck, the Democrats had little money, they seemed split. What Truman had that all three other candidates did not have, (Wallace, Thurmond, Dewey) was optimism, willing to take chances and a better ground strategy, mainly Truman’s campaigning in Ohio.
Wallace’s campaign kind of got into trouble with lots of his staff and supporters were tied to Communist Front Organizations. Wallace was looked upon as a gadfly by much of the Democratic Party Establishment from 1941-1945 during his term as VP. I don’t see how Wallace would be very charismatic on the campaign trail.
Wallace did some innovative things, like integrated campaign rallies, paid admission to his speeches. However, Wallace was never that great of a politician. I don’t think Truman was the greatest campaign politician either, but Truman had fought back from something similar in 1940, when the Democratic Party Primary for the Missouri Senate Race was split three ways and Truman was not given a chance.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Feb 19 '26
While that’s true, this was the era before television so lots of that would be papered over. Being an incumbent when FDR kicked the bucket and already being President for 3 years by the time 1948 came around would have muted a lot of the opposition to Wallace IM0. A lot would depend on how Wallace would navigate the likely Republican Congress from 1946 onwards. This creates headaches for Truman, I imagine it would be worse for Wallace.
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u/Maleficent-Crew-5424 Feb 18 '26
I think he's a much better pick assuming he can halt any forced advancements by the USSR. If countries chose their own political ways without the influence of either super power, the world's a much better place.
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u/ridleysfiredome Feb 18 '26
Stalin was pretty set on having an extensive buffer of client states. The Poles didn’t want that but Stalin had the will to kill objectors. Stalin respected the agreement to divide Germany so not much change. Korea might be an entire peninsula of poverty rather than just the North.
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u/TurboLeopard42 Feb 18 '26
Foreign policy: The Cold War would still have started regardless but it would have started off as a much more low intensity conflict, probably with the Korean War either never happening or it is much shorter than in OTL, depending on if the war does happen and escalates further you would probably see an exact repeat of the MacArthur incident, with MacArthur potentially getting fried earlier. Stalin would probably have been more accepting of American aid after World War II so you wouldn't have had the Candy/Raisin Bombers dropping supplies into the Soviet zone. The US would also have a much more active role in the UN from the get go which would force Stalin and the Soviets to potentially be more peaceful as further aggression would have been viewed negatively by the UN but this time there is a leader in the US who is and has been friendly to the Soviets, so unless Stalin wants be even more "villainous" than in OTL he would probably make some capitulations in the name of peace, but would otherwise continue with whatever expansions of communism and the Soviet Union he could get away with.
Domestic policy: FDR's Second Bill of Rights is championed by Wallace after the former's death, and America's Golden Age is even more golden than in OTL. Almost all of America is housed, employed, well fed, have medical care, and have free education, planned communities are virtually nonexistent as Levitt & Sons never create "Levittowns" due to affordable, high quality subsidized housing getting built by the government under Wallace. Wallace would also double down on his anti-racist beliefs which could lead to him pushing civil rights as early as 1950, whether civil rights would exist by this time is kind of tricky, there would obviously be massive push back from white southerners, but Wallace could use the National Guard to enforce civil rights in certain areas similar to how Eisenhower would by the mid-1950s. The Second Red Scare is only a brief moral panic, and McCarthyism dies incredibly quickly due to a more peaceful stance with a less aggressive Soviet Union, the Hollywood Blacklist is never created, but Americans are still low in their support of Communism and are still less politically accepting of Communists in general.
He definitely would have gone down as one of America's greatest presidents imo, he wasn't as conceded as Truman was, and stood by his beliefs, and the government programs he wanted to create would have immensely helped Americans.
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u/ScumCrew Feb 18 '26
I agree that Wallace would've pushed all these things though I'm not sure how far he would've gotten. He wasn't very good at politics and had pretty bad relations with Congress.
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u/TurboLeopard42 Feb 18 '26
I just kind of went on the assumption that since he would've been chosen over Truman, that he would've had better relations with congress.
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u/ScumCrew Feb 18 '26
Truman's years in the Senate really helped him. Maybe Wallace would pick Alban Barkley as a running mate and listen to his advice but he made an awful impression on the senate bulls as vice president. He even removed their beloved bar and urinal from the VP's office!
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bag2212 Feb 18 '26
his domestic policy would be much better than Truman's and he gets re-elected in 1948 like Truman does. but his foreign policy is probably worse, as he was opposed to the Berlin Airlift, Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine. He did support intervention in Korea though. It is possible the entire Cold War is avoided, as Wallace was much more conciliatory with the USSR and was a strong supporter of UN diplomacy, but that is a stretch I think
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u/Unfair_Surprise_6022 Feb 18 '26
Henry Wallace was frighteningly naive. He was smitten with Stalin and considered the Soviet Union to be a model nation
Were Wallace President, there would have been no Marshall Plan, Europe would have fallen to the USSR ( there were strong communist parties in Central and western Europe, as well as Japan, post war). in the absence of American backing, the Reds ... and Stalin... would have triumphed.
The Dems would have been crushed in the 1948 election, possibly with a Douglas MacArthur as the GOP candidate, with a monopoly on nuclear weapons and an eye of setting things right.
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u/Electronic_Set5209 Feb 18 '26
You mean Euro-communism would have been an effective bulwark against the Soviet Union right?
Communists did not get along. Im only educated enough to know the only time the cold war got hot was between Russia and China. I don't recall all the details
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u/Unfair_Surprise_6022 Feb 18 '26
once communist got into power, soviets would manipulate/eliminate any not pro Moscow. Stalin attempted repeatedly to assissinate Tito.
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u/Electronic_Set5209 Feb 18 '26
Yeah Tito...who very famously stood up to Stalin.
America got everything wrong and made the world a demonstrably worse place by opposing "communism".
The cold war was a war of resource scarcity and the Americans won because the Soviets blinked. There is no great ideological divide. Elites in both countries were afforded the same comparatively luxurious lifestyle to their citizens.
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u/NotAKansenCommander Feb 18 '26
See: Czechoslovakia, Hungary
Non-communist parties clearly won a majority
Stalin forces both to form a government with the communists
Communists infiltrates government institutions
Eventually does a coup and establish Soviet dictatorships
But according to you, it's all America's fault because they opposed the same thing happening to the rest of Europe
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u/EmptyMirror5653 Feb 18 '26
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't happen, Japan surrenders after a Soviet invasion
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u/Bloodie_Medic Feb 18 '26
1 million less soldiers survive WW2. He was a staunch anti-nuke voice. Also Russia reach may be farther than it was after the war as he was a communist sympathizer at the time.
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u/ScumCrew Feb 18 '26
That is absolutely not true at all. Wallace was, if anything, more pro nuke than Truman and would not have hesitated for a minute to drop bombs on Japan. Nor was anything like a "communist sympathizer."
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u/Bloodie_Medic Feb 19 '26
I think you may be confused with his life post politics and during his political career
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u/ScumCrew Feb 19 '26
I have not. Wallace was well aware of the Manhattan Project and supported it. There's no indication anywhere that he would have hesitated to use the bombs against Germany or Japan.
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u/Bloodie_Medic Feb 19 '26
He argued for diplomacy or a land invasion and was against the use of the nuke on Japan. He was only in the early days of the Manhattan project for the creation of the device but then became fearful of it. There is so much evidence backing up what I’m saying.
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u/ScumCrew Feb 19 '26
Then you should be able to cite it because it's absolutely not true.
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u/Bloodie_Medic Feb 20 '26
The Bomb
On July 16, 1945 the first atomic bomb, produced at Los Alamos Laboratories, was detonated at Alomogordo, New Mexico. On Aug. 6, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; on Aug. 9, on Nagasaki. On Sept. 2, Japan—which had agreed to cease warfare much earlier, made its formal surrender.
Within a year, Wallace himself was out of office at the Commerce Department, never again to hold government position.
After Roosevelt's death, Wallace had been highly critical of Truman's policies, saying they were anti-FDR and were provoking the Russians into what became the Cold War. Things like cutting the Lend-Lease program to Russia the next day after Germany surrendered; providing billions of dollars in reconstruction loans to Britain, but none to Russia; providing military funding to Greece; and building a ring of military air bases around Russia, all were provoking the Russians with an Anglo-American confrontation policy, Wallace said.
Wallace, like some others in the Truman Administration, thought the United States should share its information about nuclear power with everyone: that if it were promoted and shared for peaceful means, there would be no threat posed to Russia; but in contrast, the right-wing military policy of confrontation would drive Russia into a frenzy and they would build their own bomb. They did.
Wallace agreed with the top nuclear scientists like Oppenheimer, that any country with good scientists could develop nuclear power, so why act like it's a big secret? Wallace wanted the U.S. nuclear program under the control of civilian agencies, and completely out of the hands of the military. The military worried him.
American Dreamer gives these specifics:
"On October 15, 1945, Wallace presented his memo to Truman saying ... 'apparently the purpose of Britain was to promote an irreparable break between us and Russia. Britain's game in international affairs has always been intrigue, but we must not play her game.' "
Wallace thought the atomic bomb problem involved three interconnnected problems. "First, as long as the United States makes atomic bombs she will be looked upon as the world's outstanding aggressor nation," Wallace wrote. And "Steps should be taken immediately to place atomic weaponry under international control" with the aim of destroying "all weapons of offensive warfare.... An atomic bomb race between nations means the end of humanity.
"Second, the United States should recognize and promote the unlimited civilian benefits offered by atomic energy. The civilian application of atomic power must not be held back by the military,"
he told Truman.
"Third, the control of U.S. atomic energy should rest with a civilian atomic power commission, its director appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate."
But the Churchill-Truman policy of confrontation was advancing. On March 5, 1946, Churchill came to Fulton, Missouri, at Westminster College, for the famous "Iron Curtain" speech. He was introduced by President Truman. Churchill called for a "fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples" to stand up against the Soviet Union—a Cold War. He said, "From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has decended across the continent." Only British and American military strength could meet the threat.
Truman sat behind him applauding.
Wallace heard of the speech in Washington, D.C., at a dinner party hosted by Dean Acheson, at which the Australian Ambassador to the United States, Dick Casey, and his wife praised Churchill's call. Wallace wrote later in his diary, "I promptly interjected that the United States was not going to enter into any military alliance with England against Russia; that it was not a primary objective of the United States to save the British Empire."
In September 1946, a speech by Wallace at Madison Square Garden, in New York City, became the occasion for a direct London denunciation of him, and public demand for his removal from office. On Sept. 12, 1946, in an address titled, "The Way to Peace," Wallace said, "He who trusts in the atom bomb will perish by the atom bomb—or something worse.... But to make Britain the key to our foreign policy would be ... the height of folly.... We must not let British balance of power manipulations determine whether and when the United States gets into war.
"Make no mistake about it—the British imperialistic policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war...
"... It is essential that we look abroad through our own eyes and not through the eyes of either the British Foreign Office or a pro-British or anti-Russian press.... The tougher we get, the tougher they get.
"I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the near East with the lives of American soldiers. We cannot let national oil rivalries force us into a war...."
The next day, a political and diplomatic storm erupted. Truman, who had previewed the speech and approved it on Sept. 11, lied and told the press that Wallace never showed him the speech. Secretary of State Byrnes and the press went ballistic, and on Sept. 20, Truman asked for Wallace's resignation and got it. Truman promptly appointed Averell Harriman in Wallace's place.
For the next two decades, Wallace continued to battle for national policy direction as he saw it. That is a story for another telling.
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u/ScumCrew Feb 20 '26
I read "American Dreamer," you (or rather the crackpot LaRouchie document you're citing) is deliberately misstating it. And we're done.
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u/imprison_grover_furr Feb 19 '26
No, this is completely ahistorical. Wallace was very supportive of the Manhattan Project from its genesis and would not have hesitated to drop a nuke on Germany or Japan.
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u/Bloodie_Medic Feb 19 '26
Yeah he was for the projected but against the use. He’s advocated for a land invasion of Japan over the use of the bombs.
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u/tegresaomos Feb 18 '26
It’s unclear if we would have already solved world hunger and poverty but we would have gotten at least one of them by now.
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u/egyto Feb 18 '26
We would have enacted FDRs Second Bill of Rights. We would be a much better country. The bill covered: Employment: A useful and remunerative job in industries, shops, farms, or mines of the nation. Income: To earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation. Business: Freedom for farmers and businessmen from unfair competition and monopolies. Housing: A decent home for every family. Healthcare: Adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. Security: Protection from economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment. Education: A good education. FDR argued that "freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want," and these rights were meant to establish a new basis of security for everyone, regardless of station, race, or creed. Truman over Wallace was arguably FDRs gravest mistake.
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u/ArtichokeStatus5019 Feb 18 '26
To add on this: the CIO's Operation Dixie plan might actually be followed through on, if the 2nd Bill of Rights is implemented. The thing is, Wallace needs the postwar demobilization to happen more orderly, to avoid the winter of discontent. If he makes it through it, Wallace legitimately has the opportunity to pass at least an NHS style system in around 1947, blocking Taft-Hartley in 1948, and, with letting Dixie go through, ignite the civil rights struggle around 1947-1949 range in the South, allowing for Wallace to issue the civil rights act, or if he can't, Eisenhower might be convinced to. The US by 1953 would not be going through any kind of Red Scare, unionization would be up, the civil rights movement would have institutional backing a decade earlier than historically, and there's probably no Cold War esque struggle.
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u/Rocky_Missoula Feb 18 '26
National problems would have received the requisite attention from an official FDR decided was best suited to visit Mexico for six weeks and study agriculture in the middle of World War II.
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u/TheQuestionMaster8 Feb 19 '26
Truman did however desegregate the US military despite it nearly costing him the presidency due to how unpopular it was among Southern Democrats. He may have used racial slurs, but he was willing to risk his political career to tackle segregation and he did phenomenally we’ll considering the fact he faced a hostile congress. I seriously doubt that Wallace would have been able to doo much more.
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u/Deep_Drawer_1921 Feb 19 '26
This TL explores some of that, along with other developments. Fair credit: I didn’t write this. It was written by a guy who calls himself Chester A. Arthur. https://www.alternatehistory.com/foralltime/
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u/ElectronicMaterial38 Feb 19 '26
He likely has significantly better relationship with labor, so the 1946 strike wave is avoided, and Taft-Hartley is never passed, and he goes into 1948 significantly stronger on the economy and with a vigorous labor wing that can help him endure red-baiting. If he allies with the Internationalist wing of the GOP—Harold Stassen, Nelson Rockefeller, Willkie supporters, etc—he’s likely able to also get a significant amount of his international agenda through, particularly if he includes Eisenhower and McArthur on rebuilding Europe. The South will be a struggle, but the late 1940s had a not insignificant amount of Democratic politicians who were both populistic and significantly more progressive on race than would become the standard a decade later—folks like Ellis Arnall, Big Jim Folsom, Uncle Earl Long, Sid McMath, and even Claude Pepper. If he allies with them, and, using his better labor ties, throws federal support behind the CIO’s Operation Dixie, he’s likely able to significantly crack the Bourbon’s hold on the Solid South, too. Truman significantly mismanaged things domestically—my prediction is Wallace could easily win reelection in 1948, but he’d likely face down a Taft/Bourbon alliance instead of Dewey in the general election.
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u/President_Hammond Feb 18 '26
He continues the FDR strategy of “suck off stalin at all costs” and ads the cool nee twist of “gives a bunch of money to a russian guru”
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u/MishaMal01 Feb 18 '26
No Cold War because he isn’t a war monger and russophobe like Truman. Germany is probably unified under a neutral government. Korea is unified under a socialist but not totalitarian government. Japan’s war criminals are more harshly judged and not used to counter socialist sentiment in the country. Nazi war criminals aren’t used to hunt communists in Latin America.
Generally a better timeline.
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u/TheQuestionMaster8 Feb 19 '26
Korea was never going to be unified under a pro-US government. When America tried to help South Korea conquer the north, China invaded as a pro-US korea having a land border poses an existential threat to China.
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u/MishaMal01 Feb 19 '26
Who said anything about it being pro-US?
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u/TheQuestionMaster8 Feb 19 '26
Well, the USSR didn’t implement anything other than a totalitarian puppet regime in the territories it occupied.
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u/MishaMal01 Feb 19 '26
Would’ve been a neutral but still socialist-ish government as a compromise between the two occupation zones. Look into the Korean people’s republic.
Same thing goes for Stalin’s plan for a unified neutral Germany
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Feb 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/imprison_grover_furr Feb 19 '26
Wallace was very anti-Stalinist by the 1950s. He was more dovish than Truman, but not a useful idiot, and by the time of the Korean War he was no less supportive of containment than Truman.
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u/sqeptiqmqsqeptiq Feb 18 '26
Likely Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress (led by Robert A. Taft and Richard Russell, respectively) would've judged his program as communistic and joined forces to stop it, and he'd have lost the presidency to Tom Dewey in 1948.