THIRD PARTIES: Iowa Hybrid

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Seeds & Grass. As a young man, Henry Wallace once wrote: "I have always had a great affection for grass. It seems to stand for quietness and strength." He immersed himself in the world of nature. He was but six years old when George Washington Carver found a haven and a place to study on the campus where Wallace's father taught, and awakened in young Henry an interest in the cross-breeding of plants. At eight, Carver's small disciple started crossing pansies. At 17 he began experiments with corn. This became his life.

In 1916, Wallace was stricken by what doctors said was tuberculosis. He always insisted it might have been undulant fever. He was bedridden for four months. He read the Midwest's mordant iconoclast, Thorstein Veblen. He wrote: "One hundred years from now people will realize that he [Veblen] was one of the few men of the early 20th Century who really knew what was going on." Wallace dreamed of a world properly clothed, properly fed, free from disease.

In 1928, Wallace abandoned the Republican Party and voted for Al Smith. Four years later, with righteous anger in his heart, he watched the evicted farmers trudging the roads of Iowa. He was invited to Hyde Park for a conference with the new Democratic candidate for President. He helped write Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 farm platform. A few months later a triumphant Roosevelt offered the Secretaryship of Agriculture to the somewhat shaggy but also somewhat distinguished 45-year-old Iowa farm editor, statistician and geneticist.

Prophet and Patriot. Perhaps Wallace should have stayed in his own cornfield. In the Midwest he was a vigorous voice, an awkward, shambling speaker and writer but a minor prophet of the farm land. He was a sound scientist and a competent businessman. Out of his experiments with corn grew the Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co., which began to provide him with a sizable income—and still does (he is 1948's wealthiest presidential candidate).

Wallace's colleagues in the New Deal Cabinet later recalled some impressions of the disheveled, brooding Iowan. To Frances Perkins he was a man of "patriotism and nobility of character." Cordell Hull dryly remarked: "He was so active that his tendency at times was to trench on the jurisdiction of his colleagues, including myself." Henry Morgenthau, who fancied himself as a farmer, dismissed Wallace's basic farm proposals as "nonsense." Harold Ickes thought he was consumed by political ambition. Wallace thoroughly annoyed the downright and bullying Ickes, who watched Wallace sitting hunched over at droning Cabinet meetings with his mind on other things. He was "present in the flesh," Ickes reported, "but usually in absentia in spirit."

The public heard about Wallace as the man who established the AAA, ordered the slaughter of little pigs ("You'd think the farmers had raised the pigs as pets," Wallace remarked petulantly). His department set up the Ever Normal Granary and the Food Stamp Plan.