Henry A. Wallace in McCarthyism & Red Scare
Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965) was an Iowa farmer and longtime progressive politician who served as Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, and Vice President under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the early Cold War years, Wallace opposed President Harry Truman's aggressive anti-Soviet stance, arguing that peaceful cooperation rather than anticommunist containment should be the basis of American foreign policy.
Wallace ran for president in 1948 on the anti-Cold War platform of the new Progressive Party. His crushing defeat—he won only 2.4% of the vote—suggested that straying from the anticommunist Cold War consensus would no longer be tolerated in respectable American political circles.