bro whaaaaat? respect. I do wonder how a non-revolutionary China would have turned out. What's the significance of Henry Wallace over Harry Truman?
the main things to note are like:
- being somewhat of a prodigal son of fdr, as the third term VP wallace was far more attuned to fdr's relationship with stalin and the wider geopolitical issue of what to do about russia post-ww2, whereas truman was distrusted by all in fdr's cabinet, didn't know about the a-bomb until (iirc) just after fdr died and was little more than a stooge for bad actors. wallace was far more politically astute, if not as directly cunning as fdr or as truman liked to think he was, and would have been much less likely to bungle the stalin & japan issues. iirc he did support internment, so that is an unconscionable black mark, but i do not believe he would have dropped the bomb. however, that's pure conjecture.
- wallace was also not hobbled by personal prejudices the way fdr was, and was a far more honest embodiment of the promises of the new deal and what LBJ would come to call his great society; while we're all products of our times, henry wallace was akin to... let's go with Farmer Bernie Sanders in terms of empathy.
- having wallace at the helm of what was the end of one world and the beginning of another would have changed the future entirely; one of the few politicians of the time not willing to sell out civil liberties in the HUAC era, the possibility of whether the HUAC scare would have even happened is a big question, because it happened as a result of truman so heavily fucking up international relations + being a puppet for anti-communist hysterics. similarly, wallace not being displaced by truman wouldn't have caused the death of progressive politics for three generations - the progressive uptick we are seeing right now is what we haven't seen in more decades than we might care to remember, as even the 1960s had accepted certain facts that were up for debate in wallace's era, even though the 60s brought to an end some facts that were sadly NOT for questioning in wallace's time. while i still think the goldwater shitheel conservative revival would have happened, the ongoing fight against the new deal would have been delayed long enough for the voting public to see its undiluted benefits for longer, hopefully causing the worst parts of the goldwater revival to lose steam.
it's really just an exercise into an entirely different alternate history to even consider the possibility of wallace's ascendancy, as it would have happened at such a critical juncture that the flow-on from truman we know today would be drastically different.
