Mark Schauer

Vice President Henry A. Wallace: Hybrid corn, politics, and the Century of the Common Man Mark Schauer

Essay from the year 2008 in the subject History - America, grade: A, Northern Arizona University, course: Undergraduate Study, language: English, abstract: For all the intemperate rhetoric about how dangerous Wallace was to the American way of life, it is striking how very common a specific type of American middle class man he actually was: An avid, if ungraceful tennis player; a middle aged man who marveled at the health benefits of such mundane choices as forswearing the elevator for stairs. It is easy to imagine a David Brooks "bobo" profile of Wallace in the late 1990s, albeit with a quaint pastoral twist. Wallace's biggest political sin may have been being born too early. Perhaps the changing times have afforded Wallace a certain degree of recognition that previously escaped him: Though he never got his own presidential library, in 2003 the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library opened the newly constructed Henry A. Wallace Visitor, Education, and Conference Center.