Stokes: Wallace gives rare demonstration of honesty
He disregards foes to speak his mind
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Chicago, Illinois –
Somebody throws a bomb at Hitler. The Japanese Cabinet falls. The deadly circle closes in on the dictators.
Beating in on them too, are the shouts from assemblies of free people, such as that in Chicago’s great stadium. There a great political party goes through those contortions typical of a democracy in its trial-and-error method – a method which seems crude and cumbersome, but which leaves men free.
A man stands before them. He is the antithesis of Hitler and Tōjō. He grins shyly. He raises his hand as the crowd roars, in an awkward sort of wave. There is nothing mechanical about it. It is grateful.
He looks like Iowa
His hair is lopping, and he presents that ruffled appearance, which causes a wife always to say afterward, “Why didn’t you comb your hair? I wanted you to look nice before all those people.”
His tie straggles.
Henry Wallace is from Iowa, and he looks every inch of it.
He stands there and he talks, talks in simple, direct sentences, and suddenly you feel that you are hearing the voice of the plain people – the plain people of this country and of the world.
Here is honesty
And as you watch and listen, something tightens in you. You brush at your eye, and something cold chases up your spine.
Here, you think, is honesty. Here is decency. And as he goes on, here is a demonstration of “guts.”
This man is doing no ordinary thing. He is Vice President. He wants to be renominated, for in that way he can best carry on the fight for human justice, but not at the sacrifice of any convictions.
There are some sitting before him who hate him for the things he believes. But Wallace is no politician. He nits clean from the shoulder, and he smiles as he strikes – a friendly smile, not a taunting or belligerent smile. The iron is not on the surface. That’s underneath.
If telling the truth as he sees it means the end of political hopes, well and good.
“This is the way I see it,” he says in effect. “Do with me what you please.”
There are Southerners sitting before him, many of them. They don’t like him. There are others before him who represent economic interests that would be disturbed by the things Mr. Wallace would do. He knows that, he knows his political fate is in their hands, but he strikes:
In a political, educational and economic sense, there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Equal educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work, regardless of sex or race.
Then he says – what many realize who sit there before him – many who saw the party go down to defeat because it took the easy way and stood for nothing.
The Democratic Party cannot long survive as a conservative party.
I go away knowing that this is the greatest speech I have heard in 20 years of covering national political conventions.