Henry A. Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the 33rd Vice President of the United States (1941–45), the Secretary of Agriculture (1933–40), and the Secretary of Commerce (1945–46). In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the presidential nominee of the Progressive Party.

Early life

The Wallace family was of Scots-Irish Presbyterian heritage and had originally emigrated from Ulster to Pennsylvania. Henry Agard Wallace's grandfather, Henry Wallace or "Uncle Henry", was a former Presbyterian minister who preached the "social gospel". As a large landowner in Iowa, "Uncle Henry" was an advocate of "scientific farming" and helped organize The Farmers' Protective Association, the Agricultural Editors Association, and the Iowa Improved Stock Association, becoming the editor of the Iowa Homestead, the state's largest and most important farm publication. He viewed it as his life mission to serve God by helping his fellow farmers.

This Henry's son, and Henry A.'s father, was Henry Cantwell Wallace, a farmer, newspaper editor, university professor and author who would serve as the Secretary of Agriculture in the Republican administrations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Henry Agard was born on October 7, 1888, at a farm near the village of Orient, Iowa, in Adair County, but the family later moved to Des Moines. Wallace's mother, née May Brodhead, was deeply religious. She had been to college and was trained in music and art.