Henry A. Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the 33rd vice president of the United States, serving from 1941 to 1945, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He served as the 11th U.S. secretary of agriculture and the 10th U.S. secretary of commerce. He was the nominee of the new Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election.

The oldest son of Henry Cantwell Wallace, who served as U.S. secretary of agriculture from 1921 to 1924, Wallace was born in rural Iowa. After graduating from Iowa State University in 1910, he worked as a writer and editor for his family's farm journal, Wallaces' Farmer. He also founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, a hybrid corn company that became extremely successful. Wallace displayed intellectual curiosity about a wide array of subjects, including statistics and economics, and explored various religious and spiritual movements, including Theosophy. After his father's death in 1924, Wallace drifted away from the Republican Party; he supported Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election.

Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture under Roosevelt from 1933 to 1940. He strongly supported the New Deal and presided over a major shift in federal agricultural policy, implementing measures designed to curtail agricultural surpluses and to ameliorate rural poverty. Roosevelt overcame strong opposition from conservative leaders in the Democratic Party and had Wallace nominated for vice president at the 1940 Democratic National Convention. The Roosevelt–Wallace ticket won the 1940 presidential election. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, conservative party leaders defeated Wallace's bid for renomination, placing Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman on the Democratic ticket instead. In early 1945, Roosevelt appointed Wallace as Secretary of Commerce.