It's a little hard to imagine this radio address is actually from 1948. The problems Progressive Party Presidential Candidate Henry Wallace discusses during this campaign talk are somewhat eerie in their similarities to our current situation.

Political corruption, the over-bearing influence of Wall Street and the Banking system over elected officials. The manufactured prices, the hysteria and the fear mongering - it's all there. Only it's 1948.

Henry Wallace was an ardent New Dealer and Secretary of Agriculture before becoming vice-President during FDR's third term. After FDR's death, Wallace broke with the party and clashed with Truman over domestic and foreign matters. Wallace was repeatedly smeared by both Democrats and Republicans as being pro-Communist, and the fact that he enjoyed a cordial relationship with Moscow probably didn't help matters any.

But he did speak about things that have come back to haunt us now.

So here, in its entirety, is Henry Wallace's Campaign address from July 29, 1948.

And keep reminding yourself of that as you're listening.

Former vice-President and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace broke with the Democratic Party in 1948. Anger with what Wallace considered Truman's dismantling of FDR's New Deal policies and a general slide back to the days before the Depression. Wallace, running as a Third Party candidate (The Progressive Party), gave a series of radio talks leading up to the 1948 election which he based on subjects voters wanted to hear about the most. This talk, number 3 of a series of 7, is about Inflation and what could be done about it in 1948.

Henry Wallace: “Inflation, what you and I call the high cost of living, is not something that just happens like the weather. You can’t do anything about weather, but you can about inflation. Inflation is not accidental, it is man made. It is monopoly made. It was made and forced upon us by the men of Wall Street, acting through their agents; the Republicans and the Democrats – the two party’s. And there is something we can do about it. We can end it.”

Wallace was pretty much marginalized by the powers that be at the time. I suppose the closest comparison you could draw (although by no means a wholly accurate one) would be a 1948 version of Ralph Nader. Seen as a thorn in the side of the two party system and ignored to a great degree when he wasn't being smeared as a Communist sympathizer. It's always interesting to consider how things might have turned out had Wallace gained momentum. But you could also draw a conclusion as to how Third parties tended to fare in our political climate throughout history. Perhaps that's something to think about as November draws nearer in 2010.

They say that everything old is new again - and in this case, everything new is old again. Old news is the fact that this country weathers through economic disasters on a periodic basis. The remedies, like insanity, are ones tried over and over again hoping to achieve different results. And subsequently we are routinely visited by the ghosts of disgusting familiarity.

In 1949 we were in the midst of yet another recession. This one was by and large the product of a Post-World War climate, a period where dramatic upheavals were taking place all over the world. The Cold War was a relatively new malady and a focus-point for alarmists everywhere. Our Foreign Policy was a shambles (the same shambles it is today but for mostly different reasons), our Domestic policy was busily being undermined by the legendary "do nothing" Congress (deja-vu you ask?) and we were starting on that gradual decline that has taken us to where we are today.

Former vice-President and Presidential Candidate for the Progressive Party, Henry A. Wallace laid out the situation in a radio address, part of the radio series Pro and Con on July 29, 1949.

Among the many things he crammed into fifteen minutes, he said:

Henry Wallace: “It is no answer to say that savings are high. The truth is that one-third of American families have no savings. And that most of the savings are in the hands of the top 10%. The wealthy 10% can’t buy all the products of our farms and factories. That is why there are 3 million fewer people working this summer than last summer. That is why farmers are making 1/10th less money. That is why business failures have doubled in less than a year. The President tells us the decline in industrial production has only been moderate. And as I look at those figures I see that the decline in the last seven months is as great as the decline in the first seven months of the 1929-1930 bust.

Wallace was acutely aware of what the problem was. As Secretary of Agriculture prior to his vice-Presidency, he oversaw many of the New Deal Recovery programs take shape to help put the country back on its feet. Clearly, in those 60+ years, not much has changed. Well, the stakes, the greed, the corruption and the incompetence have reached new highs. But the bottom line hasn't.

And that's where the insanity takes over.

"Congress is asked to rush through a momentous decision, as if great armies were already on the march. I hear no armies marching. I hear a world crying out for peace".

I wonder how history will eventually judge Henry Wallace. Certainly no household name, Wallace was first Secretary of Agriculture in FDR's first term. During FDR's third term he was Vice-President. He had a dramatic split with Truman in 1946 and ran on the Progressive third party ticket in 1948. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has an interesting essay on Wallace (linked here) written for the L.A. Times a while back. The address I'm putting up today is from a rally sponsored by The Progressive Citizens of America in March of 1947. At the time a civil war was going on in Greece and tensions were erupting with neighboring Turkey. Iran was in the midst of a civil war. In fact, the whole Middle East region was on the brink of major changes. All of this and the fact that Europe was still struggling to get back on its feet after the war and Russia was emerging as a major world power.

Wallace was a firm believer in the United Nations and was afraid it would go the way the League Of Nations had only a few years earlier. The question of oil as a reason for going to war started coming to light, and it's interesting to see how this particular argument has been played out repeatedly the past 60 or so years.

Wallace has been dismissed as naive, an idealistic relic in a world slipping into Cold War. It's worth wondering if even he could have anticipated the turn of events that took place a few months after this speech was given. Probably more interesting to consider if he had stayed in favor with the Roosevelt administration and continued as vice-President for a fourth term, how the world stage might have changed if he had become President in April of 1945.

(Henry Wallace with running mate Sen. Glenn H. Taylor in 1948)