Unhappy Warrior

A drunk caught a glimpse of the rumpled, hatless man entering the hotel and shouted: "Why, there's old Henry! He looks like a herring." Heaving round, the drunk padded through the side door into the empty lobby of Cedar Rapids' Allison Hotel. Presidential Candidate Henry Wallace came through the main door. The drunk grabbed Henry's limp hand and cheerily pumped it. Wallace gave him a sour look, yanked his hand free, and retreated to the hotel barbershop.

Back in his native Iowa with his third-party campaign, Wallace slogged along on his crusade. He looked tired and sullen; his hair was now almost white. Seeing him wandering aimlessly around hotel lobbies, old friends came up to him with a smile, and tried to talk. They soon gave up and just stared. Wallace stared back and then wandered on, heavy-bodied, restless and moody.

TIME'S correspondent wired: "Wallace has become a bitter, dour man with a developing persecution complex. He would like to succeed to the mantle of Roosevelt but he does not know how to meet the common man whom he champions. His manner repulses people, and he in turn gets more & more resentful. He is a bore. His speeches sometimes put people to sleep. He is completely humorless."

His mounting air of martyrdom showed in his manner, burst out in his speeches time & again. Earlier in the week, at Moline, Ill., his audience had laughed when he said they had been afraid to park their cars near the hall for fear they would be identified. "You laugh," he shouted furiously, "but I've seen it happen in other places."

Dogged Line. The speeches written for him by smart, genial young Lew Frank Jr., a onetime New Republic staffer, cleaved more & more shamelessly to the Communist line. He delivered them doggedly, chin buried between his shoulders, his mouth turned down at the corners. He attacked the "oil trusts," the U.S. policy of "intimidation"; he charged: "We are guilty of almost every charge we level at the Russians." At Iowa City he demanded a meeting between the next President and Stalin, adding: "Roosevelt always said he could do business with Stalin. That's what he often told me personally." At Oskaloosa, he derided the idea that U.S. Communists are controlled from Moscow.

When asked about Soviet Russia, he made gently critical or defensive statements. The strongest thing he would say was: "I detest dictatorship," quickly adding that the idea that Hitler's dictatorship and Stalin's dictatorship are alike is "criminal ... a myth."

Occasionally reporters thought they saw the man that Wallace would like to be. Just outside Oskaloosa, Wallace stopped at small, Quaker-run William Penn College, spoke to its 250 students in the white, high-ceilinged chapel. With the bright Iowa sunlight streaming through the windows, Wallace talked earnestly and simply. Said he: "The guiding principles of the Quaker faith are still the most practical guide to ordinary living." Afterward, he sat under a tree on the lawn, chatted with undergraduates.

Wild Eggs. But that night at Cedar Rapids, his prepared speech was again the angry mixture of demagoguery and rabid denunciations that Lew Frank turned out for him. For the benefit of Cedar Rapids' predominantly Czech population, he declared himself "distressed" over the Czech coup, but added: "The utterly insane and suicidal foreign policy of our own country contributed greatly to these developments." The Russians, he cried, "have no necessity to expand their borders, nor will they for many decades to come, except as external threats and pressures compel them to seek military security."

His audiences, mostly students and schoolteachers, ranged from curious to friendly; they were rarely hostile. He made his obeisance to traditional U.S. campaigning by posing with two babies in his arms. Once a boy lobbed two eggs in his direction. Both went wild. At week's end, he trudged on into Kansas and Missouri, a lonely, unhappy man.

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