The World That Wasn't
Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Graybill
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By:
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Benn Steil
About this listen
From the acclaimed economist-historian and author of The Marshall Plan, a “timely, riveting” (The Washington Post) new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace—one that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War.
Henry Wallace is the most important, and certainly the most fascinating, almost-president in American history. As FDR’s third-term vice president, and a hero to many progressives, he lost his place on the 1944 Democratic ticket in a wild open convention, resulting in Harry Truman becoming president upon FDR’s death. Books, films, and even plays have since portrayed the circumstances surrounding Wallace’s defeat as corrupt, and the results catastrophic. Filmmaker Oliver Stone, among others, has claimed that Wallace’s loss ushered in four decades of devastating and unnecessary Cold War.
Now, based on striking new finds from Russian, FBI, and other archives, Benn Steil’s The World That Wasn’t paints a decidedly less heroic portrait of the man, of the events surrounding his fall, and of the world that might have been under his presidency. Though a brilliant geneticist, Henry Wallace was a self-obsessed political figure, blind to the manipulations of aides—many of whom were Soviet agents and assets.
From 1933 to 1949, Wallace undertook a series of remarkable interventions abroad, each aimed at remaking the world order according to his evolving spiritual blueprint. As agriculture secretary, he fell under the spell of Russian mystics, and used the cover of a plant-gathering mission to aid their doomed effort to forge a new theocratic state in Central Asia. As vice president, he toured a Potemkin Siberian continent, guided by undercover Soviet security and intelligence officials who hid labor camps and concealed prisoners. He then wrote a book, together with an American NKGB journalist source, hailing the region’s renaissance under Bolshevik leadership. In China, the Soviets uncovered his private efforts to coax concessions to Moscow from Chiang Kai-shek, fueling their ambitions to dominate Manchuria. Running for president in 1948, he colluded with Stalin to undermine his government’s foreign policy, allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech. It was not until 1950 that he began to acknowledge his misapprehensions regarding the Kremlin’s aims and conduct.
Meticulously researched and deftly written, The World That Wasn’t is a spellbinding work that shows how “American history—and world history—could have turned out very differently if just a few things had gone the other way” (The Wall Street Journal).
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In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green. What happened to Dantrell led to a truce among Chicago’s gangs, but it also ignited a national panic about poverty and violence in America’s cities. Dantrell’s name would soon be used to demolish all of Chicago’s high-rise public housing, displacing tens of thousands of low-income families.
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A Gripping and Necessary Work
- By booklover on 11-24-24
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Ho Tactics
- How to MindF**k a Man into Spending, Spoiling, and Sponsoring
- By: G. L. Lambert
- Narrated by: Patrick Stevens
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
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I have discovered a group of women who refuse to be exploited, are immune to manipulation, and who never settle in the name of love. These ladies know what they want and take what they want by beating men at their own game. Utilizing the secrets exposed in this book, these women gain power, money, and status. Men call them gold diggers, women call them hos, but they call themselves winners. This is the book that society doesn't want you to listen to….
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I spent $24,000 in 4 months
- By B.M. on 10-06-18
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- As Told to Alex Haley
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Experience a bold take on this classic autobiography as it’s performed by Oscar-nominated Laurence Fishburne. In this searing classic autobiography, originally published in 1965, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and Black empowerment activist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Human Rights movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American dream and the inherent racism in a society that denies its non-White citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time.
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it's Nearly perfect
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I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t)
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Based on seven years of ground-breaking research and hundreds of interviews, I Thought It Was Just Me shines a long-overdue light on an important truth: Our imperfections are what connect us to each other and to our humanity. Our vulnerabilities are not weaknesses; they are powerful reminders to keep our hearts and minds open to the reality that we're all in this together.
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I'm sure its great if you are a mother ....
- By Leslie A Hill on 08-09-11
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Mythology: Mega Collection
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- By: Scott Lewis
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Do you know how many wives Zeus had? Or how the famous Trojan War was caused by one beautiful lady? Or how Thor got his hammer? Give your imagination a real treat. This Mega Mythology Collection of eight audiobooks is for you....
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An interesting set of introductions.
- By Kevin Potter on 05-30-19
By: Scott Lewis
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The Philosopher's Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room
- By: Patrick Grim, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Patrick Grim
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
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Taught by award-winning Professor Patrick Grim of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, The Philosopher’s Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room arms you against the perils of bad thinking and supplies you with an arsenal of strategies to help you be more creative, logical, inventive, realistic, and rational in all aspects of your daily life.
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This should NOT be an audio book
- By Brooks Emerson on 03-21-20
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My Big TOE: Awakening
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My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds is brought together under one seamless scientific understanding.
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What a Trip (but to where?)
- By Michael on 11-26-13
By: Thomas Campbell
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Great intro to why you should care about blockchain tech.
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Is this a mystery, a history or an economics book?
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Blitzed
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When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy. Yet by the time he left office, the nation's economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration's progressive reformers were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement.
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The Goodness Paradox
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Throughout history, even as daily life has exhibited calm and tolerance, war has never been far away, and even within societies, violence can be a threat. The Goodness Paradox gives a new and powerful argument for how and why this uncanny combination of peacefulness and violence crystallized after our ancestors acquired language in Africa a quarter of a million years ago.
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Great book but maybe less suited to an audiobook
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1932
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At the start of 1932, the nation's worst economic crisis has left one-in-four workers without a job, countless families facing eviction, banks shutting down as desperate depositors withdraw their savings, and growing social and political unrest. Amid this turmoil, a political decision looms that will determine the course of the nation. It's a choice between two men with very different visions of America: Incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover and New York's Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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Facts Wrong
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If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That's not us,' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep seated in the American past as the founding ideals.
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Comprehensive American History
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What listeners say about The World That Wasn't
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cindy
- 03-24-24
Should be required reading for all voters
I put off listening due to length and unfamiliarity of Wallace (which is why I bought it). It reveals history prior to my time. I wish I could ask my parents what they thought about these elections. Noble intentions can be used by devious. I will think about Wallace when I eat chicken or corn-his area of expertise in which he excelled.
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- Banyan
- 05-18-24
Not really a biography
The book doesn’t really pretend to be a full biography. The author is more into policy. Wallace believed and did som rather bizarre things and after reading the book I still didn’t feel I understood why. Still, this is an important book for anyone wanting to understand Wallace and the postwar world. The author has dug lots of interesting material out of the Soviet archives. It was clearly hard for many New Dealers to shift gears after World War II when the threat from the “right” gave way to the threat from the “left.” It was made even harder by Communist infiltration, and in Wallace’s case, arrogant self-righteousness.
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- Mark Falcoff
- 12-19-24
An important book--and a very good one.
This is not merely a biography of Henry Wallace, a somewhat forgotten but important figure of twentieth century American politics. It is also an exploration into a range of important subjects--agricultural policy during the New Deal, US relations with the Soviet Union, the Chinese civil war, and the policy struggles surrounding the early Cold War, not to mention the internal politics of the Democratic party in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. It is extremely readable, remarkably well researched, and read fluently.
Wallace was an important figure of the New Deal. A former Republican (whose father was a cabinet member under Herbert Hoover), Wallace the son became, first, Agriculture Secretary in the first two Roosevelt administrations, then Vice President (1940-44) until he was pushed out to become Commerce Secretary (replaced in the vice presidency by Senator Harry Truman) in the last days of FDR's presidency. And a good thing too, because by then Wallace was on his way to becoming the most important stooge of the Soviet Union was ever to enjoy in American politics. Angered by the Marshall Plan and Truman's refusal to hand over the atom bomb to the Soviets, Wallace--driven by vanity and ambition--left the Truman administration to run for the presidency on a third party ticket (the Progressive Party, actually an instrument of the CPUSA, that is, the American Communist Party). In what must have been the biggest upset in history of American politics, Truman won a three-way race and Wallace's political career came to an end. When the Chinese, with Soviet support, invaded South Korea, Wallace, disillusioned, switched sides and supported Truman and the United Nations, but his political career was over. He retired to his farm in upstate New York City and died almost forgotten.
Wallace's real interest was scientific agriculture, and he was a distinguished plant and animal scientist. He should have stuck to that.
This book is a needed corrective to work of "revisionist" historians of the Cold War, most notably the late John Morton Blum of Yale, who during the aftermath of Vietnam tried to resurrect Wallace as a neglected visionary (The Price of Vision). I am not surprised that Wallace's grandson does not like this book. Too bad.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-03-24
ideological hit job
the book barely covers Wallace's most important legacies: his tenure as secretary of department of agriculture, his founding of the greatly successful pioneer hi bred company, his anticolonialist and anti racist campaigns, his contributions as chairman of the board of economic warfare during ww2, and his methodological contributions to statistics and econometrics. most of these aspects of his life recieve at most passive mention in favor of red scare red herrings. the documentation from Soviet records does open a new perspective on Wallace's life worth considering, but not in favor of essentially ignoring the major contributions he made to making America and the world more prosperous and equitable. it seems that even for those at the leadership of cfr, ideologically selective revisionist history passes for a reasonable contribution.
tl;Dr the Wallace biography worth reading is American dreamer by culver and hyde
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- Diana Plascencia
- 01-19-24
American Dreamer
2000’s “American Dreamer: Life of Henry A Wallace” was better. It was more engaging as just a read while also being more fair because the authors are actually from Iowa and one of them was a Senator. Make that one an Audible option
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1 person found this helpful