Truman's Dismissal of Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce

Truman’s dismissal of Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace on September 20, 1946, resolved a Cabinet conflict that had become a public test of the administration’s foreign policy. The crisis began when Truman said he had approved Wallace’s speech without having read it carefully. It escalated as Wallace defended his criticism of the administration’s approach to the Soviet Union, while Secretary of State James F. Byrnes warned that the split was damaging American credibility abroad. Truman hesitated to dismiss Wallace, but ultimately concluded that the Secretary would not accept the foreign policy for which the President was responsible.

The Speech and Truman’s Mistaken Endorsement

At a press conference on September 12, a reporter asked Truman about a speech Wallace was scheduled to deliver that evening at a political rally in New York. Truman initially declined to discuss a speech that had not yet been given. When the reporter clarified that Wallace’s text referred to the President and described its words as administration policy, Truman acknowledged that Wallace had shown it to him. Asked whether he endorsed a particular passage or the speech as a whole, Truman answered that he had approved the whole speech. He then said Wallace’s position was in line with Byrnes’s policy toward Russia.

That public answer exceeded what Truman had actually reviewed. Charlie Ross later recorded that Truman had not read all of the speech, or had not been attentive when Wallace discussed it with him. Truman’s own account was that he had given Wallace only ten or fifteen minutes, spent partly on other business, and had skimmed the text. He recalled noticing a passage about wanting peace on an equal basis rather than having special friendships with particular countries. Trusting Wallace’s assurance about the rest, Truman approved it on that limited understanding. The episode turned his amiability into a political liability: his assurance in public suggested a settled policy endorsement where, by his own account, he had not considered the speech closely.

The distinction mattered because the speech combined positions Truman regarded as consistent with his administration’s policy with claims that cut against it. Wallace supported the United Nations, greater international trade, and international control of atomic weapons. But he also condemned British imperialism and argued against a tougher policy toward the Soviet Union. He said the United States had no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than the Soviet Union had in those of Latin America. At Madison Square Garden, before an audience of twenty thousand that included vociferously pro-Soviet listeners, Wallace went beyond his prepared text to argue that imperialism posed a greater danger of war than communism. The resulting dispute was not simply over Truman’s press-conference phrasing: it exposed a real disagreement about how the United States should respond to Soviet power.

Attempts to Contain the Dispute

On September 14, Truman acknowledged to his staff that he had made a serious blunder. At a press conference that afternoon, he read a prepared statement and took no questions. He now described his answer as a natural misunderstanding, saying that he had meant to approve Wallace’s right to deliver the speech, not the speech itself. He also reaffirmed that the country’s established foreign policy had not changed. The clarification did not settle the issue. The account describes Truman as trying to escape the consequences of his answer and protect Byrnes, then in Paris; criticism continued to mount.

The problem persisted because Wallace continued to defend his speech, while Truman initially avoided a public confrontation. When the two men met alone in the Oval Office on September 18, Wallace said that the mail he had received favored his New York address five to one. He argued that Americans feared a policy of getting tough with Russia would lead to war and maintained that Truman himself believed in the speech. Wallace also urged Truman to adopt a more leftward position while Congress was out of session and move right when it returned, describing that maneuver as Franklin Roosevelt’s political technique. Truman rejected the suggestion that he should treat political survival as justification for saying whatever was necessary.

Truman asked Wallace either to stop making foreign policy speeches or to agree with the policy for which the President was responsible. Wallace would do neither. Yet Truman still did not fire him. As the last surviving New Dealer in the Cabinet, Wallace carried symbolic weight among liberal Democrats who regarded him as the rightful heir to Roosevelt, while seeing Truman as a usurper. Truman feared that an open break could prove politically disastrous. After two and a half hours, the only agreement was that Wallace would make no further foreign policy speeches until Byrnes returned from Paris. Wallace then told reporters that everything was lovely, but the fundamental disagreement remained unresolved.

Byrnes’s Warning and Wallace’s Dismissal

From Paris, Byrnes asked Truman to relieve him at once. He argued that a government divided over its own foreign policy could not persuade other nations that the United States had a coherent position. Byrnes stressed that he was not asking Truman to force Wallace out, but warned that a Cabinet member who publicly undermined the administration impaired both the President’s standing and the government’s prestige abroad. He also pointed to the bipartisan policy he and Truman had spent fifteen months building, which, in his view, Wallace had damaged in a day. His message made the consequences of continued disagreement especially stark: the dispute at home was affecting the administration’s effort to present a dependable policy internationally.

At 9:30 on the morning of September 20, Truman telephoned Wallace and fired him. Wallace was so agreeable that Truman later told Bess Wallace he had nearly backed out. The evening before, Truman had sent Wallace an angry, handwritten letter. Wallace offered to return it, describing it as not abusive but low in tone; Truman gratefully accepted, preferring that it not become public. The private exchange revealed the awkwardness of the break even as Truman carried it through: he had chosen to dismiss Wallace, but did not want the personal quarrel preserved as part of the public record.

Public Consequences and Political Meaning

Truman announced the dismissal at a crowded, hastily called press conference. Reporters audibly gasped, and one gave a long, low whistle. After the room cleared, Truman turned to Ross and said that the die was cast. The reaction registered the importance of the decision, while Truman’s remark marked its finality: after days of trying to contain the controversy, he had acted.

The dismissal ended Wallace’s role in the Cabinet but did not erase Truman’s responsibility for how the crisis began. He had publicly claimed to approve a speech he had only skimmed, then issued a correction that failed to stop criticism. The decision to remove Wallace came only after the Secretary refused either to fall silent or to accept the President’s policy, and after Byrnes described the division’s costs to American credibility. Truman’s hesitation reflected the political significance of Wallace’s position among New Deal liberals; his eventual action asserted that the President could not allow a Cabinet secretary to keep publicly contesting the policy for which the administration was accountable. In the account of the episode, the dismissal is therefore both a personnel decision and the resolution of a conflict between symbolic party unity and a single, publicly represented foreign policy.