harry truman and henry wallace. >> my students don't know who hard e henry wallace is. >> we have to have a chat with the professor if che don't know who he is. franklin roosevelt -- >> think bernie sanders. >> with a red star on this coat jacket that he didn't know about it. wallace is -- if you ever get -- the current administration decides to appoint people and some of you get tapped for a senate committee, they ask you question, name, address, social security number, maybe your religion. henry wallace was the second of agriculture under president roosevelt. his religion was mystic. figure that out. there are people who talk to plants, who talk to trees help called himself a mystic and i can see franklin roosevelt shaking his martini glass, what the hell is that? he became a pretty good politician, very good at handling congress and very good at handling republicans because hi father had been agriculture secretary, and roosevelt decided that when james garner -- roosevelt's first vice president was james garner, the former speaker of the house -- you have your old democratic coali

in his diary henry wallace called him a water man. capable of looking in one direction while rolling in another. among the best description there is of roosevelt's methods. and these were timelines at the end of his life his instinct for secretiveness could be justified on the grounds of national security, under a voluntary censorship agreement with reporters covering the white house the actual whereabouts of the president retreated as a state secret, not just when he traveled abroad, but also when he was abroad in the united states. he was actually away from the white house more than any. congress, the public at large often did not know where he was let alone where he was going. he made 21 trips to hyde park in the 17 months. on a presidential tray that would depart late at night from the basement of engraving and printing across the mall from the white house, riding in his own railway car called the ferdinand magellan. which now if you have any thoughts of heading to the sunshine state can be visited outside the miami zoo and what i

absolutely but i wouldn't limit it to mr trump i think henry wallace had a very clear vision he was a visionary as we know basically looking back on him and he understood especially in a capitalism that has reduced the number of wealth and power holders to a relatively small number the richer the fs minority gets the more urgent it has to control politics less the majority recognizing that it's a majority do what majorities can do and in order to prevent that you have to buy and control the political apparatus that's what the two parties allowed themselves the republicans with enthusiasms the democrats with perhaps some hesitation but in the end they've become beholden to the big box and so they've behaved in a corresponding way and we are now at the end result of that behavior when the mass of people basically said no we're going to vote for the guy you make fun of mr trump it's like the british working class saying to their establishment we're voting to leave your up basically because you tell us not to and we don't trust you and we don't like you and we're on the way to a country t

solution or a right wing solution in this country back in one nine hundred forty four boys president henry wallace warned. about the rise of people he called american fascists he described them in the new york times as people who quote claim to be super patriots but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the constitution they demand free enterprise but are the spokesman for monopoly and vested interests their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that using the power of the state in the power of the markets simultaneously they keep the common man in eternal subjection as we look at all these goldman sachs bankers in the in the trump cabinet we look at scott pruitt turning the e.p.a. and all the regulatory agencies over to the giant corporations the i mean you know branch after branch of our government is right now being handed over to oligarchy in the minute we have left richard wolffe are we looking at something like that right now. i think what we're looking at is the run up to it we're looking at a capitalism that cannot solve these p

wallace is it. if he asks grant or henry halleck for help, what are they going to say? don't worry about it, it is not your job. wallace will return that no love lost situation. he writes about henry halleck that he had no genius except as wasrplot, at which he incomparable. i had to plug the dictionary. a marplot is someone who ruins a plan by being meddlesome. he is basically calling him a big you body -- calling him a busybody. goingve got these barbs back and forth, and in that topsy-turvy attitude, that is when garrett comes into play. you have the same man complaining about thunder and shouts, garrett is his opportunity to go to the front. so he promises garrett that he is going to defend that railroad. and especially he is going to defend the railroad at the crossing of the monocacy river. the western boundary is the monocacy river. he cannot officially go across that river. monocacy is his boundary. he is going to say to garrett, i'm going to defend your iron railroad bridge. and i'm going to do that. so at midnight on july 5, without telling anybody, wallace gra

. >> it happens sometimes, for instance, in 1945, franklin roosevelt had fired, essentially, henry wallace from his ticket. he had been vice president, needed a place to put him, wallace wanted to be secretary of commerce, so roosevelt fired the secretary of commerce, jesse jones, to create some space for that. but the difference was, if donald trump's objective here is to shut down the independent prosecutor, bob mueller's investigation, in order to save his presidency, there's no historical precedent for that. >> and speaking of that, tonight we have this huge "washington post" story that donald trump in the service of trying to end this investigation or curtail it, actually came up with the talking points that his son, donald junior, used to excuse this meeting involving eight people, including multiple russians tied to the kremlin. what do you make of that? >> it sounds very much in character for donald trump. very much like richard nixon. john ehrlichman, nixon's aide, who finally went to prison for a year and a half in the watergate scandal said in retrospect, nixon couldn't keep his

henry wallace apparently with the end of the frontier government had better get bigger because government has to step in and supply the services that the frontier once provided. if you don't have free land, you better have some other source of widely available understanding and opportunities. so, so the upsurge of this -- it seems to have been hard on people to deal with so i think it's okay to call it an aapplication of frontier anxiety and produced mixed results and some of those rumts were very troubling. i don't know how extremely troubling and really undesirable. so to use one of many examples, i've put the phrase of the time that will influence many of the thing that is come up the next few minutes for us, timber famine. i mean, really, that's a hard -- if you're not a beaver, it's hard to be hungry for timber so it's a weird word of associating timber with famine but the notion that the united states was the wonderfully forested part of a continent, the astounding forest resources, in some parts of north america had been ripped through, wisconsin, michigan, especially the upper mid