Paramount Victory Short No. T2-3: The Price of Victory

This Paramount short subject got an Oscar nomination for 1942 and it's a speech delivered fireside chat style by the then Vice President Henry A. Wallace. He was the second of FDR's three Vice Presidents and a most controversial figure of the time.

Wallace was a man literally forced on the Democratic convention of 1940 by FDR to party bosses who knew that without him their chances of victory were dubious. He was the Secretary of Agriculture and maybe the best man ever to hold that position. His constituency was the left and far left of the Democratic party. What Wallace was doing here was trying to bring a little of the New Deal idealism to the war effort.

The guy who got forced also got dumped in the following term for Harry S. Truman and the result was history. Wallace made a lot of enemies on his own both foreign and domestic. Note his mentioning among other places that were fighting for freedom was India. Only they were fighting against our British allies. You can bet Churchill who was adamantly opposed to Indian independence was not pleased when he heard Wallace speak from the cinema. Wallace also included the Russian Revolution as part of the continuing struggle for the common man. Those who survived the atrocities committed on either side wouldn't have found those remarks inspiring.

The most interesting thing I found that this most liberal of all New Dealers who was a civil rights advocate before it was popular used the negative ethnic slur 'Jap' to describe one of our enemies. Not uncommon as everyone referred to the Japanese that way. Certainly war films kept doing so for at least 20 years after World War II ended. Coming from Wallace though was somewhat disconcerting.

To this day a controversial figure among historians this film gives you some idea of the ideas Henry A. Wallace advanced, some remarkably ahead of their times, some of them even now.

Now I've seem some rousingly patriotic propaganda from both sides of the Atlantic, but this has to be the most akin to a party political broadcast. From the mouth of US Vice-President Wallace, we hear a speech that is clearly intended to galvanise a free world to face the war, without remotely recognising that a great deal of the free world had already been fighting it for some years! Then there is the briefest of stories about three men in a boat, but quite what happened to them after they landed on a remote desert island isn't explained. Finally, he starts quoting bible verses about empowering the faint and the weak which does seem to be somewhat incongruous as we look at scenes of Jewish persecution or Japanese intervention in an Asia that was only ever Christian in the first place because the Western powers imposed it on the population. It's an address proclaiming how "we" must all pull together, about how "we" must strive to improve production through extra effort, owning farmland, building aircraft. Essentially it's a lecture on the necessities of industriousness delivered in a the most sterile fashion and isn't really a film at all.