Oliver Stone (
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Vice President Henry Wallace was pushed out by party bosses. (
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Here’s something about American history you probably don’t know: At the 1944 Democratic Convention, Florida senator Claude Pepper almost re-nominated Vice President Henry Wallace.
Wallace, who had a 65 percent approval rating and President Roosevelt’s support, would have secured the nomination, and eventually succeeded Roosevelt as president.
But party bosses, who strongly opposed the long-forgotten Wallace, adjourned the convention for the day when Pepper was just five feet from the podium. That night, they cut a series of deals to replace Wallace with a little-known senator named Harry Truman.
“It was like a Greek tragedy,” says Oliver Stone, who is presenting his own take on American history in a 10-week series on Showtime. The Truman show airs tonight. “In those days, party bosses had a lot more power than they do now. It was a sad, sad moment.”
In “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States,” the veteran filmmaker makes the case that Pepper’s seemingly small, five-foot miss wound up causing the Cold War, and resulting in the unnecessary dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan.
Stone developed the series with Peter Kuznick, the director of American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute, and makes numerous assertions that aim to upend our conventional take on history.
“We’re saying the Russians were the essential factor in winning World War II,” says Stone, who, along with Kuznick, spent four years researching and filming the series, which takes on history from World War II to the present day. “Not that they didn’t get help from us and the British, but they essentially took on the hugest part of the German war machine and stopped it.”
The series advances the idea that had Wallace become president, the Cold War would never have happened.
“Stalin wanted to maintain a postwar friendship with the US out of self-interest,” says Kuznick. “The US was promising 10 billion dollars [in loans] which the Russians desperately needed. They were expecting to have a close friendship for a long time, and Wallace was the one person after Roosevelt died who they really trusted in the American administration.”
The series also asserts that Truman lacked the wisdom to guide America though the end of the war.
“Truman had a very limited vision. He couldn’t begin to understand what the Soviets had experienced,” says Kuznick. “It was Truman who said in the Senate, ‘If the Russians are winning, we should support the Germans, and if the Germans are winning we should support the Russians, and let them kill as many of each other as possible.’ ”
Stone understood the importance of ensuring that this potentially unpopular take on our history was well-supported.
“It’s all based on fact and scholarship. It’s been fact-checked three times,” he says. “This is not at all dramatized. We do some interpretations of the facts, but the facts are solid.”
Kuznick and Stone also emphasize that they see their show not as an effort to bludgeon people with their world view, but as a chance to present an interpretation of events that will be new to many Americans.
“I got a pretty good education, I went to Yale for a while, but I honestly did not know this,” says Stone. “I didn’t know about the true significance of the Russian contribution to the war. I didn’t understand about the Cold War. I don’t think people have access to this information. You read bits and pieces of it, but you never see it in this pattern.”
“I talked to a group of people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s the other day, and they were gung-ho, pro-Truman when we started,” says Kuznick. “But by the end, most agreed that he might not have gotten the most important things right. We don’t expect people to see this and suddenly reject all their thinking, but we want to plant the seeds of doubt so they’ll read more, study more, and think of other possible interpretations.”
Stone and Kuznick ultimately hope that by showing how precarious history can be, viewers will realize that they have the power to change it.
“What gives us hope is that if five feet can [change history] in the negative, then it can also happen in a positive way,” says Stone. “Maybe not everyone’s gonna get [what we’re saying], but if there’s one person watching who’s gonna be the next leader, a powerful person who can do something with this knowledge, then that’s a spark.”
OLIVER STONE’S UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNTITED STATES
Monday, 8 p.m., Showtime