American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace.

Maybe fifty years from now, someone will write as fine a book about Ralph Nader as John C. Culver and John Hyde's American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (Norton, 2000). If so, the much-maligned 2000 Presidential candidate will be a lucky man indeed.

Wallace was the last American progressive to mount a serious third party Presidential campaign, and he came away from that candidacy every bit as battered and officially marginalized as the 2000 Green Party candidate. An internationally respected agriculturalist, economist, and author, a former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, Wallace left the Democratic Party to mount his 1948 campaign for the Presidency because, he argued, the Democratic and Republican parties had both fallen under the influence of Wall Street. Condemned as a threat to the reelection of Democrat Harry Truman, Wallace told his Progressive Party followers: "We must make it clear to the Administration that we, as progressives, would prefer the election of an out-and-out reactionary like [Republican Robert] Taft in 1948 to a lukewarm liberal. We want this to be a genuine two-party country and not a country operated by a fake one-party system under the guise of a bipartisan bloc."

The Progressive Party campaign of 1948 was a visionary journey: Wallace warned that the Cold War would empty the national treasury and leave little money for eliminating poverty and uplifting society; he saw the threat of a yet-unnamed McCarthyism as a greater danger to American democracy than the communism it sought to confront; he spoke before integrated audiences in the segregated South and challenged every aspect of Jim Crow; and he gave fresh voice to a radical sense of American democracy. "When the old parties rot, the people have a right to be heard through a new party. They asserted that right when the Democratic Party was founded under Jefferson in the struggle against the Federalist Party of war and privilege of his day. They won it again when the Republican party was organized in Lincoln's time. The people must again have a right to speak out with their vote in 1948.... The lukewarm liberals sitting on their chairs say, `Why throw away your vote?' I say a vote for a new party in 1948 will be the most valuable vote you have ever cast or ever will cast."

Much of Wallace's campaign foreshadowed this year's Nader candidacy--including the final vote count: about 2.4 percent of the electorate for Wallace, as opposed to 2.7 percent for Nader. Wallace's punishment for challenging the two-party duopoly was banishment to the political wilderness. So thorough was that banishment that no single, comprehensive biography of "the Prophet of the Common Man" was published until now. Fittingly, the authors are natives of Wallace's home state of Iowa, former U.S. Senator John C. Culver and Des Moines Register Washington correspondent John Hyde. This exhaustively researched and artfully constructed biography plucks an American hero from the scrap heap of history and redeems him. As such, it is the finest political book of 2000--perhaps the finest book, period.

Worthy of note as well this year is John R. MacArthur's brilliant dissection of the legislative and public relations battles over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), The Selling of "Free Trade'" NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy (Hill and Wang, 2000). MacArthur, the author of the fine 1992 book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Hill and Wang), is a masterful investigative reporter, and with his new book he has targeted the biggest story of the 1990s--the spread of global trade agreements that allow corporate whims to supercede the will of citizens and their governments.

Great stories do not always make for great reading--especially when the subject matter is as arcane as trade negotiations. MacArthur meets the challenge with exceptional writing that is at once humane and aggressive, turning the tale of NAFTA and its aftermath into a heartbreaking account of real workers losing real jobs and of the chilling indifference not just of multinational corporations but of political figures who have abandoned Main Street for Wall Street.

Pico Iyer presents another side of the globalization debate with The Global Soul: Jet Lag; Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (Knopf, 2000). "As our new world order spins, ever more intensely, so, too, do our dreams, and almost any immigrant who arrives today at the place he's hoped for will find it's become somewhere else," writes Iyer, whose poetic search for "the global soul" strikes a proper balance between hope and horror at the prospect of a rapidly and radically transforming world.

John Nichols is Editorial Page Editor of The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin.