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What Vice President Henry Wallace knew about American fascism and can tell us about Trump

His words are even more relevant today than they were in 1944.

Robert Reich Oct 25

Friends,

My young and attractive mother recognized Henry Wallace — who had been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president from March 1941 to January 1945 — in the South Salem, New York, post office one day and summoned the courage to introduce herself and her three-year-old son.

Wallace invited us to tea on his large porch. I remember him as a kindly old man with a bright shock of white hair who pulled me up onto his lap while spending what seemed interminable hours talking to my mother. She was thrilled. I was bored.

After we left, she told me Henry Wallace was a great man, and that someday most Americans would agree. But when my mother mentioned to a neighbor that we had tea on Wallace’s porch and I had sat on his lap, the neighbor was horrified. She called him a communist.

Wallace was not a communist. He was a champion of democracy and fierce opponent of American fascism. He saw what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and feared the same could happen in America. He worried that an unprincipled sociopath with a gift for marketing and self-promotion could turn some Americans into violent bullies if they felt abandoned and angry enough.  

With Roosevelt’s encouragement, Wallace spoke out against American fascism. “The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way,” Wallace wrote in his landmark essay “The Danger of American Fascism,” published in The New York Times Magazine on April 9, 1944.

Wallace’s thoughts and words are even more relevant today than they were then. Here are additional excerpts:

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions, or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.…

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.…

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.…

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.… They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interests.…

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.…

Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself….

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Wallace saw the connection between Hitler’s preachments about racial “purity” and the language of Southern segregationists who spoke of a master race. “Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward Nazism,” he warned. And “the second step toward fascism is the destruction of labor unions.”

To avert the rise of American fascism, Wallace argued that America must champion “the democracy of the common man,” embracing “not just the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy, and democracy in the treatment of the sexes.”

Wallace scorned the America First rhetoric that was being mouthed by prominent Democrats as well as Republicans. “We must remember that down through the ages one of the most popular political devices has been to blame economic and other troubles on some minority group,” he said. “The survival and strength of American democracy are proof that it has succeeded by its deeds thus far,” he continued:

But we all know that it contains the seeds of failure. I for one will not be confident of the continued survival of American democracy if millions of unskilled workers are condemned to [near poverty] all their lives, with no place in our industrial system. I will not be confident of the survival of our democracy if half our people must be below the line of a decent nutrition [and] if most of our children continue to be reared in surroundings where poverty is highest, and education is lowest.

Wallace called for massive investment in job creation, education, social services, and peacemaking.

Because Wallace was increasingly seen as too sympathetic to Soviet Russia and the Democratic Party bosses couldn’t control him, FDR was forced to drop him from the ticket in the 1944 election in favor of a little-known Missouri senator and former haberdasher named Harry Truman, whom they assumed they could control. FDR died in 1945, and Truman became president.

As the midterm elections of 1946 loomed, Wallace feared that without a strong progressive message and platform, Democrats would not be able to mobilize their base to beat the Republicans. He warned that “if the Democrats fail to control the Eightieth Congress there is only one way in which we get control again and that is by becoming more progressive.”

He was correct. The Democrats’ abandonment of progressive populism and the redistributionist policies FDR championed did much to destroy the New Deal coalition that had spawned leaders like Wallace.

In the first midterm election of Truman’s presidency, the Democrats lost control of both the House and the Senate for the first time since Herbert Hoover occupied the Oval Office in 1932. Wisconsin ended its era of progressive Republicanism and sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California replaced New Dealer Jerry Voorhis in the House with a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon.

Now, 76 years later, America faces the real possibility of electing Donald Trump — a man who John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, says meets the definition of a fascist.