Amid all the perfervid debate about whether Trump or Trumpism was ushering in homegrown fascism during the first year of the forty-fifth presidency, a social-media meme started making the rounds. It purported to quote Henry Wallace, Vice President to Franklin D. Roosevelt, defining an American fascist as “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 Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party" by John Nichols
That read like too perfect a prediction of Trump and Trumpism. People were skeptical, as they often are of online memes. The fact-checking website Snopes.com recognized why people would doubt that a sitting Vice President might have made so bold a statement. But Snopes certified that the quote had been “correctly attributed.”
It is a measure of how time and bias unwind our history that Wallace’s engagement with the threat of American fascism was forgotten. Seventy-five years earlier, however, what Wallace was doing went to the very heart of the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party and the country.
For the better part of a year, from the summer of 1943 to the summer of 1944, everyone who was paying attention knew that Wallace was defining fascism in an American context. As he wrote in his landmark essay, “The Danger of American Fascism,” published in The New York Times Sunday magazine in April 1944: “Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals, and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.”
The fight that Henry Wallace waged against American fascism was a fight for democracy. A vital American democracy, he argued, was the antidote to American fascism.
Wallace was expanding the definition of American fascism. He was not just talking about Fritz Julius Kuhn’s Nazi-inspired German American Bund and the Fascist League of North America that Mussolini’s agent, Paolo Ignazio Maria Thaon di Revel, had organized in New York and Boston.
This was about more than the incidents like those in which young men dressed in the SS-inspired uniforms of the American Ordnungsdienst marched into Milwaukee public meetings and beat up anyone who dared to object when the jagged thunderbolt symbol of the SS was raised beside the stars and stripes.
“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,” argued Wallace in his essay. He charged that those who sought to divide the United States along lines of race, religion, and class could be “encountered in Wall Street, Main Street, or Tobacco Road.”
“Some even suspect,” Wallace wrote, “that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac.”
Wallace did not limit his critique of American fascism to the overt racists and anti-Semites that at least some of the mainstream politicians of his day decried. He was determined to go deeper, to talk about the enablers of the racists and anti-Semites.
“The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others,” Wallace wrote. “The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis.” Rather, he warned of “a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information and those who stand for the KKK type of demagoguery.”
This was a definition of fascism that brought the issues of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, of media manipulation and political machination, home to America. Wallace even saw the prospects of an American fascism in the predictable machinations of big business.
“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,” he wrote. “In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”
This was all too much for the editorial page of The Times, which took the extraordinary step of denouncing Wallace’s essay on the very Sunday it was published in the newspaper’s magazine. Decrying what it referred to as the “shrill cries of ‘Fascist’ ” that foster “an atmosphere charged with emotion, suspicion, and bitterness,” the Times editorial accused Wallace of going too far in his denunciations of monopolies and cartels.
“It is astonishing that Mr. Wallace cannot see that in going to such lengths he approaches the very intolerance that he condemns,” the editorial said. The Times was effectively arguing that “it can’t happen here.”
Had Wallace been more cautious in his approach, he might well have earned the praise of The Times, the grudging embrace of his fellow Democrats, a second term as Vice President and, with the death of Franklin Roosevelt less than three months after his fourth Inauguration Day, almost a full term as President.
But Wallace felt a sense of urgency for his party, for his country, and for the world, that would cost him almost everything—except the bully pulpit from which he came close to writing his own alternative history.
As Wallace turned the volume up, the columnist Max Lerner declared, “There is not a man in the country, or anywhere in the world, who is saying the things Wallace is saying.” Wallace was making the biggest play of his career. He well understood the risks, and he embraced them.
“Time will not wait,” he declared at a September 1943 rally organized by the Chicago United Nations Committee to Win the Peace. “The breath of the future is on us as it has never been before.”
Through the long wartime winter of 1943 into 1944, Wallace traveled the country at his own expense, speaking in union halls and on factory floors, on waterfronts and in hotel ballrooms, in farm country and big cities, about what was at stake. He rallied with African Americans against racism, with Jews against anti-Semitism, with women for an Equal Rights Amendment, with returning soldiers about what the country owed them for their sacrifices. He did not limit himself to Democratic audiences.
“Those who fight for us in this war belong to many parties, many creeds, and many races,” he said. “This is a people’s war. The peace must be a people’s peace.”
Historian Peter Dreier has referred to Wallace as “the New Deal’s evangelist” and never was the Vice President’s missionary zeal so ardent as in February 1944, when he embarked on a speaking tour that focused on the theme “America Tomorrow.”
It took him to Los Angeles; San Diego; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Milwaukee; Chicago; Springfield, Illinois; St. Louis; and Minneapolis, where a young professor of political science at Macalester College, Hubert Humphrey, would introduce him to a crowd of 10,000 at the Minneapolis Armory and tell the Vice President “progressive forces look to you for inspiration and leadership.”
Historian John Morton Blum observed that the tour put Wallace “unequivocally on his party’s left,” with speeches in which he “called for a ‘general welfare economy’ and predicted ‘a profound revolution’ after the war that would be ‘gradual and bloodless’ if the press, politicians, and men of wealth used their influence ‘on behalf of the public good.’ ” Their cooperation was not assured, however, as Wallace explained in the opening address of the tour to a crowd of 5,000 gathered in Los Angeles.
“Big business must not have such control of Congress and the executive branch as to make it easy for them to write the rules of the postwar game,” he warned.
The next day, Wallace spoke to thousands of workers at the Wilmington shipyard in Los Angeles and then rallied Teamsters to oppose the threat of fascism in the postwar era.
“It is so easy in government to put the dollar and the plant before the man,” he said. “This is a fascistic idea.Yet, unless labor makes itself heard among the Congressional and governmental committees which have so much to do with problems of reconversion of industry and postwar activity, we shall see a tendency for property rights to be placed ahead of human rights.”
The New York Times was not impressed. In an editorial published a week after the America Tomorrow tour began, the editors asked of Wallace, “Who are the ‘stooges’ who put Wall Street first and the country second?”
Accusing the Vice President of endangering the war effort with reckless charges and suggesting he had disregarded “the tolerance and good temper that must lie at the heart of any democracy that is to work,” the editors asked, “Who are these American fascists?” It wanted evidence that the men about whom Wallace spoke met the narrowest definition of a “fascist,” as believers in “one-party totalitarian government” and “the suppression of all opposition,” using violence so extreme that “those who disagree with them [are] either to be shot or thrown into concentration camps.”
Wallace initially ignored The Times editorials demanding that he explain what he meant when he spoke of the “American fascist.” But he eventually wrote his famous reply, which filled three pages of its Sunday magazine on April 9, 1944.
“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “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 claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”
The fight against American fascism would not be waged by pointing fingers of blame at this industrialist or that editor, Wallace wrote, but rather by remaining on “guard against intolerance, bigotry, and the pretension of invidious distinction.”
Even today, there are debates about how to define fascism, but we recognize now that it cannot be identified by a single rigid set of characteristics. Fascism “takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects,” author Adam Gopnik observed in 2016. “In Italy, it is bombastic and neo-classical in form. In Spain, Catholic and religious. In Germany, violent and romantic.” He added: “It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television.”
And Henry Giroux, a cultural critic who has written extensively on authoritarianism, says: “Fascism looks different in different cultures, depending on that culture. In fact, it is the essence of fascism to have no single, fixed form.”
The fight that Henry Wallace waged against American fascism was a fight for democracy. A vital American democracy, he argued, was the antidote to American fascism. As he put it:
“We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outrun our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.”
If that read like a political appeal, it was. At the very opening of his essay for the Times, Wallace wrote, “The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique, or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.” (Emphasis added.)
As Wallace readied to battle for a second nomination as Vice President, one that would ultimately be denied him, he wrote his friend William Allen White, a liberal Republican editor from Kansas.
“Well,” Wallace concluded, “we shall each keep fighting in our own way and perhaps between us we can produce results.” That was a knowing wink to the broader struggle, and to Wallace’s own circumstance as he prepared to wrestle for the soul of the Democratic Party.