forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
At the press conference the day before his 1943 Detroit speech, Wallace was asked whether he was “the last New Dealer.” In response, he argued that what was really playing out was the old fight between “men and corporations who put money rights above human rights” and progressives who “put human rights above money rights.” Within the Democratic Party, he acknowledged, “each group is conscious of the existence and the need of the other. It’s just a question of which is going to dominate. I’m confident the people will take care of that.”
The following day Wallace delivered his speech referencing “Americanized fascism.”
We will not be satisfied with a peace which will merely lead us from the concentration camps and mass murder of Fascism into an international jungle of gangster governments operated behind the scenes by power-crazed, money-mad imperialists. Our choice is not between a Hitler slave-world and an out-of-date holiday of “normalcy.” The defeatists who talk about going back to the good old days of Americanism mean the time when there was plenty for the few and scarcity for the many, when Washington was a way-station in the suburbs of Wall Street … Nor is our choice between an Americanized fascism and the restoration of prewar scarcity and unemployment. Too many millions of our people have come out of the dark cellars and squalor of unemployment ever to go back. Our choice is between democracy for everybody or for the few—between the spreading of social safeguards and economic opportunity to all the people—or the concentration of our abundant resources in the hands of selfishness and greed.
The initial reaction to Wallace’s speech was rapturous. The crowd in Detroit cheered the vice president on, and African-American newspapers across the country praised him for recognizing that homegrown racial hatred existed on a continuum with Hitler’s vile doctrines. The July 26, 1943, New York Times placed the story of Wallace’s Detroit speech high on Page 1 and reproduced the entire address inside.
By the next day, however, the newspaper’s influential editorial page was denouncing it. “Vice President Wallace has done a poor service to the American people with his reckless talk about ‘American Fascists,’ ” the editorial stated. “If he had used this phrase to describe the handful of native or alien crackpots (some of them now in jail) who have gone about this country trying unsuccessfully to organize feeble imitations of Mussolini’s Black Shirts no one could object. But he did not use the phrase this way. Instead, he borrowed it for a sweeping denunciation of opponents of Mr. Roosevelt’s domestic policies—the ‘powerful groups,’ in his language, ‘who hope to take advantage of the president’s concentration on the war effort to destroy everything that he has accomplished on the domestic front over the last 10 years.’ ”
The Times was appalled at what it described as Wallace’s demagoguery. “The people who belong to these ‘powerful groups’—presumably anyone with a shred of conservative opinions on any phase of the whole domestic situation—may be mistaken in their point of view. They may be shortsighted and behind the times and not as well advanced in their social thinking as is Mr. Wallace. But they are not ‘Fascists,’ and to call them ‘Fascists’ is dangerous nonsense.”
Never mind that Southern Democrats would double down on Jim Crow in the aftermath of World War II, as returning veterans would be attacked by local officials because they demanded the right to vote. Never mind that civil liberties denied to Americans like the Japanese of California during the war years would continue to be denied in the postwar era. Never mind that, in less than a decade, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin would be organizing a Red Scare that would lead to blacklisting, jail terms, financial ruin and worse for Americans accused of joining a Communist Party that was not only legal but was campaigning in and sometimes winning elections during the 1930s and 1940s. Never mind that conservative Democrats and their right-wing Republican allies enacted a Taft-Hartley law written to thwart the multiracial and multiethnic unions being organized in the Deep South by the CIO’s “Operation Dixie” campaign and in the southwest by the left-wing International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Despite what would unfold in the coming years, the Times editors reassured their readers, “Not at any point in their thinking or their actions do these more conservative people with whom Mr. Wallace disagrees correspond to the Fascist pattern.”
The Times editorial got one thing right, however, when it speculated, “It is unlikely that Mr. Wallace’s remarks will draw from the president a rebuke.” Indeed, Roosevelt was impressed with the speech. On July 28, three days after Wallace’s appearance in Detroit and one day after the Times editorial appeared, FDR wrote the vice president. “Your speech was splendid,” he declared.
“P.S.,” the president added. “You drew blood from the Cave Dwellers!”
The Fight against American Fascism
Henry Wallace and the Consequencesof Speaking Truth to Power
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.
—Henry Wallace, New York Times, April 9, 1944
I know personally from experience that there is a certain zone which when a man has walked through it, he has got to be careful. Maybe Time was the scissors that Delilah used for shearing Samson! After which, “Samson wist not that God had departed him!” I am afraid—deeply and mortally afraid—because I love my country and want it to go right, that I can hear Delilah’s scissors clicking.
—William Allen White to Henry Wallace, August 10, 1943
Amid all the perfervid debate about whether Trump or Trumpism was ushering in homegrown fascism during the first year of the 45th presidency, a social-media meme started making the rounds. It purported to quote Henry Wallace 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.” 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 took up the question: “Did FDR’s Vice-President Write an Op-Ed About ‘American Fascism’?” The website 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 the New York Times: “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.” They knew that, even as American leaders denounced the crimes of German and Italian fascists, the vice president was charging that the United States harbored millions of “patriotic
