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 fear that there lingered in the United States remnants of the crowds that packed arenas for the Bund’s prewar rallies, like the 1939 “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism” that filled Madison Square Garden with 20,000 self-identified “American patriots” who mingled chants of “Sieg Heil!” with the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, cheered speakers who mocked the Roosevelt administration’s “Jew Deal” and unfurled banners that read “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism.” 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. About more than the assassination in January 1943 of the antifascist campaigner Carlo Tresca, which took place at the corner of Fifth Avenue at 15th Street in New York City.
“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 landmark essay “The Danger of American Fascism,” published in the New York Times Sunday magazine on April 9, 1944. 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.”
That was a politically risky line for a candidate for re-election, especially at a time when the New Deal Coalition included a Southern contingent that defended segregation and threatened to withhold support for initiatives that challenged racism. The Southerners, and the Northern business interests that often aligned with them, were not going to appreciate it when a Democratic vice president said, “It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.”
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