life. The party in power is the one which for long years has been most sympathetic to all manner of socialist doctrines and collectivist trends.”
Nothing about Luce’s “American Century” sat well with Henry Wallace. As a counter, the vice president proposed “the Century of the Common Man.”
A Long-Drawn-Out People’s Revolution
Wallace traveled to New York on May 8, 1942, to address the Free World Association, having cleared the agenda-setting speech he was about to deliver with Roosevelt, who despised Luce. The Free World Association stood at the forefront of international “Stop Hitler Now” campaigning, promoting active resistance to Nazism, working with American Jewish groups to reveal the horrors of the Holocaust and arguing that the authoritarian threat must be answered first by winning the war and then by developing a global democratic federation.
Wallace titled his speech “The Price of Free World Victory,” and it was in it that he addressed the future circumstance of the common man.
“Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’ ” he said, referring directly to Luce. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come into being after this war —can be and must be the century of the common man. … No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.”
Wallace described World War II in Biblical terms that spoke directly to millions of Americans and people around the world listening in via radio. (He personally translated the speech into Spanish and repeated its essential themes in a separate broadcast to Latin America.)
Satan is now trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and darkness. For the stark truth is that the violence preached by the Nazis is the devil’s own religion of darkness. So also is the doctrine that one race or one class is by heredity superior and that all other races or classes are supposed to be slaves. The belief in one Satan-inspired Fuhrer, with his Quislings, his Lavals, his Mussolinis—his “gauleiters” in every nation in the world—is the last and ultimate darkness. Is there any hell hotter than that of being a Quisling, unless it is that of being a Laval or a Mussolini? In a twisted sense, there is something almost great in the figure of the Supreme Devil operating through a human form, in a Hitler who has the daring to spit straight into the eye of God and man. But the Nazi system has a heroic position for only one leader. By definition only one person is allowed to retain full sovereignty over his own soul. All the rest are stooges. They are stooges who have been mentally and politically degraded, and who feel that they can get square with the world only by mentally and politically degrading other people. These stooges are really psychopathic cases. Satan has turned loose upon us the insane.
Rallied against Satan and his stooges, suggested Wallace, were veterans of “a long-drawn-out people’s revolution.”
“In this Great Revolution of the people,” he explained, “there were the American Revolution of 1775, the French Revolution of 1792, the Latin American revolutions of the Bolivarian era, the German Revolution of 1848, and the Russian Revolution of [1917]. Each spoke for the common man in terms of blood on the battlefield. Some went to excess. But the significant thing is that the people groped their way to the light. More of them learned to think and work together.”
The applause from the crowd in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Commodore Hotel, which included refugees from Nazi-occupied lands and their liberal allies, built with each line.
Wallace continued: “No compromise with Satan is possible. We shall not rest until the victims under the Nazi and Japanese yoke are freed. We shall fight for a complete peace as well as a complete victory.” The vice president defined “complete peace” in starkly anti-imperialist terms. “Yes, and when the time of peace comes, the citizen will again have a duty; the consumer will have a duty—the supreme duty of sacrificing the lesser interest for the greater interest of the general welfare,” he said. “Those who write the peace must think of the whole world. There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis. And we cannot perpetuate economic warfare without planting the seeds of military warfare. We must use our power at the peace table to build an economic peace that is charitable and enduring.”
Wallace finished his speech with a plea for expanding literacy in a largely illiterate world, which was still susceptible to the appeals of double-talking tyrants.
In those countries where the ability has been recently acquired or where the people have had no long experience in governing themselves on the basis of their own thinking, it is easy for demagogues to arise and prostitute the mind of the common man to their own base ends. Such a demagogue may get financial help from some person of wealth who is unaware of what the end result will be. Herr Thyssen, the wealthy German steel man, little realized what he was doing when he gave Hitler enough money to enable him to play on the minds of the German people. The demagogue is the curse of the modern world, and of all the demagogues, the worst are those financed by well-meaning wealthy men who sincerely believe that their wealth is likely to be safer if they can hire men with political “it” to change the signposts and lure the people back into slavery of the most degraded kind.
“Not even William Jennings Bryan had employed such a combustible mixture of radical and religious rhetoric,” New Yorker magazine writer Alex Ross would muse decades later. This argument that the fight against fascism required opposition not merely to the distant demagogues of Europe and Asia but to the financiers who might enable American demagogues would frame Wallace’s message going forward, along with the call for massive investment in domestic and international job creation, education, social services and peacemaking to combat the threat. It was rooted in Christian faith and the unapologetically liberal and vaguely social-democratic economic theories of reformers such as British economist William Beveridge, who in 1942 issued his groundbreaking report on how the war-ravaged country might address the “Giant Evils” that afflicted society: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.
A young Edward R. Murrow suggested that the postwar era would be defined by whether the vice president’s program would become “the forerunner of the American policy of tomorrow.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s biographer, Blanche Wiesen Cook, wrote that “Wallace’s speech complemented ER’s vision, and she never tired of quoting his words,” and pointing out that “she vigorously opposed Henry Luce’s notion of an American Century and rejected completely his call for ‘the Americanization of the world.’ ” Walter Lippmann, a frequent critic of the vice president, told Wallace that the speech was “the most moving and effective thing produced by us during the war” and, indeed, that he thought it “perfect, and you need have no qualms about letting it be circulated not only all over the country but all over the world.”
Wallace’s New York speech was translated into twenty languages and featured in books and pamphlets that were distributed to workers in defense plants, sailors, and soldiers. Recordings of the speech were issued as phonograph albums, sometimes with musical accompaniment. The Price of Victory, a short film based on the speech and narrated by Wallace, was produced by Paramount Pictures and the U.S. Office of War Information. It was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1943.
Aaron Copland was so inspired by the address that he wrote a short musical piece based on it for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army; he deserved a fanfare,” explained Copland, the son of Jewish immigrants who had made common cause with the “popular front” leftists of the 1930s. His Fanfare for the Common Man, as a 2018 National Public Radio tribute noted, would eventually be “performed for presidents, played to honor victims at the opening of the National September 11 Memorial
