Bill Knight column for 4-9, 10 or 11, 2020
Seventy-six years
ago this week, U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace wrote a New York Times
piece about fascism that not only stirred red-white-and-blue fervor during
World War II, but now seems both timeless. And timely. And troubling.
The April 9, 1944, essay said, “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 supreme god of a fascist … 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.
“It is an
infectious disease,” he continued, “and we must all be on our guard against
intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. Every
Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have
been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues … are ripe material for
fascist leadership.”
Wallace especially
targeted those who exploited the media.
“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,” he wrote. “His method is to poison the
channels of public information.”
Investigative
journalist I.F. Stone wrote, “Let no one call Henry Wallace an ineffectual
dreamer. In this town [Washington, D.C.], which worships 'toughness' but
usually mistakes the loudmouthed for the strong, this is an achievement.”
Twenty years ago,
John Culver and John Hyde published their definitive biography “American
Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace,” showing Wallace as a cerebral country boy
who rose to national prominence as a friend of farmers and workers and a progressive
who denounced racial segregation.
Born of Scottish
ancestry on an Orient, Iowa, farm, Wallace was the son of Harry Wallace, a
Republican who started the premier agriculture journal of its time, Wallaces'
Farmer, co-founded the American Farm Bureau, and was Secretary of Agriculture
for President Harding. Henry was a solid journalist and scientist, a gifted
gardener and inventor who launched the Hi-Bred seed company (later Pioneer) and
in 1936 became a Democrat. But he was considered an outsider by party bosses.
Nevertheless, Franklin D. Roosevelt had made Wallace his Agriculture Secretary
from 1933-1940, and then picked him as a running mate. Wallace served as VP
from 1941-45, after which he became Commerce Secretary.
In 1944, weeks
after Allied bombers mounted the first full-scale daylight raid on Berlin,
Wallace wrote about fascists in general, saying, “Always and everywhere they
can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon
the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. They claim
to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the
Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly
and vested interest.”
Wallace also
conceded the existence of authoritarian tendencies in the United States.
“If we define an
American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of
human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United
States,” Wallace wrote. “There are probably several hundred thousand if we
narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and
power are ruthless and deceitful.
“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,” he added.
Favored by an
ailing Roosevelt to return as VP, Wallace later that year was betrayed by
Democratic Party insiders allied with conservative interests, ironically
foreshadowed in his 1,843-word essay.
“American fascism
will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the
cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand
for the KKK-type of demagoguery.”
His writing was as
inspiring as his 1942 speech “Century of the Common Man,” which moved composer
Aaron Copland to write “Fanfare for the Common Man.” But following his failed
third-party run for the presidency as a Progressive in 1944, he nominally
returned to the Republican Party and eventually supported Eisenhower, yet
consulted with Kennedy and Johnson before being stricken with ALS (“Lou
Gehrig’s Disease”) and dying in 1965.
But his life was as
an idealist.
“If we put our
trust in the common sense of common men and ‘with malice toward none and
charity for all’ go forward on the great adventure of making political,
economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.”
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