The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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are preaching a modified form of Prussian Nazism, and the only outcome of such preaching will be war.”
The Last New Dealer?
By mid-July, Wallace had resolved to get specific. On July 24, 1943, he arrived in Detroit to deliver the speech that would formally introduce the idea of homegrown fascism (as recounted in Chapter 1). He had chosen to come to Detroit, in consultation with union allies and with a text already vetted by Roosevelt, to call out racial hatred and division as a threat to the war effort. Appearing in one of a number of cities that had experienced race riots that summer, Wallace would make the link between racism at home and the hatred preached by Hitler and his followers.
It was here that Wallace inserted the term “American fascism” into the wartime debate. At a press conference shortly after his arrival in Detroit, Wallace said that “certain American fascists claim I’m an idealist.” These homegrown authoritarians disdained him, he asserted, because he threatened their dreams of reclaiming the outsize power and privilege they had enjoyed before the New Deal began to reposition government on the side of the great mass of Americans. “Old-fashioned Americanism is the last refuge of the fascists,” Wallace told the reporters. “But by old-fashioned Americanism they do not mean what is implied by the term, but mean the situation that existed when great corporations rose to power economically and politically. The reason Mr. Roosevelt is so hated by many businessmen is the fact that he stopped making Washington a way-station on the road to Wall Street.”
Roosevelt had said much the same thing in the past, when he closed his campaign for a second term with a rally at Madison Square Garden on October 31, 1936. “We have not come this far without a struggle, and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle,” FDR said back then.
For twelve years this nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The nation looked to government but the government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these 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