The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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warned, “necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” And he proposed to address the threat of future fascisms with “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.”
The Democratic Party that in 1940 nominated Roosevelt and Wallace would, as the decade wore on, abandon FDR’s certainty that “an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” was “the minimum requirement of a more permanently safe order of things.” But despite that surrender, Wallace refused to abandon the New Deal and the promise of Wendell Willkie’s manifesto One World and FDR’s Four Freedoms and Second Bill of Rights. He could not accept that an unjust order built upon the crumbling foundations of racism, monopoly and militarism would need to be maintained for decades, and then generations, because his own Democratic Party had lost its nerve—and its faith.
Wallace, a brilliant writer and thinker and an accomplished editor, cabinet member, vice president, presidential candidate and businessman, never suggested it would be easy to end segregation and sexism, address poverty and inequality, upend the military-industrial complex and avert nuclear war. Rather, with the support of Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, a young Betty Friedan and a younger Noam Chomsky, he argued that this program was an urgent necessity that could not be cashiered as political concession or electoral compromise. His supporters circulated posters with the picture of an African-American youth and the message: “A black child born on the same day in the same city as a white child is destined to die 10 years earlier. … We are fighting for those 10 extra years.”
Wallace embraced a “new liberalism,” asserting: “A liberal is a person who in all his actions is continuously asking, ‘What is best for all the people—not merely what is best for me personally?’ Abraham Lincoln was a liberal when he said he was both for the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict he was for the man before the dollar. Christ was the greatest liberal of all when he put life before things.” He identified as a patriotic American who believed “in using in a nonviolent, tolerant and democratic way the forces of education, publicity, politics, economics, business, law and religion to direct the ever-changing and increasing power of science into channels which will bring peace and the maximum of well-being both spiritual and economic to the greatest number of human beings.”
These were not uncommon notions at a time when political leaders, having survived the Great Depression and thwarted Adolf Hitler, imagined a new world order of peace and prosperity, freedom and equality. Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, a young Michael Foot, a younger Tony Benn and the British Labour Party preached another version of this social gospel as they set out to win the peace in 1945 with a “Let Us Face the Future!” campaign on behalf of a national health-care system, the nationalization of basic industries and a redistribution of wealth from Downton Abbey elites to the toiling masses. Tage Fritjof Erlander, Einar Henry Gerhardsen and the Scandinavian social democrats echoed that message as they forged the model of the modern social welfare state. Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur joined their voices to the chorus as they saw off British colonialism and announced that “at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
In America, however, Wallace was deemed dangerous by the Southern power brokers, the patronage bosses, the corporatists and the monopolists who were quite happy to bury the New Deal with FDR. The men who schemed to divert the postwar march of democracy disdained Henry Wallace. And he disdained them. Their corruptions, their calculations, he warned, were the stuff of “American Fascism.”
From the mid-1940s onward, Wallace was prepared to name the enemies of human progress. He shared Paul Robeson’s view that the danger for the United States in the postwar era lay “in the resurgent imperialist and profascist forces in our own country.” As the second highest-ranking official in the country, he did not hesitate to make the appropriate, yet too rarely spoken, connection between Hitler’s preachments about racial “purity” and the language of Southern segregationists who also spoke of a “master race.”
For Wallace, a breaking point came in the summer of 1943, after racial violence flared in Detroit, leaving thirty-four dead (including seventeen African Americans at the hands of the police). Wallace traveled to the city and addressed a mass meeting of labor and civic organizations. “We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home,” he told the crowd. “Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward Nazism.” Wallace warned: “There are powerful groups who hope to take advantage of the President’s concentration on the war effort to destroy everything he has accomplished on the domestic front over the last 10 years. Some people call these powerful groups ‘isolationists,’ others call them ‘reactionaries’ and still others, seeing them following in European footsteps, call them ‘American Fascists.’ ”
Those were jarring words from the vice president of the United States, but Henry Wallace chose them carefully. Starting when he was Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Wallace studied foreign languages so that he could speak directly with the leaders and planners of the fight against Hitler and his Axis. He traveled widely and consulted often with those who had resisted the rise of fascism in Europe and who were resisting its pull in Latin America and Asia. He made a study of the threat, and he intended to speak about it in an American context. He proposed a broad definition of this charged term that could apply to the racists, warmongers and monopolists who manipulated media and politics to maintain their grip on America.
Speaking to that 1943 mass meeting in one of the nation’s great industrial centers, Wallace warned that “the people of America know that the second step toward fascism is the destruction of labor unions. There are midget Hitlers here who continually attack labor. There are other demagogues blind to the errors of every other group who shout, ‘We love labor, but …’ Both the midget Hitlers and the demagogues are enemies of America. Both would destroy labor unions if they could. Labor should be fully aware of its friends and of its enemies.”
Wallace ripped into industrialists. “We know that imperialistic freebooters using the United States as a base can make another war inevitable,” he warned. “Too many corporations have made money by holding inventions out of use, by holding up prices and by cutting down production.”
Could the schemes of the midget Hitlers, the imperialist freebooters, the American fascists be stopped? “Shouldering our responsibilities for enlightenment, abundant production and world cooperation, we can begin now our apprenticeship to world peace,” Wallace said. “There will be heart-breaking delays—there will be prejudices creeping in and the faint-hearted will spread their whispers of doubt. But … nothing will prevail against the common man’s peace in a common man’s world as he fights both for free enterprise and full employment.
“The world,” pledged Henry Wallace, “is one family with one future—a future which will bind our brotherhood with heart and mind and not with chains!”
Segregationists, the captains of industry and the big-city bosses of the Democratic Party were determined to destroy Wallace, and for the most part they succeeded. They denied him the vice-presidential nomination at the 1944 Democratic National Convention and, by extension, the prospect of the presidency, for it was well understood that, were a Roosevelt-Wallace ticket to be re-elected in 1944, an ailing Roosevelt would in all likelihood be replaced by his vice president. They drove Wallace from the powerful cabinet position that FDR had chosen for him, secretary of commerce, in the Truman administration. In the late 1940s, they elbowed the former vice president to the margins of American politics and then shoved him into the shadows. Eventually, they reimagined our history and our politics so aggressively, and so completely, that Wallace’s warnings were laughed off as a sort of political madness while generation after generation of centrist Democrats neglected fundamental economic and social challenges. Ultimately, FDR’s New Deal coalition collapsed and a yawning space was opened for the sort of “American fascist … who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings.” Only with the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene—to the accompaniment of headlines like the CBC’s that asked: