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“You Drew Blood from the Cave Dwellers”

Wrestling with Demagogueryand the Wealthy Men WhoFinance Authoritarianism

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.

—Henry Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” speech given in New York before the Free World Association, May 8, 1942

[Henry Wallace] is a human being who has become a statesman … driving into the minds of the American people certain truths made clear as no other statesman in this period has done.

—Eleanor Roosevelt, “Henry Wallace’s Democracy,” New Republic, August 7, 1944

What began as a battle between one Henry and another evolved into the most revealing American debate of the World War II era. One Henry, magazine publisher Henry Luce, was in the words of his able biographer Robert E. Herzstein, “the most influential private citizen in America of his day.” He used his bully pulpits, Time and Life magazines, to make himself, in the words of historian of journalism James Baughman, “America’s single most powerful and innovative mass communicator.” In this capacity, he advanced the agenda of empire-building capitalism favored by the class warriors of the Grand Old Party. The other Henry, Vice President Henry Wallace, was the second most influential public citizen of his day. Their clash began in early 1941, as the United States was being drawn into World War II. It would define the battle lines of American politics across the decades, to this very day.

Luce and Wallace both rejected isolationism. The publisher’s oft-stated allegiance to “God, the Republican Party and free enterprise” was that of the multinational capitalist—not that of the right-wing zealots who were spinning conspiracy theories about FDR’s strategies for getting the U.S. into the war. The vice president, meanwhile, was a stalwart internationalist. Yet, these were very different men with very different values.

In the February 17, 1941, issue of his enormously popular Life magazine, Luce published his famous essay “The American Century.” He argued that the United States was already in the war informally, as part of a “collaboration” with Winston Churchill’s embattled Britain, and all but certain to be formally engaged before the fighting was done. “Almost every expert will agree that Britain cannot win complete victory—cannot even, in the common saying, ‘stop Hitler’—without American help,” Luce wrote. Now, he argued, “in any sort of partnership with the British Empire, Great Britain is perfectly willing that the United States of America should assume the role of senior partner. This has been true for a long time. Among serious Englishmen, the chief complaint against America (and incidentally their best alibi for themselves) has really amounted to this: that America has refused to rise to the opportunities of leadership in the world.”

Luce proposed to rise to the occasion with a Pax Americana, a worldview that historian John Morton Blum would suggest “contemplated a political, economic and religious imperialism indistinguishable, except by nationality, from the doctrines of Kipling and Churchill.” In the field of national policy, Luce explained,

the fundamental trouble with America has been, and is, that whereas their nation became in the 20th century the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world, nevertheless Americans were unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that fact. Hence they have failed to play their part as a world power—a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind. And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.

Denouncing “this virus of isolationist sterility [that] has so deeply infected an influential section of the Republican Party,” Luce advocated interventionism with a purpose: to make himself and people like him richer. Dropped amid his rumination on the language to be employed in discussing the role of the United States—“if we cannot state war aims in terms of vastly distant geography, shall we use some big words like Democracy and Freedom and Justice? Yes, we can use the big words”—were pronouncements that left little doubt regarding his own aims and those of his class. The United States had “a golden opportunity, an opportunity unprecedented in all history, to assume the leadership of the world—a golden opportunity handed to us on the proverbial silver platter. … America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise … America as the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas … America as the dynamic leader of world trade.” Reflecting on how, “throughout the 17th century and the 18th century and the 19th century, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes,” Luce now proposed Manifest Destiny for the world. He offered an expanded calculus in which other nations might be considered based on what they “will be worth to us.” He ended by declaring “the world of the 20th century, if it is to come to life in any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century.”

Luce’s article would prove to be highly popular with and influential for the powers-that-be. But Sidney Hillman, president of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, saw it as little more than a proposal that “American big business exploit the rest of the world.”

The publisher devoted much of his article to attacking FDR and the New Deal, and haughtily dismissed the Roosevelt-Wallace landslide of just three months earlier by asserting that Roosevelt “owes his continuation in office today largely to the coming of the war.” Luce adopted the language of FDR’s right-wing critics, claiming that the administration had saddled the country with “huge Government debt, a vast bureaucracy and a whole generation of young people trained to look to the Government as the source of all 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 & Museum and [used to lend] a sense of gravity to television sports and news programs” and “has even been heard in space: in 2008, NASA pilot Eric Boe chose it as wake-up music for his crew of astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavor.”

Along with all the accolades it received, however, Wallace’s speech was denounced by those who heard it as a threat to their politics and to their powers. As Wallace continued to speak, and to expand upon his themes, the denunciations grew louder. Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe Luce, a newly elected Republican member of the House of Representatives from a wealthy district in Connecticut, took to describing the vice president’s internationalism as “globaloney,” while Secretary of State Adolf Berle, who was already fretting about the “reds” who might be on the State Department payroll, joked that he had to station policemen around his home when Wallace visited “because of your talk about revolutions.” Sharper reactions came from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, which would soon be devoting editorial after editorial to calling out Wallace’s rhetoric. British prime minister Winston Churchill was reportedly “enraged” by Wallace’s talk of uprooting imperialism and ending empires. Like Churchill, nascent Cold Warriors at home grumbled about Wallace’s inclusion of the Russian Revolution on his list of long-drawn-out people’s revolutions, citing it alongside their complaints about Roosevelt’s willingness to work closely with Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.

But Roosevelt was determined to promote cooperation. “Never before have the major Allies been more closely united—not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims,” he would say before the war was done, as he predicted “the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” Such pronouncements unsettled people like Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist who had become a red-baiting editor of Luce’s Time magazine, and who would eventually make a name for himself by portraying the Roosevelt administration, including the Department of Agriculture that Wallace ran for FDR’s first two terms, as a hotbed of left-wing skullduggery.

Though Luce and Wallace exchanged passive-aggressive compliments after the vice president parried the “America Century” with the “People’s Revolution,” political battle lines were being drawn. Wallace began to argue within the White House for a pushback against what he referred to as “the Time-Fortune-Life crowd” and its allies within the administration. He saw the wartime debate in stark terms, as he explained in a December 28, 1942, diary entry recalling an end-of-the-year meeting with Roosevelt.

“I said there was one group of people in the United States at the present time definitely moving toward producing a postwar situation which would eventually bring us into war with Russia; and another group moving into a situation that would eventually bring us into war with England,” Wallace wrote. “I said the time had come when we must begin to organize skillfully and aggressively for peace. He said he was going to go a long way in his speech to Congress on [January] 7th, that he was going to appeal particularly to the soldier boys, saying that he knew what kind of world they were fighting for; they were fighting for a world in which there would be no more war and in which they as individuals could be sure of a job. He said he was going to put in his speech that he had been advised that it was bad politics to say what he had said, but he felt it was the thing to do anyway.”

Wallace’s personal interactions with Roosevelt were as important as his public pronouncements because, as in all consequential presidential administrations, FDR’s inner circle was both a team of rivals and an ideological battleground. The New Deal coalition that produced four landslide victories for Roosevelt was enormous. It included every region and just about every partisanship. There were Southern Democrats who stood far to the right of most Republicans. There were Northern and Western Democrats who stood to the left of some Socialists. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 on something of a unity ticket, with a Northeastern liberal at the top, paired with Southern conservative John Nance Garner, a wily Texan and former Speaker of the House who was never fully onboard for the New Deal. FDR had a high tolerance for internal conflict and heard his aides out before making decisions. He also followed the news obsessively, taking note of the rise of militant trade unions, political parties like the Wisconsin Progressives and the Minnesota Farmer Laborites and other popular movements that were staking out positions to the left of the Democrats. There is no question that he moved left during the course of his presidency, but it was not a steady process. He would lurch left and then edge back; he would welcome the hatred of the bankers and plutocrats and then meet the investors and business owners whose buy-in he needed to retool the economy, especially as it became clear that the United States would be drawn into World War II. The decision to move Wallace from the Department of Agriculture to the vice presidency was a reflection of the president’s desire to have one of the more left-wing members of his administration at his side, in position as a potential successor. He valued Wallace’s advice and counsel. Yet he also listened to those who warned that Wallace was too idealistic, too mystical, too radical. It was a constant balancing act.

When Wallace was with the president in the same room, the two men maintained a working relationship that was intellectually adventurous and passionate. Wallace often brought reports from a labor rally or a meeting with African-American, Latino or Jewish activists to the Oval Office. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Wallace was an advocate for those whose voices were rarely heard in the corridors of power. The first lady and the vice president served as a counterbalance to those who assumed that the country was comfortably united in a time of war. No, they warned, there were tensions, and they needed to be addressed. When Wallace counseled that the administration needed to provide clarity regarding the purpose of the sacrifices it was demanding from Americans and the shape of its postwar vision, FDR listened. So it was that the president was soon sounding many of the themes Wallace had raised in his New York address.

“The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942—or eventually lose everything,” Roosevelt said on January 7, 1943, in his State of the Union address. “I do not need to tell you that our enemies did not win the war in 1942.” He followed that mordant line by surveying the map of global conflict and vowing to take the war to the enemy. “I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. … But I can tell you that no matter where and when we strike by land, we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly. … Yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and they are going to get it. … Yes, 1943 will not be an easy year for us on the home front. We shall feel in many ways in our daily lives the sharp pinch of total war,” the president warned. But he said the tide was turning in the right direction and, keeping a promise he had made to Wallace two weeks earlier, Roosevelt detailed a vision of the postwar era:

We, and all the United Nations, want a decent peace and a durable peace. In the years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War, we were not living under a decent or a durable peace.

I have reason to know that our boys at the front are concerned with two broad aims beyond the winning of the war; and their thinking and their opinion coincide with what most Americans here back home are mulling over. They know, and we know, that it would be inconceivable—it would, indeed, be sacrilegious—if this nation and the world did not attain some real, lasting good out of all these efforts and sufferings and bloodshed and death.

Referencing his Four Freedoms speech from two years earlier, he told the Congress that

the people at home, and the people at the front, are wondering a little about the third freedom—freedom from want. To them it means that when they are mustered out, when war production is converted to the economy of peace, they will have the right to expect full employment—full employment for themselves and for all able-bodied men and women in America who want to work.

They expect the opportunity to work, to run their farms, their stores, to earn decent wages. They are eager to face the risks inherent in our system of free enterprise.

They do not want a postwar America which suffers from undernourishment or slums or the dole. They want no get-rich-quick era of bogus “prosperity” which will end for them in selling apples on a street corner, as happened after the bursting of the boom in 1929.

When you talk with our young men and our young women, you will find they want to work for themselves and for their families; they consider that they have the right to work; and they know that after the last war their fathers did not gain that right.

When you talk with our young men and women, you will find that with the opportunity for employment they want assurance against the evils of all major economic hazards, assurance that will extend from the cradle to the grave. And this great Government can and must provide this assurance.

I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.

I dissent.

And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.

FDR closed with a rejection of isolationism and imperialism that mirrored much of what Wallace had been saying. “Hitlerism, like any other form of crime or disease, can grow from the evil seeds of economic as well as military feudalism,” the president declared. “Victory in this war is the first and greatest goal before us. Victory in the peace is the next. That means striving toward the enlargement of the security of man here and throughout the world—and, finally, striving for the fourth freedom—freedom from fear.” To that end, FDR proposed a worldview, like that of Wallace, that rejected heavy-handed empire building in favor of diplomacy and cooperation. “The very philosophy of the Axis powers is based on a profound contempt for the human race,” he said. “If, in the formation of our future policy, we were guided by the same cynical contempt, then we should be surrendering to the philosophy of our enemies, and our victory would turn to defeat.”

The War within a War

Franklin Roosevelt’s words echoed those of Henry Wallace on that January day. But as 1943 progressed, it became painfully evident that the administration was deeply divided on the practical questions of how to pursue the war, and the peace.

During the course of 1942 and 1943, Wallace fought inside the Roosevelt administration to advance his views, often with the president’s support but sometimes without it. The bitterest battle—the “war within a war,” as historian Bascom Timmons put it—was with Secretary of Commerce Jesse Holman Jones, a real-estate mogul from Texas whose power inside and outside government was such that FDR sometimes referred to him as “Jesus H. Jones.” In what Wallace biographers Culver and Hyde would describe as “the most celebrated intragovernmental squabble of the era,” Wallace was pitted against a sixty-eight-year-old “fiscal and social conservative with no interest in politics as a vehicle for change.”

Jones had come to Washington as an appointee of a Republican president, Herbert Hoover, yet he had remained to chair the powerful Reconstruction Finance Corporation through Roosevelt’s first two terms. During the war years, he served not only at Commerce but as Federal Loan Administrator, which gave him responsibility over all federal investment agencies. Jones was so used to calling so many of the shots regarding federal finances and priorities that he was sometimes referred to as the head of “the fourth branch of government.” He bristled at FDR’s assignment of key responsibilities to Wallace, who signaled from the start of his term as vice president that he intended to maintain the activist role he had established as head of Agriculture.

Before he was sworn in on January 20, 1941, Wallace had studied the office of the vice presidency, including a 1920 essay titled “Can the Vice President Be Useful?” penned by a failed contender for the job named Franklin D. Roosevelt. As FDR began his third term in the White House, he moved to expand the scope and character of the No. 2 job—which Wallace’s predecessor, Garner, had suggested was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”—by issuing Executive Order 8839 shortly before the U.S. entry into World War II. That order established the Economic Defense Board, which Wallace would chair. After Pearl Harbor, it was renamed the Board of Economic Warfare.

Culver and Hyde note that the position gave the vice president a role in “dealing with a wide range of international economic issues including exports, imports, ‘preclusive buying’ (the purchase of strategic materials in order to keep them out of the enemies’ hands), foreign exchange transactions, international credit and transportation, the control of foreign-owned properties, and patents and all other matters related to foreign economics.” Less than two months after he issued the executive order empowering the new vice president, FDR issued another, creating the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board, where Wallace, again as the chair, would be in charge of speeding the delivery of arms and other materials to allies in Europe. The Des Moines Register described the vice president as the “American minister of economic defense, and the chief planner of the new world order when the war is over.” In short order, Culver and Hyde recount: “Wallace had become the most powerful vice president in the nation’s history. No vice president had ever wielded such administrative authority, much less a policy voice of consequence. Roosevelt ‘used me in a way which made the office for a time a very great office,’ Wallace later observed.”

The operative words were “for a time.” The vice president was determined to go all out to defeat fascism on the battlefield and in the postwar era—so determined that lines of division quickly developed within the administration.

At every turn, Wallace emphasized the importance of making a win-the-war-and-win-the-peace connection. In an essay he wrote for the Atlantic magazine just weeks before the United States entered World War II, Wallace had argued: “The overthrow of Hitler is only half the battle; we must build a world in which our human and material resources are used to the utmost if we are to win complete victory. This principle should be fundamental as the world moves to reorganize its affairs. Ways must be found by which the potential abundance of the world can be translated into real wealth and a higher standard of living. Certain minimum standards of food, clothing and shelter ought to be established, and arrangements ought to be made to guarantee that no one should fall below those standards.”

That made sense to some key figures in the White House, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who in her 1942 essay “What We Are Fighting For” described the war in the context of “the world struggle of ordinary people for a better way of life” in which “the human beings of the world, regardless of race or creed or color, are to be looked upon with respect and treated as equals.”

There was good reason to believe that Franklin was sympathetic with the message. But FDR’s administration really was that team of rivals, and within it were clear factions that the president welcomed and encouraged as he kept building out a Democratic coalition far broader than any the party had seen before. Wallace positioned himself at one pole in FDR’s big tent. Jesse Jones held up the other pole.

Jones thought of himself as a businessman, not an idealist, and he had nothing but disdain for Wallace personally and politically. He decried “the socialist-minded uplifters and uppity underlings” of the Board of Economic Warfare, and he steadfastly resisted efforts by the vice president and his staff to include “labor clauses” in BEW contracts that called for foreign producers to “maintain such conditions of labor as will maximize production … adequate shelter, water and safety appliances” and fair wage rates. Wallace explained that “greater stimulus” would boost production. The BEW’s blunt-spoken executive director, Milo Perkins, argued, “It isn’t radical to believe that you can get as much in return by increasing the food to a human being as by increasing the food to a mule.”

This emphasis on the condition of workers was indeed seen as radical by the administration’s conservative critics. Ohio Republican senator Robert A. Taft warned about the danger of “setting up an international WPA,” referring to the New Deal’s Depression-era jobs program. Taft and his fellow congressional conservatives found a willing ally in Jones, who, according to Culver and Hyde, “opposed anything that changed the customary relationship between capital and labor.”

As the vice president accumulated more authority during 1942 and early 1943, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on “the crumbling empire of Jesse H. Jones.” But Jones was not about to stand down. He held a trump card: as the Wall Street Journal noted, “Jones still must sign the checks.” This he did slowly—so slowly that Wallace and Perkins began to raise concerns about delays in the acquisition of raw materials needed for the war effort. As Wallace was literally traveling to the jungles of Latin America in search of better sources of everything from rubber to quinine, and as Perkins was identifying cheaper and faster methods for processing and distributing supplies, the pair grew increasingly agitated with Jones. In June 1943, they sent a 28-page complaint to the Senate Committee on Appropriations, which detailed “obstructionist tactics … delay of the war effort … hamstringing bureaucracy and backdoor complaining” by Jones. Wallace warned, “We are helpless when Jesse Jones, as our banker, refuses to sign checks in accordance with our directives” and suggested that the bureaucratic barriers the BEW was running up against were “utterly inexcusable in a nation at war.”

“These,” Jones biographer Steven Fenberg observed, “were fighting words.” Jones accused Wallace of “malice, innuendos and half-truths.” At that point Perkins, always a hotter head than Wallace, let rip. He accused Jones of holding up the acquisition of quinine, used to treat malaria, and adopting a “Rip Van Winkle approach to a commodity that means life or death to our soldiers.” The clash became national news. Jones roused his allies on Wall Street and in the war industries and appealed to conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress, especially fellow Texas Democrats like House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Tom Connally, to support his efforts to rein in the liberals. Jones found willing allies at the State Department, where there were worries that alliances with “old order” leaders like Winston Churchill were being jeopardized by talk of “labor clauses” and Wallace’s assertion that “the new democracy by definition abhors imperialism.”

As the wrangling between Jones and Wallace grew more intense and more public, the president grew more agitated. Roosevelt did not want the differences of opinion within his White House to go public—especially at a critical point in a war that was far from won. So, on July 15, 1943, he issued Executive Order 9361 abolishing the Board of Economic Warfare and transferring its work to a new Office of Economic Warfare, which would consolidate projects previously overseen by Wallace and Jones under FDR’s “fix-it” man, Leo Crowley.

Crowley would soon be heading a powerful agency dubbed the Foreign Economic Administration. A fiercely anti-Soviet banker aligned with Wall Street, Crowley was seen as much more of a Jones man than a Wallace man. So it was fair to say that the decision went to Jones. Indeed, as journalist I.F. Stone observed, “Behind Jones is the State Department, and behind the State Department are those forces, clerical and capitalist, which have no intention of letting this era become, in Wallace’s phrase, the Century of the Common Man.”

Henry Wallace understood now that he was in a fight not just for his own political future but for that of the Democratic Party and, by extension, for the nation in the postwar era.

Wallace did not fear for his relationship with Roosevelt. Even as the dust from the BEW punch-up was settling, FDR assured his vice president, “It is needless for me to tell you that the incident has not lessened my personal affection for you.” Within days, the two men were consulting on what would today be described as “messaging,” framing out the bold themes that Wallace would take on the road as a roving champion of the administration.

Still, there was no denying that Wallace’s authority had been diminished, and within the upper echelons of the Democratic Party there was now open speculation that he would be bumped from the 1944 ticket. In a July 20, 1943, diary entry, the vice president offered a clear-eyed assessment of his relationship with FDR. He had no doubt that the president was “really fond of me except when stimulated by the palace guard to move in other directions.”

So Wallace chose to go around that palace guard. With FDR’s encouragement, he began speaking out against American fascism. Wallace devoted hours, even days, to constructing speeches and articles on the subject. From the start, he distinguished the fascist threat at home from the threat posed by Hitler and Mussolini. He expected to stir controversy. That was the point. Privately, however, Wallace speculated to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that he and his ideas might be swept aside by a rising tide of “bipartisan American fascism.”

Wallace had already suggested, in a March 8, 1943, address at Ohio Wesleyan University, that “we shall decide sometime in 1943 or 1944 whether to plant the seeds for World War No. 3. That war will be certain if we allow Prussia to rearm either materially or psychologically. That war will be probable in case we double-cross Russia. That war will be probable if we fail to demonstrate that we can furnish full employment after this war comes to an end and Fascist interests, motivated largely by anti-Russian bias, get control of our government.” Though he did not make specific reference to “American fascism” in the speech, Wallace warned, “Those who preach isolationism and hate of other nations 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!”