American Fascism

by Henry Wallace. Former Vice President of the U.S. 1944.

The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way,” Wallace wrote in his landmark essay “The Danger of American Fascism,” published in The New York Times Magazine on April 9, 1944.

Wallace’s thoughts and words are even more relevant today than they were then. Here are additional excerpts:

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 American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. 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 into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.…

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.…

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.… They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interests.…

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.…

Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself….

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Wallace saw the connection between Hitler’s preachments about racial “purity” and the language of Southern segregationists who spoke of a master race. “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,” he warned. And “the second step toward fascism is the destruction of labor unions.”

To avert the rise of American fascism, Wallace argued that America must champion “the democracy of the common man,” embracing “not just the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy, and democracy in the treatment of the sexes.”