I'm not sure who started this particular round of it. A blog called Estimated Prophet posted some excerpts almost a year ago. The article is called The Danger of American Fascism and first appeared in the New York Times on 04/09/1944. It was included in a collection of his articles and speeches published as a book that year under the title Democracy Reborn.
Henry Wallace is a controversial figure in recent American history. As Secretary of Agriculture during the 1930s, he was a leading figure in the New Deal's efforts to meet the farm crisis that actually set in during the 1920s and preceded the Great Depression. As Vice President 1941-1945, Wallace was a prominent spokesperson for the US government during most of the Second World War.
But in 1948, he broke from the Democratic Party as ran against Harry Truman for president as the candidate of the new, left-leaning Progressive Party. The American Communist Party provided a great many of the activists for the Progressive Party - in Communist terms they regarded it as a "popular front" party - and Wallace openly accepted their endorsement for President. Wallace himself was not a Communist. He later endorsed Truman's decision to go to war in Korea, and was bitter at the criticism of his former allies in the Communist-influenced left of the time.
Ironically, given Wallace's later reputation, he was a Republican up until 1936. In those days, and well into the 1970s actually, there was a notable faction of the Republican Party known as "liberal Republicans." It seems a long time ago. Describing Wallace in 1940 in Freedom From Fear (1999), historian David Kennedy wrote, "Wallace was an unreconstructed liberal reformer and an unflinching New Dealer, qualities that recommended him to Roosevelt."
It didn't escape the notice of either the media or Republican opposition research that 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, then-Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, had supported Wallace for President in 1948. In his 1977 autobiography Grassroots, McGovern describes his reasons for supporting Wallace as being primarily based on Wallace's criticisms of what McGovern thought was an emerging Cold War policy that overemphasized military confrontation with the Soviet Union. McGovern's description of his own preference that year provides a good capsule summary of Wallace's career and his place in history:
Thus [because of foreign policy concerns] I was receptive to an alternative to the Truman-Dewey bipartisan policy of 1948. That alternative was provided by former Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace was a highly respected Iowa businessman and farm operator who had developed hybrid-seed corn plants in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio that were selling $4 million worth of seed corn annually by 1933. He had served as Franklin's Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture and then as his Vice President. He was forced to resign as President Truman's Secretary of Commerce when he took public exception to the Administration's Cold War policies.Wallace's 1944 article on fascism appeared of course during the Second World War, still before the Normandy invasion. But at that point, the decisive Soviet victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad made it clear that the tide had turned in the war, and the defeat ofGermany and Japan were in sight, though no one knew at that point how long it might take or how many lives it might still cost. In his article, we can see the lessons that many in the democratic world were beginning to draw from the experience of the rise of Fascism in Germany and Spain and National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany.
When he emerged in 1948 as a third-party presidential candidate on a platform of international cooperation and "people's capitalism," [my wife] Eleanor and I gave him our support. Indeed, we went as delegates from Illinois to the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia. My most vivid memory of that convention was the group singing led by Pete Seeger. I also remember enountering a few hard-line Communists whose rigidity and fanaticism I found obnoxious. But most of the delegates were idealistic meddle-class Americans who wanted a foreign policy based on restraint and reason, and domestic policies geared to the public interest. Wallace was attacked by his enemies as a "pink" or a "red." He was, in fact, an old-fashioned free-enterprise capitalist and a practical internationalist.
The concept of fascism
My favorite quote from this article has always been:
Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.Today, the word "fascism" has lost much of its meaning, and is known mainly as an insulting epithet. In 1944, it was much more of a contemporary term, and most people didn't think they needed any special definition of the concept.
Among historians and political scientists, there has been a long-running debate, never resolved to any general consensus, over what "fascism" really is. Mussolini's movement used the word "fascism" to describe itself, so that one pretty clearly counts. Spain's post-civil war dictatorship under Francisco Franco (1892-1975) called its governing party the Falange Española, and the Spanish Falangists are generally regarded as a type of fascist rule.
One of the most complicated and interesting questions in this dispute is whether Hitler's National Socialism counts as a form of fascism, or whether it reprsents some kind of qualitatively different form of dictatorship. Though in 1944, most people would have understood "fascism" to include the Hitler regime.
But without getting bogged down in the poltical science disputes, most definitions of fascism would include a dictatorial government, a one-party state, a capitalist economic system, the promotion of extreme nationalism, and an emphases of military power. "Militarism" would be normally used to describe the latter. But in the more technical sense of military officials having the ultimate say in the government, militarism would more accurately describe Japan under the warlords during the Second World War or Germany under Hindenburg and Ludendorff during the First World War, though Franco would qualify as well. While Mussolini and Hitler emphasized military strength and imagery, both governments wer civilian dictatorships in which civilian officials controlled the military.
Wallace's view of the threat of fascism 1944
This passage in interesting because, despite the United Nations (US/Britain/USSR) policy of unconditional surrender, Wallace seems to envision a possible future German threat even after the war ends:
The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.There was a large presence of German immigrants and their descendents in Latin America at that time. You hear stories and jokes about Nazi war criminals escaping to South America after the war. But there was actually large-scale German emigration to Latin America a century ago, even before the First World War, including German Jews. (One of the most notorious terrorist attacks of recent years was a truck bomb attack by the Shi'ite terrorist group Hizbollah against a Jewish community center and the Israeli embassy in Argentina.) [Update 11/06/2011: I would no longer identify Hizbollah so unequivocally as the perpetrator of that attack.]
In what actually developed, the most direct influence of European fascism of that period was in Argentina, in the form of Juan Perón's movement. Perón (1895-1974) was an admirer of Benito Mussolini, and travelled to Italy to study Italian military methods. Perón had just become vice-president of Argentina in February of 1944 as a result of the formation of a military junta there, following on the seizure of power in June 1943 by the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (GOU), of which Perón had a part in creating. [Update 03/03/2017: My description of Perón's movement there was conventional, but wrong. There are interesting reasons why the European and American view of Perón as a fascist in the Mussolini mode became so common in European and the United States. But it doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny.]
Wallace probably had developments like this is mind, especially since the German communities in South America tended to be quite sympathetic to the Nazi government, in a kind of "more German than the Germans" attitude.
Fascism was not unknown on American soil. Clumsy German espionage efforts took their own fool racial progaganda way too seriously and imagined that the German-American Bund, a national network of social clubs for ethnic Germans, would somehow mobilize the German-Americans to support the cause of the Nazi party ruling the old homeland. The Bund overtly propagandized for Nazi ideas and happily displayed their swastika flags. German-Americans like Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall tended to be singularly unresponsive to such appeals.
Henry Wallace's article stresses the more homegrown versions of the fascist type movements. These were also familiar to readers in 1944. The isolationist, antiwar America First group prior to the war had opposed American aid to Germany's foes and painted the Roosevelt administration as a bunch of blithering warmongers. While many sympathizers of this group were antiwar for more generall pacifist reasons - I believe labor leader John L. Lewis fits this category - other like its most famous advocate Charles Lindburgh were German symphasizers, however much Lindburgh's later admirers tried to play down his German sympathies and anti-Semitic and racial-supremicist attitudes.
Other groups identified with Hitler-and-Mussolini-like outlooks included the radio priest Charles Coughlin, a spiritual and political predecessor of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh; the Silver Shirts of William Dudley Pelley; Gerald L.K. Smith and his so-called Committe of One Million; and, the Ku Klux Klan in its various incarnations of the time. At least among New Deal Democrats, Louisiana's Huey Long, who ran the state of Lousiana under Mussolini-style conditions while building strong sympathies among many farmers and working families, was regarded as the most likely candidate for an American Hitler. Sinclair Lewis in his contemporary novel It Can't Happen Here and William Faulkner in his later novel The Mansion took Long as their model of an American fascist demagogue.
It's in this context that Wallace's readers would have understood his article, with statements like this:
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 K.K.K. type of demagoguery."Cartelists" is a concept that not much used today, although it could be translated into present-day language as something like "the Enrons and the Halliburtons." As for poisoners of public information, there is an endless stream of "fair and balanced" examples of those available 24/7 for anyone with access to cable television. And KKK type demogoguery is no farther away than the Web site of Trent Lott's and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's friends at the White Citizens Council (aka, Council of Conservative Citizens).
This observation is still current:
The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But 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. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.Anyone who has has paid close attention to Rush Limbaugh or John Ashcroft can also find contemporary resonance in the following warning. Substitute "unilaterialism" for "isolationism" and a number of other examples from today come readily to mind.
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 opportunityto impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. 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. 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. (my emphasis)His concerns in the following passage give a hint of his later alarm over what he saw in 1948 as the short-sighted Cold War policies of the Truman administration. But one doesn't have to accept his 1948 foreign-policy viewpoint to notice that American democrats had reason to be concerned that some pressing for aggressive postwar military policies didn't have the best interest of American democracy in mind:
Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.It's become such a commonplace today in American politics that the United States is the world's only superpower. And both parties right now take it for granted that the US should be prepared to assert military dominance anywhere in the world. Far too little comment is made today on the ways in which such policies can endanger democracy at home.
As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Anatomy of Power (1983), with particular referenceto the US, warned of the exercise of deceptively benign power in contemporary society by institutions that give the public the illusion of greater democratic control than what actually exists, not least because concentrated power is opposed by a diffusion of groups whose actually effectiveness is limited in comparison:
The modern military establishment strongly concentrates power. It exacts a high level of submission from a large number of individuals within the organization, and in symmetrical fashion it exacts an equivalent obedience outside. The modern large corporation expects and receives a high level of conformity from the many in its management. And its property resources accord it an extensive command over the many it employs. From this flows and extensive submission by the citizenry and by the state. As in the case of the miltiary, the purposes of the great business enterprise, the ideas that sustain it, are largely, though not quite completely, above debate. As social conditioning advese to the military is unpatriotic and negligent of national security, so that which is adverse to the modern industrial enterprise is subversive of the free enterprise system. Not the least of the strengths of the military and corporate power is the diffusion in the sources of power that are brought in opposition [to them]. ... Nothing so serves the military or corporate power as the belief if its opponents that they have accomplished something by holding a meeting, giving a speech, or issuing a manifesto. No one in a democracy [on the one hand] should be in doubt as to the real effectiveness of organized opposition to concentrated power. But all [on the other hand] must have an acute understanding of the weakness arising from the diffusion of power and the difference between illusion and practical effect.And the following passage from that same book of Galbraith's, written over 20 years ago, is an all-too-relevant warning of a key way that demogoguery can be used to concentrate power and stigmatize dissent, in the same way of which Wallace warned 60 years ago:
An essential, even vital, need for the conditioned [i.e., psychological/ideological] power of the military is a specific enemy. If the military power is to be more than traditional, ceremonial, or precautionary in character, a hostile threat is indispensable. Such a threat wins the appropriations - the property - from whch compensatory power derives. It also leads to consolidation of belief within the military establishment and similar belief outside. Internal discipline must be kept tight; external dissent or opposition must be subject to the suspicion or assertion that those involved are aiding, abetting, or motivated by the enemy. At a minimum they are unpatriotic; at most their dissidence verges on treason, invoking the traditional threat of condign punishment [i.e., legal sanctions]. Deeply conditioned attitudes affirm the value of patriotism, and these become of absolute importance when there is external danger.[my emphasis]Wallace:
It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction.[Minor proofreading corrections made to this post 11/06/2011; the last paragraph is a quote from Wallace that was not clearly distinguished from the preceding Galbraith quote in the original.]
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