The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: It Can Happen Here

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm

 

Published on Monday, July 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: " It Can

Happen Here "

by Thom Hartmann

 

 

The Republican National Committee has recently removed

from the top-level pages of their website an

advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those

of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This

little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist

and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his

attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of

Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens

without charges, his willingness to let corporations

write legislation, and the so-called " Free Speech

Zones " around his public appearances are all steps on

the road to American fascism.

 

The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and

Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the

first American Vice President to point out the

" American fascists " among us.

 

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was

Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt

died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had

two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner

(1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early

1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry

Wallace to, as Wallace noted, " write a piece answering

the following questions: What is a fascist? How many

fascists have we? How dangerous are they? "

 

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was

published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at

the height of the war against the Axis powers of

Germany and Japan.

 

" The really dangerous American fascists, " Wallace

wrote, " are not those who are hooked up directly or

indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on

those. 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. 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. "

 

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of

the word " fascist " - the definition Mussolini had in

mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It

was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who

wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that

said: " Fascism should more appropriately be called

corporatism because it is a merger of state and

corporate power. " Mussolini, however, affixed his name

to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

 

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted,

fascism is: " A system of government that exercises a

dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through

the merging of state and business leadership, together

with belligerent nationalism. "

 

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In

a 1923 pamphlet titled " The Doctrine of Fascism " he

wrote, " If classical liberalism spells individualism,

Fascism spells government. " But not a government of,

by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a

government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate

interests in the nation.

 

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into

full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced

it with the " Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni " -

the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations

were still privately owned, but now instead of having

to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and

covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge

of the government.

 

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944

Times article his concern about the same happening

here in America:

 

" If we define an American fascist as one who in

case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human

beings, then there are undoubtedly several million

fascists in the United States. There are probably

several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition

to include only those who in their search for money

and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are

patriotic in time of war because it is to their

interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow

power and the dollar wherever they may lead. "

 

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate

heads who had run for political office, and, in

Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was

their obligation to represent We The People instead of

corporate cartels. " American fascism will not be

really dangerous, " he added in the next paragraph,

" until there is a purposeful coalition among the

cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public

information... "

 

Noting that, " Fascism is a worldwide disease, " Wallace

further suggest that fascism's " greatest threat to the

United States will come after the war " and will

manifest " within the United States itself. "

 

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel " It Can't Happen Here, "

a conservative southern politician is helped to the

presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show

host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his

campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism.

Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of

traditional American democracy as anti-American. When

Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style

detention center, and the viewpoint character of the

book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees

to Canada to avoid prosecution under new " patriotic "

laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.

 

As Lewis noted in his novel, " the President, with

something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are

two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who

don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a

common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the

Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State]

Sarason had more or less taken from Italy. " And,

President " Windrip's partisans called themselves the

Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which

nickname was generally used. "

 

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize,

was world famous by 1944, as was his book " It Can't

Happen Here. " And several well-known and powerful

Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost

businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by

Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler.

These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President

Wallace's thinking when he wrote:

 

" 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.

American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely

aligned with their German counterparts before the war,

and are even now preparing to resume where they left

off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases. "

 

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As

the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes,

fascism/corporatism is " an attempt to create a

'modern' version of feudalism by merging the

'corporate' interests with those of the state. "

 

Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the

three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies,

feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of

American republican democracy, and can be roughly

defined as " rule by the rich. "

 

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and

more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle

class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who

notes in his new book " What's The Matter With Kansas "

that, " You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly

any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of

business' signs side by side with placards supporting

George W. Bush. "

 

The businesses " going out of business " are, in fascist

administrations, usually those of locally owned small

and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in

big business " are willing to jeopardize the structure

of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. "

He added, " 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 [companies]. In

an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival

growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy

itself. "

 

But American fascists who would want former CEOs as

President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and

Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with

corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to

We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it

does to small businesses and working people. Instead,

as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the

Jews, they point to a " them " to pin with blame and

distract people from the harms of their economic

policies.

 

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent

suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because

of gays, Wallace continued:

 

" 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... "

 

 

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists

would have to lie to the people in order to gain

power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's

largest corporations - who could gain control of

newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote

their lies with ease.

 

" The American fascists are most easily recognized by

their deliberate perversion of truth and fact, "

Wallace wrote. " 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. "

 

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the

Vice President of the United States saw rising in

America, he added, " 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. "

 

Finally, Wallace said, " The myth of fascist efficiency

has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush

fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep

people fully employed and at the same time balance the

budget. It must put human beings first and dollars

second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not

to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate

oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the

form of monopolies and cartels. "

 

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which

very large businesses and media monopolies are broken

up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan

stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers &

acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was

the driving vision of the New Deal (and of " Trust

Buster " Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

 

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said

when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in

Philadelphia, " ...out of this modern civilization,

economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It

was natural and perhaps human that the privileged

princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for

power, reached out for control over government itself.

They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the

robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the

average man once more confronts the problem that faced

the Minute Man.... "

 

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would

directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought

the issue to its core: " These economic royalists

complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of

America. What they really complain of is that we seek

to take away their power. "

 

But, he thundered in that speech, " Our allegiance to

American institutions requires the overthrow of this

kind of power! "

 

In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad

Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great

Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising

in America, this time calling itself " compassionate

conservatism. " The RNC's behavior today eerily

parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, " In

vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the

Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the

flag and the Constitution stand for. "

 

It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists

who run the Republican National Committee would have

chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their

campaign commercials, just before they launched a

national campaign against gays and while they continue

to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public

places.

 

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's

warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so

critical that this November we join together at the

ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of

feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our

nation.

 

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project

Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of

a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk radio

show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are

" The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, " " Unequal

Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the

Theft of Human Rights, " and " We The People: A Call To

Take Back America. " His new book, " What Would

Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy, " based on four

years of research in Jefferson's personal letters,

begins shipping this week from Random House/Harmony.