Henry Wallace couldn’t get them all right

American Fascism, in 1944 and Today:

Seventy-three years ago, The New York Times asked the sitting vice president to write an article about whether there are fascists in America, and what they’re up to.

It was an alarming question. And the vice president took it quite seriously. His article, “The Danger of American Fascism,” described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears, but is really interested only in protecting his own wealth and privilege.

That vice president was my grandfather, Henry A. Wallace. And in my view, he predicted President Trump.

If you know American history you know that Wallace was famous for something else besies his anti-Fascism. But all in good time. From the original Wallace piece:

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. 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.

The reality is that the Prussian Junker was no more racist than a British aristocrat or an American Boston Brahmin. I believe in making one’s arguments one should be punctilious in adherence to facts. Wallace was in this piece channeling a particular sort of anti-German inflected “root cause” argument which would be exposited later in the “Authoritarian Personality” arguments, and derive from early 20th century rivalries between the Anglo world and the rising Germany.

Second, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels came from Catholic backgrounds. None of them were obviously practicing Catholics, but their disdain for the religion was a general one derived from their skepticism of Christianity. The reference to anti-Catholic is simply due to the fact that Wallace wants to connect to American readers in the 1940s, where prejudice against ethnic whites, and in particular Roman Catholics, was common.

Later on the piece tips its hand as to why it is so out of place in today’s world:

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

…

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.

Henry Wallace is famous for being totally wrong when it came to the possibility of the threat from Communism. His 1948 campaign for the presidency was dogged by ties to, and influence from, American Communists. Wallace was an anti-anti-Communist.

To be fair to him, Henry Wallace did change his mind on Communism in the 1950s.

But it’s somewhat strange to see him being presented as a prescient thinker when he admits that in 1944 on a visit to the Soviet Union he was duped.