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