Illustration: a Second World War naval-intelligence collage of a Pacific theatre map, aerial reconnaissance photographs and radar plots.

Henry A. Wallace

Illustration, not an archive object

Henry A. Wallace, portrait of about 1940
Photo: Unknown (U.S. Department of Agriculture), Public domain (U.S. federal government work)

Vice President of the United States · United States

On the regime page: Roosevelt administration

4 quotes, oldest first. Filter with other speakers.

  1. “Some have spoken of the "American Century." I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come out of this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.”

    May 8, 1942 · Speech · New York City, Hotel Commodore, dinner of the Free World Association

    Broadcast by CBS five months after the United States entered the war. It answered the publisher Henry Luce's 1941 call for an "American Century" and set out a postwar aim of raising living standards worldwide.

    "The Price of Free World Victory" (the "Century of the Common Man" speech), address of 8 May 1942, Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 7, pp. 482-485 Source

  2. “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.”

    April 9, 1944 · Article · New York Times Verified (secondary source)

    Written while he was Vice President, in response to a request from the New York Times for an article on what a fascist is, how many there are in the United States and how dangerous they are. He did not name individuals in this passage.

    Henry A. Wallace, "The Danger of American Fascism," New York Times, 9 April 1944, as reproduced (numbered paragraphs) by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, "Henry A. Wallace on the Danger of American Fascism" Source

  3. “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.”

    April 9, 1944 · Article · New York Times Verified (secondary source)

    From the same article. He wrote that such people, in his view, used control of news and information as their main method rather than violence.

    Henry A. Wallace, "The Danger of American Fascism," New York Times, 9 April 1944, as reproduced by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Source

  4. Content note: Describes forced-labor camp workers as volunteers. The words are shown as they were said or written. Why

    “The Kolyma gold miners are big, husky young men, who came out to the Far East from European Russia. I spoke with some of them. They were keen about winning the war.”

    May 1944 · Book · Kolyma region, Soviet Far East, published in Soviet Asia Mission (1946) Verified (secondary source)

    Wallace's account of his May 1944 visit, as Vice President, to the Soviet Far East. The Kolyma gold fields were worked by the forced labor of prisoners of the NKVD camp system (Dalstroi); the CWIHP dossier by Vadim Birstein argues, from Soviet documents, that Wallace was shown a staged picture of the region.

    Henry A. Wallace with Andrew J. Steiger, Soviet Asia Mission (Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1946), pp. 34-35, as quoted in Vadim J. Birstein, "Three Days in 'Auschwitz without Gas Chambers': Henry A. Wallace's Visit to Magadan in 1944," Cold War International History Project e-Dossier No. 34 (Wilson Center) Source