Politics & Power Quote by Henry A. Wallace

“Worldwide disease” is not just vivid phrasing; it’s a strategic reframing. Wallace yanks fascism out of the comfortable WWII script where it’s a foreign ideology with a clear battlefield address, and recasts it as something contagious, adaptive, and capable of surviving “defeat.” Disease implies latency. It can go underground, mutate, and return when vigilance drops. That choice of metaphor also smuggles in a moral warning: treating fascism as merely a military opponent misses its social conditions of spread - fear, hierarchy, grievance, and the hunger for simple solutions.

The most pointed move is the timing: “after the war.” In 1944-45, the American public was primed to see victory as closure. Wallace argues the opposite: victory is when the real test begins, because democracies relax and power brokers reorganize. He’s also pushing against a familiar U.S. habit of externalizing evil. By naming Latin America, he’s nodding to the region’s strongmen, oligarchic alliances, and the ways U.S. business and security priorities could tolerate, even incubate, authoritarian regimes as “stability.” The subtext is uncomfortable: fascism can wear a friendly uniform if it protects investments and fights the “right” enemies.

Then comes the sharper blade: “within the United States itself.” Wallace is warning that fascism doesn’t need an invasion; it can arrive through domestic demagogues, corporate capture, racial terror, and the laundering of authoritarian ideas through patriotism. For a sitting vice president, this isn’t abstract alarmism. It’s a rebuke to complacency - and a forecast of a postwar politics where anti-fascism abroad could coexist with illiberalism at home.