Leadership Quote by Henry A. Wallace

Tyranny doesn’t arrive with a drumroll; it arrives with permission slips. Wallace’s line is engineered to strip “modern tyrants” of their favorite alibi: that they’re freak accidents of history, charismatic glitches in otherwise stable systems. “It is no coincidence” is a prosecutor’s phrase, not a philosopher’s. He’s arguing causality, not correlation, and the target is as much the audience as the despot. Prejudice isn’t treated as a regrettable side effect of authoritarianism; it’s the early-warning system, the social infrastructure that makes repression feel like common sense.

The subtext is ruthlessly political. Prejudice narrows the circle of who counts as fully human, which makes extraordinary measures seem ordinary: surveillance becomes “security,” exclusion becomes “tradition,” violence becomes “restoring order.” Wallace also implies a strategic timeline: by the time a tyrant is “grown,” the ground has already been softened by jokes, slurs, scapegoats, and “reasonable” exceptions to rights. The real action happens before the tanks.

Context matters. Wallace spoke and wrote during an era shaped by fascism abroad and nativism and segregation at home, when the U.S. was deciding whether democracy was a set of principles or a brand name. As vice president (and later a more outspoken critic of reactionary politics), he understood that authoritarian temptations don’t just live in dictators; they live in coalitions. The line reads like a warning to liberals and moderates: if you treat prejudice as a cultural nuisance instead of a political weapon, you will end up negotiating with it at gunpoint.