Politics & Power Quote by Henry A. Wallace

Wallace’s line lands like a warning shot from inside the house. He isn’t describing jackboots; he’s describing the infrastructure that makes jackboots feel “necessary.” By defining “American fascists” through “deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” he shifts fascism from a foreign costume to a domestic method: not a party label, but a discipline of lying with purpose. The key word is deliberate. This isn’t ordinary spin or partisan exaggeration; it’s an organized sabotage of shared reality.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “Newspapers and propaganda” aren’t merely biased outlets; they’re tools engineered to “cultivate” division the way an industrial farmer cultivates a crop. Wallace’s metaphor matters: disunity is not an accident of democracy but a manufactured product. “Every fissure… every crack” reads like a checklist, suggesting systematic exploitation of race, class, region, religion, labor—any fault line that keeps people from forming the “common front” required to resist authoritarian power.

Context sharpens the intent. Wallace, a New Deal progressive and wartime vice president, was speaking amid World War II anxieties and fierce fights over labor rights, corporate power, and the role of government in safeguarding ordinary Americans. Naming “fascists” at home was politically radioactive; the subtext is that democracy can be hollowed out without a coup if elites can keep the public distrustful, atomized, and permanently at each other’s throats.

The rhetorical move is both moral and tactical: defend truth not as virtue-signaling, but as national security. In Wallace’s framing, the first battlefield is epistemic. If reality is up for grabs, the republic is, too.