Politics & Power Quote by Henry A. Wallace

Wallace’s line is a warning aimed less at goose-stepping caricatures than at the homegrown manager of authoritarianism: the respectable operator who insists tyranny can be made palatable with local branding. The phrase “dangerous American fascist” doesn’t point to a foreign import; it points to a native ambition that understands the U.S. doesn’t need a swastika to slide toward coercion. It needs paperwork, slogans, and a flag-draped rationale.

The brilliance is in the contrast: “in an American way” versus “in a Prussian way.” Wallace treats fascism as a transferable technology, not a uniquely German madness. “Prussian” functions as shorthand for militarized discipline and old-world hierarchy, the kind of aesthetic Americans could dismiss as alien. By relocating the threat into an “American way,” he strips readers of that comforting distance. The subtext is that American authoritarianism would arrive wearing the costume of American virtues: efficiency, patriotism, law-and-order, free enterprise, even “common sense.” It would sell itself as modernization, not conquest.

Context matters. Wallace, a New Deal progressive and Roosevelt’s vice president before being pushed aside in 1944, was speaking in an era when the U.S. was fighting fascism abroad while flirting with illiberal temptations at home: corporate influence over politics, anti-labor crackdowns, nativism, and the easy moral panic of wartime. His intent is prophylactic: to make “it can’t happen here” sound naive. The line works because it anticipates the most effective authoritarian move in American life: denying you’re doing it, while doing it.