"There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful"
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Wallace’s line has the clipped chill of a man trying to name a problem without sounding like he’s naming names. “Several hundred thousand” is an audacious figure: big enough to feel systemic, not just a handful of bad apples, yet bounded enough to avoid the paranoid sweep of “millions.” The real rhetorical move is in the qualifier. He doesn’t condemn ambition or wealth outright; he “narrows the definition” to those who pursue them “ruthless and deceitful.” That narrowing is a pressure valve, signaling reasonableness while still putting a target on a recognizable type: the operator who treats democracy as a marketplace to be gamed.
As a vice president speaking from inside the machinery of power, Wallace is doing something riskier than moralizing. He’s warning that the threat isn’t only foreign or overtly violent; it’s domestic, managerial, dressed in respectability. The phrase “search for money and power” implies a permanent class of seekers, people for whom politics is extraction. “Ruthless and deceitful” makes the behavior, not the ideology, the indictment. That’s subtext with consequences: it invites vigilance against methods (manipulation, disinformation, coercion), even when they arrive wrapped in patriotism or business pragmatism.
The likely context is Wallace’s mid-1940s alarm about authoritarian currents and plutocratic influence in American life. Coming from a New Deal progressive who understood both corporate power and wartime propaganda, the sentence reads like a preemptive rebuttal to complacency: you don’t need a coup to lose a republic; you just need enough skilled cynics working the levers for personal gain.
As a vice president speaking from inside the machinery of power, Wallace is doing something riskier than moralizing. He’s warning that the threat isn’t only foreign or overtly violent; it’s domestic, managerial, dressed in respectability. The phrase “search for money and power” implies a permanent class of seekers, people for whom politics is extraction. “Ruthless and deceitful” makes the behavior, not the ideology, the indictment. That’s subtext with consequences: it invites vigilance against methods (manipulation, disinformation, coercion), even when they arrive wrapped in patriotism or business pragmatism.
The likely context is Wallace’s mid-1940s alarm about authoritarian currents and plutocratic influence in American life. Coming from a New Deal progressive who understood both corporate power and wartime propaganda, the sentence reads like a preemptive rebuttal to complacency: you don’t need a coup to lose a republic; you just need enough skilled cynics working the levers for personal gain.
Quote Details
| Topic | Honesty & Integrity |
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