Darrell Castle talks about what Vice President Henry Wallace described in a 1942 speech as the Century of the Common Man. What is the status of the “common man” today? Transcription / Notes CENTURY OF THE COMMON MAN Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday June 19, 2020 and on this Report I will be talking about what former vice president Henry Wallace described as the century of the common man. What condition is the common man in today since this is supposed to be his century? For the Castle Family week four out of quarantine passed uneventfully although the powers that be tell us we are now part of the masked ones whether we want to be or not. The family daughter remains marooned but safe and unmasked, virus free but in a distant land. On May 8, 1942 in the Grand Ballroom of the Commodore Hotel in New York City Vice President Henry Wallace gave a speech to a packed house. It was packed with a diverse group from 33 different nations including all the nations of Latin America. It was the Vice President after all, and the nation was in the early stages of a World War. Mr. Wallace titled his speech “The Century of the Common Man.” He reviewed the great revolutions that had engulfed the world over the centuries in which he asserted the common man had tried to uplift himself through bloodshed. He emphasized that the next century would be different, since the coming change would be for the benefit of the common man and the government would bring it peacefully. He said that he and President Roosevelt were proposing to make the following 100 years the century of the common man buttressed by the four freedoms emphasized by the President in his recent speech to congress. These four freedoms, President Roosevelt told the world, were the four freedoms that Americans held to be so dear they would be willing to die for them or go abroad and kill to protect them. The four freedoms were freedom of speech, freedom of religion or worship as the President worded it, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. We will address the state of the four in a moment but first, the vice president’s speech became an international sensation. Mr. Wallace was an avowed socialist or communist depending on who you talked to, and that was 78 years before Bernie Sanders made it fashionable to be a socialist. Composer Aaron Copeland who was the son of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants was so taken by the speech that he wrote a composition in honor of it which he called “Fanfare for the Common Man.” The piece became a part of Americana and is still played today. I’m sure you’ve heard it sometime in your lifetime. The vice president was honored by fellow socialists around the world for his idea of bloodless revolution although at the time the world was awash in blood. Mr. Wallace proposed that the government should relive the burden of individual responsibility that the common man had shouldered since the advent of America. The burden would henceforth be socialized across all strata of society. Incidentally, what is a common man. What does it mean to be called common? In the traditional European definition, it meant anyone not a member of an inherited royal status or anyone not deemed royal by a member of the royal family. Here in America where we are supposed to reject such titles, it could mean anyone not of any esteemed social status. Such things in America are usually determined by money instead of birth. At the time Mr. Wallace spoke, common men and women were dying by the millions across the world. Dying in battle, dying as collateral damage, and dying in the German Camps. When the war ended, the 15 years of the post war boom really could truthfully be said to be the golden age of the common man. Except for a few years fighting on the Korean peninsula, the common man’s plight was uplifted by the world war and its aftermath. The industrial machinery of the war was converted quickly to civilian consumer goods and that provided good...
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