The Fund is inspired by the progressive vision of its initial founder, Henry A. Wallace, who championed what he called the “common man” in the struggle against the moneyed elites for control of government and the planet’s precious resources. This is a phrase that he coined in his most celebrated speech as Vice President of the United States, in 1942, in the middle of World War Two, when he rejected rising rhetoric on the right demanding that America should dominate the postwar world, fueled by “a system of free economic enterprise” for business

To Life Magazine publisher Henry Luce’s famous call for an “American Century” after the war, Wallace urged that “the century on which we are entering can and must be the century of the common man.” He warned against complete free enterprise for “international cartels that serve American greed,” and said they “must be subjected to international control for the common man, as well as being under adequate control by the respective home governments.” To Luce’s notion of American exceptionalism, he declared: “There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis.”