 Wallace struggled to carve out authority for the BEW, clashing with both the State Department and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).On May 8, 1942, Wallace delivered what became his best remembered speech, known for containing the phrase "the Century of the Common Man".He cast World War II as a war between a "free world" and a "slave world," and held that "peace must mean a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China, and Latin America–not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan".