by Amity Shlaes
Hoover’s facial features were now assembled in a permanent configuration of chagrin, but he had not given up on the game. Lately he’d busied himself collecting statements from Republican delegates who might be friendly toward a Hoover candidacy at the GOP’s convention a few months hence.
Yet, Root discovered, Hoover was saying little that Republicans had not said before. Even worse—for, especially in an election year, presentation mattered a lot—the ex-president would take questions only in writing. After introductory remarks, Root recalled, Hoover “ran through” the questions written on the papers “as one would shuffle a deck of cards.” Eventually Hoover came to a query about the policy of the United States in the event that German arms jeopardized the future of France and Britain. Since Germany had already invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia, and France was still thinking in the context of its Maginot Line, the question seemed reasonable. Hoover dismissed it, Root later recalled, “with the comment that it was too impossible an event to warrant comment.”
The weakness of the performance shocked Root. After all, 1940 was the year when, finally, Republicans had a real chance at the presidency. They’d made those gains in 1938. The concept of a third term for one individual in the presidency seemed improbable, even if the figure was Franklin Roosevelt. To find Hoover once again hogging the Republican stage was unacceptable. Root thought about the other Republican possibilities—Thomas Dewey of his own New York, Robert Taft of Ohio, and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in the Senate. He wondered, he would later write, “whether they offered the answer to our problems.” Dewey was a New York prosecutor—indeed, some of his more publicized cases had involved the same business as the Schechters’, the live poultry market. He was zealous and personally brave: he had faced down mobster Dutch Schultz, who at one point had put out a contract on Dewey’s life. He was a New Yorker, and New York was electoral king. But Dewey was hard to like. There was something simultaneously cold and juvenile about him—later, when he ran for president, Ickes would joke that he “threw his diaper into the ring.” And, like many litigators, he was weak on policy itself. He took too few clear positions.
Root believed several things. The first was that the struggle for Europe was related to the struggle to get beyond the New Deal at home. The second was that though the country was not ready in January or February to talk about war, the presidency might end up going to the man who understood that the United States must involve itself in Europe and that foreign policy had to do with growth at home. Indeed, Root was willing to bet on it. And right now one person on his horizon fit that description: Willkie. Willkie was an old Wilsonian. Willkie understood that democracy was at stake. Root was braver than the leaders of his petrified party. He decided it did not matter that Willkie had become a Republican only the year before. Willkie was, at least, “positive and constructive.” Root decided to float Willkie as a candidate. What did he have to lose?
Several months after the Hoover meeting, Willkie provided Root with a format for doing so. With the aid of Russell Davenport, he published his own political manifesto in Fortune. The title was “We the People.” The manifesto spoke to Roosevelt directly. “In the decade beginning 1930 you have told us that our day is finished, that we can grow no more, and that the future cannot be equal to the past. But we, the people, do not believe this, and we say to you: give up this vested interest that you have in depression, open your eyes to the future and help us to build a New World.” Root, feeling the adrenaline rise, wrote his own pro-Willkie petition, basing it on Fortune language: “Because Wendell Willkie does not believe in this philosophy of defeat we welcome him.”
The petition that Root created said that Willkie would “be the defender of our power”—the power of the country as a whole—“and not of the power of any institution or favored group.” There were fifteen places for signatures, and instructions that completed pages be returned to Root’s residence at 455 East Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. Root mailed off his petitions to two groups in his world—the alumni of Yale’s class of 1925 and Princeton’s class of 1924. The reaction, he later recalled, was “immediate and overwhelming”; those who did not receive copies of the petition printed out more. The phone switchboard at Root’s law office was also “swamped, to the exclusion of the firm’s proper business.” The partners at Root’s firm were not pleased.
Willkie protested showily—he had Thomas Lamont, his friend from the New York Economic Club and a partner at J. P. Morgan, ring up the young Root to scare him off. But when the scare tactic failed to intimidate Root, Willkie went along. Other fans printed up tens of thousands of Willkie buttons. Through the energies of Root and others, Willkie Clubs were starting across the nation. Root even traveled to Oscaloosa, Iowa, on the train to help a Willkie Club get started.
Willkie liked Root’s wager. He made it his own. He launched his campaign from Irita’s West Side apartment—though the papers did not mention the venue. Irita saw what the chance meant for Wendell. Edith also went along, graciously appearing as the spouse in public. The Katharine Hepburn film State of the Union later fictionalized such a threesome.
At the start, there were mainly scoffers. Root and Willkie might have been thinking about Europe, but many Americans still wanted to tell themselves that staying out might keep the European conflict smaller. The American Left was in a state of shock after the Nazi-Soviet pact. Willkie was seen as a setup, a puppet of a party in disarray. Felix Frankfurter called Willkie “Wonder Boy,” the same phrase that Coolidge had contemptuously used for Hoover. The best putdown came from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of TR and an establishment Republican. People said Willkie had come up from the grass roots, but she quipped that those grass roots were “the grass roots of ten thousand country clubs.”
This argument, however, weakened when it became clear that, despite his Wall Street allies, Willkie was garnering at least a following across the nation. Though the economy had at times recovered, it was still, international observers noted, nowhere near as strong relative to other nations as it had been. The United States was not the power it had been. The reputation of the New Deal was continuing to drop.
In part this was because people were taking in the longer-term consequences of all the experiments. At Casa Grande, the settlers were still having trouble putting down roots. They had come to the farm to be homesteaders, and now they were more like tenant labor. That year, 1940, the farm would have a new regional director, Laurence Hewes. From James Waldron, the farm supervisor, Hewes heard what was coming to be a familiar story: “There is a definite split in the membership and very strongly opinionated, in fact almost bitter, groups have developed.” The division: “one group wishes to get everything possible from the government in the way of wages, benefits subsidies, etc, and also to control association on a political basis. The other group, in our opinion, has a more fundamental outlook. They look to the future of the organization.”
Hewes that year decided to find a “high-type educator”—what Hewes thought of as a $6,000-a-year man—to fix the social problems at Casa Grande. But a senator from Arizona who had an interest in the project insisted that the person to fill the job had to reside in Arizona. Hewes gave up the plan, certain he couldn’t find such a person in this state. Morale worsened. Later in the year, Hewes on a visit, would discover the ultimate expression of the settlers’ opinion of Tugwell’s project. They had trashed the community house.
But such domestic minutiae were hard to concentrate on—even for Tugwell. All spring, Hitler seemed on the edge of invading the countries of Western Europe. The New York Times that winter was reporting the possibility of a record famine for the occupied areas. The paper noted that the Belgian Relief Unit foresaw “the worst suffering in the history of the Western World.” Suddenly the war was becoming an issue, just as Root and Willkie had thought it might.
And Root’s campaign had generated 200,000 signatures in advance of the June convention. Willkie’s New York socializing had paid off. Hen
ry Luce put his press empire behind Willkie, and Life magazine fronted him, printing a picture of Willkie’s already large head that was bigger than life. Hubert Kay wrote in the magazine, “In the opinion of most of the nation’s political pundits Wendell Lewis Willkie is by far the ablest man the Republicans could nominate for president at Philadelphia next month.” Even Roosevelt was impressed, understanding that Willkie, unlike Dewey, Landon, and certainly Hoover, matched him when it came to charm. Over and again, people found that meeting with the utilities executive changed the course of their lives. Willkie would make such an impression on the poetess Muriel Rukeyser that she would, decades later, publish a 330-page epic poem about him. Especially inspiring to many Americans was Willkie’s good humor. “With malice toward none”—the theme of a 1939 article—was a great change from the sour rage of the Liberty League. It was also a change from Roosevelt, whose lists of names were hard to forget.
As the Nazis rolled forward in Europe, Willkie gave a speech at home in Indianapolis. He charged that Roosevelt practiced a “technique of defeatism” and was militarily unprepared for war. The country was more sophisticated than it had been in the past—certainly more sophisticated than in the days of World War I, when Germans were still called Huns. Instead of counting against him, Willkie’s German background was actually an advantage. As refugees from Prussian Germany, Willkie’s family knew all too well about European tyranny. Willkie himself had served in World War I. When Willkie argued from Indianapolis that the Europeans’ cause was the American cause, the Germans, the Poles, the Czechs of the Midwest all understood.
Roosevelt shot back in a Fireside Chat in late May. The unpreparedness argument was wrong—the United States had spent a billion on the navy under Roosevelt. The U.S. Navy was “far stronger today than at any peace-time period in the whole long history of the nation.” The United States must pay attention and help “the destitute civilian millions”—if only through the American Red Cross. Europe was not “none of our business.” The United States could not retire “within our continental boundaries”—a defense policy that invited future attack. Still, these revisions did not stop Willkie’s momentum. Dorothy Thompson, the journalist, was in Paris before the Nazis marched in that June. She sent home a dispatch arguing for a joint nomination by Democrats and Republicans of a Roosevelt-Willkie team. (Roosevelt would have none of it, writing to a friend who knew Thompson: “Do try to get that silly business of Wendell Willkie out of her head.”)
Politics is not exclusively about absolute numbers; it is also about relative change. Because Willkie was such a dramatic dark horse, his new popularity raised enormous hopes for him at the Republican convention in Philadelphia. To be sure, Dewey was still a favorite. And Hoover was there, spoiling the party again, railing against U.S. involvement in the war: “Every whale that spouts is not a submarine,” he intoned. “The 3,000 miles of ocean” was “still protection,” a buffer between the United States and contentious Europe. Dewey spoke of the New Deal’s “temperamental inability to follow a straight road toward a national goal.” Robert Taft was a possibility, the name Taft being the one many Republicans believed most likely to beat the name Roosevelt. The delegates split over Dewey and Taft, just as Davenport and Willkie had predicted on Long Island the summer before.
Still, what the delegates talked about was that by now Willkie-for-president clubs across the nation had swelled to almost five hundred in number. The novelty factor that had benefited the Roosevelt team for so long now served the Republicans. In 1940, a year when delegates could still change their allegiance at the convention, they did. Dewey won the first ballot, but only by a plurality. A majority was necessary. He led the second, and the third. Willkie led the fourth, but with insufficient votes. From the galleries and the floor, delegates and guests shouted “We Want Willkie!” The final ballot, and the only one with enough votes for a successful nomination, went to Willkie. The very exhilaration of the Willkie nomination—and the fact that he had beaten such long odds—now made the man seem invincible. From the convention on, every day, it seemed clearer that Willkie would fare better than Landon had.
Other observers at the time and especially later emphasized the differences between Willkie and Landon, or Willkie and other Republicans. Willkie’s candidacy now was about the war; though he, like Roosevelt, shifted position from time to time, Willkie was emphatically not an isolationist. Unlike the Liberty League types, Willkie was able to show that free market ideas were innately American common sense. As a vice presidential candidate he had accepted the nation’s highest-ranking Republican, Senate minority leader Charles McNary.
The Willkie-McNary campaign produced short film clips for movie theaters. One, featuring Willkie and McNary amid the corn in a field, sought to demonstrate his understanding of the farmer (and presumably the farmer subsidy). Another publicized the economic costs of higher taxes and the importance of freedom (this one featured the ringing of the cracked Liberty Bell). The theme in many of his speeches was the protection of freedom and growth in the United States. With more than one in ten Americans still out of work, the argument was compelling.
Besides, Willkie did not merely criticize the New Deal. He tried to show where it served well, and where it diverged from that common sense. In a speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Willkie argued it was important that governments “leave men free.” He also argued that the United States had to think about freedom in Europe, that the United States had “a vital interest in the continuance of the English and French way of life.” At the end of the Republican convention, the situation on the domestic front seemed clear. Willkie was for limiting the New Deal; FDR was for expanding it.
At his own party convention in Chicago, Roosevelt tried to shift the terms of the debate. He said that he stood for the businessman but also stated, via the party platform: “We have attacked and will continue to attack unbridled concentration of economic power and the exploitation of the consumer and the investor.”
It was a difficult moment for him and his old brain trusters. Earlier that year the Town Hall Meeting of the Air—the same in which Willkie appeared—had aired a show about Steinbeck’s theme, the rural migrant. The title was “What Should America Do for the Joads?” Tugwell had been one of the debaters, but when it came to present solutions, he fell silent. The next day the New York Times commented on his vagueness: “Mr. Tugwell was the only one of the speakers who did not have a concrete suggestion for alleviating measures.” Chase for his part was also outside, consulting at the Temporary National Economic Committee, an office created by Roosevelt during the 1938 downturn to study monopolies. (Chase was now advocating the establishment of a permanent PWA.)
But now people knew the president. After reelection, he might turn back to his old planning friends, and he might do something else—the unpredictability was the only thing you could be sure of. Again, Roosevelt had a response to this: to anchor extant constituencies. The president at the last minute traded John Nance Garner, his conservative vice president, for farming’s powerful friend, Henry Wallace of the Agriculture Department. The move showed he understood the threat of Willkie’s wager. In July he told fellow Democratic strategist James Farley, “You know, if the war should be over before the election and I am running against Willkie, he would be elected.” The country seemed wild to know everything about Willkie—right down to the fact that his given name was really Lewis Wendell Willkie, and not Wendell Lewis. On August 3, George Gallup, the pollster, reported that Willkie would have the edge over Roosevelt if the election were held that day. Willkie had already decided to go back home to deliver his acceptance speech in Elwood.
He took his time writing it. It was the most final, and strongest, rebuttal to the progressives that had yet been offered. Before a crowd estimated at 200,000, and with the weather 102 degrees in the shade, Willkie asked the public to think about what it meant to be an American liberal. Was a liberal merely a left progressive? Or was a liberal someone who
believed in liberalism in the classic sense, in the primacy of the individual and his freedom? Willkie railed against Roosevelt’s “philosophy of distributed scarcity.” And he argued, speaking of both the United States and Europe, that it was “from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power…
“American liberalism does not consist merely in reforming things. It consists also in making things. The ability to grow, the ability to make things.” Redistribution was a loser’s game: “I am a liberal because I believe that in our industrial age there is no limit to the productive capacity of any man.” Growth, not government action, would lift the United States out of its troubles: “I say that we must substitute for the philosophy of distributed scarcity the philosophy of unlimited productivity. I stand for the restoration of full production and reemployment by private enterprise in America.”
Listeners yelled their approval. Anne O’Hare McCormick, the columnist who had accompanied the labor delegation on its visit with Stalin in Moscow and had profiled Roosevelt at Hyde Park after his nomination eight years before, now produced a giant feature that the New York Times titled “Man of the Middle West.” A new group, Democrats for Willkie, hailed him as “this leader of true liberalism.” And in a way he was that leader—the liberal of individual freedoms rather than the leader of group rights. From Yale, Irving Fisher, ebullient as ever, now wrote to offer his services. In an essay arguing against a third term for Roosevelt, Fisher recalled that Theodore Roosevelt had promised not to run in 1908, and had kept that promise. When it came to his old friend FDR, Fisher argued that the election of 1940 was dominated by “two sinister facts. One is that he has built up a political machine. The other is that he has put millions of voters under obligation to him.” Fisher had managed to get a meeting with Willkie in July and wrote in his diary, “A red letter day, not because it’s the Fourth, but because I saw Willkie.” Willkie, unlike Roosevelt, was “pressed for time,” Fisher noted—“His desk was a terrible mess.” Still, Fisher felt he had connected with him.
