by Amity Shlaes
Another supporter of Willkie’s turned out to be Judge Joseph L. Dailey of New Mexico. Dailey had been the head of the western division of Tugwell’s Rural Rehabilitation Service. Now he was lunching with Willkie. Gallup’s math put Willkie ahead of Landon’s record in Maine, a fact that some observers took to mean that Maine would, through Willkie, win back its old role as a signal state. Willkie’s campaigners were ordering up buttons that read “Learn to Say: President Willkie.”
ELWOOD PROVED TO BE THE HIGH POINT of the Willkie campaign. This was partly because, like most independents, Willkie was less equipped for a general election than a campaign primary. The marriage between him and the Republican Party as it existed in 1940 was an awkward one, and it made Willkie a weaker candidate. Willkie, after all, was a hawk when it came to Europe, and liked free trade; the party platform took the opposite positions. Willkie liked the private sector, and McNary liked it less so. Observers began to underscore Willkie and McNary’s differences: McNary was from Oregon, a big government power state—indeed, a large dam would be named after him only a few years later. McNary had fought against steps to build the arsenal of the Allies. But policy was not the end of it, for there were also differences even in speaking style. Willkie talked everywhere, whereas McNary had a record as the silent senator in his quarter century in the Senate. Though Willkie justified his differences with McNary as part of politics—only a broad coalition could win in the United States—the disparity between them was so great as to make the ticket illogical.
The Republican film clip depicting Willkie and McNary as men of the soil—“Willkie and McNary Know Their Farming”—was a bit ridiculous, when people thought about it. Willkie had his farms in Rushville, Indiana, but he was a self-confessed “conversational” farmer—he managed his properties, mostly, by telephone. As for McNary, he was more a man of the farming business than a farmer; he had, for example, worked on increasing the commercial prospects for the Imperial prune. Two weeks after Willkie’s Elwood speech, Henry Wallace gave his own acceptance speech in Des Moines, Iowa. The new vice presidential candidate was showing the country, in effect, that the Democrats had a real farmer on offer as well.
Willkie compounded his problems by softening his positions in other areas. Suddenly he was talking about supporting organized labor, a position that seemed at odds with his arguments against “vested interests” earlier in the year. Very late in the campaign, in a moment of pure political angling, John L. Lewis endorsed Willkie over the radio, railing against “Caesar”—Roosevelt. Herbert Hoover wired his congratulations to Lewis the same night.
Lewis’s move seemed brilliant tactically but it made no sense when it came to policy, and therefore helped neither Willkie nor Lewis. Nor could the fact that Willkie used the opportunity of a speech before a labor audience in Mellon’s Pittsburgh to strike out at Frances Perkins. Promising to name a labor secretary from among organized labor itself, Willkie added, “And it will not be a woman, either.” Perkins later reported that Roosevelt consoled her, saying: “That was a boner Willkie pulled.” Why, Roosevelt asked, reasonably enough, “did he have to insult every woman in the United States?”
There was a logic to Willkie’s inconsistency that went beyond the blind desire to win. It was the logic of his, and Root’s, 1940 wager. The German liberal or Social Democrat in him—and the American civil rights advocate—continued to watch Europe. That war needed stopping. With the determined ambition of a candidate, Willkie decided that he would subordinate domestic concerns, shift his positions, all in the name of winning control of U.S. foreign policy.
Here Roosevelt still worked from greater advantage. To start with, he had his interest groups lined up. The new Hatch Act notwithstanding, he was still spending on jobs across the country. Forty-two million American workers were now enrolled in Social Security—more than it took to win an election by far—and they looked forward to getting their Social Security payments. Farmers still believed—cheap Willkie McNary advertisements notwithstanding—that Roosevelt would protect them. Roosevelt’s choice of Henry Wallace as running mate was paying off. Nor did many in labor forget that it was Roosevelt whose law had given them the closed shop. “They will vote to continue the New Deal,” said Jacob S. Potofsky of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers at the end of October. “Labor will not scrap its newly won rights because of one man’s personal grudge.” Roosevelt had created the modern farmer-labor coalition, and now it was there for him.
But the real reason Roosevelt started to gain was the coming war. For one thing, it promised yet more spending. The Lend-Lease law would be passed only after the election, but both events and Willkie were already forcing Roosevelt in the campaign period to make clear that he would spend to defend the United States and to help its allies. The downturn was ending. Gross national product was finally approaching the level of 1929, though a comparison was misleading, for now the population was millions greater. The cotton crop for the year looked to be good again. And business activity picked up tremendously in preparation for that spending. Even in World War I, government spending had had a tremendous influence. Business knew that if government was already bigger by so much than it had been in the 1910s, then a coming war would only increase its scale more.
There was another, less discussed factor. Roosevelt truly was doing what Willkie had asked back at the Town Hall Meeting of the Air debate in January 1938. He was toning down his rhetoric against business, again, and asking for a truce. In the war, Roosevelt needed a picture of a self-reliant United States, not a weak one. If that meant changing the New Deal, well, of course he would change it. This switch was already evident within the administration. About a year before, for example, Roy Stryker and his photo office had been visited by a German diplomat who wanted to send photos of America’s weakness home to Hitler. Stryker felt a sudden resolve: “He was a very pleasant little Nazi. I had no intention of allowing the record of America’s internal problems to fall into his hands. I had the file clerks show him a wonderful range of things—mountains and rivers and lush fields.”
Now, in 1940, Stryker sent one photographer out at Halloween with the assignment of documenting the opposite of what the team had portrayed in the preceding decade: “Emphasize the idea of abundance—the ‘horn of plenty’—and pour maple syrup over it you know, mix well with white clouds, and put on a sky-blue platter.” The domestic political goal of highlighting trouble now was subordinate to international politics, and everyone, including Stryker, knew it. In 1942, Stryker would be even more direct in his orders to his photographers. They could still photograph the needy but should also take “pictures of men, women, and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person’s home and that just about everyone is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens.”
The old figures whom businesspeople had feared were now ignoring them, or asking them for help. Ickes was focusing on foreign matters; he would shortly begin to manage energy for the president in the war period, teaming up with oil companies rather than attacking them. Hopkins too was hard at work on foreign policy. Reports came out that Hopkins even lived at the White House—he had been there since the spring. Frankfurter’s stay had been about the courts and legislation; Hopkins’s visit focused on the crisis of defense. Time readers learned that Hopkins had been aboard when the president had sailed down the Potomac with the navy secretary, touring military facilities and talking about conscription.
Roosevelt knew that he needed more than an economy that looked good. He needed an economy that actually was strong. A war on business and a war against Europe could not happen at the same time. In World War II, as in any war, bigger businesses tended to do well, for they were the ones who became government partners. The smaller ones sometimes suffered—and sometimes didn’t. The nimbler among them found a way to survive or even thrive while serving the war cause. Alfred Loomis, for example, was a great an
glophile; he believed that the destruction of Britain was the destruction of civilization. Now he could put to work all the research he had been doing on radar, in the service of beating the Germans. From an antagonist of Roosevelt’s, he turned into a servant.
Another example of this new dynamic in operation—albeit on a very small scale—showed up at Casa Grande. The farmers continued to squabble at the collective farm. It was clear that they might not stay together in the long run. But some of the edge was off. For the fighting was no longer about losses—it was about gains. Nineteen forty was turning out to be a good year. Water flowed from the Coolidge Reservoir, and prices for crops were rising. The management’s hypothesis that livestock was a good idea was proving true. Though the farmers could not know it yet, 1941 would be even better, showing a profit of $15,791, nearly treble the expected rate, for the cattle. There would be profits in cotton and poultry. After their long wait, the settlers would eventually get a raise, to $65 a month. The concept of settlement still felt wrong, but the edge was off.
Washington too was giving up its fantasy. Within a few years, by 1943, lawmakers would make their impatience with Tugwell’s experiment explicit. They would bar the Farm Security Administration from using any appropriated funds for resettlement projects—unless that cash was used to speed liquidation of such farms. Myer Cohen, assistant regional director at the FSA, moved on. He would take up work as administrator of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, helping war casualties in Europe. Though the farm would, in the good harvest year of 1942, offer $4 a day to workers who used to get less than $2, many of those migrants would not take work even at that price; as Time magazine would report, they could get $1.12 an hour building internment camps for Japanese Americans. Casa Grande was becoming history.
Over the fall, the Republicans began to realize their error. Willkie had wagered correctly indeed—it was true that the candidate who seemed to know best about the war would win. But Roosevelt had found the biggest flaw in his wager: it was easy for Roosevelt to supplant Willkie as that candidate. Roosevelt had more credentials. Willkie may have served as an officer, but Roosevelt had personally managed the navy as assistant secretary for seven years. He had led the country through the domestic war of the Depression. What the Depression had been to the Roosevelt candidacy in 1932, the war was to the Roosevelt candidacy of 1940: the single best argument to reelect Roosevelt and give him special powers. Even Time of the Luce empire, the very empire that had advanced Willkie, understood. That year Time’s editors had written, “Whether Mr. Roosevelt is Moses or Lucifer, he is a leader.”
All these facts Roosevelt, a more experienced campaigner than Willkie, understood. But there was one additional, and very powerful, bonus for Roosevelt. Willkie was basing his campaign on the ten million unemployed whom he would cite all year as evidence of Roosevelt’s failures. Though unemployment was heading down now, it was still over one in ten. A war, however, would hand to Roosevelt the thing he had always lacked—a chance, quite literally, to provide jobs to the remaining unemployed. On the junket down the Potomac, for example, he could count 6,000 men at work at Langley Field; 12,000 men at Portsmouth Navy Yard, where there had been 7,600; and new employment in the military or the prospects of it, for Americans elsewhere. Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now he did: he could make them soldiers.
GOP leaders fought back. But as leaders and oppositions since have discovered, war trumps everything—economics as well as politics. The TVA, for example, could not be the target it had found itself in the 1930s, for now it was generating power for the war effort. By July 9, a subcommittee in the House of Representatives had already approved an extra $25 million infusion to the TVA budget so that the TVA might partner with—of all concerns—Mellon’s own old firm, Aluminum Company of America. Past enmities were to be forgotten in the name of the production of aluminum sheeting, vital for such things as airplanes. By the end of the month Roosevelt was signing $68 million in cash for the TVA, “essential to the national defense.” This was well over the original appropriation for the whole TVA project and double the amount in Roosevelt’s original plan for construction of the Norris Dam at Cove Creek. Lilienthal held a cheery press conference in Washington—as it happened, two doors down from the Washington for Willkie headquarters—affirming forcefully that “no TVA director” or employee would participate in the election. But then, none would now need to.
All this made matters harder for the necessarily partisan Willkie. General Hugh Johnson, Roosevelt’s old NRA head, was especially unhappy at the thought of the United States heading to Europe, an event that would certainly lead Congress to giving Roosevelt new powers. Johnson later told a radio audience that Roosevelt would give up the emergency powers “as willingly as a hungry tiger gives up red meat.” As election night drew near, the nation was tenser than it had been in many preceding elections. The New York Times announced plans to flash results from its tower in Times Square—when the beam swept north, it meant Roosevelt was leading. A beam sweeping south would signal that the lead was Willkie’s. A steady beam to the south made Willkie the winner. A steady beam to the north was a Roosevelt victory.
At the end, the beam shone steadily north. The Republicans were bitter, for they concluded, accurately enough, that the outcome would sideline not only their party but their record of accuracy when it came to the economy. They had been right so often in the 1930s and they would not get credit for it. The great error of their isolationism was what stood out. And their bitterness made them look small.
But Wilkie had polled 22 million votes, more than any Republican in history, even more than Hoover in 1928. Even discounting for the population increase, it was an impressive showing. Willkie recognized that the political news was that he had come as far as he had. “I accept the result of the election with complete good will,” he told the press at the Hotel Commodore’s Parlor A. The New Deal had clearly changed the country forever. Now the government would always be there on the national stage. But the election of 1940 showed that the less-governed America of Coolidge and Mellon—or Father Divine, Joseph Schechter, and Bill W.—was still strong.
Back in Elwood, Willkie had reminded the country of the original forgotten man, so obscured in recent years. That forgotten man—Summer’s man, the individual so beloved of the old liberals—was important too, and he had no political party. Then Willkie had posed a rheotrical question. Was the government with its support now the central thing about the country, the thing that “the forgotten man wanted us to remember”? It wasn’t. A government might help, when necessary, but a government was secondary, “not enough.”
“What that man wanted us to remember,” Willkie said, “was his chance—his right—to take part in our great American adventure.” The country now seemed to remember again what it always knew: that the adventurer was the force who pushed the country forward. It was the adventurer’s America too that the soldiers would shortly be defending. And no one wanted to serve more than the Forgotten Man.
Coda
Roger Baldwin, the ACLU cofounder, worked hard for the peace movement in the 1930s. His change of heart at the news of the Soviet-Nazi Pact changed the course of both the ACLU and American history. Baldwin now brought strong anti-Communists onto his board. In 1940 the ACLU expelled a board member, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was a Communist; Baldwin concluded that “an organization devoted to civil liberties should be directed only by consistent supporters of civil liberty.” At the end of 1959, Baldwin told scholar Lewis Feuer, “We went wrong, we were starry-eyed. We didn’t see the potentiality of totalitarianism.” Some have called Baldwin’s anti-Communist shift early McCarthyism, but it gave the ACLU a legitimacy that would enable it to play an important role in civil rights battles after World War II.
Stuart Chase went on to write in a number of other areas. His best-known book was titled The Tyranny of Words, and his work on semantics produced admiration from people of all pol
itical backgrounds. One observer wrote admiringly, “Mr. Chase’s logic wobbles, but his sentences march.” From the 1950s, he served on the planning commission of his town, Redding, Connecticut. In the 1960s he strongly supported President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. In 1961 Chase traveled to the Soviet Union with the singer Marian Anderson, the publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, William Benton, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and other intellectual and cultural figures to meet with Soviet citizens in the hopes of improving understanding between Moscow and Washington. Chase died in 1985, at age ninety-seven.
Despite his age—he was turning nearly fifty—Paul Douglas enlisted in the Marine Corps as a private during World War II. After the war, he was elected U.S. senator and became one of the first on the Hill to insist on racial integration of his staff. Douglas championed civil rights, and led the successful drive to protect the Indiana Dunes for recreation and the environment. He would later write that he had doubts about the U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union:
As one who must bear perhaps an infinitesimal share of responsibility for this decision, I have often wondered whether it was wise. Certainly recognition helped pave the way for Russia’s combining with Great Britain and the United States to defeat monolithic Nazism. But Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 might have brought about the same result without any recognition.
But whether or not this decision was wise, I no longer believe in [Henry] Clay’s doctrine of always recognizing existent government…My disillusioning experience with Russian recognition was one of the factors that led me to oppose the recognition of Communist China and its admission into the United Nations.
