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to Southern and border states in competition with Commonwealth & Southern. Willkie, himself a former Democrat, became such a prominent and effective critic of Roosevelt’s policies that Time magazine identified him as “the only businessman in the U.S. who is ever mentioned as a presidential possibility in 1940.” A grassroots mobilization by Willkie for President clubs across the country captured the imagination of Republican leaders and secured him the nomination in one of the great political upsets of the 20th century. In the words of biographer Bill Severn, Willkie “openly admitted that the New Deal had accomplished many needed reforms … and approved most of the goals if not the methods of the Roosevelt foreign policy.”

      As a challenger to FDR, Willkie’s appeal was his freshness. Roosevelt, a man aged beyond his years by struggles with polio and other physical maladies, faced enormous demands as he wrestled with an unstable economy and global threats. The president remained personally popular, yet there were doubts about his policies—especially when it came to preparation for a war that a great many Americans hoped to avoid. FDR’s decision to seek an unprecedented third term brought an outcry from critics inside his own Democratic Party and inspired hope among Republicans. The GOP had suffered the worst defeat in the party’s history in 1936, but there was a sense that Roosevelt might be vulnerable to the right challenger in 1940. Ten years younger than the incumbent and possessed of a boyish charm that softened his image as a titan of industry, Willkie projected a combination of youth and competence.

      Roosevelt countered the Willkie challenge with a political masterstroke. He replaced the uninspiring vice president of his first two terms, John Nance Garner, and made the Democratic ticket fresh, and young, by insisting that the party nominate as his running mate a candidate who projected just as much energy and idealism as Willkie—and who, like the Republican nominee, had never before sought elected office. The man FDR chose as his new running mate was Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.

      While Wallace’s addition to the 1940 Democratic ticket frustrated the big-city bosses and segregationists, it electrified the CIO union activists, rural populists, African Americans and young people who had come to see Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture as the keeper of the New Deal flame. The first of FDR’s close associates to publicly champion a third-term candidacy, Wallace had framed the 1940 election campaign even before it began as a struggle for political and economic democracy. And against fascism.

      Roosevelt “wanted a leading outspoken, anti-fascist on the ticket given what he knew we were up against in the 1940s,” explains historian Peter Kuznick. Wallace saw the rise of Hitler and Mussolini as an existential threat, and he warned about it in passionate terms at a time when groups like Friends of New Germany and the German American Bund openly celebrated Hitler and prominent figures like Charles Lindbergh were peddling crude nativism and anti-Semitic tropes at huge “America First” rallies. The Iowan shared the concerns expressed by popular authors like Sinclair Lewis, whose 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here imagined the election of a demagogue to the presidency and an American turn toward fascism.

      Wallace openly scorned the America First rhetoric that was mouthed not just by Republicans but by prominent Democrats. “We must remember that down through the ages one of the most popular political devices has been to blame economic and other troubles on some minority group,” Wallace warned in a 1939 speech in New York. The text of that speech, according to biographer Russell Lord, “aroused fervent interest among important leaders, intellectual and political, of racial minority groups,” and was circulated in the White House by a key adviser to the president, Samuel Rosenman, a New York Supreme Court justice who was a prominent member of the American Jewish Committee.

      “The survival and strength of American democracy are proof that it has succeeded by its deeds thus far,” Wallace continued. “But we all know that it contains the seeds of failure. I for one will not be confident of the continued survival of American democracy if millions of unskilled workers and their families are condemned to be reliefers all their lives, with no place in our industrial system. I will not be confident of the survival of democracy if half our people must be below the line of a decent nutrition, while only one tenth succeed in reaching good nutritional standards. I will not be confident of the survival of democracy if most of our children continue to be reared in surroundings where poverty is highest and education is lowest.”

      After FDR made Wallace his running mate, he focused on the work of the presidency, while Wallace hit the campaign trail with a vigor that led New York Times columnist Arthur Krock to refer to him as “the best of the New Deal type.” The Roosevelt-Wallace ticket swept to victory, defeating Willkie and his running mate by five million votes nationwide. In the Electoral College, the Democrats gave the Republicans a 449–83 thumping.

      Wallace would be the new vice president. But the other new man of 1940, Willkie, would have his own role, as a frequent ally of the New Dealers. Before the war was done, Willkie and Wallace would be appearing together as champions of a strikingly parallel vision for the postwar era. They even joined up to address the topic in a December 1943 national broadcast that was part of the radio series Beyond Victory, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Willkie called for an end to colonialism while Wallace proposed a global New Deal designed to raise the people of the world out of poverty. The former rivals were singing now from the same hymnal about laying the foundation for a postwar era that would not repeat the mistakes of the past. That same year, Wallace and Willkie both contributed to a popular book, Prefaces for Peace, on the need for a new international order dedicated to economic, social and racial justice.

      There could be no greater measure of the extraordinary moment that developed during the course of World War II than the shared efforts of Willkie and Wallace on behalf of the Four Freedoms vision that FDR had outlined. While Wallace entered the 1940s as a progressive of long standing, stretching back to his support of Robert La Follette’s groundbreaking 1924 independent presidential bid, Willkie evolved toward the ardent liberalism that would frequently align him with the administration.

      Barely two months after the 1940 election, Willkie was telling Republican groups to abandon isolationism and embrace the global struggle against fascism. “Whether we like it or not America cannot remove itself from the world,” he warned in a January 1941 speech to New York Republicans. “I take issue with all who say we can survive with freedom in a totalitarian world. I want to say to you even though some of you may disagree with me, and I say it to you with all the emphasis of my being, that if Britain falls before the onslaught of Hitlerism, it will be impossible over a period of time to preserve the free way of life in America.”

      Historian Howard Jones asserts that Willkie “had more influence on causing the American people and government to turn away from isolationism in the years from 1940 to 1944 than anyone other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Roosevelt, impressed by Willkie’s sincerity, made him a roving ambassador to the allied countries that FDR had begun to refer to as “the united nations,” a group that included the Soviet Union. Willkie did much more than merely carry messages to Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek, however. He began to formulate arguments for “winning the peace” that were more radical than those advanced by any other prominent figure, save Wallace.

      Willkie argued that Americans would need “to accept the most challenging opportunity of all history—the chance to create a new society in which men and women the world around can live and grow invigorated by independence and freedom.”

      Willkie made that appeal at the close of One World, the book he wrote after making a seven-week, 31,000-mile journey through war zones and national capitals in the summer and fall of 1942. The trek allowed him, he wrote, “to see and talk to hundreds of people in more than a dozen nations, and to talk intimately with many of the world’s leaders. It was an experience which few private citizens and none of those leaders have had. It gave me some new and urgent convictions and strengthened some of my old ones. These convictions are not mere humanitarian hopes; they are not just idealistic and vague. They are based on things I saw and learned at first hand and upon the views of men and women, important and anonymous, whose heroism and sacrifices give meaning and life to their beliefs.”

      One World, which topped the New York Times best-seller lists for four months in 1943

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