Wendell Willkie

Wendell Lewis Willkie (born Lewis Wendell Willkie; February 18, 1892 – October 8, 1944) was an American lawyer, corporate executive and the 1940 Republican nominee for president of the United States. Willkie appealed to many convention delegates as the Republican field's only interventionist: although the U.S. remained neutral prior to Pearl Harbor, he favored greater U.S. involvement in World War II to support Britain and other Allies. His Democratic opponent, incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had made campaign pledges against U.S. involvement in World War II, won the 1940 election with about 55% of the popular vote and took the electoral college vote by a wide margin.

Willkie was born in Elwood, Indiana, in 1892; both his parents were lawyers, and he also became one. He served in World War I but was not sent to France until the final days of the war, and saw no action. Willkie settled in Akron, Ohio, where he was initially employed by Firestone, but left for a law firm, becoming one of the leaders of the Akron Bar Association. Much of his work was representing electric utilities, and in 1929 Willkie accepted a job in New York City as counsel for Commonwealth & Southern Corporation (C&S), a utility holding company. He was rapidly promoted, and became corporate president in 1933. Roosevelt was sworn in as U.S. president soon after Willkie became head of C&S, and announced plans for a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that would supply power in competition with C&S. Between 1933 and 1939, Willkie fought against the TVA before Congress, in the courts, and before the public. He was ultimately unsuccessful, but sold C&S's property for a good price, and gained public esteem.

A longtime Democratic activist, Willkie changed his party registration to Republican in late 1939. He did not run in the 1940 presidential primaries, but positioned himself as an acceptable choice for a deadlocked convention. He sought backing from uncommitted delegates, while his supporters—many youthful—enthusiastically promoted his candidacy. As German forces advanced through western Europe in 1940, many Republicans did not wish to nominate an isolationist like Robert A. Taft, or a non-interventionist like Thomas E. Dewey, and turned to Willkie, who was nominated on the sixth ballot. Willkie's support for aid to Britain removed it as a major factor in his race against Roosevelt, and Willkie also backed the president on a peacetime draft. Both men took more isolationist positions towards the end of the race. Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term, taking 38 of the 48 states.

After the election, Willkie made two wartime foreign trips as Roosevelt's informal envoy, and as nominal leader of the Republican Party gave the president his full support. This angered many conservatives, especially as Willkie increasingly advocated liberal or internationalist causes. Willkie ran for the Republican nomination in 1944, but bowed out after a disastrous showing in the Wisconsin primary in April. He and Roosevelt discussed the possibility of forming a liberal political party after the war, but Willkie unexpectedly died in October 1944 at the age of 52 before the idea was finalised. Willkie is remembered for giving Roosevelt vital political assistance in 1941, which helped the president to pass Lend-Lease to send supplies to the United Kingdom and other Allied nations.

Youth, education and World War I service

Lewis Wendell Willkie was born in Elwood, Indiana, on February 18, 1892, to Henrietta (Trisch) and Herman Francis Willkie. Both of his parents were lawyers, his mother being one of the first women admitted to the Indiana bar. Willkie was the fourth of six children, all intelligent, and learned skills during the nightly debates around the dinner table that would later serve him well.

Although given the first name Lewis, Willkie was known from childhood by his middle name. Herman Willkie, who had come from Prussia with his parents at age four, was intensely involved in progressive politics, and in 1896 took his sons to a torchlight procession for Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who had come to Elwood during his campaign. The Willkie boys had a sidewalk fight with Republican youths, and though the Willkies won their battle, Bryan lost his to William McKinley. When Bryan ran again in 1900, he stayed overnight at the Willkie home, and the Democratic candidate for president became the first political hero for the boy who would later seek that office.

By the time Willkie reached age 14 and enrolled in Elwood High School, his parents were concerned about a lack of discipline and a slight stoop, and they sent him to Culver Military Academy for a summer in an attempt to correct both. Willkie began to shine as a student in high school, inspired by his English teacher; one classmate said that Philip "Pat" Bing "fixed that boy up. He started preaching to Wendell to get to work and that kid went to town." Faced with a set of athletic brothers—Edward became an Olympic wrestler—Willkie joined the football team but had little success; he enjoyed the debate team more, but was several times disciplined for arguing with teachers. He was class president his final year, and president of the most prominent fraternity, but resigned from the latter when a sorority blackballed his girlfriend, Gwyneth Harry, as the daughter of immigrants.

During Willkie's summer vacations from high school, he worked, often far from home. In 1909, aged 17, his journey took him from Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he rose from dishwasher to co-owner of a flophouse, to Yellowstone National Park, where he was fired after losing control of the horses drawing a tourist stagecoach. Back in Elwood, Herman Willkie was representing striking workers at the local tin plate factory, and in August journeyed with Wendell to Chicago in an attempt to get liberal attorney Clarence Darrow to take over the representation. They found Darrow willing, but at too high a price for the union to meet; Darrow told Wendell Willkie, "there is nothing unethical in being adequately compensated for advocating a cause in which you deeply believe."

After graduation from Elwood High in January 1910, Willkie enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington. There, he became a student rebel, chewing tobacco, reading Marx, and petitioning the faculty to add a course on socialism to the curriculum. He also involved himself in campus politics, successfully managing the campaign of future Indiana governor Paul McNutt for student office, but when Willkie ran himself, he was defeated. He graduated in June 1913, and to earn money for law school, taught high school history in Coffeyville, Kansas, coaching debaters and several sports teams. In November 1914, he left his job there for one as a lab assistant in Puerto Rico arranged by his brother Fred. Wendell Willkie's commitment to social justice was deepened by the sight of workers suffering abuse there.

Willkie enrolled at Indiana School of Law in late 1915. He was a top student, and graduated with high honors in 1916. At the commencement ceremony, with the state supreme court present, he gave a provocative speech criticizing his school. The faculty withheld his degree, but granted it after two days of intense debate. Willkie joined his parents' law firm, but volunteered for the United States Army on April 2, 1917, the day President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. An army clerk transposed his first two names; with Willkie unwilling to invest the time to have the bureaucracy correct it, he kept his name as Wendell Lewis Willkie. Commissioned as a first lieutenant, Willkie was sent for artillery training. He arrived in France as the war was ending and did not see combat. In January 1918 he married Edith Wilk, a librarian from Rushville, Indiana; the couple had one son, Philip. In France, Willkie was assigned to defending soldiers who had slipped away for time in Paris against orders. He was recommended for promotion to captain, but was discharged in early 1919 before the paperwork went through. The Saturday Evening Post dubbed Willkie "the man who talked back". He had voted for Landon in 1936, he said, and he felt that the Democrats no longer represented the values he advocated. As he later characterized it, "I did not leave my party. My party left me."

The start of the war in September 1939 alarmed Americans, but the majority thought the U.S. should not get involved. Willkie spoke often about the threat to America and the need to aid Britain and other Allies. Willkie biographer Steve Neal wrote that the war "transformed Willkie from a big-business critic of the New Deal into a champion of freedom. And it gave his candidacy new purpose." Despite the chatter about Willkie, there were many who were skeptical about his chances should he seek the nomination. Kenneth F. Simpson, Republican National Committeeman from New York, initially thought the idea of a Willkie run to be silly. Indiana Senator James Eli Watson stated that he did not mind if "the town whore" joined the church, but she should not lead the choir the first week. According to Zipp, Willkie's moment revived the earlier "Wilsonian moment," a period marked by European support for President Wilson's idealist foreign policy in the aftermath of WW1, and expanded its terms by emphasizing the vast networks of connectivity between different nations. Zipp argues that this "Willkie moment" was characterized by Willkie's three imagined geographies of the world. The first was "titular universalism," or the idea that the new modes of travel and communication were rapidly shrinking borders and encouraging international collaboration and decolonization. The second geography reframed the true global conflict as not about freedom versus fascism but racism versus empire, thus challenging the morality of both European colonialism and American segregation. Willkie's call to put an end to "our imperialisms at home" in One World was the first time that many Americans had heard such a public figure cast doubt on US domestic policy around race. Despite his optimistic outlook on a future defined by international collaboration and racial equality, Zipp contends that Willkie's third geography was one of "empire obscured."

Civil rights activism

During his 1940 campaign, Willkie had pledged to integrate the civil service and armed forces, and proudly pointed to what he deemed the strongest civil rights plank in history in the Republican platform. He also promised to end racial segregation in Washington, D.C. He gained the endorsements of the two largest African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American. With Willkie running to the left of Roosevelt on civil rights, Roosevelt feared that blacks would return to their traditional home in the Republican Party, and he secured several prominent promotions or hirings of African Americans. Roosevelt was successful in keeping the majority of the black vote. After the election, Willkie promised to keep fighting for civil rights.

Willkie warned Republicans that only a full commitment to equal rights for minorities would woo African Americans back to the party, and he criticized Roosevelt for yielding to Southern racists among the Democrats. Willkie addressed a convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1942, one of the most prominent politicians to do so up to that point. He urged integration of the armed forces, and when a violent race riot broke out in Detroit in June 1943, he went on national radio in order to criticize both parties for ignoring racial issues. When the movie hearings of 1941 ended without further action, Willkie had been made chairman of the board of Twentieth-Century Fox. In 1943, he worked with Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, to try to convince Hollywood to give blacks better treatment in films. Movie moguls promised changes, and some films featured blacks in major roles, but faced with objections from white Southerners, they reverted to giving blacks stereotyped roles after Willkie's death in 1944, such as servants. After his death, the NAACP named its headquarters the Wendell Willkie Memorial Building.

On November 9, 1942, soon after making his reports to Roosevelt and the American people, Willkie argued the case of Schneiderman v. United States before the Supreme Court. William Schneiderman, secretary of the California Communist Party, was a naturalized American until the government revoked his citizenship, stating that he had concealed his membership on his application for naturalization in 1927. Two lower federal courts upheld the denaturalization. Representing a communist, even in wartime, did nothing to shore up Willkie's diminishing support in the Republican Party, but he wrote to a friend saying, "I am sure I am right in representing Schneiderman. Of all the times when civil liberties should be defended, it is now." In his argument Willkie quoted Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson by saying that the people could, if they deemed it necessary, remake the government, and he stated that Marx's view of revolution was mild by comparison. In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled for Schneiderman, 5–3, restoring his citizenship. Although Willkie refrained from criticizing Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans, he stated in a speech that war was no excuse for depriving groups of people of their rights. He spoke out against those who blamed the Jews for the war, warning against "witch-hanging and mob-baiting". For his activities, he received the American Hebrew Medal for 1942.

1944 presidential campaign

Willkie spent much of 1943 preparing for a second presidential run, addressing Republican and nonpartisan groups. He did not meet with Roosevelt; with the presidential election approaching and with both men likely to run in it as candidates, their continued association would have been awkward. Although they differed with him on many issues, Republican leaders recognized Willkie's appeal and they had wanted him to campaign for the party in the 1942 midterm elections, but he went around the world instead. The huge publicity received by the titular head of the Republican Party as an emissary for a Democratic president frustrated leading Republicans. In 1942, the Republicans gained seats in both the House and the Senate. Though they still remained in the minority, they formed a Conservative coalition with Southern Democrats that took control of domestic issues in Congress. Few Republican members of Congress were by then willing to support Willkie, and he dropped to second place behind General Douglas MacArthur in polls of likely voters in the party's 1944 presidential primaries. By 1943, even liberal Democrats did not doubt Willkie's progressive credentials. He spoke of appointing an African American to either the cabinet or the Supreme Court, and he warned California's Republican committee that the New Deal was irreversible and he stated that all they would get by opposing it was oblivion.

Willkie made his candidacy clear in an interview with Look magazine in early October 1943, arguing that a return to isolationism would lead the party to disaster. He decided to enter several presidential primaries in order to demonstrate his public support of the party, and he chose Wisconsin, with a primary on April 4, 1944, as the first major test. Willkie had not taken Wisconsin's electoral votes in 1940, though he had won in all parts of the state except Milwaukee. His advisors feared the large German-American vote in Wisconsin, which had contributed to the state being firmly isolationist until Pearl Harbor. None of the other major candidates—Dewey, Stassen, MacArthur and Ohio Governor John Bricker—spoke in Wisconsin; MacArthur and Stassen were on active duty and could not do so. Willkie stated that if he did badly in Wisconsin, he would end his campaign.

The New Hampshire primary had not taken on the significance it later would, and Willkie won it on March 14, taking six out of eleven delegates. This was deemed a disappointment because he had spoken there many times since 1940, and was expected to do better. In Wisconsin, Willkie ran a slate of delegates led by future governor Vernon W. Thomson, and he devoted two weeks to campaigning there. He was endorsed by most newspapers, but polls showed him well behind Dewey both in the state and nationwide.

On March 16, his first day of campaigning in Wisconsin, Willkie made eight speeches, and the pace took a toll on his voice. The weather did not cooperate, and he travelled through a blizzard to reach a rally in the northern part of the state. Willkie attracted large crowds in most places, and he told them that the Republican party would fail unless it accepted the New Deal and recognized the need for the U.S. to remain active in the world after the war. The Democrats, he alleged, had been in office too long and they did not have the vision that was needed in the postwar world. Willkie's speech in Milwaukee attracted 4,000 people to a hall that could hold 6,000, and he left the state on the 29th for Nebraska, where he had also entered the primary. Once he was gone, Dewey's backers, including most of the Wisconsin Republican leadership, flooded the state with billboard advertisements and radio commercials. On April 4, Dewey gained 17 of Wisconsin's 24 delegates, Stassen 4, and MacArthur 3. Willkie's delegates ran last in every district. The following night, after giving his speech in Omaha, Willkie addressed the crowd:

Final months and death

thumb|right|250px|[[Wendell Lewis Willkie House|Willkie's home in Rushville, Indiana, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1993]]

Defeated in his second bid for the White House, Willkie announced that he was returning to the practice of law, but his friends doubted that he would be content there. Roosevelt was anxious to dump Vice President Wallace from the ticket in his bid for a fourth term, and he had an intermediary sound out Willkie about running in Wallace's place. Willkie was reluctant even to respond, knowing that Roosevelt had made promises to potential running mates which he did not follow through on. There were further discussions between Willkie and the White House, of which third parties were aware though the details are not known; the vice presidential nomination went to Harry S. Truman. Willkie got Roosevelt interested in a new liberal party which would be formed once peace came that would combine the left of the two existing major parties, but Willkie broke off contact with the White House after there were leaks of this to the press, because he felt that Roosevelt had used him for political gain. Roosevelt sent a letter expressing his regret for the leak, but that too was printed in the papers, and Willkie stated, "I've been lied to for the last time."

In spite of their breach, Roosevelt continued to try to conciliate Willkie. Roosevelt's son Elliott later stated that his father hoped to have Willkie be the first Secretary General of the United Nations, and the two men agreed to meet later in the year. Willkie had not been invited to speak at the 1944 Republican National Convention in Chicago that nominated Dewey for president, and he declined a pass as an "honored guest". Dewey hoped to get Willkie's endorsement, and he sent his foreign policy advisor, John Foster Dulles, to see Willkie. The former candidate refused to be drawn, and he made no endorsement before he died. Willkie wrote two articles for Collier's, one urging an internationalist foreign policy, and the other demanding advances in civil rights for African Americans. He also explored becoming a newspaper publisher.

Willkie had long been neglectful of his health and diet, smoking heavily and rarely exercising. His heavy drinking had charmed the reporters in Philadelphia in 1940, but by 1944 it was becoming a problem.

Legacy and remembrance

thumb|Plaque dedicated to Willkie outside the [[New York Public Library Main Branch|main branch of the New York Public Library]]

Soon after the 1940 convention, Roosevelt described Willkie's nomination as a "Godsend to our country", because it ensured that the presidential race would not turn on the issue of aid to Britain. Walter Lippmann believed Willkie's nomination to have been crucial to Britain's survival, "second only to the Battle of Britain, the sudden rise and nomination of Willkie was the decisive event, perhaps providential, which made it possible to rally the free world when [Britain] was almost conquered. Under any other leadership but his the Republican party in 1940 would have turned its back on Great Britain, causing all who resisted Hitler to feel abandoned". Charles Peters wrote that "it is arguable that [Willkie's] impact on [the United States] and the world was greater than that of most men who actually held the office [of president]. At a crucial moment in history, he stood for the right things at the right time." When Georgia Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat, gave the keynote address at the 2004 Republican National Convention, he urged unity instead of partisan strife in the war on terror, and recalled Willkie's actions, "He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time. And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue."

Historian Hugh Ross argued that in gaining the nomination, Willkie "gave exceptional promise of being a winner. There were ample precedents from American political history in which a minority party, queasy over prospects for survival, bypassed professional leadership in order to entrust its political fortunes to a man without political experience. In most of the previous instances, the nomination had gone to a military man. In 1940, it went to a businessman." Richard Moe, in his book on the 1940 election, suggested that the nomination of Willkie left long-lasting scars on the Republican Party, with conservatives angered by the success of its Eastern Establishment wing; "whatever else it did, Philadelphia gave birth to the bitter proprietary division within the Republican Party, one accentuated by ideology and geography, that would define the party for decades to come." Among those converted from isolationism by Willkie's oratory, and who worked intensely on the Willkie campaign in Michigan, was future 38th president Gerald R. Ford, who wrote many years later in his memoirs, "I now realize that my participation did not make much difference at all to the political fate of Wendell Willkie. But it made a lot of difference to me."

Correspondent and author Warren Moscow wrote that, after 1940, Willkie helped Roosevelt, who was always careful not to go too far in front of public opinion, "as a pace-setter with the President's blessing". Willkie's global trip and the publication of One World increased public support for the idea that the United States should remain active internationally once the war was won, and should not withdraw into a new isolationism. Indiana University president Herman B Wells noted that One World "has had such a profound influence on the thinking of Americans". Historian Samuel Zipp noted, "He launched the most successful and unprecedented challenge to conventional nationalism in modern American history ... He urged [Americans] to imagine and feel a new form of reciprocity with the world, one that millions of Americans responded to with unprecedented urgency."

His advocacy came at a cost to his standing in the Republican Party. According to Moscow, "his appeal for the party to be the party of the Loyal Opposition, supporting the President, was treason to the diehards; his trip around the world marked him as a Presidential agent seeking to infiltrate the Republican Party". This decline was accelerated as it became apparent that Willkie was a liberal, standing to the left of Roosevelt and proposing even higher taxes than the president was willing to stomach.

The World War II Liberty Ship was named in his honor.

In 1965, Indiana University completed Willkie Quadrangle, an 11-story undergraduate residence hall, on the Bloomington campus that was named after Willkie.

In 1992, the United States Postal Service marked the centennial of Willkie's birth with a 75-cent stamp in the Great Americans series. Dunn concluded that Willkie "died as he had lived, an idealist, a humanitarian—and a lone wolf". Willkie's biographer, Neal, wrote of him,

Works

One World (1943)
An American Program, Simon and Schuster, 1944 (short essay collection)

Notes

Explanatory notes

References

Bibliography

Madison, James H., ed. Wendell Willkie: Hoosier Internationalist (Indiana University Press, 1992).

External links

Wendell Lewis Willkie presidential campaign papers (MS 556). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. [http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ms.0556]
Biography from the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site
Willkie Farr & Gallagher website
"Wendell Willkie, Presidential Contender" from C-SPAN's The Contenders
An Exhibit: Wendell Lewis Willkie The Lilly Library Bloomington, IN
"Wendell Willkie: The Dark Horse," Indiana Historical Bureau