U.S. At War: Farewell at Rushville

Wendell Willkie had come back to Rushville, Ind. for the last time. Here he had courted Edith Wilk and married her; and when he made his money he bought farms nearby. In the past he had come back to this small town (pop. 5,709) from the great cities which were his arena, like a boxer coming back to his corner between rounds. Last week Rushville was quieter than usual; schools were closed; flags hung at half-mast and big, crepe-bordered photographs of Wendell Willkie hung in store windows. All morning people went into the grey stone Wyatt Memorial Mortuary, housewives pausing to leave their shopping bags at the door.

In the afternoon fifteen hundred gathered for the funeral. There was room for only 250 inside the mortuary. Mrs. Willkie sat beside her son, Philip, a Navy lieutenant rushed back from convoy duty in the Atlantic for his father’s funeral. Loud speakers were set up outside, and people stood on the lawn in the thin autumn sun shine. Three small boys sat on the mortuary steps self-consciously, hats held care fully in their laps; their elders greeted each other with the formality peculiar to small towns on grave occasions.

The simple ceremony began. As the Rev. Dr. George A. Frantz, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, delivered a Midwesterner’s eulogy, scores in the chapel and on the street wept.

“If men ask where is his monument,” said Dr. Frantz, “let them but look around at a world, one in integrity like his own, one in a passionate dedication to freedom like that which consumed him. . . . The uncorrupted instinct for true greatness has given unanimous suffrage that ‘this was a man.’ It is hard to lose him. But it is easier because we lose him to the immortals.”

Eight Rush County farmers, seven of them tenants on Willkie land and one a former tenant, carried Wendell Willkie’s flag-draped coffin to the hearse. As the funeral procession moved over the road to East Hill Cemetery, hundreds stood bareheaded. The hearse rolled through a grey stone arch, up a hill to the grave.

Here, even more than in the town, there was the feel of autumn quiet. People walking up the slope to the grave stirred fallen leaves. Mrs. Willkie stood quietly beside her son, and her husband’s brothers, Fred and big Ed Willkie. When the coffin was lowered she took one quick step toward the grave. Then, slowly, with the family group, she walked away down the knoll. The crowd left. Wendell Willkie, who had discovered that the world was one, was back home in Indiana.