REPUBLICANS: While London Burned

Last week Wendell Willkie went forth as an evangelist. For weeks he had smoldered in Rushville, Ind., reading reports that his campaign had stalled. The only answer he got to his daily denunciation of Franklin Roosevelt was an aloof and lofty silence. Mr. Willkie wanted to fight; Mr. Roosevelt made it plain that he was too busy to campaign. Angry, steam up, Mr. Willkie finally climbed aboard his campaign train.

He was grim and unsmiling as the twelve-car train pulled out of Rushville. First scheduled stop was Chicago. First important speech would be three days later at Coffeyville, Kans., where he had taught high school. Willkieites counted on that speech to do what his acceptance speech at Elwood had failed to do: set the Willkie drive on fire. If the Coffeyville speech did not do it, GOPoliticians would have good cause for gloom. Aboard the train were skeptical newspapermen, the candidate’s staff of amateur advisers, Mrs. Willkie in a grey hat and coat, Son Philip, Brother Ed.

Wendell Willkie was in Chicago next day. A cavalcade of 30 autos took him to the Union Stock Yards. In the stockyard stench he talked with fervid earnestness. His audience, some in bloodied aprons, listened with polite interest, few cheers.

He rode through quiet, cynical streets to the Western Electric plant, said to 5,000 workers: “He [Harry Hopkins] said the people were ‘too damn dumb’ to understand the reason why the New Deal can get away with the things it has. . . . You don’t look ‘dumb’ to me.” In a confused moment he made his first blunder, let slip: “To hell with Chicago.” The cavalcade rushed off to the financial district, LaSalle Street. There Chicago’s cool reception turned tumultuous. A ticker-tape blizzard showered down.

He rolled off again to the South Chicago steel mills. He strode into the American Giants Baseball Park before 8,000 Negroes, promised to eliminate discrimination because of race or religion. His voice was getting husky.

His train took him south through Illinois, criss-crossing the meandering route of Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate Henry Wallace. Joliet, Morris, Ottawa, LaSalle, Peoria. Local politicians climbed aboard, appeared beside him on the rear platform. The crowds that gathered to see & hear numbered in thousands. If they did not rock with enthusiasm, they listened carefully to Willkie’s fervent voice. He did not spare himself. His voice began to croak.

He made his second slip. Denouncing Mr. Roosevelt’s capacity for handling foreign problems, he cried: “Was that an extraordinary demonstration of human knowledge . . . when he telephoned Hitler and Mussolini and urged them to sell Czecho-Slovakia down the river?” Aides hastened to explain. Mr. Willkie had “misspoken,” had meant to say that Mr. Roosevelt had urged a settlement at Munich and the Munich pact “agreed to sell Czecho-Slovakia down the river.”

A bigger Willkie blunder became apparent as his train rolled on across Illinois. He had continually disdained the microphone, had not saved his voice. In fact, it was suddenly discovered that he had lost it. To Galesburg, Ill., a doctor was summoned from Chicago. He warned the candidate not to talk any more that day. Willkie stood in silence on the platform, holding out his arms to the crowds with a rueful smile. At Rock Island he croaked: “The spirit is—squawk—but the voice is —squack.” He crossed the Mississippi River to Iowa. His entourage was in despair. A specialist from California flew east, looked down the Willkie throat.

Morning of the day he was due in Coffeyville he was better. Reassured, he made platform speeches again as the train chugged west through Missouri—Pleasant Hill, Butler, Nevada; Pittsburgh, Kans. That afternoon he reached Coffeyville.

It was a hot Kansas evening. A crowd of 15,000 streamed into Coffeyville’s softball park (now “Willkie Park”)—women in summer dresses, men in shirt sleeves. Walter Johnson, “Big Train” of baseball, who once lived in Coffeyville, introduced Wendell L. Willkie.

In a voice that scratched, twice almost cracked, he said:

“I am here to open a campaign. It is a political campaign. It belongs to our American traditions.

“. . . As I speak, a great city on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is in flames … a place named London. But it is much more than that which is burning today. A philosophy is in flames, a way of life is in peril. . . .

“And I wonder what stands between us and that calamity except a smooth radio voice offering us the gold brick of safety without sacrifice. We are all just as much concerned with the Battle of Britain as Mr. Roosevelt. But we must be more concerned right now with the Battle of America. . . .”

He had learned, he said, from the history he had once taught at Coffeyville high school, “that democracy is not what we call the Government. Democracy is the people. . . . Only we, the people, can save this our beloved country. . . .

“Democracy is rooted in the people. The chief executive of a democracy must therefore believe in the people.” But, he charged: “Franklin Roosevelt has lost faith in the American people. . . .” The President is surrounded by “cynics who scoff at our simple virtues. [They] sneak through back doors and pull hidden wires. A few of them form an illegitimate cabinet that gets the President’s ear when few others can. . . . The cynicism of these men has spread through Washington and down, unfortunately down into the very roots of our democracy. Because it does not trust us, our Government no longer feels obliged to tell us the truth. . . .”

He attacked Roosevelt’s preparations for national defense. “He defended his Administration with the deceptive phrase ‘on hand or on order’ . . . most of the equipment he was talking about so confidently was merely ‘on order,’ some of it not to be delivered for two or three years. No doughboy ever made the mistake of firing a rifle that was ‘on order.’

“If the President trusted us, surely he would not have misrepresented the strength of our military establishment when we were so very, very anxious to know the truth. He has also used other subterfuges. I guess we are supposed to believe that he was drafted for a third term by the free votes of the delegates to the Democratic convention.”

He said bitterly, in carefully spaced-out words and avoiding for the most part his Hoosier slur: “He [Roosevelt] now has power, among other things, to close all of our banks whenever he wishes; to change the value of the money you and I carry in our pockets. … If he declared another emergency he could close all the broadcasting stations. And incidentally, he has declared about 40 emergencies in the last seven years.”

He accused Roosevelt of delaying the defense program by refusing to appoint a chairman of his Advisory Defense Commission, because he wished to retain all the power for himself. “… I am frightened to think that our only shelter is—not airplanes and tanks—but a man who in seven years of peace could not get factories producing our peacetime needs.”

He challenged: “. . . Awaken your fellow citizens to those moral and spiritual values, without the exercise of which our democracy must inevitably contract into a dictatorship. . . . And I turn to that vast, mistaken, deluded Government of ours in Washington, and I say to them: Give our country back to us, it belongs to us. We want it. We’re not cynical about it. We love it. We should like to share the burden of it amongst ourselves. We should like if necessary to suffer for it, so that we may pass it on intact to other generations.”‘

Having finished his speech, he stepped into a car and was driven to the Coffeyville high school. He went in. On a classroom door was written: “This Is the Room Where Wendell Willkie Taught.” Said he: “Oh, no; this isn’t it.” He found his old room, scrawled on the blackboard: “No Third Term—Wendell Willkie.”