REPUBLICANS: The Crowd at Elwood

Last week, at Elwood, Ind., Wendell Willkie accepted the Republican nomination for President of the U. S. Bigger than the story of his acceptance was the story of the crowd at Elwood that swarmed in, 200,000 strong, to make the biggest political rally in U. S. history—three times as big as the one that heard Alf Landon’s acceptance, twice as big as the one that heard Franklin Roosevelt accept in 1936 at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field. On the quiet Indiana town that normally holds 10,000 people the crowd moved like some vast, unregimented, good-natured army on the march. It moved faster than any motorized column on record. It traveled in 60,000 automobiles that came from all over the country, in 63 special trains, in 300 Pullmans, in 1,200 busses. It was a U. S. crowd, used to traveling fast, accustomed to finding its way around, impatient with jams and detours, afraid of traffic cops, pleased at an opportunity to pass something, and performing as a matter of course gigantic, coordinated, mechanized, mass movements which, had some dictator ordered them, would be accounted miracles of efficient organization.

Wendell Willkie flew from Colorado Springs, slept at the home of Mary Sleeth, his farm manager, in nearby Rushville. There was no place for the crowd to sleep—the 48 rooms of the only hotel, the Sidwell (Sleep well at the Sidwell), had been taken weeks before. First-comers moved peacefully into the private homes of Elwood, renting the rooms as the homeowners slept on the living-room floor or out on the grass in the backyard. Late arrivals drove straight to Callaway Park, where the speech was to be delivered, to be on hand for good seats in the morning, to sleep safely under blankets, under the maples, the beeches, the oaks, the bright Indiana moon.

Problem. For Wendell Willkie the day began early. The two months that had passed since he won the Republican nomination in Philadelphia had been preparation for his speech. The polls had indicated that he would win the election if it were held now—but the polls had shown Alf Landon leading immediately after his nomination, and after Landon’s weak and unimaginative acceptance speech at Topeka, the polls had shown his steady decline. Wendell Willkie’s ease and self-confidence had made it plain that his campaigning would be colorful, his personal appearances could carry him far.

But these qualities showed best in informal gatherings. Through his pre-Convention campaigning his radio speeches had been formal and stiff; he was at his best when he pushed aside the microphone and talked with an unforced intimacy to the living people he could see before him. Now he was not facing a group of supporters who could be moved merely with the contagion of his visual confidence. The U. S. itself was listening; he was facing the President on the ground Franklin Roosevelt liked best—before the microphone in a time of crisis.

The task of Franklin Roosevelt in accepting the Third Term nomination was colossal—it was to explain why a move that Washington and Jefferson had thought improper was necessary and right for him. The task of Wendell Willkie’s acceptance was almost as great—it was to challenge Franklin Roosevelt without intensifying class and party hostilities, without plunging the U. S. into a desperate political fight over foreign policy, without arousing the bitterness that would weaken U. S. defense. There was a tone to be set for a critical campaign. And there was a huge, hot and widely traveled crowd that would be listening.

Appearance. At 5 a.m. there were 5,000 people in Callaway Park. At 9 a.m. 20,000 of the 30,000 seats were taken. An hour later, when the heat of the day began, the crowd had grown to 60,000, though the speech was still seven hours away. Downtown the special trains were unloading at the Nickel Plate and Pennsylvania stations; the crowd shuffled through sweltering side streets into the river of humanity that filled Elwood’s main Anderson Street from curb to curb—a river that emptied, after a crooked mile, into the surging sea at Callaway Park.

It slowed and stopped the Willkie car the way a flood does in the desert when it washes out the road. Before the car reached his old high school for a brief preliminary ceremony, it was stuck solidly for 15 minutes, in a temperature of 102°; only Wendell Willkie’s 220 lb. kept him from being pulled from the car by handshakers; he shook each hand that was offered and did not lose his smile. But in the school building from which as a boy he had been twice expelled, he seemed to lose his vitality and sat down almost in exhaustion on the stairs. He lit a cigaret and said: “They didn’t use to let me do this in this building.”

The dust on the temporary dirt road to Callaway Park blotted out everything three cars ahead. When the band struck up Back Home in Indiana as he appeared, the crowd made the trees shake with their racket. Away from the speaker’s stand, as far as he could see, stretched the shirt-sleeved crowd, under the maples and oaks whose lower branches were cut away to lengthen the view. Sunlight filtered through the green upper branches and pierced the dust that rose in the grove. The crowd cheered through Representative Charles Halleck’s introduction of Speaker Joe Martin, cheered through Joe Martin’s introduction of Wendell Willkie, cheered Willkie for ten minutes before he could begin. They wanted a hell-fire-and-brimstone speech after their long wait; it would have been easy to win cheers with an unsparing condemnation of Franklin Roosevelt and all his works. And that was not the kind of speech that Candidate Willkie had prepared.

Acceptance. Wendell Willkie was constrained and formal. The crowd could let out a whoop when he began with a reference to the traditions of the acceptance speech: “I take pride in the traditions and not in change for the mere sake of overthrowing precedents.” But how could it do more than dutifully applaud when he heavily promised a campaign on principles—”not on the basis of hate, jealousy, or personalities?” And Wendell Willkie seemed to have lost the buoyance that had marked his whole campaign and that had brought the thousands to Elwood.

The crowd cheered when it could. It cheered his restatement that the U. S. had a stake in the World War. “. . . We know that we are not isolated from those suffering people. . . . Try as we will we cannot brush the pitiless picture of their destruction from our eyes or escape the profound effects of it upon the world in which we live.” It applauded his refusal to guarantee peace in the future—”No man is so wise as to foresee what the future holds … no man can guarantee to maintain peace. Peace is not something that a nation can maintain by itself. It also depends on what some other country does. . . .”

But there were long stretches when the crowd found little to cheer about. It knew the importance of his stand on the draft: “I cannot ask the American people to put their faith in me without recording my conviction that some form of selective service is the only democratic way. …” It recognized the importance of his statement on British-American relations: “We must admit that the loss of the British Fleet would greatly weaken our defense. … If the British Fleet were lost or captured, the Atlantic might be dominated by Germany, a power hostile to our way of life. . . . This would be a calamity for us.” It respected his pledge of support to President Roosevelt’s announced purpose to extend “to the opponents of force the material resources of this continent” and to develop U. S. defenses for any emergency.

What the crowd found easier to applaud was Willkie’s criticism of Presidential actions in foreign affairs in detail—for inflammatory statements, manufactured panics, for “courting a war for which the country is hopelessly unprepared and emphatically does not want,” for meddling in other countries, for “unscrupulously” promising more help than the U. S. could give, for being secretive with the U. S. people.

The speech was half over. It was heavy, it was disappointing, and Wendell Willkie’s awkward, high-school-debater delivery, his slurred syllables, his twangy Indiana accent robbed sensationally forthright statements of their sensational impact. The crowd had waited too long. It was too hot. And Willkie had much to learn as a speaker.

Challenge. But the crowd rose to a challenge to Hitler. “We must face a brutal, but a terrible fact. Our way of life is in competition with Hitler’s way of life. This competition is not one merely of armaments. It is … energy against energy, production against production, salesmanship against salesmanship. … I promise, by returning to those same American principles that overcame German autocracy once before, both in business and in war, to outdistance Hitler in any contest he chooses in 1940 or after. And I promise that when we beat him we shall beat him on our own terms and in the American way.”

The speech began to swell; the crowd began to roar. At each challenge it rose—the challenge to manufactured class hatred, the challenge of poverty, the challenge to increase productivity (“Only the strong can be free and only the productive can be strong”), the challenge of greater hardships (“In these months ahead of us every man who works in this country—whether he works with his hands or with his mind—will have to work a little harder. … You will have to be hard of muscle, clear of head, brave of heart”).

The sun had moved from behind the protective trees; the full light fell on Wendell Willkie’s sweat-shined face and tousled hair as he called out his challenge to Franklin Roosevelt: “I charge that the course this administration is following will lead us, like France, to the end of the road … to economic disintegration and dictatorship. This is a serious charge. It is not lightly made. It cannot be lightly avoided. … I, therefore, have a proposal to make. The President stated in his acceptance speech that he does not have either ‘the time or the inclinations to engage in purely political debate.’ I do not want to engage in purely political debate either. But I believe that the tradition of face-to-face debate is justly honored among our political traditions. I propose that in the next two and a half months the President and I appear on public platforms together in various parts of the country and on those platforms to debate the fundamental issues. . . .”

At last the crowd heard the kind of thing it wanted to hear. The settled dust rose again as the thousands jumped to their feet, drowned out the band, shouted for ten minutes.

In Washington, New Dealers called the acceptance speech the greatest political failure in history, announced that Harold Ickes would answer, began talking up Ambassador Bullitt’s Philadelphia addressbefore Wendell Willkie had finished his talk. Elsewhere the speech was deemed moderately good: to the Louisville Courier-Journal, too general; to Herbert Hoover, a strong speech for a strong people; to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, fine; to the Baltimore Sun, thoughtful; the Chicago Daily News (which last week dropped the name of its owner, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox from its masthead called it a courageous speech and came out for Willkie for President. Columnist Ray Clapper asserted that people were filled with pain and disappointment at the bad delivery, judged Willkie “by the Roosevelt standard of radio crooning,” but changed their minds if they read the speech. “Not many major political utterances in modern times have rung with such courage as this Willkie acceptance speech. . . . [He] has destroyed utterly the fugitive dreams of appeasement. … A smaller man than Willkie . . . would have paralyzed us in the presence of real danger. Willkie has risen above that. He has placed national interests above politics in this crisis.”

But as Elwood went back to normal, it was plain that what politicians and writers thought of the speech meant less than what was thought of it in the homeward-bound cars that were fanning out over the highways. The talk that counted was the talk that went on behind the golden headlights that danced over the white pavements — the talk of the crowd, of people who were a long way from Washington, a long way from editorial offices, the crowd that rose to a challenge, the crowd that had never heard of the decline of western civilization and would not put much stock in it if it did.