REPUBLICANS: Terribly Late

There had never been anything like it. Maybe there never would be again. Only those who were actually on the scene knew what it was like. Wendell Willkie’s tour of the U. S. was not a mere campaign. It was an extraordinary phenomenon almost certain to make a notable exhibit in the museum of political history. Its ups and its downs were not reasonable. They were a fantastic form of political melodrama.

The men who accompanied Willkie on his travels saw the incredible story unfold. Some of them became as hardened to fabulous occurrences as a magician’s assistant. Some, refusing to believe, fixed their eyes only on the polls and political indexes.

According to the polls, Wendell Willkie last week seemed close to defeat. But a fact weightier than polls, sharper than experts, still gave him hope: this was 1940, when nothing was certain but the sunrise.

Betting odds had been 7-5 on Roosevelt, with few takers; they became 12-5 on Roosevelt, with practically no takers, and possible Willkie bettors were being nourished as tenderly as a zoo keeper cherishes the last of a soon-to-be-extinct species.

At Pontiac, Mich., young men in dirty overalls began to show Wendell Willkie the strength of Franklin Roosevelt’s political muscles. They came out of automotive and machine-tool plants to boo and Bronx-cheer. Pontiac—typically Midwest, a small town with a one-street business district—had just gone to work at 9 a.m. when the Willkie motor caravan passed through, with the bareheaded candidate waving from an open car, cameramen standing smoking in a truck, a score of shiny 1941 model cars stuffed with aides, newsmen and political small fry. Near the railroad tracks, a half-dozen blocks from the town centre, Willkie got his first real baptism by booing: a three-story red-brick General Motors assembly plant sprouted workers at every window, and up went the boos, loud, clear, mocking in the fresh Indian summer day.

Broader went Willkie’s forced smile.

Women and overalled children fringed the parade route, skittering along the sidewalks behind the posted American Legionnaires, who wore their monkey-caps and their one hour’s importance solemnly. From the sidewalks came an occasional “hurray!” From the factories, from the men of Pontiac, came boos, hisses.

“Sticks & Stones.” Oakland County’s limestone courthouse is a gingerbready, dishwater-grey building, set at the principal business intersection, Saginaw and Huron streets. Before it local Republicans had nailed together an uncovered yellow pineboard platform. There Willkie talked, his booming baritone sunk by hoarseness to a deep bass: earnest, forthright, without fireworks.

As he neared the speech’s end, from across the street a lean arm stretched above the crowd into pitching position. An egg splashed on one of the platform’s uprights. Willkie didn’t notice. The crowd did. The booing grew.

Willkie told them off, votes or no votes. Said he, catcalling had taken the place of honest thinking in Germany and Italy before democratic government was lost there. Platform politicos, ringsiders clapped politely. The crowd stayed sullen.

The candidate wound up with his usual “God-bless-you-and-keep-you,” headed for the open Buick. Ahead of him, as always, went Mrs. Willkie in her soldier-blue pancake hat. A photographer cursed; an egg had smashed on the side of his camera-suitcase. He scrambled into his car. As the party climbed into the car, from somewhere an egg swished past Mrs. Willkie’s little hat, splashed against the back of the driver’s seat, spattered her dress and stockings. For the first time newsmen saw Wendell Willkie get mad. The muscles of his face tightened; he reddened with rage, turned toward the eggpitcher, then controlled himself.

Mrs. Willkie smiled, began handing roses to the small boys beside the car. The newsmen, who love her without exception, relaxed. One said: “There’s a little champion.”

Leaves eddied behind the hurrying cars. A smell of bonfires hung in the fresh, clear autumnal air. Candidate Willkie, still mad, boarded his train without a “God-bless-you.” On to Flint moved the special.

At Flint, Buick, Chevrolet, Fisher Body workmen took a curious look at the Willkie procession, turned back to work. The few people along the way stood motionless, waiting. Before two public schools stood rows of moppets, listlessly waving U. S. flags.

Past the Buick and Fisher plants to the Flint auditorium rolled the Willkie caravan. There, before 3,000 white-collar workers, Willkie pleaded earnestly, saying please, please listen to what I have to say; you must not close your minds; please listen to me on the radio, listen to the arguments on the other side, then decide how you want to vote. Back on the train, while all hands had a welcome Scotch-and-soda, newsmen looked at each other, said: Never saw anything like it. What the hell next?

East Side, West Side. The welcome in Lansing’s broad, brick-paved streets took the chill off the party. Every green inch of the State Capitol’s great lawn was covered by Republican State Government workers and their friends. In Grand Rapids, city of furniture, even the trainside crowd was heartily friendly. As the motorcade moved into the town’s heart, through laughing, cheering ranks, denser, noisier, more & more excited all the way, there was an explosion of welcoming noise.

In front of a huge horseshoe of American Beauty roses Candidate Willkie spoke, promising “jobs and jobs and jobs.” The speech had neither gaglines, taglines nor headlines in it, but the crowd applauded in the right places, cheered, shouted, laughed, booed Term III. Flushed, happy, Willkie moved on, certain that if Grand Rapids could have its way, he would be elected President.

The train moved out of the yard. A two-inch rock crashed through a double window of the rear diner, showered glass on shrewd Correspondent William C. Murphy Jr., Philadelphia Inquirer political expert. Bill Murphy and his wife laughed.* But the conductor pulled down all the shades. The day ended on the morning’s ugly note.

Next day Willkie had chosen to invade the toughest, most Democratic factory areas of Toledo. The party detrained at Sylvania, drove for 45 minutes into Toledo, through back alleys, industrial areas, poor sections.

The window hecklers were tough and loud. For miles Wendell Willkie, his smile set, drove past surly, scowling, derisive faces. Men in their working clothes leaning out of factory windows booed louder & louder. Snaggle-toothed old women stood with feet planted wide, arms out, thumbs down in the ancient gesture. Viragoes spat and jeered. Men with smut and grease on their dungarees shook their fists, bellowed epithets. On through the dingy streets rolled the shiny, new 1941-model cars, past Toledo Machine & Tool Co., the Willys-Overland plant. Outside the heavy-meshed “strike fences” stood mocking, spindle-legged children, hard-muscled men, mustached old women. “Hello, rats!” they shouted. In front of -Electric Auto-Lite Co., scene of bloody labor battles between strikers and National Guardsmen, greybeards shook fists in the car windows. Men held up crudely-lettered signs: “Roosevelt Forever.” “Win what with Willkie?” they bellowed. “To hell with Willkie!”

When someone yelled a mere “Hello, punks!” newsmen relaxed, lit cigarets. Willkie kept his stiff smile. These were people he believed he could win—if only he could make them listen.

Newshawk Robert C. Albright, Washington Post, remembered that this was the last week of the tomato season. Everyone felt better. And now the familiar scene occurred again: in downtown Toledo, Wendell Willkie was welcomed screamingly, like a combination of Lincoln and Clark Gable, by another ecstatic, confetti-and-hurrah audience.

On he went—Oak Harbor, Sandusky, Elyria, plowing the ground, sometimes stony, sometimes soft. Everywhere he had been phrasemaking, rather than speechmaking: “When you have unemployment you have cut the jugular vein of America. . . . People say we ought not to change horses in the middle of the stream. .

How did we get there? . . .*Don’t be misled by Boss Flynn. . . . If we godown this road, democracy will disappear. . . . Please, please, listen to me. . . . Don’t let them lead you like cattle to the shambles. . . . Boos don’t hurt me. … All I ask is a square shake.”

At Cleveland events followed the now-familiar Willkie pattern: terrific buildup, hysterical ovation, a solid, sound, sensible but not stirring speech. Crowds were huge, friendly, happy, excited. To the Public Auditorium they came, to sit with the stage partitions opened up, so that two enormous audiences faced each other across a great divide.

Willkie’s voice was vigorous but tired. The audience had gone ready to scream, shout, laugh, cry, cheer, boo, wave their little U. S. flags. But the Candidate wouldn’t pull out the stops, hurried on to his next sentence even as applause broke out, slurred his words so that their sense was sometimes lost. Once again the speech, with its simple, strong points read better than it sounded:

“The American people . . . don’t want any more swashbuckling words. Theodore Roosevelt had an expression, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ We don’t want a policy of talking loudly and carrying a swagger stick. . . .

“In the eyes of ruthless foreign states we are neither a strong nation nor a great nation. . . . Our vast strength … is still ‘on order.’

“I propose, therefore, that we stop talking; I propose that we get to work.”

Willkie had flat words to say on national defense (see p. 28):

“The plain fact is that we are late. We are terribly late.”

Next day the train rolled on to Youngstown. In the chill morning, with a light fog rolling down the valley, the caravan was under way at 9 a.m. through quiet crowds that welled into one enormous throng in Public Square, roofed tenuously by vast webs of paper streamers. Willkie spoke simply, clearly, effectively. The crowd loved it.

There was no letdown that day: into Pittsburgh the caravan rolled like a victorious army, through enthusiastic crowds that finally burst into one roaring welter of people and noise in the city’s famed Golden Triangle, where blizzards of torn paper swirled and settled only to swirl up again as new waves of screaming rolled up. Only casualty: a motorcycle policeman hit on the wrist by a telephone book someone had neglected to tear up.

Over the Manchester and Point Bridges —where the Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio Rivers join—the parade whisked on for a 53-mile, 12-stop trek up the Monongahela, on the way to Steel. Past burning blast furnaces, past stacks belching columns of black, profitable smoke, along the river with its flat, grimy coal barges, the railroad tracks with their chuffing, endless trainloads of coal and iron—on up through the tough steel towns went Wendell Willkie. The workers listened. There were boos; but everywhere they listened: at Hays, at Homestead (scene of the 1892 massacre), at Duquesne, Clairton, Wilmerding. Solid walls of factories blossomed with masses of dirty-faced workers, like tenement flowerpots, who cheered and waved, laughing, sometimes jeering. Children, white, black, yellow, many times screamed derision; but Willkie’s evangelical earnestness won their parents’ respectful attention. Even in polyglot Homestead, where the police motorcycles bore “Vote Roosevelt” signs, Willkie was heard fairly & fully. For five hours the candidate crisscrossed the river, returned to Pittsburgh for his set speech at Forbes Field on labor.

Introduced to a crowd of 35,000 by Senator Charles L. McNary, his running mate—who had been drafted by Pittsburgh GOPoliticos for the occasion, in order to keep the honor from little Governor Arthur H. James—Willkie promised to appoint a man as Secretary of Labor (“it’s a man’s job”), to revise NLRB through special legislation, to extend Social Security, to enforce the wage-hour law, to clean out Communists in the Government. He asked labor to clean house of its racketeers. The speech went well with the audience, was said, unofficially, to have pleased C. I. O.’s John L. Lewis, A. F. of L.’s William Green.

On his way to Philadelphia, Willkie addressed 25,000 people before the Capitol at Harrisburg, made back-platform talks at Lancaster and Coatesville—where an egg hit the rear platform, a stick, and occasional boos, were flung at the rear car.

Philadelphia was a downtown triumph again. Fourteen weeks before, Wendell Willkie had arrived in a Pullman seat, with “headquarters under my hat,” had walked the streets unnoticed. Now, the arrival of his 14-car special train was the signal for Philadelphia to blow its top, for thousands to batter at police lines just to get a look at him. At night, before 30,000 people in Shibe Park, he again attacked New Deal management of National Defense, charged bluntly:

“The New Deal has known for many years that . . . America must save itself from foreign attack . . . through adequate defense. It has lacked the ability to get things done.” New Deal incompetence and fumbling, he said, had caused a “drift toward war. We must stop that drift toward war. We must stop that incompetence. Fellow Americans, I want to lead the fight for peace.”

For the weekend Willkie went to New York City to tour Democratic Brooklyn. His voice was tattered to a rasp. Still he refused to make a Fourth-of-July speech, still turned down the pleas of politicians to let loose with a ring-tailed, rabble-rousing rannygazoo.

No campaigner had ever been surer that he was right, that his cause just. Wendell Willkie believed in his crusade with such patent sincerity that even the most partisan hearer took away some belief in him—as a man, if not as a candidate. And those who got the gospel were slightly dippy, like fresh religious converts so full of doctrine that they need not eat, drink or sleep.

Even such professional cynics as newsmen knew that no mere love of office or appetite for acclaim could drive a man to the punishment Willkie was taking daily —not the boos, but the grinding strain of the campaign. “A punch-drunk prophet,” said one newshawk.

He had run the gantlet—not actually running, but striding proudly as an Indian brave who would be dishonored if he once winced or cringed or even hurried: looking his foes in the eyes, leaving them ashamed and respectful.

He had heard more boos, catcalls, razz-berries in more States than any other man since Herbert Hoover; he had argued with more hecklers than anyone but John Barrymore; he had had more assorted sizes and kinds of vegetables thrown at him than anyone since old Mississippi showboat days.

He had fought hard but fairly. He shook off hecklers the way a plow horse, intent on his furrow, swishes off flies. Grimly, ponderously, doggedly he plowed on, anxious only that his furrow be broad and deep and exactly straight; refusing to compromise or deviate or even rest until he had plowed the whole U. S. with the blade of his campaign.

And now, at the week’s end came the loudest boo, the harshest catcall Willkie had heard yet—the Gallup poll. From 78 electoral votes Willkie had dropped to 32. Franklin Roosevelt’s score had risen from 453 to 499.*Willkie was conceded only six States—North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, and the ancient stalwarts, Vermont and Maine. Only encouragement: in the big States, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Candidate Willkie had held his own, or nearly so, and was still within striking distance. But to believers in the summary of polls, the disenchantment was profound.

Not to Wendell Willkie. He grinned at the poll. The hulking crusader refused to be convinced. Little mattered to him except his belief that something dangerous and disastrous will happen to the U. S. if Franklin Roosevelt is reelected. And he knew that at last people were listening to him, that millions of minds had not yet been irrevocably made up. It was still 1940. There was still time for a political miracle. But not much time. The hour, in his own words, was “terribly late.”

*Washington correspondents next day sent Newshawk Murphy a trench helmet, a pair of football shoulder pads. *The “midstream” line, most effective of all Willkie cracks, became so familiar to correspondents that they wrote a song called Down by

the Old Midstream. *Pollster Rogers Dunn privately produced a poll last week giving Willkie 331 electoral votes, Roosevelt 200.