National Affairs: Willkie’s Case

Last week Wendell Willkie made the tenth major speech of his campaign. Ten more were planned for the next fortnight. Win or lose, his case was becoming clear. With his remarks at dozens of rallies, his rear-platform comments at innumerable stops, his occasional statements to the press, the Willkie case added up to a body of writing that was more than ordinary campaign literature. It was plain that by election eve Willkie partisans would know what body of ideas they were voting for, Willkie opponents would know the arguments they were voting against.

Ten Willkie speeches fitted into a pattern in which specific legislative and economic proposals alternated with general discussions of Wendell Willkie’s basic political views. In Los Angeles he talked of taxation, in San Francisco, of foreign policy, in Portland, of power, in Seattle, labor, in Omaha, the farm problem, in Cleveland, defense, in Pittsburgh, again labor. But between these talks that bore on what he planned to do if elected were reaffirmations of principles—harking back to the pattern of democratic education (Coffeyville), to the position of women in democratic and totalitarian societies (Detroit)—as if he were attempting to link moral, educational and ethical issues with his case for a freely competitive, economic order and the system of government based upon it. Underlying these two themes was another—his denial of the doctrine of class struggle in America, a denial that he preached in terms of his own career, and which he dramatized by talking to stockyard workers who listened silently, Tacoma factory workers who listened thoughtfully, Michigan automobile workers who greeted him with boos.

Concrete proposals in the Willkie case:

Taxation. Willkie opposed the New Deal’s tax structure as unscientific, repressive, loaded with punitive measures, because it “put a premium on the investment of money in all types of Government securities, and drives money out of productive enterprises.” His main points: with normal recovery the U. S. should have had 700,000 new business enterprises in the past seven years; present tax laws place their heaviest burdens on companies newly organized, are more easily borne by larger, well-established firms. His remedy: “The best tax system in the world will not balance the budget for us at the present time. . . . The best we can do is to stimulate production immediately and revise the tax system so that it will not act as a brake upon industry.” He proposed to set up a tax commission immediately upon election, find out the answers to three questions: 1) what the present tax structure will yield “when business really gets going”; 2) the real national income at full employment; 3) the possible tax revenue when the national income reaches full height.

Foreign Policy. Willkie favored aid to Great Britain and China, approved the destroyers deal (but condemned the way the deal was made by President Roosevelt), favored the acquisition of Pacific air bases, condemned reckless and incendiary statements in foreign affairs, executive secrecy in their conduct. He argued that a prosperous U. S. would have strengthened the democratic world, quoted the warning that Winston Churchill made in 1937: “The Washington Administration has waged so ruthless a war on private enterprise that the United States . . is leading the world back into depression. . . . Even the most enthusiastic New Dealer might ask himself whether, with . . . the whole world in its present condition, this is a good time for the United States to indulge in this devastating internecine war.”

Power. He advocated the public development of power, the communities involved to determine whether they wanted public or private distribution.

Labor. “I stand for the National Labor Relations Act and the right of free collective bargaining. I stand for minimum wages and maximum hours, and for legislation to enforce them. I stand for social-security benefits and believe that they should be extended to other groups. . . ” But over & over Wendell Willkie insisted: “That is not enough—that is not enough.” Collective bargaining was meaningless to a man with no job to bargain with; minimum wages meant nothing to the man on relief; social-security benefits were endangered in view of future financial crises; the only real remedy was an administration that would encourage business to launch the enterprises that would make more jobs.

Farms. Wendell Willkie pledged himself to maintain 1) soil conservation; 2) commodity loans (“despite some inherent dangers”); 3) rural electrification; 4) farm credit; 5) crop insurance. Above all he stressed the argument that increased payrolls for industrial workers would mean an increased consumption of the farmer’s produce.

Defense. “For many years the American people have been told that theirs is the greatest and most powerful country on earth. We did everything in a big way. We produced the most steel. We consumed the most rubber. . . . The fact is, that in the eyes of ruthless foreign states we are neither a strong nation nor a great nation. Nothing we have to say is of any consequence to them. Because they see how ineffective we have become. Our vast strength … is still ‘on order.’ ”

Positively, Wendell Willkie favored conscription; coordination of U. S. defense with that of Canada; appointments to defense posts of “capable men” irrespective of political considerations. One capable man he specified: William Knudsen. But, he insisted, such capable men should be given authority to be effective, there should be no withholding of authority, as at present, when the Defense Commission lacks a chairman and President Roosevelt keeps all power in his own hands.

Negatively, Wendell Willkie insisted that the New Deal had not strengthened U. S. defense in the past and was not adequately doing so now.

He said the U. S. could put into the field today only 75,000 completely equipped men. He reviewed official estimates of U. S. defense needs and the time required to fill them:

>3,750 mortars, 120 105-mm. guns, 2,400 tanks—”13 months, if we get going now.”

>1,400 anti-tank guns, 240,000 semiautomatic rifles—”21 months, if we get going now.”

>300 90-mm. anti-aircraft guns with their direction and height-finders—”27 months, if we get going now.” Supply on hand—none.

>In 1929, 21% of Government expenditures was for defense; in 1939, with Hitler in power, 9%; in 1939, at the outbreak of war, 13%.

Political Machines. At a Republican rally in Newark, N. J. this week, Wendell Willkie stated his case against political bosses: “This morning I toured through Hudson County, one of the most populous in the United States. This county has been dominated for more than 20 years by a political boss. . . . And I was shocked to see the vacant buildings, the houses boarded up, the empty lots. They are evidence of what happens when the people lose the power to govern.”

He asked: “Who is this man whose political machine corrupts democracy in Jersey City? Who is this man who says who shall speak and who shall not speak? . . . Who is this man who has said of Jersey City, ‘I am the Law?’ ” “Hague!” thundered the crowd.

Said Wendell Willkie: the Democratic Party has been transformed since 1932, is no longer the party of liberalism or reform; New Dealers and political bosses have made an alliance; the Third Term candidate “cannot represent the democracy that I stand for while he seeks to perpetuate his power through petty Hitlers right here in our own land.” He damned Mayor Hague’s refusal to permit Norman Thomas to speak in Jersey City, damned New Jersey’s stuffed ballot boxes and the burning of poll books: “I will go down the line for the right of every man to cast his vote—for me or against me. . . . We say, come out and vote as free men. Vote against us if you will, but vote the way you want and not the way some boss tells you to vote.”

Voice. Hardheaded, commonsensible, the Willkie speeches had little emotional lift, little oratorical resonance. They had none of the bite and bitterness of Tom Dewey’s pre-Convention attacks on the New Deal, in which the young prosecutor lashed at New Deal scandals, hypocrisy, unsound financing, business baiting, as if he were arraigning some particularly loathsome criminal. Nor were they akin to the measured reproofs in which Senator Taft, with ample statistics and a ruddy-cheeked smile, proved inexorably that the U. S. under the New Deal was headed for disaster. At best Wendell Willkie’s achievement was to present the U. S. in a state of concealed crisis—its finances in disorder, its industry stagnant, its defenses almost nonexistent, its state of mind wavering between grandiose delusions of strength and periodic retreats to defeatism and despair. Without contributing to the defeatism he condemned, Willkie prophesied to Americans their possible future. Cried he at Cleveland: “We can still lead the world out of depression and disaster and despair and war. We can still lead the world toward prosperity and peace and hope.”

Last week it looked as if no candidate on record had presented so many unpalatable arguments to so many possible supporters as had Wendell Willkie. He had spurned isolationist support and the backing of Father Coughlin; he had warned of the need for toil and sweat, sacrifice and hardship; he went up & down the land telling a people accustomed to hearing of its strength, of its present and future weaknesses. Last week’s Gallup poll suggested that this course was not getting him many votes. But it was making him an increasingly able popularizer of one of the world’s thorniest subjects—the relations of economics and government, and their relation to the lives of individual citizens. His strongest statements came in his assertions that the doctrine of the class struggle was retrogressive in terms of U. S. life. He quoted the phrases of Lincoln that many a leftist has popularized: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is therefore the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.” But he also quoted Lincoln’s answer to Karl Marx: “Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. . . . Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own will be safe when built.”

Thus to deny the validity of the class struggle to workmen who listened silently, or who booed his car as it passed, did not look like clever politics. But, given the structure of Willkie’s ideas, his campaign led him inevitably to the factory gates, though it might never lead him to the White House. This hammering at the factory gates was not only a demonstration of personal courage. It was also a campaign for labor votes. But it was above all an integral point in the Willkie argument that he was trying to put across by his actions as well as by his words, an expression of his belief that there was a fundamental relation between the growth of U. S. industry and the historic U. S. denial of the class struggle, between the ancient forms of U. S. free education and a farm and labor program—and that they were all inextricably mingled with the currents of hatred and hope that flow beneath the surface of U. S. life.