National Affairs: Nobly Save or Meanly Lose

Wendell Willkie rode into St. Louis last week through a blizzard of confetti and congested, noisy streets. It was the best welcome he had had so far. As the Willkie 16-car special rolled across New York and Ohio, reports of an upswing in Willkie sentiment had roused resurgent hopes. To the train had come an announcement that Franklin Roosevelt was about to charge into the Presidential campaign. The news was like a tonic. Willkie had at last smoked out the ghost. The absentee champ was at last coming out of his corner. With a new note of confidence in his voice, Wendell Willkie faced 27,000 people who jammed the St. Louis Arena that night (7,000 more stood outside).

In an extemporaneous opening he paid his respects to Chairman Flynn, “that apostle of purity of The Bronx,” and invited Candidate Roosevelt to answer three questions: 1) What did he think about a fourth term?* 2) Had he entered into any secret pact with a foreign nation? 3) How did he justify running as a liberal and reform candidate with the support of the political machines of Chicago, Jersey City and The Bronx? Reading from his manuscript, Willkie attacked Roosevelt’s foreign policy, the present role of the U. S.

in the war.

To his Midwestern, isolationist audience he said: “We do not want to send our boys over there again, and we do not intend to. If you elect me President, we will not. … I believe if you elect the third-term candidate they will be sent.” He finished. CBS Announcer John Charles Daly drew his fingers across his throat, traditional signal that allotted radio time was up. People began to get up, still applauding. Willkie began to speak again, extemporaneously, lifted his audience as he had not lifted them before.

“We must not fail,” he told them passionately. “We cannot fail. The free way of life is at stake. . . . See people, convert them, take them to the polls. We must win. People ask me, can you take it? I can take it forever. There is no personal sacrifice I would not make to prevail in this struggle. Do not be afraid. Be soldiers unafraid in the fight for justice. America would not be the land of the free if it were not also the home of the brave.”

“Falsifications.” Julia Willkie, who had stepped across the border from Canada to hear her brother speak in Buffalo, had told him: “Wen, keep punching, punching.” Wen needed no encouragement last week. Roosevelt, caparisoned in righteous indignation, warned that he would point out “falsification of fact by the opposition.” Willkie grinned, and kept on punching.

Across Ohio, Indiana and Missouri, he spoke on, hoarsely, doggedly from his book of indictments, spoke on across Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota. He charged the President with dilatory tactics which had retarded the defense program, pointed specifically to the long delayed Excess Profits Tax Bill, the slow, uncoordinated production of airplanes.

He attacked the New Deal for creating a new form of slavery “that does not shut men in; it shuts them out. They stand outside factory gates waiting for a job.

They can hear the machinery turning within. . . . But the gates are shut against them.

“At night in the streets they can look into the lighted windows of our homes, but the doors … are shut against them.

In the morning in our cities they see crowds hurrying expectantly to work.

They must stand aside and let those crowds pass by. They know that if they were to follow . . . somewhere a door, another door, would be shut against them.

That is the new slavery, the slavery of idleness. This is the slavery that our modern society and the New Deal have created.” He accused the New Deal of playing politics with relief, exchanging bread for votes, wasting relief money through “in efficiency, poor planning, improper bidding.” He cried out that Roosevelt had refused to define either his principles or his platform. “The third-term candidate says: ‘Take me, take me, believe me,’ and that is all he says.” He reiterated his charge that the New Deal had helped bring on the war by demoralizing industry, so weakening all the democracies that they were rendered vulnerable to the “insatiate andaggressive dictator.” Again he quoted WTinston Churchill: if the Roosevelt Administration had long ago quit badgering business, had permitted economic recovery in the U. S., Hitler might have been checked in the beginning.

He said that the New Deal failed to understand production, failed to under stand the “real function of America in a war-torn world,” which was — to produce.

“Our agencies of production were abused, attacked, smothered.” As a result, “everything we send to Britain is a sacrifice to our own defense. [Now] we must make the awful choice . . . whether to supply Britain first or ourselves first.” He charged that the New Deal was campaigning on a platform of “no more jobs,” quoted Vice-Presidential Candidate Henry Wallace as saying that, if the Republicans were elected, the U. S. would have a depression. He taunted: “That is like telling a man who is lying flat on his back that if he isn’t careful he will fall down.” If this was a “systematic program of falsification,” let Franklin Roosevelt make the most of it. The first-term candidate was not covering up: he was swinging with both hands.

“Perilous Night.” Fewer missiles than usual were hurled at him: tomatoes, a rock, a pear. One hit him: a tomato, which fell in his lap. He remarked that New Deal sympathizers were declining as baseball players: they had made so few hits. He told a Springfield, Ohio audience that he was reminded of the words of the Master: “Forgive them. Father, for they know not what they do.” The missiles, said he, were “symptomatic of the class divisions and distinctions and bitterness and hatred that have been brought into American life in the last seven and a half years.”

He scarcely passed a crowd, no matter how small, without saying a few words to them. In Missouri a coal miner and a farmer edged into the Willkie train, looked up bashfully to see whether the gesticulating man ready to go out on the rear platform recognized them. Twenty-two years before, they had served in Battery F of the 325th Field Artillery in France under Lieut. Willkie. Willkie spotted them, called their names, grinned and shook hands.

There was no letup in the punishing pace the candidate set for himself—and for the tired newsmen on the train, who groaned over their killing assignment. In 13 speaking days definitely scheduled before Oct. 29 his calendar called for 55 speeches in nine pivotal States. Before he is through he will have made many more than that. Handsome, 38-year-old Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, who prides himself on keeping physically fit, took bear-cage walks on Ohio station platforms, finally caught cold, left the train at Cincinnati to go to a hotel, to rest. Brother Ed Willkie caught the bug, sniffled: “I hope to gosh Wendell doesn’t get it.” Willkie stayed well, to the delight of his chef, ate heartily.

He told listening crowds what “our Administration” would do. He promised to purge the Government of Fifth Columnists, to purge Labor of “racketeers.” He promised continued relief for those who needed it, outlined a plan for overhauling relief (extend public works, using private contractors, place its personnel on a merit system, allocate relief moneys to the States according to their numbers unemployed, treat reliefers as employes, develop a training program, set up machinery to coordinate relief efforts). On the same day that War Secretary Henry Stimson remarked: “Only God and Hitler know what will happen to the U. S.,” Willkie declared: “More than ever before in history it is for [the American people] to mold the shape of things to come.”

This was the message that he carried through the Midwest. He was more poised, surer of himself than he had been in the beginning of his campaign, but sometimes in his eagerness he stumbled, sometimes blundered. In Hannibal, Mo., boyhood home of Mark Twain, he told the crowd how glad he was to be in “Hanover.” In the press lounge of the Willkie special, newsmen groaned. I. N. S. Correspondent Walter Kiernan wailed: “And they say there will be no text on Springfield. Oh, Lord, protect us through this perilous night.”

“Last Best Hope.” Willkie had chosen Springfield, Ill., burial place of Abraham Lincoln, as the setting for the most important speech of the week, which he would make not from a manuscript, but from his heart. Newsmen saw it as his biggest opportunity: in Lincoln’s town, how could Willkie miss? Some of them, so smart they were sure of what he would say, wrote provisional leads around the Lincoln quotation which they considered the best crack at Roosevelt: “You may fool all the people some of the time. . . .”

But Willkie fooled the newsmen. The quotation he had chosen from Lincoln was nobler, if not so smart. With rumpled hair and awkward, wooden gestures, he stood before the 10,000 who had come to hear him, spoke to them in a solemn, earnest voice. “Neither Roosevelt nor myself are great men,” said he. “We are but the results of accidental circumstances that have brought us to the fore, respectively representing certain causes. . . .”

The New Deal, he said, wished to socialize the “economic instrumentalities” of the U. S. His alternative: “A peaceful revolution” and return to free enterprise, an enlightened capitalism freed from the ancient evils of exploitation.

If they were opposed to “state socialism,” he called upon them to “join me.” He said: “Private initiative made America. If you individually will exercise private initiative in this campaign and crusade to save America, private initiative can save America. Lincoln, his brooding figure, had an expression for it and with that I leave you. ‘We will nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope on this earth.’ ”

That was probably Wendell Willkie’s best statement of his philosophy, the belief which had sent him on a crusade.

The newsmen, who learned for the umptieth time that this was the most unconventional of all Presidential candidates, shrugged, tore up their leads. Willkie laid a wreath on the Lincoln tomb and the train rocked on into Minnesota.

There, in Minneapolis, he made one of the dreariest speeches of his campaign. Twelve thousand white-collar workers and farmers heard him recite the woes of agriculture under the New Deal, which they knew as well, if not better, than he. While they waited for his cures, he promised to call an immediate conference of agriculture, labor, industry and consumers, “if I am elected.” He promised to establish a system of continuing research into farm problems. That was all.

Sunniest thought among Republican farmer leaders, after he had gone, was that he had probably not lost any votes. Still ebullient, unaware of the fiasco, back aboard his train, Willkie issued a public challenge to Roosevelt to debate in Baltimore. Still confident, he rode on to Milwaukee.

There he stood on firmer ground. Crying that the New Deal policy was destroying private initiative, discouraging youth who “stare at our generation with disillusioned eyes and sometimes with revolution in their hearts,” he pointed to individual enterprise as their only salvation. Under a friendly government capital would be willing to take risks, develop the vast new opportunities that lie at hand. He saw in an expanding industrial U. S.: “the America of higher wages, of greater consumption, and of opportunity for every individual in the land.”

The Willkie train rocked eastward into the last two weeks before election. Newsmen waited to hear the exchange when the golden Roosevelt voice began to pour across the land.

*For news of a reporter who implied the same question.