THE CAMPAIGN: The Issue

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Ray Clapper is a middle-sized man with wise eyes, stooped shoulders, and a burning conviction that journalism is the most important profession in the world. In themselves, these attributes would not make him unique. The quality that long ago lifted Scripps-Howard’s Clapper out of the ruck of columnists is his knack of translating some event into sound sense on the very day that people want to hear about it. Somehow he manages to move mentally a half-step faster than the mass mind. Farmers rocking on their porch chairs in the evening, clubmen lounging beside an afternoon cocktail, come to Clapper conclusions almost exactly the day he does. With the same painful care that his daily readers were exercising, he had been trying to spell out very simply just what was the central issue in the 1940 campaign. The war had obscured the issue, Candidate Franklin Roosevelt talked about loftier things, Candidate Wendell Willkie some how couldn’t seem to make it plain.

Last week Mr. Clapper made up his mind what the fight was about, pecked his findings into his dilapidated typewriter: “The sharp difference between Willkie and the New Deal centres on the place of capitalism in our national life. Roughly, Willkie believes private capitalism can carry the ball alone. New Dealers believe private capitalism alone is inadequate and that public spending must supplement it. The more extreme New Dealers go even further and question whether private capitalism is not a waning influence destined not to disappear perhaps but to play a far less controlling part in our national life.”

Wendell Willkie had finally clarified the issue by his speech last week at Providence, R. I. In that speech he took an uncompromising stand, directly opposed to New Deal philosophy, asserted that industry, given its head, could give jobs to everyone.

Not only Ray Clapper but the U. S. had gradually learned what sort of a strange, uncompromising, unpolitical rugged character the G. O. P. had nominated.

The issue was rooted in the man’s own obstinate independence. Independence was basic in the Willkie character—a tough, chip-on-the-shoulder independence that ranged from brute stubbornness to a rooted belief in the individual rights of man. Out of it had come the philosophy of his campaign: that the individual is greater than the State; that the purpose of Government is to make men free, since only free men will be able to build a productive and prosperous society. At Elwood he had said: “Only the strong can be free and only the productive can be strong.”

That independence had gotten him many a black eye and bloody nose in the days when he was one of the four rough Willkie boys at Elwood, Ind., a talent for trouble that rose from pushing over Elwood outhouses (sometimes with outraged citizens in them), on through college, when he was so pugnaciously nonconformist as to organize the “barbs” against the fraternity men. He had always eventually conformed, but always on his own terms. In his last year as a turtleneck-sweatered roughneck at Indiana University he did join a fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, best on the campus, whose requirements were: a slick blond pompadour and more money than brains. Willkie had neither.

Invariably his pugnacity and his conviction led him into trouble, whether it was in trying to paint his class numerals on an Elwood gastank or in delivering a valedictory address on the theme that the faculty was incompetent to teach law. In one case he got a broken arm; in the other his degree was withheld 24 hours.

The Willkie family, under Herman Willkie, lawyer, book lover, Prussian-hater, had grown up in an atmosphere of argument that began when Father Willkie woke the boys with a bellowed quotation (a favorite of Lincoln’s): “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?” and lasted until the evening hour, when he would read to them from one of the 6,700 books that lined the spreading, maple-shaded house.

Willkie took then, as he still does, his thirst for argumentative ideas into his reading. He has always had great difficulty in finishing a book. A footnote in the first chapter sends him to another book, a second reference to a third, until, lounging on a couch, shoes off, he wallows happily in cascades of books. He has never read books in the usual sense—he argues his way through them.

As an Akron lawyer he refused to try to keep-up-with-the-Joneses. As counsel and then president of Commonwealth & Southern Corp. he refused to conform to the established slick norm of utilitycoons. He carried that spirit into his battle with the Government over TVA; his old talent for trouble sought out what he considered the biggest enemy of his business.

Gradually his belief in independence began to take a political turn. For him, the cause of Commonwealth & Southern be came the cause of business against Government, then the cause of the people against the New Deal, and finally, the cause of democracy and freedom against all collectivism and totalitarianism. His progress was simple and definite: at the time of the Philadelphia Convention, Wendell Willkie had more friends for his ideas in the U. S. than Republican wardheelers could conceive. For what has been generally termed the miracle of Philadelphia was a miracle only in this sense: that a widely held U. S. belief had triumphed over entrenched Republican stupidities.

To Wendell Willkie it was no miracle that that belief had triumphed; it was a matter of common sense. Last week he still believed that the campaign was a matter of logic; that the national problem should be debated; that the voters were debate judges; and that he could win the debate.

No one could prove to him that a campaign is something both less and more than a debate, that the 45,000,000 voters, feel, as well as think, and that a crusade is perhaps not compounded of rational ideas. In 1932 Herbert Hoover told a Nevada audience on the night before Election Day: “If the thinking people of the United States go to the polls tomorrow I will be re-elected President of the United States.” Thirty-three million people voted next day, but he was not reelected.

As every newsman on the Willkie train knew, Wendell Willkie would rather be right than be President. To gain 10,000 votes in a crucial area he would not compromise a single belief. Willkie’s conviction of rightness, coupled with his understanding of the seriousness of the times, had led him deliberately to take an attitude of sober seriousness. Day in & day out, he refused to make fireworks speeches. It was not that he couldn’t; he wouldn’t. He clung almost mulishly to his conviction that plain, serious talk will convince the voters, for the voters of 1940 are serious people who want the truth unvarnished.

Deliberately Willkie had divested himself of any possible glamor; distrusting heroics and grandiosity, he had stripped his speeches to bare, plain statements. But the people who had shouted “We Want Willkie!” were not hoping for a simple, humble fellow but for a great, forceful leader, a torchbearer, a prophet, a hero.

Only Willkie himself and his narrowest partisans refused to believe that he had disappointed in some measure most of the audiences he had addressed—hundreds of them now, all over the country. Always the people, unsatisfied, shouted “More!” again & again in the hope that this time, this time, at last, he would sound the call they could march to.

But now the issue had come clear. Partisan Willkiemen saw it as a choice between freedom and collectivism; partisan Rooseveltians saw it as an effort by a Wall Street wolf to don New Deal lamb’s wool. The temperate saw it, as Columnist Clapper had clearly stated it, as a struggle between two basic philosophies.

The candidates themselves showed the gulf between them most clearly one night last week. In what some men thought his greatest speech, Franklin Roosevelt orated mellowly of hemisphere defense and freedom of the seas, while Wendell Willkie bellowed huskily about plant amortization as a bottleneck in the defense program. Not many of the 45,000,000 U. S. voters can define the word amortization, but even in far-off South America listeners could appreciate the President’s vibrant “Viva la Democracia!”

Whether or not Willkie’s listeners, like Clapper, began to see what he was driving at, he kept on driving. For the home stretch he mapped a killing itinerary. Before the campaign’s end he would cross and crisscross the vital regions, smashing more & more boldly into Democratic citadels, ending with a bombardment of New York City.

Over the weekend came the first clear encouragement to those who want him to fight, not chat: Willkie got mad. The smear by the Colored Division of the Democratic National Committee got his dander up. He smashed hard at the “high professions and low performances” of the New Deal. At Schenectady, beside the railroad tracks, he roared to 2,000 people: “The opposition party’s strategy has now become perfectly obvious. It is to have the National Committee deal in the lowest type of politics and smear; to deal with the most corrupt of political machines, while the candidate himself engages in lofty speeches and expression about world leadership and his knowledge of foreign affairs.

“. . . Nobody understands better than I do the necessity of the United States maintaining a certain position in world affairs but I still believe that the primary issues of this campaign are American issues—what is going to happen to America.” It had taken Willkie three days to get angry, but when he got mad he stayed mad: public slurs had been circulated about his wife, his father, his family. He began giving each train-platform audience a history of each of them—his father’s belligerent advocacy of civil liberties, his father’s attempt to enlist in 1917 at the age of 60, his mother’s years of work in the Red Cross, his sister’s wartime Government work as a translator of confidential war documents, his own enlistment, that of his oldest brother Robert, the war work of another brother in airplane manufacture, his youngest brother’s service in the Navy, his younger sister’s Washington work for the Red Cross. It was extremely affecting talk. Even hard-boiled reporters were moved. One old newshawk, tough as a boot, confessed to a throat lump big as a doorknob. Willkie himself had wet eyes. At long last, and perhaps in spite of himself, Wendell Willkie was finding out that a Presidential candidate must do more than grind away at his ax: he must dramatize himself.

Only three weeks were left of the campaign. But at last the voters’ position was clearing. For the first time in U. S. history, U. S. citizens were being asked to judge between the State’s rights and the citizen’s. That such a historic decision was due to be made in 1940, of all furious, distorted years—this imminent fact stretched up as the major news of the day. Voters this year, if never before, could cast their votes and mean it.