TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/40elect/40elect.07a

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                                                                                October 28, 1940

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 side 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
and aggressive dictator." Again he quoted Winston 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 understand 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
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 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 crows 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 bet 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 certian 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.


Willkie's Issue

     Last week Wendell Willkie named the issue of the 1940
campaign: state socialism.

     Whatever you want to call it, he said, "national socialism,
national capitalism or a complete concentration of power in a
centralized government of the economic forces of the country. . .
That is the issue."

     There was much more in Wendell Willkie's preachments last
week. But that the 1940 campaign, unlike most U.S. political
battles, reached into almost every aspect of U.S. life, became
clearer as election day and the future approached with locomotive
speed. In the long debate over the Third Term before the Chicago
Convention, there had been no discussion of the long-term effects
on the U.S. of a continuation and extension of New Deal policies.
That debate was narrowed to the question: Would Franklin
Roosevelt run again? (Pundit Walter Lippmann pondered some of the
issues last year, came out with a flat prediction that the
President would not run again. Analyzing the Great Third Term
mystery as a detective following the deductive method. Mr.
Lippmann pontificated: "The only man who could conceivably obtain
a third term is one who convinced the country that he did not
want it. . . . The effort to get a third term would convince the
country that the man must not have it, it would be. . . . using
the power of his office to perpetuate himself in office. . . .")
Last week The Christian Century came out for Wendell Willkie on
the ground that a third term for Franklin Roosevelt involved in-
calculable changed in the U.S. two-party system of Government and
the economic order upon which it is based.

     Most vigorously intellectual of U.S. Protestant religious
weeklies, The Christian Century is edited by tall, quiet, Dr.
Charles Clayton Morrison, has been kept rigorously non-denomi-
national, vigorously liberal. To the Christian Century neither
candidate is perfect -- "black and white on one side and white
and black on the other" -- and it does not oppose President
Roosevelt's re-election on the grounds of venerable tradition.

     "We are opposed to a third term for any president, because
the very fact that he covets it, and that he has a fighting
chance to win it, implies the presence of the precise conditions
which make a third term dangerous for the country." Its main
point: the 1940 election is more momentous than any since 1860
and 1864, because voters are called upon to decide questions that
vitally affect the U.S. governmental forms and the U.S. economic
system. At stake is the third term and the economic policies of
the New Deal; to The Christian Century they are inextricably
linked. "The traditional barrier against more than two terms for
any President reflects the instinctive opposition of American
democracy to facism." Though Jefferson did not know the word
"fascism", he knew absolutism; protection against it in U.S.
democracy depended on the patriotic honor of democratic leaders.

     "The essence of fascism is one-party government. Essential
to a democracy is a two-party system. . . . The political
situation in America is now, for the first time in our national
history, favorable to the consolidation of interested groups into
a one-party system. . . ."

     The Christian Century argued that while interested groups,
some predatory, always unite behind a leader, there is no threat
of fascism if after two terms the leader automatically goes. The
Christian Century attached no blame to President Roosevelt for
the events and his leadership that poured enormous political
power into his hands -- the Roosevelt landslides, the relief
measures which willy-nilly became political forces, the social
reforms which were "not only legitimate but necessary" -- but "if
Mr. Roosevelt breaks through the third term barrier, he will
break through the only inhibition which our system of government
recognizes as a check against the one-party system, which spells
fascism and totalitarianism." For the reforms and emergency
measures of the first Roosevelt Administration The Christian
Century gave all praise, but in the second it believed that Mr.
Roosevelt had exhausted his constructive resources for solving
the problem of national prosperity. "His second term has been
economically sterile. He offers no hope and makes no promise of
doing more in a third term than in his second."

     Whether or not Wendell Willkie can end unemployment by
increasing production and multiplying jobs. The Christian Century
was for him because it preferred "as president a man who sees the
realities of our predicament clearly enough to promise that he
will try to save us, rather than one who cavalierly pretends that
we are already saved." And it saw against him such powerful
forces working to establish a one-party system that, if they
succeed, "the possibility of creating a formidable opposition
party will vanish for a long time to come." For the makings of an
American fascism by way of a one-party Government, The Christian
Century listed: 1) the vast political machines; 2) the Solid
South; 3) "the economic blocs grateful for his (the President's)
special legislation"; 4) peacetime conscription; 5) emergency
"partly inevitable, partly shaped to political ends." Add the
doctrine of the indispensable leader, "and you have a road to
fascism paved even more smoothly than the road by which Mussolini
and Hitler came to power."

     The Christian Century appeared before Wendell Willkie named
state socialism as the goal of New Deal economic policies. Said
Wendell Willkie: he opposed state socialism not to defend the
ownership of property, or the right of men to make money, but
because "I know of no way to maintain freedom for the individual
under such a system."

     The means by which the New Deal will socialize U.S.
industry, he said, is the public debt; its momentous increase,
together with the added increase under the possibility of war,
means that "the Federal Government gradually takes over the
economic instrumentalities of this country." His statement of the
importance of the 1940 campaign: the people are called to decide
for or against the socialization of the U.S. "If you are of that
school of thought that thinks that society would be happier and
men would lead more pleasant lives if all of the economic
instrumentalities of the nation were controlled by the State,
then you should . . . follow the banner of the third term
candidate.

     "If, on the other hand . . . you are against that process,
then you should join under the banner of Wendell Willkie."

     He did not speak for the democratic system as a sentimental
issue: "Can we keep alive a government diffused among the people
instead of concentrated in single hands? Can we keep alive a
society that is solvent and does not become socialized and still
make that society effective? . . . I think this democratic way of
life is not alone the most pleasant, but I think it can be made
the most effective. That is my thesis, that is my belief, that is
what I am dedicated to. That is what I would die for. Nothing in
all this world, nothing outside of the affections of my own
family, mean half so much to me as the fight to preserve that for
America. And that aside from the trivialities of the campaign,
that aside from the by-plays of the campaign, that aside from the
smears and things of that kind in the campaign is the basic issue
and on that platform I stand and on that platform I fight."