Wendell
Willkie was born in Elwood, Indiana, in 1892. After graduating from
Indiana University in 1913 he practised law in Ohio (1914-23) and
New York City (1923-33).
In 1933 Willkie became president of the Commonwealth and Southern
Corporation, a huge utilities holding company. Willkie was originally
a member of the Democratic Party but
was a strong opponent of some aspects of the New
Deal. He was especially hostile to the Tennessee
Valley Authority (TVA), that once established, would be a major
competitor to companies such as Commonwealth and Southern Corporation.
When the TVA scheme went ahead Willkie joined the Republican
Party.
At Philadelphia in 1940 the Republican
Party chose Willkie rather than Thomas
Dewey as their presidential candidate. During the campaign Willkie
attacked the New Deal as being inefficient
and wasteful. Although he did better than expected, Franklin
D. Roosevelt beat Willkie by 27,244,160 votes to 22,305,198.
Willkie
was an idealistic internationalist and was a strong opponent of American
isolationism. Franklin D. Roosevelt
had a great deal of respect for Willkie and in 1941 appointed him
as his special representative. During the Second
World War he visited England and the Far East.
Willkie
played an active role in the American Committee for Russian War Relief.
Along with Fiorello La Guardia, Charlie
Chaplin, Vito Marcantonio, Orson
Welles, Rockwell Kent and Pearl
Buck, Willkie also campaigned during the summer of 1942 for the
opening of a second-front in Europe.
In
1943 Willkie published his book One World
where he called for a post-war world which was a union of free nations.
The book, which was a best seller, laid the groundwork for the United
Nations. He followed this with An American
Program (1944). Wendell Willkie died of a coronary thrombosis,
on 8th October, 1944.
(1)
Wendell
Willkie, speech in Elwood, Indiana
(17th August, 1940)
We must honestly face our relationship with Great Britain. We must
admit that the loss of the British Fleet would greatly weaken our
defense. This is because the British Fleet has for years controlled
the Atlantic, leaving us free to concentrate in the Pacific. If the
British Fleet were lost or captured, the Atlantic might be dominated
by Germany, a power hostile to our way of life, controlling in that
event most of the ships and shipbuilding facilities of Europe.
This would be calamity
for us. We might be exposed to attack on the Atlantic. Our defense
would be weakened until we could build a navy and air force strong
enough to defend both coasts. Also, our foreign trade would be profoundly
affected. That trade is vital to our prosperity. But if we had to
trade with a Europe dominated by the present German trade policies,
we might have to change our methods to some totalitarian form. This
is a prospect that any lover of democracy must view with consternation.
We must face a brutal,
perhaps, a terrible fact. Our way of life is in competition with Hitler's
way of life. This competition is not merely one of armaments. It is
a competition of energy against energy, production against production,
brains against brains, salesmanship against salesmanship. In facing
it we should have no fear. History shows that our way of life is the
stronger way. From it has come more wealth, more industry, more happiness,
more human enlightenment than from any other way. Free men are the
strongest men.
But we cannot just take
this historical fact for granted. We must make it live. If we are
to outdistance the totalitarian powers, we must arise to a new life
of adventure and discovery. We must make a wider horizon for the human
race. It is to that new life that I pledge myself. I promise, by returning
to those same American principles that overcame German autocracy once
before, both in business and in war, to outdistance Hitler in any
contest he chooses in 1940 or after. And I promise that when we beat
him, we shall beat him on our own terms, in our own American way.
(2)
Wendell
Willkie, Saturday
Evening
Post (27th June, 1942)
Today we are living once more in a period that is psychologically
susceptible to witch hanging and mob baiting. And each of us, if not
alert, may find himself the unconscious carrier of the germ that will
destroy our freedom. For each of us has within himself the inheritances
of age-long hatreds, of racial and religious differences, and everyone
has a tendency to find the cause for his own failures in some conspiracy
of evil. It is, therefore, essential that we guard our own thinking
and not be among those who cry out against prejudices applicable to
themselves, while busy spawning intolerances for others.
In addition, as citizens,
we must fight in their incipient stages all movements by government
or party or pressure groups
that seek to limit the legitimate liberties of any of our fellow citizens.
For government, which should be the very guardian
of these liberties, is frequently, through excess zeal or desire for
quick accomplishment of a purpose, the oppressor. And political parties,
overanxious for vote catching, become tolerant to intolerant groups.
I have noticed, with much distress, the excessive wartime activity
of the investigating bureaus of Congress and the administration, with
their impertinent and indecent searching out of the private lives
and the past political beliefs of individuals. Such methods, of course,
are employed with the excuse of protecting the nation from subversive
activities. So are those of the Gestapo. I have been appalled at the
callous indifference of high officers of the navy to the obvious and
undemocratic discrimination against Negroes, and disturbed to find
similar discrimination too often in the ranks of industry and labor.
I have been shocked to read that the Department of Justice seeks to
revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens suspected of foreign
allegiance, rather than forthrightly to prosecute such persons for
whatever crime they may be guilty of. The course it is pursuing casts
doubt on the rights of all naturalized citizens to the same treatment
before the law as is enjoyed by their fellows who were born here.
I have been sickened to see political parties flirting with remnants
of anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klanism and hesitating to denounce the anti-Semitism
of Coughlinites and others.
For now more than ever,
we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever
we take away the liberties of
those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those
we love. Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate
fabric. It is made up of many threads. It has been woven over many
centuries by the patience and sacrifice of countless liberty-loving
men and women. It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and
rich, of black and
white, of Jew and gentile, of foreign - and native-born. For God's
sake, let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed,
where or when man will find its protective warmth again.
(3)
Wendell
Willkie, One World (1943)
A true world outlook is incompatible with a foreign imperialism, no
matter how high-minded the governing country. It is
equally incompatible with the kind of imperialism which can develop
inside any nation. Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy
it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone,
whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not,
no matter what their race or the color of their skin. We cannot, with
good conscience, expect the British to set up an orderly schedule
for the liberation of India before we have decided for ourselves to
make all who live in America free.
It has been a long while
since the United States had any imperialistic designs toward the outside
world. But we have practised within our own boundaries something that
amounts to race imperialism. The attitude of the white citizens of
this country toward the Negroes has undeniably had some of the unlovely
characteristics of an alien imperialism - a smug racial superiority,
a willingness to exploit an unprotected people. We have justified
it by telling ourselves that its end is benevolent. And sometimes
it has been. But so sometimes have been the ends of imperialism. And
the moral atmosphere in which it has existed is identical with that
in which men - well-meaning men - talk of "the white man's burden."
But that atmosphere is
changing. Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful
Americans that we cannot fight the forces and ideas of imperialism
abroad and maintain any form of imperialism at home. The war has done
this to our thinking. Emancipation came to the colored race in America
as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly
it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian
reform and social enlightenment. But it required a disastrous, internecine
war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process
of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single
hour. We are finding under the pressures of this present conflict
that long-standing barriers and prejudices are breaking down. The
defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from
without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly
apparent.
Our very proclamations
of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequities self-evident.
When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking
paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be
ignored. If we want to talk about freedom, we must mean freedom for
others as well as ourselves, and we must mean freedom for everyone
inside our frontiers as well as outside.
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