FDR - Jean Edward Smith [283]
Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan was a distant second. A Senate fixture since his arrival in 1928, the courteous and fair-minded Vandenberg mistook approval by his colleagues for electoral support. He disdained primaries—“Why should I kill myself to carry Vermont?”—and soon found himself trailing badly.65 Running neck and neck with Vandenberg was freshman Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, son of the former president and chief justice. In the Senate little more than a year, Taft’s sense of entitlement left few doubts that he was ready to take on the presidency. Vandenberg and Taft appealed to the same constituency: the isolationist hard core of the GOP who had never forgiven FDR for defeating Hoover in 1932. Vandenberg’s campaign was low-key and understated; Taft’s strident and self-righteous. “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circles in Washington than there ever will be from activities of the Communists or the Nazis.”66
The convention dark horse was Wendell L. Willkie, the folksy, forty-eight-year-old Hoosier lawyer who had risen to become president and chief executive officer of Commonwealth and Southern, the nation’s largest utility holding company. An outsider to politics, Willkie’s huggy-bear good looks made him what David Halberstam called “the rarest thing in those days, a Republican with sex appeal.” John Gunther called him “one of the most loveable, most gallant, most zealous, and most forward-looking Americans of this—or any—time.”67 The fact is, Willkie was a lifelong Democrat, from a family of lifelong Democrats, who turned Republican in early 1940.68 He had gained prominence as a progressive, independently minded businessman who could hold his own in public forums with the nation’s leading intellectuals. He wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, and The New Republic—where he defended the free speech rights of Nazis and Communists.69 He charmed the nation’s radio audience with an April 1940 guest appearance on the phenomenally popular Information Please program hosted by The New Yorker’s Clifton Fadiman* and routed the New Deal’s Robert H. Jackson in a widely listened to policy debate on Town Meeting of the Air.
Politically, Willkie supported virtually all of the accomplishments of the New Deal except the TVA.70 He had an established record of fighting the Klan in Indiana, and was a firm friend of civil liberties. In foreign policy he supported Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, advocated American membership in the World Court, and backed unlimited aid to the Allies. “England and France constitute our first line of defense against Hitler,” he told the Akron, Ohio, post of the American Legion in May. “If anyone is going to stop Hitler, they are the ones to do it. It must therefore be in our advantage to help them every way we can, short of declaring war.”71
Willkie had become a Republican because he disliked and distrusted FDR. Personal ambition was part of it. He had lost Commonwealth and Southern’s struggle with TVA over electric rates and had failed to prevent passage of the Public Utilities Holding Act, which severely crimped its power. He believed that Roosevelt had steered the Democratic party away from its liberal ideals and converted it into the party of centralized bureaucracy and big government. Still dedicated to the social goals of the New Deal, including national health care, Willkie saw Roosevelt as a threat to individual liberty. The possibility of a third term was a manifestation of that threat.
Willkie was a political outsider in the sense of not being a career politician. But he was very much an establishment insider, a director of the Morgan Bank, and a member of every important