FDR - Jean Edward Smith [296]
Public reaction was overwhelmingly favorable. On Capitol Hill criticism was muted. The transaction was so manifestly to America’s advantage that even the most ardent isolationists found it difficult to find footing. Litigation brought by individual citizens to challenge the constitutionality of FDR’s action was routinely dismissed by federal district courts because the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue.78
The destroyer deal jump-started Roosevelt’s reelection campaign. A Gallup Poll in late August showed FDR and Willkie in a virtual dead heat, the president leading 51 to 49 percent. By mid-September Roosevelt had opened a ten-point gap.79 Willkie had failed to find a winning issue or to breach the New Deal coalition. Despite his endorsement by John L. Lewis, American workers remained staunchly Democratic. Willkie was booed from factory windows in Detroit, he was egged in Pontiac, and a rock was hurled through his train window in Grand Rapids.80 Stories circulated about his German ancestry, about signs in his Indiana hometown reading “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you.”81 Willkie’s unpolished campaign style was both an asset and a liability. Voters responded favorably to his openness and unaffected sincerity, but his inexperience on the stump led to more than the usual number of foot-in-mouth encounters. Speaking to a labor audience in Pittsburgh he announced he would appoint a secretary of labor directly from the ranks of organized labor—a slam at Frances Perkins that drew raucous cheers. Hoping to get another big hand he added gratuitously, “And it will not be a woman either.”
“Why didn’t he have sense enough to leave well enough alone?” FDR asked Frances Perkins. “He was going good. Why did he have to insult every woman in the United States? It will make them mad, it will lose him votes.” Which apparently it did.82
The campaign bristled with the customary ad hominem, but it was directed at the candidates’ stance on public issues. The private lives of public figures were strictly private in 1940. The press respected that, politicians were more tolerant, and neither party sought to exploit personal lapses on the other side. The Democrats had two potential problems: Henry Wallace’s mysticism and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles’s homosexuality. In late August the Republican National Committee obtained a packet of letters Wallace had written in 1933 and 1934 to a White Russian émigré and cult leader, Nicholas Roerich. Wallace had engaged Roerich in 1933 to undertake an analysis of drought-resistant grasses in Mongolia and had evidently fallen under his spell. The letters, addressed “Dear Guru,” resonated with occult speculation sufficient to call into question Wallace’s emotional stability. At Willkie’s specific direction the Republicans did not make use of the material.83 Similarly, Welles’s sexual orientation did not enter the campaign even though senior executives of the Southern Railroad possessed affidavits from Pullman car porters attesting to the undersecretary’s overtures. Returning to Washington from Speaker Bankhead’s Alabama funeral on September 22, 1940,* Welles, who had been drinking heavily, propositioned each of the porters working in his car for oral sex. They refused and afterward reported the incident to their employers. The affair became a matter of Washington gossip but attracted no public notice.84
For the Republicans the problem involved Willkie’s long-standing extramarital relationship with Irita Van Doren, editor of the book review section of the Herald Tribune, the former wife of Columbia’s renowned historian Carl Van Doren, and one of the nation’s most influential literary figures. The granddaughter of a Confederate general and one year older than Willkie, she and the GOP standard-bearer