Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie
Neal, Steve
ment's proper response to homicide. As a champion of tolerance and limited government, van den Haag may be understandably reluctant to take on such a daunting intellectual and political agenda....
...Under the circumstances, both parties took the high road...
...But "the technology of the clock was the technology of astrological indicators...
...He also made a respectable sum in real estate...
...he became president in 1933, at age 41...
...In Europe clocks were from the beginning genuinely public, and soon private and unofficial people began to possess their own...
...Under the T'ang dynasty, in the seventh century, "A History O f f i c e was establ i s h e d . . , and thereafter controlled all the accessible past...
...which he attended as a delegate from Ohio, fought a memorable donnybrook over the renascent Ku Klux Klan, Willkie firmly took the anti-Klan side...
...the annual toll from executions is likely to remain a mere handful...
...But there would have been more than one in a postwar world subject to Nazism's magnetic field...
...the letter was signed by Helen Reid's brother...
...For in the thirteenth century Marco Polo had found China, in almost every direction, technically more advanced than his native Venice...
...One would have been too many...
...But the New Deal sucked him into industrial politics...
...After the Court-packing scheme and the 1938 off-year elections, however, the GOP's fortunes perked up considerably, and the nomination looked like something worth having again...
...Dismissal ends all...
...Does the occasion, or the movement, always find or produce the leaders who are needed...
...Hitler was the girl history had fun with, Stalin the one it married...
...Herbert Hoover in 1932 had taken the worst pasting received by a major party candidate in a two-man race since Winfield Scott--until 1936, when Alf Landon set the all-time record, which still stands...
...Henrietta was the first woman admitted to the Indiana bar, and the first woman in the town of Elwood to smoke cigarettes...
...To hell with the judges," Willkie agreed...
...One of the first, most remarkable o f Chinese achievements," however, "was a wellorganized, centralized governm e n t . . , with a vast hierarchy of bureaucrats...
...nor could it have developed in statist China...
...He was a proper gent-very easy to mix with...
...After all, he notes, some 55,000 people die in traffic accidents each year in the United States and more than 20,000 are murdered each year...
...Some feared that we would be taking on the less dangerous opponent, and they were probably r i g h t - - f o r , however dynamic National Socialism was, Communism has proved to be more tenacious...
...In The Discoverers, Part III of Book I, "Time," deals with "The Missionary Clock...
...But both sides in this debate are strangely reluctant to explore the broader "social attitudes" embodied in our national division over the death penalty...
...an obtusely stubborn insistence, in defiance of every evidence to the contrary, that the Universe must in fact be as it might indeed have been were it the creation of a Marxist Deity...
...Neal is not quite sure that Samuel Pryor, the Willkie man who chaired the convention's committee on arrangements, slipped Herbert Hoover a dead mike, thus fatally muting the former President's stemwinder...
...But I do not think people can be persuaded about the rightness of the death penalty if they are not convinced about the rightness of much else besides...
...A real grass roots movement, Joseph Alsop observed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth...
...Mencken, "that the nomination of Willkie was managed by the Holy Ghost in person...
...I reproduce a passage cited in Richard Norton Smith's Thomas E. Dewey and His Times: Men and women all over the world are on the march, physically, intellectually, and spiritually...
...It really does tell " a tale of discoveries and beginnings," in which Boorstin "sees every discovery as an episode of biography...
...This increases the significance of various judgments which are, as it were, forced out through clenched teeth...
...Willkie was an innovating executive, cooking up bonuses and alluring rate schedules...
...Life, Time and the Saturday Evening Post swung behind him in due course...
...He is certain that Pryor packed the galleries with roaring Willkie-ites, whose unrelenting chant of "We Want Willkie" beat down on the hapless delegates like an aural tsunami...
...Franklin Roosevelt was flexible but superficial...
...Why were people so slow to learn that the earth goes round the sun...
...The two were ideological antagonists, and Willkie profited from their deadlock...
...Secretariat~was not handled more carefully than Willkie...
...The third general feature o f Boorstin's always exciting treatment is that he "sees every discovery as an episode of biography...
...Only Willkie's heart was in it...
...These apt and suggestive headings are perfectly representative of the swinging yet scholarly style of the whole work...
...Abuse and distortion come during the lifetime...
...My personal feeling about the League of Nations," he wrote in a letter to a pro-League Democrat for whom he was offei-ing to work, "almost reaches the point of religious conviction...
...He worked for _9 Firestone Tire and Rubber until 1929, when he left for Wall Street...
...Nor does either take up which crimes ought to receive the death penalty or which ought to be punished as severely as first-degree murder...
...John and Gardner Cowles, publisher(of Look, sponsored Willkie on a delegate-hunting tour of the Midwest...
...For, in seeing things this way, Boorstin is implicitly adopting what must surely be correct positions on manifestly factual albeit much disputed issues about the role of the individual in history...
...His exertions four years earlier may have undermined his health...
...They are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism within their own society than in the society of nations...
...Was she stimulating...
...Neal does not say which, if any, of the lobbyists knew of Viereck's scheme...
...The Discoverers is indeed " a mystery story played by a vast cast #n an ever-changing stage...
...Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark in April, the Low Countries in May...
...But surely the wider debate on the death penalty continues to engage our political energies and moral passions precisely because it is not an isolated policy dispute, but a piece of a larger struggle over the kind of society or the kind of people we conceive ourselves to be...
...Maybe any book, written in the hopes and fears of wartime, was bound to be stupid...
...Therefore, capital punishment "is important as a sign from which one can infer social attitudes and that is meant to express them...
...Totalitarianism ignores boundaries...
...Wendell Willkie did genuine good...
...He has to ask, as Boorstin does, why it did not all happen, and sooner, in China...
...But there was also an issue...
...Certainly, whenever that response is given, we have yet one more paradoxical example of atheist providentialism...
...In 1940, George Sylvester Viereck, an American Nazi, presented a plan to the German Embassy to subsidize isolationist congressmen in lobbying the Republican platform committee...
...It was probably just as well...
...The 19~0 Republican Convention was one of the rowdiest of modern times, and it is best told from the point of view o~f the winner...
...He was therefore condemned for "defaming the Emperor," who in the end graciously commuted the mandatory death sentence to castration...
...a potlatch to the locals, with the prosTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 37 pect of a return potlatch on election day, in the Tammany tradition it more closely resembled...
...indeed, that they wished it...
...It wore a Palm Beach suit and was smoking a five-cent cigar, but nevertheless it was palpably an angel...
...It was not enough to have had "the longest continuous past and the most copious written record...
...After the fifth ballot, the Michigan delegation, hanging by a hair, notified Cincinnatus that they would tip the scales in his favor if he would be agreeable in the matter of federal judgeships...
...She crocheted, played the piano, and left the cooking to a housekeeper...
...Control of the calendar, and hence of the calendar science of astronomy, was a vital matter of state: "This meant, of course, that Chinese astronomy became increasingly bureaucratic and esoteric...
...They deduced from this that we dare not mix with Europeans and other wogs...
...He is writing a book about the I984 election...
...And so on...
...In May, Davenport left Fortune to become Willkie's campaign manager--more a shift of institutional formalities than the undertaking of a new job...
...He had married Edith Wilk, a small town librarian, when he was not quite 26...
...The front runner was Thomas Dewey, 37-year-old District Attorney for New York, with Senator Robert Taft of Ohio a strong second...
...Democratic copies of Willkie's letters to Van Doren were balanced by Republican copies of letters from FDR's running mate, Henry Wallace, to a Russian theosophist...
...Was it fun...
...The whole apocalyptic philosophy of history presented in the Communist Manifesto is in the same way paradoxically providential...
...Neal tells the life of the sixteenth Republican to run for President in a friendly, straightforward, and, with one exception, honest book...
...For Becker, these were probably truisms...
...I n Steve Neal, Wendell Willkie has what every public man deserves--a sympathetic biographer...
...dared to defend an unsuccessful general against a false charge of cowardice...
...But he commenced chasing skirts until, in 1937, he met Irita Van Doren, book editor of the New York Herald Tribune...
...Plekhanov', the doyen of pre-Leninist Russian Marxism--is perhaps less clearly required...
...Reductionism ("how his father beat him, how he ran away," as Auden put it) comes later...
...An affirmative response to the second question--such as was so confidently returned by G.V...
...Virtually all of the Republican leadership, from aging robber barons to Plains states populists, wanted America to stay out...
...His parents seem to have been worthy folk...
...Such a lobbying blitz took place, orchestrated by Representative Hamilton Fish, Sr...
...Some--Hoover, Dewey--were willing to help beleaguered England...
...Maybe there was something too selfconscious in the do-gooding of the senior Willkies that implanted itself in their son, ultimately to swell to international proportions...
...How did he get that way...
...His peak of celebrity had passed, and he would have become a pest--the Eleanor Roosevelt of the GOP, if not the Henry Wallace...
...Like his isolationist opponents, he believed in America as the last, best hope of mankind...
...Chinese discover America...
...D r . Boorstin, Librarian of Congress, has produced another immense book, continuously instructive yet consistently fascinating...
...The Republicans' scruples were not frivolous...
...At the moment the sixth ballot was being counted, I saw an angel in the gallery...
...tA sample of Wallace's devotional prose not quoted by Neal: "I have been thinking of you holding the casket--the sacred, most precious casket...
...Augustine, solidly guaranteed as the inexorable will of a Being who cannot be frustrated...
...about the human body before Paracelsus and Vesalius and H a r v e y . . . " The second is an eagerness to ask, and to try to answer, questions about why certain developments were so long delayed, or did not occur at all: "Why didn't the Antony Flew is emeritus professo~.t~ r philosophy at the University a~f Reading and professor of philosophy at New University, Toronto...
...The first draft, according to editor Russell Davenport, was " a little half-baked," so Van Doren and Davenport helped Willkie overhaul it...
...Van Doren and others then helped him assemble the best-selling One World...
...Nor does one want to see debate on a particular issue turn into a massed confrontation where each participant tries to crush his opponent with the accumulated weight of his own ideological baggage...
...Neal in passing gives an inkling, and it is not nice...
...Fortune commissioned a major article by him for its April 1940 issue...
...about the past before Petrarch and Winckelmann, Thomsen and Schliemann...
...For millenia Chinese history was written by bureaucrats and for bureaucrats...
...Boorstin seems not to be aware, however, that for most of his working life Needham was, and perhaps still is, a committed Marxist-Leninist...
...Are all historical developments determined by collective social forces, or do some particular individuals make significant and substantial differences...
...This applies most obviously to those which have in fact 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984...
...It is that, whereas both the Marxist and the para-Marxist have to pretend that every major discovery was bound to be made in (roughly) the place and at (roughly) the time where and when it actually was made, Boorstin, seeing every s u c h discovery as " a n episode of biography," is free to recognize that there is no such universal guaranteeing necessity...
...Within the GOP, Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft wielded sharp minds largely untempered by imagination...
...And I have thought of the new country going forth, to meet the seven stars under the sign of the three stars...
...Neither ventures any comment on the moral authority of government to compel military service, to conduct armed interventions abroad or punish "victimless crimes" at home...
...But even with Neal pulling for him all the way, the man who trounced the first two and threw a momentary scare into the third emerges as vain, impulsive, selfish, shallow, and foolish...
...None of Wi[lkie's political opponents was an entirely admirable figure...
...Meanwhile, a pro-Willkie petition started by two young Wall Street lawyers collected 200,000 signatures...
...She also introduced him to Ogden and Helen Reid, publishers of the Herald Tribune, the leading organ of eastern seaboard Republicanism...
...In Part XIV, "Opening the Past," Boorstin brings out that critical history too began in Europe, in Classical Greece...
...France fell one week before the convention opened...
...This impressive woman managed to hold his attention...
...Willkie sat out the pro38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 ceedings in a chaotic hotel room (deliberately picked by Davenport to be as cramped as possible, the better to suggest his dark-horsiness), telling reporters and delegates what a homespun, unpolitical fellow he was...
...So what is the present particular relevance of all this...
...But there was something inflated even about these early actions that gives them the puffy appearance of gestures...
...Was she stacked...
...Old fears no longer frighten them...
...Meanwhile Willkie looked to his career...
...Willkie acquired a mistress as well as a reputation...
...Yet I once found, in a secondhand shop, a yellowing copy of Carl Becker's How New Will the Better WorldBe...
...Thus, in The Grand Titration, Needham a d m i t s that capitalist pluralism was essential to this historic Great Leap Forward...
...Yet many people do fail to realize how much we need, in order to be sure that we have correctly identified the crucial factors i n - - s a y - - t h e growth of modern science in Western Europe, to be able to examine other cases where some but not all of these supposedly crucial factors were present, yet without producing anything like the particular effect for which we have to account...
...And I have thought of the admonition, 'Await the stones.' " After the election, the two contenders got on well...
...Willkie deduced that we must raise them to our level...
...Was it love...
...Willkie, then as twenty years before, had "religious convictions" instead...
...Any Marxist, or indeed any adherent of any similarly ambitious philosophy of history, has to answer the first, two-part question with-respectively--a yes and a no...
...Willkie was approached several times about founding a new national liberal party, though one has the impression Roosevelt was toying with him for immediate political effects...
...So this also had to be "tightly controlled...
...For the promised and allegedly inevitable ir o f the secular Kingdom of God on earth is not there, as it is in St...
...He was also helped by old-fashioned dirty tricks...
...That is both true, and kind...
...There he could profitably have stayed...
...When the wild Democratic Convention of 1924, Richard Brookhiser is senior editor at National Review...
...Only here, in recounting their affair, does Neal falter, for the explanation which tumbles from his Kaypro, like a can from a Coke machine, is that Willkie had--"grown...
...But this is Monday morning talk...
...Here, following Needham's "non-pareil Science and Civilization in Ancient China," Boorstin explains "why the mother of machines proved so infertile there...
...1944...
...Of course, one does not want to see condemned criminals made the wretched instruments for a reaffirmation of society's "moral fiber...
...National magazines began asking him for articles, and New Dealers debated him, usually to their sorrow...
...Certainly there have been particular discoveries, even major discoveries, about which such a claim can be plausibly made...
...And what a turkey he was...
...Maybe it is obvious to everyone that we cannot have an adequate understanding o f any achievement without appreciating the obstacles overcome...
...Neal probably means something like the last, but the easy cant of personal development, as debilitating as adultery itself, makes it seem as if Willkie took Van Doren like a post-graduate course...
...We don't know what Hitler's empire of the spirit could have looked like...
...The campaign was anti-climax...
...The first is a concern always with "the obstacles that had to be overcome: the illusions held about the continents and the seas before Columbus and Balboa and Magellan...
...The Death Penalty reveals too little about what is at stake in that larger struggle, even within the confines of its own "debate...
...Neither Conrad nor van den Haag suggests any connection between his argument on the death penalty and the ongoing controversy over government's obligation to protect unborn life--or, for that matter, on the controversy over the proper scale of health and safety regulation...
...Van den Haag does occasionally note the parallel between our squeamishness about the death penalty and our reluctance or induced incapacity to impose any real punishment at all for the overwhelming majority of criminal offenses...
...The Tennessee Valley Authority was many things to many people: a building block of socialism, in the minds of supporters and critics...
...In March 1939, the paper published a letter to the editor suggesting that Willkie run for President...
...For the most elegant of refutations of that two-part answer, see Sidney Hook's The Hero in History...
...Boorstin depends for his answers, as we all must, mainly on " t h e phenomenal Joseph Needh a m . . , who has achieved one of the great intellectual ambassadorial enterprises of modern times...
...A better tribute came from a regular at the Old Chesterfield Arms, a London pub where he had stood a round during the blitz...
...Van Doren helped write and edit Willkie's essays...
...They are beginning to know that man's welfare throughout the world is interdependent...
...Although the responsible bureau was not actually called Minitrue, it was directed to produce " V e r i t a b l e Records," with, of course, and at the same time, "appropriate concealment...
...From the grass roots of ten thousand country clubs," she replied...
...The fate of the man who might have become the Chinese Herodotus was decisively discouraging...
...I am thoroughly convinced," wrote H.L...
...By that standard, he has no monument at all...
...Willkie was perforce reunited with his wife ("politics makes strange bedfellows," she observed...
...The same commentator picks out two further general features of Boorstin's treatment, in addition to that emphasis upon the individual as opposed to the collective...
...With each side trying to preempt the moral premises of the other, with both sides conspiring to screen out the broader ideological context, the debate between van den Haag and Conrad offers too few clues about what the death penalty is "symbolic" of...
...They consorted quite openly, Willkie once gave a press conference in her apartment...
...but he is content to flourish this as little more than a debater's point, without much attention to its causes or its implications...
...I f men ask where is his monument," said his eulogist, "let them but look at a w o r l d . . , one in a passionate dedication to freedom like that which consumed him...
...The promise of the dust jacket--for once perhaps written by a thorough reader--is fully fulfilled...
...They foresaw that participating in another world war would put a permanent crick in the structure of the republic, and they were right...
...This, although the point is never in The Discoverers made explicit, is no mere matter of one personally preferred perspective among several others all equally valid...
...For Commonwealth and Southern, TVA represented an order to sell its facilities to the federal government...
...It's not on the mark either, but at least it recognizes that those who have power aren't likely to give it up, and that the power of good intentions is finite...
...Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-87...
...Both their families left Germany after the failed revolutions of the nineteenth century...
...The scrupulous historian of modern science has, therefore, no choice but to make the most of the only partly parallel case we have...
...Here the first chapter is "Open Sesame to China," the second "Mother of Machines," and the third "Why It Happened in the West...
...The Akron branch of the Invisible Empire wrote to inquire when he had gone on the payroll of the Pope, to which he replied that the Klan could go to hell...
...Van den Haag himself remarks near the end of the debate that "the main significance of the death penalty both to retentionists and to abolitionists is symbolic...
...Lewis Wendell (an army clerk later reversed the names) was born in 1892, and eventually followed his father into the law...
...He died in 1944...
...Willkie fought a five-anda-half-year retreat before the irresistible project...
...Boorstin himself never offers any rationale for either his biographical emphases or his concern to ask why developments occurred where they did, not in other places...
...After centuries of ignorance and dull compliance, hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe and Asia have THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 39 opened the books...
...Neal quotes little of it, which is understandable...
...His employer was a large utility holding company, Commonwealth and Southern...
...The Republican party had been a fire-sale item for nearly a decade...
...For greater good and ill, Roosevelt sent Willkie abroad--to London in 1941, an important signal of solidarity, and a year later to China, Russia, and the Middle East...
...Herman Willkie became a lawyer, a liberal Democrat (William Jennings Bryan once stayed in his house), and a reform-minded school superintendent...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
