WENDELL WILLKIE: DESERVING DEMOCRAT
Howe, Quincy
Wendell Willkie: Deserving Democrat By QUINCY HOWE THERE is a method in the madness that Wendell Willkie has aroused among conservative Republicans. They have begun to fear what few Democrats have...
...if they had planted their own Trojan horse in the enemy's ranks, they could not have done a better job...
...Willkie may possess, his background and experience still make him look like an amateur compared to Mr...
...Wendell Willkie also came to the top the hard way, but he won his success in the business world...
...Roosevelt is freedom of enterprise—and our free enterprisers have seen corporation profits, after taxes, rise to an all-time high this year...
...Anyway you look at it, Willkie therefore emerges as God's gift to the Democratic Party in general and to Franklin D. Roosevelt in particular...
...Instead, however, Willkie has moved over into the Republican camp where he has headed up a rebellion of liberal Republicans against reactionary inner-party control...
...Just as Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose movement elected Wilson in 1912, so Willkie's latter-day "pro-gressivism" threatens the Republicans with disaster in 1944...
...An Amateur Compared To F.D.R...
...If Willkie or a Willkie-ite wins the Republican nomination in 1944, the stage will then be set for an isolationist, nationalist, or non-interventionist candidate who will split the anti-Roosevelt Vote just as Davis and La Follette split the anti-Coolidge vote, 20 years ago...
...The point is not that Mr...
...The best hope for the Democratic Party is that the confusion Mr...
...At least, that is the way that professional Republican politicians would be likely to figure it...
...Willkie's big-business backers in the 1940 campaign had achieved the same kind of success that Mr...
...Willkie has been hollering for...
...They can then hamstring Roosevelt's fourth term, blame him for the post-war troubles and then move in perhaps with Tom Dewey—for a long lease on the White House in 1948...
...The only freedom that Mr...
...If the Democrats had organized their own fifth column...
...And nobody greeted Secretary Hull more warmly than Mr...
...Secretary Hull brought back from Moscow the kind of agreement that Mr...
...They derived their wealth from the land and from foreign trade—not from speculation or exploitation...
...in 1912, the Republicans had enjoyed the sweets of office for 16 long years...
...To begin with, the President comes from a family with a long tradition of public service...
...No Public Responsibility The professional Republican politicians have much less cause for worry...
...As for domestic reform, the Gallup and Fortune polls still show organized labor and the lower-income groups preferring the President of the United States to the ex-president of Commonwealth and Southern...
...Willkie in his worst colors...
...Willkie not only an alternative to Mr...
...Willkie has a more irresponsible or disloyal nature than Mr...
...Willkie has only talked with Stalin...
...They have begun to fear what few Democrats have yet dared to hope—that Willkie's change of party allegiance threatens to split the Republicans at a time when it is the Democrats who should be divided...
...Willkie's promises...
...He was brought up* to believe in noblesse oblige...
...Willkie himself had won...
...Roosevelt, but also the perfect representative of his own way of life...
...Henry Luce and most of Mr...
...The point is that Mr...
...The President's ancestors have had property for generations...
...Willkie threatens to cause will confine itself to the ranks of the Republican Party and prove sufficiently disastrous there to make America again safe for the Democratic Party...
...Willkie is already known in some circles as the Bryan of the Republican Party...
...The division he has created among the Republicans might also be compared to the Smith-McAdop feud that tore the Democrats apart in 1924...
...His Ignorance And Inexperience President Roosevelt came to the top of the political ladder the hard way...
...The Republicans appear to have an excellent chance of controlling the Representatives of the House...
...American political history suggests other parallels...
...Willkie's irresponsibility or disloyalty that has made the most trouble for him...
...And when the Democrats finally compromised on John W. Davis, Bob La Follette headed up a third party that attracted five million votes that helped clinch the election for Calvin Coolidge...
...Had Willkie remained a Democrat, it might have fallen to him to spear-head the anti-New Deal revolt that Harry Byrd, Millard Tydings, and Walter George never quite pulled off...
...But it's not Mr...
...It is his ignorance and his inexperience...
...If, on the other hand, Willkie fails either to get nominated or elected, the old guard of the GOP is not implicated in his defeat...
...Roosevelt does, when he acts irresponsibly toward the public or disloyally toward his party...
...Roosevelt...
...He therefore applies only the business man's test to all situations—whatever works is right...
...Willkie's liberal friends...
...If Willkie should win the 1944 election, they will at least be better off than they are under Roosevelt—and the inexperienced Willkie may not prove too difficult to work with...
...Until he accepted the Republican nomination for the Presidency, he had never been responsible to anyone but himself and the corporations for which he worked...
...Willkie promises more abundantly than Mr...
...on his own...
...Roosevelt...
...Whatever personal merits Mr...
...If they fail to win a majority in the Senate, they are at least likely to hold the balance of power by working with the anti-New Deal Democrats...
...For the President's performances on the foreign and the domestic front already surpass Mr...
...But at least he has some lights to go by and he has followed them to the best of his abilities...
...The worst that can be said of the Willkies, the . Luces, the Winchells, and other public figures with no sense of public responsibility is that they use their power as a child would use a machine-gun on a crowd...
...When, therefore, Mr...
...They can create intense and meaningless confusion, but that confusion is local and unplanned...
...His chosen career made it impossible for him to know the meaning of public responsibility or political loyalty...
...Willkie cannot know, as Mr...
...The Willkie candidacy thus attracted an entirely new type of political support—the successful, intelligent, self-made business or professional man who saw in Mr...
...Perhaps the President has not always acted wisely...
...Roosevelt's conservative critics and Mr...
...perhaps some of the values he has tried to uphold may be outworn...
...Willkie's more recent attempt to out-Roosevelt Roosevelt suggested that he had no more sense of public responsibility or party loyalty than his own supporters, many of these same supporters turned against him...
...But with these two galling differences: Teddy Roosevelt had been a good Republican until he went off...
...As for 1948—that is another story and we shall see what we shall see...
...It is the comparison with President Roosevelt that shows Mr...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 49
