DEMOCRACY SPEAKS IN THE MIDDLE WEST

...one can find German, Scandinavian, Czech, Polish, and many other communities...

...Lincoln Had A Word For It But the truth of the matter is that the people of Wisconsin, who listened to Mr...

...And, as the Wisconsin primary showed so clearly, they do not regard a man who obviously camouflaged his interventionist sympathies and desires during the election campaign of 1940 as a stable and reliable guide for the war that has still to be fought and the peace that has still to be made...

...He tried to brush off one of his campaign assertions in testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with the airy remark that it was "a bit of campaign oratory...

...The people of whom William Allen White was at once a product and an expression are about as far removed from fascism, or from any form of brutalitarian society, as people one would find anywhere in the world...

...Since I am not a Middle Westerner by birth or residence I have no reason to feel any sectional bias in f«- j vor of that part of Ame'Hca...

...This same curious facility for using words in such profusion that his precise stand on the question at issue is doubtful was apparent when Willkie wrote a much publicized article on Soviet-American relations early this year...

...Abraham Lincoln had a word for it...

...Willkie was so anxious to be President that he was willing to mislead the voters in regard to his views on a vitally important subject...

...But there was not a hint of whose pockets this sizeable sum of 16 billion dollars was to come out of...

...Recently I lectured at forums held in a number of small towns in the Middle West...

...It suggests that his popular strength has been seriously overestimated in Gallup Polls...

...My italics...

...Perhaps the people are not willing to bear the sacrifices...

...As a rule it is only in dictatorships, where there is no free expression of opinion, that unanimous or near-unanimous votes are cast...

...They want to be convincingly shown, not swept off their feet by a del- uge of words...

...He restores my lost youth...

...This finds most vivid expression in the fact that his enthusiastic picture of the technical possibilities of "one world" in this age of airplane development and scientific invention is unaccompanied by any sobering recognition of the invisible barbed-wire entanglements that totalitarian states (and not all these are in the ranks of our enemies) have set up along frontiers...

...Perhaps the conscience of America is dulled...

...And, when one makes all allowance for the good intentions and lively reporting of Mr...

...Willkie, as reported in the New York Times, expressed himself as follows: "I went down just the way I'd like to go down, fighting for a principle...

...The people of the Middle West have just as keen a concern for future peace as Americans anywhere else...

...Midwestern communities are contributing as much to the war as communities in any other part of the country...

...I was interested to learn that a number of European speakers had also appeared before these forums...

...Yet Willkie employed a few mildly critical phrases, perhaps written with an eye on Americans of Polish and Baltic nationality, that won him a severe casti-gation from the hatchet-man of Pravda, David Zas-lavsky...

...The carefully cultivated front of the bluff, independent grown-up boy from Elwood, Indiana, speaking his mind freely regarding questions on which politicians hold their peace is a completely synthetic product and disintegrates rapidly under an acid test of examination...

...The people who live there, like Americans in other parts of the country, are an amalgam of European strains...

...Wisconsin's emphatic rejection of the Man of Words and Wall Street has served as a springboard for new attacks on the Middle West as isolationist, indifferent to international issues, unconcerned about the war...

...And this is only too typical of Willkie's political record...

...Judging from One World, he thinks about everything what I thought when I was 18 years old...

...What possible guaranty could there be that any statement he might make in obtaining the nomination and election now would not be brushed aside with equal unconcern, after the coveted goal has been reached...

...What possible conclusion can one draw from this record except that Mr...

...This result, which would probably have been pretty closely duplicated in any state between the Alleghenies and the Rockies, indicates that Willkie would have been the weakest candidate the Republican Party could have nominated...

...It would be an exaggeration to say that the residents of these towns had acquired a full understanding of the complexities of Balkan politics...

...Willkie has been resorting to a good deal of futile and ineffective explaining of that "campaign oratory" phrase...

...But it is my judgment, based on a number of trips to the states of the Mississippi Valley, that there is no region of the United States where genuine social democracy is more effectively realized...

...I thought at the time, and still think, that the article was unduly pro-Soviet, because it attributed American distrust of Soviet intentions in foreign policy not to Stalin's own actions, but to artificial efforts in this country to "sow distrust" of Russia...

...They do not want to see a repetition of Woodrow Wilson's tragic experience of 1919 (very well analyzed and reviewed in a recent article by William C. Bullitt in Life, and commented on in "The Last Column," Page 12), when America's great military and economic strength was used not to lay the foundations of a true peace, but to promote selfish and annexationist aims of Great Britain and France, Italy, and Japan...

...They were serving notice that a candidate who had once played fast and loose with them on an issue of life-and-death importance should never have a chance to repeat the process...

...We are being edged toward war by an Administration which is alike careless in speech and action...

...It is noteworthy that the statement, which is quite as strong and unequivocal as any of the statements issued by America First or any of the other anti-interventionist groups, was made during the last few weeks of the campaign, when the anti-war line was obviously the popular line and when Mr...

...He would face an even harder job if he should try to square with his later actions and views the following excerpt from his political, speech at Cleveland on October 3, 1940: "I believe that we should keep out of war at all hazards...

...I am discouraged to believe that it (the Republican Party) may be the party of negation...

...In the light of this background the puncture of the soap bubble legend of Willkie as the great independent candidate, popular with the people, unpopular with the bosses, was nothing short of overwhelming...

...Equally far removed from reality is the idea that the Middle West is obsessed with a kind of know-nothing prejudice against everything connected with Europe...

...Naturally Mr...

...Nowhere is there a more successful approach to the ideal of social equality, nowhere is the public school system so generally attended by children of all classes...

...They do not believe that America today should be the tail to the kite of British and Soviet power politics...

...Willkie politely and attentively and then turned him down by such an overwhelming majority, were vindicating a principle that is essential to the maintenance of effective democracy...

...In spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that he alone among the four contenders carried out an active personal speaking campaign, the man of Wall Street and One World came out a bad fourth in the poll, without the consolation prize of even a single delegate...

...Mr.* Willkie, for understandable reasons, does not like to be reminded of many things he said during the 1940 campaign...

...You can't fool all the people all the time...

...Willkie's Gallup Poll strength jumped visibly as a result of these and similar declarations...

...There are as many service flags, as many men fighting in Europe and in the Pacific, as many casualties...

...Willkie: For And Against Willkie won some applause among superficial observers when he announced his advocacy of a truly tough tax bill, a bill to raise 16 billion dollars of additional revenue as against the 10 billion the Administration wanted...

...Scatter-brained politicians and shrill vituperative columnists have even found in this country of Lincoln and Mark Twain and William Allen White a hotbed of "American fascism...

...What voters do not and should not forget is an effort to be on two sides of such a critical question...

...There would be just as much support there as in any other section of the country for a sound, workable scheme of international cooperation, based on a just peace settlement and a fair distribution of burdens and responsibilities among the major powers...

...But Middle Westerners possess a quality that is sometimes attributed especially to Missourians...

...Willkie, in the moment of crushing defeat, tried to dramatize himself as the martyr of principle, the misunderstood patriot, the statesman superior to his party and ahead of his time, the victim of the "backward, isolationist" Middle West...

...The misconceptions of the Middle West held by some individuals who have never been west of the Hudson River are indeed extraordinary...

...My own necessarily hasty judgment of the mood of the Middle West added up to something like this...

...Practically, it was far easier for men, books, and ideas to move from one country to another before World War I than it was when Wendell Willkie took the Jules Verne round-the-world trip that left him breathless in more ways than one...

...And when the President vetoed a Congressional tax measure that provided for only about two and a half billion dollars of additional revenue Willkie censured the veto...

...On receiving the news that his "blitz" drive in Wisconsin had ended in complete fiasco, Mr...

...Willkie's global tour, there is a stamp of immaturity on the book...

...Perhaps this sounded smart and clever to him when he said it, but this phrase, and the mental attitude it revealed, sounded his deathknell as the trusted candidate of any large group of American voters...

...But there was a desire to learn as much as possible about foreign affairs and foreign countries and I found none of the ignorant anti-foreign prejudice that is sometimes ignorantly attributed to the Middle West...

...A cosmopolitan friend said to me recently: "I like Wendell Willkie, although I have never met him...

...Democracy Speaks In The Middle West By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN THERE HAVE been few developments in modern American politics more decisive and emphatic and unmistakable than the rejection of Wendell Willkie by the participants in the recent Wisconsin primary election...

...In a democracy people are usually divided on a 55-45 basis, with 60-40 an unusually pronounced trend...

...If Thomas Jefferson could visit modern America, he might well find his vision of agrarian democracy best realized in some of the midwestern farm communities and small and medium sized towns...

...Whatever may be one's personal view about the policies and events which preceded our entry into the war, one can respect the intellectual integrity of a James Bryant Conant, who openly preached intervention long before Pearl Harbor, or of a Charles A. Lindbergh, who consistently opposed intervention up to Pearl Harbor...