‘What if’ Willkie?

The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order

By David Levering Lewis

400 pages

$28.95

Winners won with dignity. 

Larger-than-life politicians tamed their egos and chose the words they uttered in public words with care. 

The Improbable Wendell Willkie describes an era some 80 years ago when – in the face of destabilizing threats to the political system from within and to the homeland from abroad – partisanship took second place to national unity. 

Wendell Willkie (1892-1944) – new to the Republican Party and to electoral politics – ran against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. He captured a respectable 22 million votes to Roosevelt’s 27 million (but a measly 82 electoral college votes to the Democrat’s 449). With this victory, FDR won his third term and would go on to win a fourth in 1944 (he died on April 12, 1945). 

What attracted me most to this biography was its author Pulitzer Prize winner David Levering Lewis. His masterful W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 is proof that an academic historian can be meticulous, judicious – and readable. If anything, The Improbable Wendell Willkie is even more accessible than Biography of a Race. 

Willkie was raised in Elwood, Indiana, became a successful lawyer, and headed the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, a utility conglomerate. For much of the 20^th century, America’s political parties tended not to be ideologically straitjacketed serving instead as vehicles for running for office. Liberals and conservatives populated both parties. Willkie was a Democrat who switched parties in time to become the Republicans’ 1940 presidential candidate. 

Broadly speaking, Willkie approved of the New Deal except that he thought the government should partner with the private sector rather than try to supplant it. Nor was there much daylight between Willkie and FDR on the need rearm America and to help Britain (at the time facing Hitler alone). However, an intransigently isolationist Democratic-controlled Congress willfully averted its eyes to what was happening in Europe.

During his presidential campaign, Willkie denounced as “barbarous” the “worse than medieval persecution of the Jews," which he branded as the “most tragic in human history." 

Remarkably, after losing to FDR, Willkie joined forces with the Machiavellian White House denizen. While the Republican-old-guard looked on in horror, Willkie helped to mobilize support for Lend-Lease and warned against isolationism.  

In 1942, he became FDR informal roving ambassador (the president put an air force plane and crew at his disposal) traveling around the world. He met with Russia’s Stalin (desperate for aid and a second front) and China’s Chiang Kai-shek (out of touch with the needs of his people). He visited Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. 

He arrived in Jerusalem to meet with (separate) Zionist and Palestinian Arab delegations. Among the Zionists Willkie spoke with were Henrietta Szold (founder of Hadassah) and Moshe Sharett (Israel’s future foreign minister). When he met with British Mandate officials, he recommended that they allow Jews and Arabs jointly to take part in governing - the British didn't think much of that idea, Levering Lewis tells us. 

Historian David Wyman expands on the Palestine visit in The Abandonment of the Jews. “Wendel Willkie confronted the British leadership with the need to admit large numbers of Jews to Palestine. The British high commissioner replied that since the United States was not taking Jews in even up to the quota limits, Americans were hardly in a position to criticize.”  

Wyman tells us that Willkie backed the Committee for a Jewish Army to fight Hitler. He sided with the American Zionist Emergency Council in its campaign against the 1939 White Paper. He supported a 1943 Congressional Resolution that would have urged FDR to effectuate a plan to save European Jewry (it did not pass). In 1944, when US newspapers disgracefully printed very little about the destruction of European Jewry, Willkie agreed to lend his (non-Jewish) name to the American Jewish Conference’s National Committee Against Nazi Persecution and Extermination of the Jews. 

He was awarded a medal by the American Hebrew magazine partly for his Saturday Evening Post essay "The Case for Minorities" (in reply to the piece the magazine ran entitled  “The Case Against the Jews”) and his opposition to Jew-hatred, according to Levering Lewis. He had pushed back against country clubs for excluding Jews. He’d denounced Joseph Kennedy (JFK's dad) for threatening Hollywood's Jewish studio moguls because -- supposedly -- they made movies that boosted opposition to isolationism. 

Willkie was generally sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. 

In 1941 he helped to establish Freedom House, an anti-totalitarian anti-authoritarian advocacy group. In 1943, Willkie brought out a genuine bestseller that articulated his internationalist philosophy. As Lewis takes pains to note, "By macabre coincidence the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began eleven days after his book One World went on sale."

He believed that after the war, America had to be engaged in the world through a United Nations. Unlike FDR he abhorred British imperialism. He thought colonialism would come back to bite its European practitioners. And while he was no babe in the woods (not in his personal life and not in the way he captured the Republican nomination), David Levering Lewis leaves the distinct impression that Willkie was a good man. 

He leaves me thinking he would have also been “good for the Jews.” 

Bucking the demagogues and popular tide, Willkie spoke out for tolerance and against racial and ethnic prejudice. He aligned himself closely, publicly and often with Walter White, who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (at a time when even the federal government colluded with segregationists).

Meantime, the Jews hero-worshipped Franklin D. Roosevelt (first elected in 1933 the same year Hitler came to power in Germany). A cadre of court Jews inside and outside the administration made excuses for the president. They tried to quash Jewish criticism of Roosevelt. History has not been kind to his enablers.

Before the war FDR sidestepped conflict with the powerful isolationist camp. He abetted the British in keeping the gates of Palestine closed to Jews. No less egregious, he refused to permit Jews desperate for asylum into the US.  

And during the war, FDR found imaginative ways of not getting in the way of Hitler’s industrialized destruction of European Jewry. From Evian in 1939 to Bermuda in 1943 the Roosevelt administration was resolute in not rescuing Hitler’s victims.

How would Jewish history have been different if Republican Willkie had defeated Democrat Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election? There are clues. 

Lewis pointedly notes, in May 1939, Roosevelt denied asylum to 937 Jewish passengers aboard the M.S. St. Louis seeking to escape Germany. 

Willkie would later tell a campaign rally, "We have been sitting as spectators to a great tragedy." 

In 1941, the America First Committee led by Charles Lindbergh, warned against "the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country into war."  

Practically channeling Hitler, Lindbergh warned the Jews not to push for war “for they will be among the first to feel its consequences." 

He archly elucidated: “It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look upon their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.”

Alongside Lindbergh and Jew-hating car magnate Henry Ford was the Catholic cleric Charles Coughlin who hinted that the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was part of a Jewish conspiracy to draw the Roosevelt administration into fighting Hitler.

The point is, being on the side of the Jews was not necessarily a politically winning strategy for Willkie.

In 1944, Willkie – now exposed as a reasonable progressive – tried a second time for the Republican presidential nomination only to be thwarted by the party's establishment wing. 

After he pulled out of the race for the nomination there was talk that he might support FDR against the conventionally-leaning Republican nominee Thomas Dewey in November. We will never know for Willkie died of a heart attack in Manhattan on October 8, 1944. He was 52.

Wendell Willkie was an improbable candidate for the Republican nomination because he was a businessman-progressive, a non-isolationist and a proponent of tolerance. He saved the party by turning it away from isolationism, and he helped save the country by promoting a bipartisan internationalist ethos in US foreign policy. 

To Read More:

Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie by Steve Neal 
(1989)

One World
by Wendell  Willkie (1943)


Quote/Unquote
Willkie in June 1942

"We are already witnessing a crawling, insidious anti-Semitism in our own country...

“Our nation is composed of no one race, faith or cultural heritage. It is a grouping of some thirty peoples possessing varying religious concepts, philosophies and historical backgrounds. They are linked together by their confidence in our democratic institutions as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution for themselves and for their children.”