Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,526

This is the grave of Wendell Willkie.

Born in 1892 in Elwood, Indiana, Lewis Wendell Willkie grew up in a locally elite family. Both parents were lawyers, which is interesting because there were so few female lawyers in the late nineteenth century. The grandparents were not only abolitionists, but had come to the U.S. to flee repression after participating in the 1848 German revolution. To say the least, the radicalism didn’t extend through the generations, though that was certainly common enough in abolitionists Republican families everywhere in the North. Willkie’s father was a big Populist and Bryan supporter and in fact, when he was a kid, Wendell (which he was known by from childhood) and his brothers got in a fight with other McKinley supporting kids during the 1896 elections. In fact, Bryan actually stayed at the Willkie home while campaigning in Indiana during the 1900 elections.

Now, Willkie wouldn’t really become a conservative until later in life, although he wasn’t that conservative for the Republican Party that he would represent in the presidential election of 1940. He went to Indiana University and pushed the university to offer courses on socialism, an ideology that he still identified with at that time. Willkie volunteered for World War I and did reach France, but not until the fighting was about over and he never saw any. But that did make him highly interested in European affairs and he would become a lifelong internationalist. He came back still the Bryanist his father was two decades earlier, outside of the internationalism anyway. He became a lawyer like his father and instead of joining his father’s firm (which is what dad wanted), he became a corporate lawyer for Firestone in Akron. This was a terrible fit. He was good at the job, absolutely, but he still saw himself as an activist. When he resigned, Harvey Firestone offered to double his salary. Willkie turned him down and Firestone told him he was a failure at life because he was a Democrat. Ah, corporate America.

You’d think Willkie, given his politics, would have found something to do other than being a corporate lawyer, but nope. It might not have worked out with Firestone, but he wasn’t done with representing corporate America. He started back in Akron by representing some private utility companies. He was very good as a trial lawyer and also was effective in presenting cases before the Ohio Utility Commission. When one of the utilities was bought by Commonwealth & Southern, a bigger New York utilities firm, executives there gave Willkie a huge raise and brought him to New York. He grew in New York a lot, which meant both engaging in the kind of culture one would never find in Indiana or Akron and through that, starting a long-term affair with the literary figure and editor Irita Van Doren. In a totally different world from today, when he ran for president, all the reporters knew of their affair and none mentioned it publicly, just as none mentioned just how disabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt really was.

In any case, when Roosevelt launched the Tennessee Valley Authority, it was a direct attack on these private utility companies. He was an active Democrat still and was a delegate from New York in the 1932 convention, supporting Newton Baker. By this time as well, Willkie was president of C&S, second in command of the company, which had business in the South. So with TVA directly threatening his corporate interests, Willkie went on the attack. Effective and skilled as a speaker, he soon became something of a hero for anti-TVA and more broadly anti-New Deal folks. Willkie was a big enough deal, not to mention a prominent Democrat, that FDR called him to the Oval Office on more than one occasion to try and work something out. This all moved Willkie to the right, or at least to an anti-New Deal stance. He voted for Alf Landon in 1936 and expected Landon to win. Speaking of this, it’s amusing how much the rich people who hated FDR misread his popularity and were shocked by his landslide election. Willkie still considered himself a liberal, but like a lot of old-style Progressive types, the use of big government to solve social problems really bugged him. He got more and more famous and became a Republican, finally leading the sale of the C&S properties to the TVA.

By 1940, Republicans were desperate to compete with FDR. They knew they could not nominate someone who was a real Republican and compete. So some of the party bosses thought Willkie could work. Sure he had been a Republican for all of one year. But why not? Robert Taft, Arthur Vandenberg, and Thomas Dewey were all considered front runners, but they were all more or less isolationists, which bothered a lot of party leaders. Willkie, whose ego and ambition grew and grew, made that party switch in 1939 mostly because he thought it was the only way he could be president. Van Doren was encouraging him this whole way and used her many social and literary connections to build up momentum for him. He leaned into it, was great in the media, and won at the convention after Harold Stassen gave the keynote speech that endorsed him. It took a bunch of rounds of voting for the other leaders to realize they would never get a majority of delegates and Willkie became the compromise candidate.

The problem with the Willkie campaign though is that there was no reason for it to exist. The only thing he was really different on than Roosevelt is big social programs, but even there, it was the TVA stuff and not much else. Moreover, he was right there with FDR on the biggest issue of the moment–Europe. He was completely supportive of Lend-Lease and wanted an active fight against the Nazis. This was of course quite controversial in a still very isolationist America in 1940. So for those Americans who were horrified that the nation could be heading into another European war–there was no candidate for you. FDR blew out Willkie that fall, by less than in 1936, but that had to do with some of the Republican-leaning farm states coming home with the agricultural economy improving and the typical rural American “our government programs aren’t welfare unlike what you are going to the Black and the unions but don’t take away our programs” bullshit. Willkie also won Michigan, largely because John L. Lewis, who had turned with a fury on Roosevelt, endorsed the Republican and this pulled in a large number of unionists.

In fact, after the election, Roosevelt and Willkie became quite close. He continued to advocate for the same foreign policy as Roosevelt and the government sent him to England as an emissary of friendliness of the U.S. He was an attack dog on Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic isolationism. During the war, he wrote One World, arguing that the U.S. should join a UN type international organization after the war, which FDR also agreed with. He also called out American hypocrisy on race and supported civil rights. In fact, part of his path forward for the Republican Party was them to embrace civil rights like it was 1866 and attack FDR for playing footsie with the South (and to be clear, FDR was personally pretty bad on civil rights, unlike Eleanor). Of course, Robert Taft was about as racist as anyone else and there was no way that was going to fly in the party.

Willkie actually came back later for another shot at the Republican ring, running for the nomination in 1944, but he had no chance against Thomas Dewey, who himself had no chance against FDR. It’s interesting though that he never did return to the Democrats. Then FDR screwed him over. They had talked about maybe forming a “Liberal” Party after the war that combined the Democrats and some liberal Republicans. FDR totally leaked it to the press to up his bipartisan credentials. Willkie felt betrayed and was very angry. Some of this was his ego as well, which was gargantuan by this time. But then he had a heart attack. He refused to see a doctor. This was a bad idea. He had a second, much larger, heart attack a few weeks later. He finally went to the hospital after that, seemed to be recovering, started working on his book, and then had a final fatal heart attack in October 1944. He was 52 years old.

Would have been interesting to imagine Willkie in the early Cold War. Might he have found a place for liberalism in the Republican Party with McCarthy? Unlikely, but intriguing.

Wendell Willkie is buried in his over the top grave in East Hill Cemetery, Rushville, Indiana.

If you would like this series to visit other presidential campaign losers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Thomas Dewey is in Pawling, New York and Adlai Stevenson is in Bloomington, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.