Hoosier in Action

Wendell Willkie stepped out of his office on Rushville's North Harrison Street one day last week, walked into a knot of well-wishers. One woman gushed: "Oh, Mr. Willkie, I've always wanted to shake hands with you." They shook hands.

Said she in a surprised tone of voice: "Why, Wendell! I don't think you recognized me."

"Gosh, Billie," her sheepish husband stammered. "Excuse me, I was thinking."

One political phenomenon that escaped the attention of political observers in Washington, but was beginning to percolate into the newshawks who hung around the lobby of the Lollis Hotel, was that Rushville and Indiana were accepting Wendell Willkie back as their own. The man who two months ago was president of a billion-dollar Wall Street corporation, and lived on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, sat under the trees on his lawn and strolled around Rushville like a native. Willkie demurred when police (including two courtesy plain-clothes men sent by New York City's police commissioner) insisted on fencing off the sidewalk in front of his rented red brick house, for every day several hundred neighbors, farmers and motorists from neighboring States stop and wait politely before the house and several times a day Willkie comes out, gives them a cheerful wave of the hand and few good-natured words. But despite this leisurely small-town existence, as his loyal wife well knew, Candidate Willkie had plenty to think about last week.

Destroyers for Bases. "The country will undoubtedly approve of the program to add to our naval and air bases and assistance given to Great Britain.

"[But] it is regrettable, however, that the President did not deem it necessary . . . to secure the approval of Congress or permit public discussion. . . . The people have a right to know of such important commitments prior to and not after they are made. . . .

"It is the contention of the totalitarian rulers that democracy is not effective. We must prove that it is effective by making full use of its processes. Congress has constitutional functions as important and sacred as those of the Chief Executive."

So read the statement which Wendell Willkie issued when the news was brought to him of Franklin Roosevelt's trade of 50 old destroyers for naval and air bases in British possessions (see p. 70). To make it required more political courage than anything that had yet been called for from Candidate Willkie.

Last week Republican leaders frantically telephoned Rushville begging their candidate to crack down, make a loud noise, blast the destroyer deal lock, stock & barrel. Once before Wendell Willkie had refused to champion what he believed to be bad policy in order to make a campaign issue--on that occasion he endorsed conscription. This time he was in a hotter spot. Some Republican leaders, isolationists by tradition and anxious to swat Roosevelt, saw in the destroyer deal an opportunity for him to seize a red hot emotional issue.

Candidate Willkie saw in the deal an arrangement that would greatly strengthen the U. S. in the defense of America and refused to seize the issue. In his first sentence he embraced the deal itself without qualification, reserved his criticism entirely for the manner of its making. In the eyes of some practical politicians he had thrown away his best chance for election.

But for better or worse politically, he had refused to make national defense a political football, had saved the U. S. from being emotionally torn apart in a way that would have halted all action on the biggest U. S. problem. With Willkie approving, not even in the U.S. Senate was a hullabaloo raised over the deal which brought the U. S. eight badly needed bases.

The Leaders. Three days later Wendell Willkie tackled the problem which his statement had made more difficult: how to get his own political machine rolling. To Rushville went the Republican leaders of 21 eastern, northeastern and midwestern States to lay plans with their candidate.

Because the Willkie house was too small, they met in the Masonic Lodge over the Princess Theatre on North Street, and the matrons of the Eastern Star were deputized to prepare lunch featuring Hoosier Willkie's favorite dish, fried chicken.

To Rushville went New York's J. Russel Sprague, Massachusetts' Sinclair Weeks, Connecticut's Sam Pryor, Minnesota's keynoting young Governor Stassen, Ohio's Taft man, David Ingalls. Pennsylvania's James Torrance, whose boys lost the State by 660,000 in 1936, carried it by 280,000 in 1938, are wondering whether Wendell Willkie is the man who can carry it by 750,000 in November. They sat down in the Lodge room, munched at their 75-c- luncheon, while the ladies of the Eastern Star fluttered happily in the background. They watched the candidate, quick, easy, confident, listened to him, respectful of their judgments on the earthy matters they knew about, direct in his plumbings of their expertness. To the leaders, to Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg and Illinois's Senatorial candidate Wayland ("Curly") Brooks, who stopped by for a chat, he appeared supremely confident that he knew what he was talking about.

By the time the chieftains foregathered after lunch on the Willkie lawn, the campaign was beginning to shape up. Candidate Wilkie had given them a keynote : "Just as the leader expects loyalty and co-operation from every member of his party, and cannot succeed without such cooperation, so is the rank and file of the party entitled to the support and loyalty of the candidate. His campaign tour, hitting the West first, striking at the East and New England in late October, was laid out. "Go back to your states," said he, "and have meetings with your county leaders. Then get them to have similar meetings with precinct workers. I have received fine reports from various parts of the country of tremendous enthusiasm and interest. But that is not enough. There must be organization in nation, State, county and precinct."

As the big man stood on the lawn, pumping hands, slapping backs, grinning at his new friends for the photographers, he called out impulsively: "Is there any doubt that Willkie and McNary are going to be elected? If there was a discordant note in the conference, I did not detect it." He laughed, waved back at the applause, waved at the politicians. "Ask them!" he shouted.

They nodded and grinned easily, for Wendell Willkie's personality is in its way as winning as Roosevelt's.

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