The Meaning of Willkie

Last week Franklin Roosevelt, as President of the United States, heard news of a matter about which plain citizens could only speculate. It was word of the powerful British Fleet (see p. 16). Like an echo blurring as it bounded back, that historic whisper turned into rumors that did not quite make sense, statements that did not hang together, fragmentary speculation whose point people could not quite catch. And it was drowned out by the clamorous news from Philadelphia, where on the sixth ballot of the 22nd Republican National Convention, Wendell Willkie of Indiana was nominated for President.

Few U. S. citizens could agree on what that first loud blast of news from Philadelphia had said. But everybody knew he had heard something loud. The fight was close; it was dramatic; the issues were grave (see p. 10). And, like some carefully planned fireworks display that did not work out as it was supposed to, the whole show appealed to a U. S. sense of humor, with booms exploding ahead of time, crowds wandering off to watch a foot race as the well-rehearsed Fourth of July oration came to an unheard climax, experts puzzling over political fizzles, like kids trying to figure out why a firecracker had not gone off.

Greatest paradox was that the innumerable explanations of the Willkie victory converged at a single point. That point was Franklin Roosevelt. To Cartoonist Harry Bressler of the New Haven Journal-Courier, it was simple: he pictured a triumphant, rearing-back Roosevelt looming over the delegates like one of mountain-spoiling Sculptor Gutzon Borglum's gigantic stone visages. More complex was the realization that more than any other candidate Wendell Willkie stood as a symbol of opposition to the New Deal --not to its ideas, to which he subscribed far more than many a Republican present, but as a businessman who had best summed up business' case against its administration, its record, its mood.

Yet there was scarcely a Republican at Philadelphia who could not deliver a well-phrased attack on the New Deal, except among the inarticulate amateurs of the galleries, who could find their voice only to shout "We want Willkie!" And ever since 1932, hostility to Roosevelt has been a potent U. S. political force--but it had not sent plain citizens out buttonholing their fellows, swallowing their self-consciousness, selling buttons naming their candidate, circulating petitions with an embarrassed ardor.

To Cartoonist H. E. Homan in the Brooklyn Citizen, it was simple. He, too, saw a non-Republican on the convention floor dominating delegates' decisions: the menacing figure of Hitler. And last week, when the fireworks were over, it was plain that domestic and foreign issues had met on the convention floor, regardless of studied and cautious decisions on foreign policy in the platform.

The amateurs who had been passively for Willkie in the days when his nomination was a political impossibility had found their voice. They would not have organized Willkie clubs, badgered Republican delegates, trekked uninvited to Phila delphia, if the voltage of U. S. political life had not been stepped up by Hitler's conquests. Nor would they have blundered ahead to do the impossible if Adolf Hitler had not plunged through the Low Countries into France.

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