The Nominee Keeps Going

Wendell Willkie's acceptance speech was behind him, the judgments on it were made and sealed, when he next faced a crowd in Indiana. The judgments were that the Elwood speech was a great deal better than its delivery, that its content would be remembered after its slurred syllables were forgotten. The next crowd Wendell Willkie addressed was not the exacting, sweating multitude which he had numbed and thrilled at Elwood. Before him last week, in the Memorial Park near his wife's home at Rushville, were 10,000 townsmen and countryfolk who simply wanted a look at a candidate whom many of them already knew. He could talk to them without forethought, manuscript, microphones; and he talked at his easy best.

They could laugh with him when he denied that his ownership of five Rush County farms made him a farmer ("I'm a purely conversational farmer. I never have done a stroke of work on a Rush County farm in my life and I hope I never have to. Louis Berkemier and Joe Kramer and the other fellows do the work. I merely do the talking"). They could nod, in sober understanding, when he said that he had spent 37 of his 48 years in their Midwest, and that now: "Bombs are raining down on England. . . . People who live and think as we have lived and thought are being destroyed. . . . There comes to me an overwhelming sense of humility when I think that I am called . . . to preserve the kind of life that you people live here."

He loafed in his mother-in-law's parlor. He led newsmen on a tour of his farms. He announced that he was going to make Rushville his "operating base." But he could not stay there all week; he had to fly to Manhattan, to mind campaign business. Some of it was serious business, so serious that it amounted to public business.

Willkie v. G. O. P.? Candidate Willkie has said that he is for selective military service, for an aggressive foreign policy. Both statements sat poorly on the stomachs of his party's more timorous Congressmen. One of Mr. Willkie's guests at Rushville was Massachusetts' Congressman Joe Martin, who, in the dual role of G. O. P. National Chairman and Republican leader in the House, looms large in the campaign. Joe Martin barely waited to get out of Rushville before announcing that 1) he had not made up his own mind about conscription, 2) he did not expect other Republicans in Congress to follow their candidate automatically on this and other issues. Mr. Martin's No. 1 candidate proceeded on the assumption that more voters were interested in Wendell Willkie than in the discontents of politicos.

Zestfully he jabbed at Franklin Roosevelt--for holding that he was too busy to meet Candidate Willkie in joint debate ("He is President of the United States, but it is equally true that he is running for a Third Term. . . ."); for nonetheless finding time to arrange three speeches in the South next Labor Day; for being secretive about the new U. S.-Canadian defense pact's terms.

Itinerary. Denied toe-to-toe debate with the President, Wendell Willkie declined to deny himself and the U. S. electorate that full discussion which he called "the basis of democracy." He 1) promised to do his utmost to establish a joint Department of National Defense instead of the present War & Navy Departments, in the meantime challenged Mr. Roosevelt to set up a unified air service; 2) plumped for conscription at once.

From Coffeyville, Kans. (where he taught school when he was 21) on Sept. 16, down through Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, on to the Pacific Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle), he will travel back through Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin to Detroit in time for a speech Sept. 30. Seven formal speeches, 55 to 60 platform stops will intersperse this 7,000-mile train tour in 17 days.

His performance on this journey through the country is bound to be crucial for Wendell Willkie. Published last week was the second Gallup Presidential poll. Candidate Willkie led the first one (published Aug. 4) by 77 electoral votes. In the second (taken before his acceptance speech could have had any effect) his lead had dropped to 37 electoral votes. Four States (Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Connecticut) had drifted from the Willkie to the Roosevelt column. Said the Gallup summary, again raising the ghost of Alf Landon: "Willkie's position in the race today, like Governor Landon's at a similar time in 1936, is extremely vulnerable. . . . [But] Mr. Willkie's effectiveness as a campaigner has still to be measured. . . ."

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