Willkie's Issue

Last week Wendell Willkie named the issue of the 1940 campaign: state socialism.

Whatever you want to call it, he said, "national socialism, national capitalism or a complete concentration of power in a centralized government of the economic forces of the country. . . . That is the issue."

There was much more in Wendell Willkie's preachments last week.

But that the 1940 campaign, unlike most U. S. political battles, reached into almost every aspect of U. S. life, became clearer as election day and the future approached with locomotive speed. In the long debate over the Third Term before the Chicago Convention, there had been no discussion of the long-term effects on the U. S. of a continuation and extension of New Deal policies. That debate was narrowed to the question: Would Franklin Roosevelt run again?* Last week The Christian Century came out for Wendell Willkie on the ground that a third term for Franklin Roosevelt involved incalculable changes in the U. S. two-party system of Government and the economic order upon which it is based.

Most vigorously intellectual of U. S. Protestant religious weeklies, The Christian Century is edited by tall, quiet, Dr. Charles Clayton Morrison, has been kept rigorously nondenominational, vigorously liberal. To The Christian Century neither candidate is perfect--"black and white on one side and white and black on the other"--and it does not oppose President Roosevelt's re-election on the grounds of venerable tradition:

"We are opposed to a third term for any president, because the very fact that he covets it, and that he has a fighting chance to win it, implies the presence of the precise conditions which make a third term dangerous for the country." Its main point: the 1940 election is more momentous than any since 1860 and 1864, because the voters are called upon to decide questions that vitally affect U. S. governmental forms and the U. S. economic system. At stake is the third term and the economic policies of the New Deal; to The Christian Century they are inextricably linked. "The traditional barrier against more than two terms for any President reflects the instinctive opposition of American democracy to fascism." Though Jefferson did not know the word "fascism," he knew absolutism; protection against it in U. S. democracy depended on the patriotic honor of democratic leaders.

"The essence of fascism is one-party government. Essential to a democracy is a two-party system. . . . The political situation in America is now, for the first time in our national history, favorable to the consolidation of interested groups into a one-party system. ..."

The Christian Century argued that while interested groups, some predatory, always unite behind a leader, there is no threat of fascism if after two terms the leader automatically goes. The Christian Century attached no blame to President Roosevelt for the events and his leadership that poured enormous political power into his hands--the Roosevelt landslides, the relief measures which willy-nilly became political forces, the social reforms which were "not only legitimate but necessary" --but "if Mr. Roosevelt breaks through the third term barrier, he will break through the only inhibition which our system of government recognizes as a check against the one-party system, which spells fascism and totalitarianism." For the reforms and emergency measures of the first Roosevelt Administration The Christian Century gave all praise, but in the second it believed that Mr. Roosevelt had exhausted his constructive resources for solving the problem of national prosperity. "His second term has been economically sterile. He offers no hope and makes no promise of doing more in a third term than in his second."

Whether or not Wendell Willkie can end unemployment by increasing production and multiplying jobs, The Christian Century was for him because it preferred "as president a man who sees the realities of our predicament clearly enough to promise that he will try to save us, rather than one who cavalierly pretends that we are already saved." And it saw against him such powerful forces working to establish a one-party system that, if they succeed, "the possibility of creating a formidable opposition party will vanish for a long time to come." For the makings of an American fascism by way of a one-party Government, The Christian Century listed: 1) the vast political machines; 2) the Solid South; 3) "the economic blocs grateful for his [the President's] special legislation"; 4) peacetime conscription; 5) emergency "partly inevitable, partly shaped to political ends." Add the doctrine of the indispensable leader, "and you have a road to fascism paved even more smoothly than the road by which Mussolini and Hitler came to power."

The Christian Century appeared before Wendell Willkie named state socialism as the goal of New Deal economic policies. Said Wendell Willkie: he opposed state socialism not to defend the ownership of property, or the right of men to make money, but because "I know of no way to maintain freedom for the individual under such a system."

The means by which the New Deal will socialize U. S. industry, he said, is the public debt; its momentous increase, together with the added increase under the possibility of war, means that "the Federal Government gradually takes over the economic instrumentalities of this country." His statement of the importance of the 1940 campaign: the people are called to decide for or against the socialization of the U. S. "If you are of that school of thought that thinks that society would be happier and men would lead more pleasant lives if all of the economic instrumentalities of the nation were controlled by the State, then you should . . . follow the banner of the third term candidate.

"If, on the other hand . . . you are against that process, then you should join under the banner of Wendell Willkie."

He did not speak for the democratic system as a sentimental issue: "Can we keep alive a government diffused among the people instead of concentrated in single hands? Can we keep alive a society that is solvent and does not become socialized and still make that society effective? ... I think this democratic way of life is not alone the most pleasant, but I think it can be made the most effective. That is my thesis, that is my belief, that is what I am dedicated to. That is what I would die for. Nothing in all this world, nothing outside of the affections of my own family, mean half so much to me as the fight to preserve that for America. And that aside from the trivialities of the campaign, that aside from the byplays of the campaign, that aside from the smears and things of that kind in the campaign is the basic issue and on that platform I stand and on that platform I fight."

*Pundit Walter Lippmann pondered some of the issues last year, came out with a flat prediction that the President would not run again (TIME, Nov. 27, 1939). Analyzing the Great Third Term mystery as a detective following the deductive method, Mr. Lippmann pontificated: "The only man who could conceivably obtain a third term is one who convinced the country that he did not want it. ... The effort to get a third term would convince the country that the man must not have it, it would be ... using the power of his office to perpetuate himself in office. . . ."

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