Republican Rebel
NYU historian David Levering Lewis tells
the story of how and why Wendell Willkie, a lifelong Democrat temporarily seized
control of the Republican Party to become its presidential nominee in 1940. This
often told story normally focuses around the Republican Convention where the
eastern establishment finance and media elite orchestrated Willkie’s sixth
ballot victory. Out of that flowed enough Republican support for conscription,
the destroyers for bases deal and lend lease which enabled Roosevelt to
overcome the isolationists in both parties to move our country closer to
confrontation with the Axis powers.
Lewis’ book is far more than that. He
takes us back to Willkie’s progressive roots in rural Indiana where is his
family was enraptured by Bryan and Wilson with the latter’s influence being
making Willkie a full-throated internationalist. Moreover Willkie was a serious
activist as he attended the 1924 and 1932 Democratic conventions. While being
an activist Willkie develops a very strong legal reputation and he rises to
become president of Commonwealth & Southern (C&S), a giant utility
holding company that lives on today as The Southern Company. In his position at
the C&S he takes on the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority and then
most of the New Deal.
Willkie becomes nationally known as a
critic of the New Deal, but with the coming of the 1937-38 recession his
criticisms begin to bite. Although supportive of Social Security and collective
bargaining, he attacked the growing tax and regulatory state that was stifling business
and thereby inhibiting the recovery from the depression. He bests solicitor general
and future Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in a national radio debate in
1938 and from there his presidential prospects take root.
It is here where I have my main
difference with Levering because it was Willkie’s attacks on the New Deal that
made him palatable to the largely isolationist Republican Party. Levering
should have devoted far more effort in this regard in flushing out Willkie’s
economic ideas that drove a dagger into the heart of the tax and regulatory state
the New Deal was building.
I gasped when Lewis recounted Willkie’s acceptance
speech to hundreds of thousands of people in Ellwood, Indiana. He attacked Nazi
Germany for its “barbarous and worse than medieval persecution of the Jews”
calling it “the most tragic in human history.” Roosevelt never went close to
making comments like that, to his eternal discredit. Willkie was also far ahead
of his time with respect to race. He was close friends with NAACP chief Walter
White and he called racism a form of “domestic imperialism.”
Lewis also touches on Willkie’s affair
with Irita Van Doren, book review editor of the New Yok Herald Tribune, who
introduced him to New York literary society. His marriage to his wife Edith was
largely loveless. He also had an affair with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who was
using him to further her husband’s political goals.
After his defeat in 1940 Willkie becomes
Roosevelt’s personal emissary to Churchill and in 1942 he does a round the
world tour for the Administration. Out of that came his bestselling book “One
World” which outlined a new era of de-colonialism and global integration. That
was too much for the Republican Party and Willkie was rejected in the 1944
primaries. He died at 52 in late 1944 just when Roosevelt was toying with the
idea of forming a new liberal political party with Willkie.
Lewis as offered us a good read into an
important aspect of our history where one individual really made a difference
and it saddened me to see how today’s Republican Party is digging itself back
into the isolationist hole of the 1930s.
For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RR5GROLG3YQIJ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
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