The Road Back

At 11 o'clock one night last week a long, dark green train standing in the Northern Pacific yards in Seattle quivered with the first tug of the engine, jolted a little as it gained speed, whistled as it raced toward the East. The Willkie Special was headed for home; the campaign tour that had led through the Southwest, up the Pacific Coast, was half over. The correspondents in the press lounge and the dining car, their stories already filed, argued over their Scotch & sodas--about the Third Term, the merits of Roosevelt and Willkie, the size and meaning of the crowds, the effect of Willkie on them--until their voices grew hoarse with contention, as the candidate's grew husky with campaigning. Tired after eleven days of travel, variously afflicted with colds and indigestion, the wisecracks all laughed at, the arguments all heard before, they were in no mood for history. If they were halfway through one of the greatest political stories in the long record of the U. S., they did not want to hear about it, would have cast a startled eye at any one of their number who had been sophomoric enough to say so.

But behind them lay the dramatic beginning of the Willkie campaign-- the first talks to the silent, enigmatic workmen in the Chicago stockyards, the tension and half-exasperated dismay as Wendell Willkie lost his voice in his first overaggressive campaigning, the doleful predictions that the campaign would be the greatest story in U. S. political history by being its greatest flop. Behind them, too, lay the astonishing crowds. Ahead of them lay the trip over the mountains in flawless Western weather. And ahead of them lay the last weeks in which the issues of the campaign, despite candidates, crowds, arguments, would gradually be clarified.

En Route. Nominee Willkie went East like no other Presidential candidate in history. The things he did & said, the things that happened, were fantastically different from anything in U. S. political memory. The professionals--politicos, newshawks, photographers--had only gradually come to understand that, since Mr. Willkie was no politician, his campaign, in any ordinary sense, would be unpolitical. This was the root cause of the Willkie failures and the Willkie triumphs. He did everything politically wrong on a magnificent scale; when he was right he was terrific.

At Portland he began the parade of promises that he scattered like Johnny Appleseed's seeds all the way across the country. He promised, in precise terms:

To maintain the Wagner Labor Relations Act and the Wage-Hour law; to expand the Social Security Act; to give a place in the Cabinet to the Northwest; to continue soil conservation, commodity loans, rural electrification, farm credit, crop insurance; call a national conference of farm, labor and industry to plan national prosperity; to revise and make more equitable the tax laws; to maintain for the people the gains made toward public power; to provide jobs for every man & woman in the U. S. willing to work; to continue giving relief to all who cannot find work.

Those were specific promises. Oratorically he promised that his crusade would culminate in building "a new America with a higher standard of life than we have ever dreamed of before." And finally, at Yonkers, N. Y., he said flatly: "I pledge a new world."

The Non-Partisan. This was high talk. All the way across the country, in plains, mountains, woods, cities, people listened, went away thinking. This sort of talk drew no applause. Whether it fell flat or sank deep, only Election Day would prove. But the cheers came only for griddle-hot partisan talk, and Willkie's strength or weakness as a candidate still lay in the fact that he is a reasonable man who doesn't know how to talk partisan politics. Too reasonable, said Roosevelt-haters.

Wendell Willkie was a walking, talking political paradox: he was trying to make a non-partisan campaign. Convinced that he will get the basic 16,500,000 regular Republican votes anyway, he struck again & again into Democratic strongholds, into areas that had never seen a Presidential nominee of any stripe, traveled over rusty railspurs that had never held a passenger train. Correspondents agreed that, as a campaigner, he was a terrific in-&-outer. Groups of a half-dozen he wholly charmed; with 300 he was excellent; with 10,000 he was fair; faced by more than 20,000 people he was unsatisfying. Observers wondered: How would he do before 130,000,000?

There was another reason for his ups & downs: he suffered from willful fatigue. Hour after hour, day after day, he harangued, exhorted, pleaded with tiny groups from the train's rear platform. Several times, noting small clusters of people who had wandered down to the tracks to hold up their babies as the train went by, he jerked the bell cord, backed up the train, and blasted away with a lengthy speech before the embarrassed little groups. The day-long strain on his voice and endurance was a constant anxiety to his handlers. But the brute endurance of his big frame and the tireless will to say his say kept him going.

His Beverly Hills voice physician, Dr. Harold Barnard, warned him a hundred times to slow down, talk less. Neither pleading nor orders had effect. Said Dr. Barnard for the umptieth time: "He needs a policeman, not a doctor." One evening last week, as the candidate's voice waned into a hoarse rasp, the doctor ordered him flatly to cut it out, sat comfortably down to dinner. Suddenly the train slowed, stopped. Willkie's voice boomed through the dining-car loudspeaker. He had sighted another cluster of voters. Dr. Barnard sighed, got up, switched off the loudspeaker so that he could enjoy his food. But bull-healthy Mr. Willkie laughed last, if somewhat hoarsely. Dr. Barnard, in the vehemence of his pleading, lost his own voice. An epidemic of colds swept the train, but Willkie stayed well.

The newshawks on the train, used to the easy professionalism of Franklin Roosevelt, came to have a grudging admiration for the Willkie spirit. No candidate since William Jennings Bryan ever fought so hard.

At his only stop in Idaho--Sandpoint--Willkie expressed his great admiration for Senator William H. Borah. At a Washington State stop he forgot, as usual, to endorse the local candidates until someone nudged him. Then he added, as the train started, "Now there isn't anyone running for the Senate from this State. . . ." Panicky aides whispered violently "Chadwick." "Oh, yes," shouted Willkie, ". . . vote for Phil Chadwick." Mr. Chadwick, former American Legion National Commander, is named Stephen. Once he committed a Spoonerism, when he referred to "train-busters" Corcoran & Cohen.

Small boys gathered everywhere to boo. Many sang: "Roosevelt's in the White House, waiting to be elected; Willkie's in the ashcan, waiting to be collected."

At Omaha, stunned by the welcome of 11,000 Republicans, he said gratefully: "You have touched both Mrs. Willkie and I." (But at Madison, Wis., noting that Democrats had charged him with splitting infinitives, and boasted that Actress Katharine Hepburn was against him, he cracked: "All I can say to that is that I admit I split my infinitives and that Robert Montgomery and Mary Pickford are for me.")

These were trivial things, important only to the partisan-minded or the quibblers. More important, as the huge, disorganized cavalcade rolled on, was: What did Willkie say? Was he making sense?

At Seattle, Willkie still abjured the easy partisan ways of vote-getting, refusing to be isolationist in isolationist territory, hewing to his convictions with a courage that still got him little notice and no great praise anywhere.

Here in the old hotbed of labor strife he got specific in lunchbox language to overalled workmen. He told them what made jobs, what killed jobs. The promises made by the New Deal to labor, the promises he was now making--these were minimum guarantees, he said, these were not jobs. "An Administration that wants to do something for labor . . . must make jobs and jobs and jobs."

A $4,000 investment--plants, tools, machinery--is required to make one job, he said, but under the New Deal the employer who puts up money to make a profit is "in the doghouse." He had made his point, Seattle listened respectfully, but the State's war-boom prosperity gave Willkie an answer definite as a factory whistle: a humming lumber business; Boeing Aircraft working three shifts daily making warplanes; a navy yard now open for the first time since the World War.

At Butte, in territory where almost the only Republicans are the absentee Eastern mine owners, Willkie struck at the centralization of power in Washington, illustrating by a reference to a statement by Franklin Roosevelt in April 1937, that the copper price was too high. Copper fell from 17 to 10-c-(--; wages in Montana mines were slashed.

This not only made sense, it made votes. Montana miners know acutely how directly their wages are tied by union contract to the price of copper. Willkie pressed home the point by noting that such a statement by Grover Cleveland could never have had such effect; the President's powers had vastly swollen since the 1890's.

As he sped East the Republican nominee, still learning, changed tactics sharply. He dropped his heated denunciations of Franklin Roosevelt. But he roasted the men around the President as unscrupulous, cynical schemers, intelligentsia, disbelievers in democracy, anxious to hold on to their power. This kind of talk went well everywhere, in Democratic and Republican territory alike. Mr. Willkie had discovered an open secret: the only popular New Dealer is Franklin Roosevelt.

On the way to Omaha two extraordinary Republicans boarded the train. W. W. Waymack, brilliant prize-wanning editor of the Des Moines Register & Tribune, and handsome Representative Clifford Hope of Kansas, ranking minority member of the House Agriculture committee, had come to compound the Willkie farm speech at Omaha. Observers held that the result was in many ways Willkie's most effective speech yet. The theme: that the problems of the farmer, laborer, businessman, investor, consumer are all one problem; that prosperity cannot come to one group only; that the national welfare depends on a unified attack, a unified consideration.

Said Willkie: "The farmer, the worker, the investor and the businessman have been like four horses attached to the same evener, the reins in the hands of a reckless driver, and all horses plunging spasmodically in different directions.

"Those horses must pull together. We cannot hope to save this democracy of ours any other way. If you will charge me with that responsibility I will see to it that the pull is strong and is smooth." Next night, at Madison, Wis., his hearers were mostly students: an intelligent, restless, heckling, cheering audience. Willkie, apparently loving it, thrust-&-parried the hecklers, gradually rose to an oratorical form that astounded the correspondents, who were only now discovering that Willkie doesn't like to talk, he likes to argue. A hostile audience is meat-&-drink to him. It was Willkie's best performance on the trip and his one major speech which was not broadcast.

Next night Willkie entered the Empire City Race Track at Yonkers, N. Y. to make a 20-minute address before 45,000 people from ten States. There, in the heart of one of the wealthiest, most Republican counties in the country (Westchester County, governed by Republicans for more than 30 years, has a $96,000,000 public debt), the candidate made a dramatically successful entrance.

His formal address was well written, soundly argued, effectively organized. Yet partly because of his own hoarse weariness, the speech was unsatisfactory to the Republican crowd present, who applauded sparingly, halfheartedly. Dissatisfied, they called him back. He spoke a kind word for Bruce Barton. Still dissatisfied, they roared for more, more, hotter oratory. A man in the front row jumped up, tore a speech text in half, shouted: "There, that's over! Now tell us!" Puzzled, pleased, the shaggy man returned, and (on the theme: "If we do not prevail this fall, this way of life will pass") lit out with a short impromptu encore that stirred his audience to enthusiasm.

After one day's rest at his No. 1010 Fifth Avenue apartment, Nominee Willkie took the road again, headed for hostile Detroit, where industry is booming again with the beginning of defense work. There he was bombed (missed) with a melon and a metal wastebasket. There, ignoring scattered shouts of "We Want Roosevelt!" he made an able, simple speech in one-syllable words--a plea to U. S. mothers to consider Germany and then to vow that no child of theirs should ever leave home or school without a kindled faith in the U. S.

He promised to clean house in Washington of all the "cynics and unbelievers, the nuts and the bunk-artists." Then he said: "I will make jobs for the young men and women that you are training in the ways of democracy. . . . I believe in America. And I want you to teach our children to believe in America.

"I want you to teach the simple, beautiful principles in which our nation is grounded.

"Let us never be too old--or too cynical --or too lax--or too lazy--or too complacent to teach the words, the precious statements of our American faith--just as they were taught to us, and to our parents and grandparents.

"Put life and reverent devotion into the old ceremonies that some of us have come to take for granted--and some of us have not observed at all.

"Gather your families together on our great national holidays--Independence Day or Lincoln's Birthday--and read to your children the sacred words of the Declaration of Independence, or the Gettysburg Address. These are the living creeds of our American faith. Teach them that way now. Teach them--with all the love for freedom and human dignity that is in your hearts. Consecrate yourselves to the salvation of the nation through devoted, faithful service. Fill every American home and every American schoolroom with the living spirit of American democracy--with belief in ourselves, with belief in one another, with belief in our country and its future.

"Say with your children--and think--and mean--and live every word of this declaration of American faith: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

If this was hokum, it was magnificent hokum. If these words were reasons to vote for Wendell Willkie, they were good reasons. For Mr. Willkie could win only if people had faith--not simply in him--but in his own faith in such words.

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