Five-a-Day

Wendell Willkie's 1944 future seemed to be staked on the Wisconsin primary of April 4. If he wins a majority of Wiscon sin's 24 delegates, he is still in the running for the G.O.P. nomination. If he does not, practical politicians were ready (& eager) to write him off. Willkie himself chose the battlefield, and it was a tough one. He chose a state partly within the reading orbit of the Chicago Tribune, a state that pledged its votes to Dewey in 1940.

He chose a state raised on LaFollette progressivism -- but also on LaFollette isolationism. He went into battle against enemies who were not there: Dewey, Stassen, MacArthur--men who by choice or necessity were "ghost candidates." It was uphill work.

Willkie began poorly in Richland Center, deep in dairyland. Farmers gave up their Saturday night shopping to jam 2,400 strong into a red-brick high school. They sat apathetic through a long farm speech, delivered without fire. Then Willkie pushed on, to Neenah, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac. His party, including 25 correspondents, rolled along snow-covered countryside in seven shiny rented 1942 Dodges. Veteran Scripps-Howard Newsman Tom Stokes was reminded of a "glamorous Broadway star going back to the five-a-day ... or a major-league pitcher back to the minors. ... All the trappings of the big time still cling, but it's all in miniature."

G.O.P. Birthplace. In Oshkosh, where 400 persons left their midmorning work to listen, Willkie first warmed up. For the first time, too, his hearers warmed. He lashed at Tom Dewey, at those who think it "clever to be silent, that it is smart poli tics to manipulate the nomination." In Ripon, birthplace of the Republican party, he put the argument on a scholarly plane, in a speech acclaimed by Columnist Marquis Childs as "one of the vital docu ments in our political history. . . . Our grandchildren may be reading it in history books 50 years from now."

Said Wendell Willkie at Ripon : the Republican party first came into power because in the Whig party before it "men sought to trim and hedge rather than to face the dangers, or talked trivialities, remaining silent on the basic issues, hoping thereby to avoid offending divergent elements. ... A certain cynicism characterized the politics of the day -- a cynicism which has had its parallel in our own time.

Nobody expected much of the politicians. . . . Yet we can triumph only if the people find in our party not a mere instrument for personal ambition, but the representation of principles."

To the Grey-Hairs. Willkie himself hedged not at all to win isolationist support. In Appleton, he said that any Republican who had the narrow nationalist support of the Chicago Tribune would go down to defeat. In Green Bay, he declared "I am in complete disagreement with the President's Vichy policy, his Darlan policy, and his dealings with the Fascist forces of Italy." But he forthrightly defended his own international sympathies, his early espousal of Lend-Lease ("I never will be prouder of anything in my life").

Three or four times a day, at luncheons, dinners, meetings, in restaurants, Elks Lodges, barns, Willkie spoke. Mostly his audiences were grey-haired. (Only at Ripon did soldiers forgo juke boxes and movies to listen to him.) Sometimes his voice was harsh from the strain, and from a cold he had caught. In Sheboygan, the Deweyite county G.O.P. chairman refused to welcome him. A rump group of Republicans rented the city armory, and packed it on a rainy night with 5,000 people--the biggest crowd so far. Willkie was in full steam: pounding with his fists, shaking his head as he pushed home a two-way attack--on his own party's Tribune followers, and on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The Milwaukee Sentinel reporter, who had sent an early story reporting a lull in the Willkie drive, hurriedly telephoned his paper to change it.

Virtuoso Performance. Altogether, in two weeks of intense campaigning, Willkie was marching 1,500 miles across Wisconsin. If his audiences were at the five-a-day level, he gave each & all the virtuoso treatment of a Metropolitan Opera appearance. No one knew better than Wendell Willkie that a Wisconsin victory might not give him the G.O.P. nomination, but a Wisconsin defeat this week might well finish him. He was a fighter, and he fought.

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