The Pittsburgh Press (August 17, 1940)
WILLKIE READY TO GIVE FIRST MAJOR SPEECH
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Nominee to State Stand on Vital Issues in Elwood Address
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By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press Staff Writer
Elwood, Ind., Aug. 17 –
Wendell Lewis Willkie, the corn belt Tom Sawyer who made good, returns to the town of his birth today to accept the leadership of the Republican Party as its presidential nominee and to reveal to the nation his stand on major issues of state.
He was scheduled to leave Rushville, Ind., home town of his wife, Mrs. Edith Wilk Willkie, at 12:30 p.m. (EST) to deliver the long-awaited acceptance speech in which he will declare his policies on foreign affairs, conscription, national administration and agriculture. The address will be broadcast by three national networks (NBC, CBS and MBS) from Callaway Park where an estimated 200,000 Republicans from all states will be assembled.
KDKA, WCAE and WJAS will broadcast Mr. Willkie’s address at 5 p.m. today. WCAE also will broadcast from Elwood at 4 p.m. today and WJAS at 4:15 p.m. today.
He comes from Rushville, approximately 50 miles to the north, by special train.
The town was in festival mood for the occasion with bunting and decorations and pictures of the candidate hung everywhere. Special trains arrived at the little Elwood stations and poured out the thousands of spectators who jammed the streets of this town and almost crowded out its 11,000 citizens. Highways were lined with autos bringing more spectators.
The crowd was mostly carnival in mood but behind the whoop-la was the serious business of a major political party attempting a comeback after two national elections in which it was almost shut out. This is an attempt to rally the agricultural Middle West around the Republican standard and away from President Roosevelt and the New Deal.
It was the first major political occasion here since William Jennings Bryan spoke during one of his campaigns for the presidency. That time, it rained inches. But today, Indiana is suffering from drought and Democrats, the few who made themselves known, hoped that it would not rain today either.
“He’s lucky,” they said. “And if it rains, Mr. Willkie will take credit for ending the drought.”
From Washington came Republican members of Congress to hear their new leader and learn what will be his attitude on the vital issues before the nation in the present emergency. Congress had recessed in the midst of hot debate over conscription, one of the issues on which Mr. Willkie was expected to speak.
The ceremonies began early with a concert by bands and informal entertainment at Callaway Park. When the Willkies arrive, the nominee will confer with Akron, Ohio American Legion buddies before leaving the train for the high school.
At 4 p.m., Mr. Willkie was scheduled to appear on the high school steps where he will give a “little talk” and accept the political marshal’s baton which will be presented by Joseph W. Martin Jr., House Majority Leader and Republican National Committee Chairman. The ceremony at the school was expected to be mostly “hometown atmosphere” to set the stage for the address art Callaway Park.
At the park, a dusty, wooded grove just a few blocks from the place where Mfr. Willkie was born, he will be introduced by Mr. Martin and formally notified of his nomination, a mere formality for he already had accepted the nomination at the close of the Republican National Convention at Philadelphia.
Lands Office Business
Arrangements have been made to park 40,000 autos on 300 acres of farm land adjacent to Callaway Park. Farmers were paid 60 cents or more a bushel on theoretical corn yields of 60 bushels to the acre for the privilege of converting their land to parking lots.
Hot dog and soft drink concessionaires looked forward to land office business, and placed orders for 384,000 buns, as many hot dogs and hamburgers and approximately 400,000 bottles of soft drinks of every description. There were more than 300 refreshment stands erected at the park and on roads leading to it from town.
Souvenir stands and stores were on every hand, selling banners, pennants, postcards, campaign biographies, and all the other things that make up a U.S. political campaign. Beer and whisky emporiums were jammed with townspeople and visitors.
WASHINGTON AGOG OVER WILLKIE TALK
Washington, Aug. 17 –
Never before, according to some of the oldest political inhabitants of the national capital, has there been so much interest in an acceptance address as there is about the speech this afternoon of Wendell Willkie, Republican nominee for the Presidency.
What will Willkie say?
The question displaces predictions of previous presidential campaigns that the nominees would follow dry formulas based on party platforms.
The uncertainty about what Mr. Willkie will say is another unusual feature of the 1940 campaign, which is distinguished also by the first tryout of the third term tradition, and by the danger of this country becoming involved in another World War.
Foremost in the speculation is what position the Republican nominee will take on the issue of peacetime military conscription. The subject was not mentioned in either the Democratic or Republican Party platforms. It has become a raging issue of the Senate in recent weeks, and is scheduled for the same prominence in the House.
Mr. Roosevelt has endorsed the principle of selective service, while refraining from specific endorsement of the Burke-Wadsworth draft bill. Army conscription never has been used in times of peace in this country.
If Mr. Willkie should take the same or approximately the same position as Mr. Roosevelt, a number of Republican members in both the Senate and House will be “out on a limb.”
Among them are Senators Vandenberg (MI) and Taft (OH), both of whom have declared against a peacetime draft. Both were candidates for the presidential nomination which Mr. Willkie won.
Among House Republicans who have declared against peacetime conscription are two Allegheny County Congressmen, Robert J. Corbett and John McDowell. More than 50 other Republican House members have sent telegrams to Mr. Willkie, urging him to oppose a peacetime draft.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 18, 1940)
WILLKIE BACKS DRAFT, BRITISH AID
Challenges The President To Series Of Debates
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CANDIDATE RAPS ‘PANIC POLICIES’
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‘Political Persecutions’ Laid To New Deal Tax Program; Spending Denounced
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By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press Staff Writer
Elwood, Ind., Aug. 17 –
Wendell Lewis Willkie accepted the Republican nomination for President today in an address in which he endorsed conscription and material aid to Great Britain as national defense measures and suggested that President Roosevelt may have been “deliberately inciting us to war.”
He accepted the nomination almost as an afterthought and said that party lines were down. Nothing could prove it better than the nomination of himself – a liberal Democrat – by the G.O.P., he said. He invited all races, creeds and colors to join the battle for “the preservation of American democracy” and challenged Mr. Roosevelt to meet him in a nationwide stumping tour to debate before the same audiences and from the same platforms the fundamental issues of the campaign.
That was Mr. Willkie’s platform today and it took precedence over the document contrived of sweat, compromise and anxious anger by the Republican Platform Committee which met at the Philadelphia convention.
The candidate’s home town was out en masse to cheer the small town boy who had made good. Perhaps as many as 250,000 others from Coast to Coast were in Callaway Park to see the Republican leader of the third attempt to stop Roosevelt and the first attempt to block an third term.
What the crowd came to hear was that Mr. Willkie proposed to do and he outlined in general a program which embraced large segments of New Deal policies but sharply protested the manner in which Mr. Roosevelt and his aides had administered then nation’s affairs.
The ceremonies were as rural as an ice cream social – but in dead earnest, to use Mr. Willkie’s own words.
“I want to meet the champ,” he had said when he was nominated. So he called out Mr. Roosevelt today for face-to-face meetings that would top the Lincoln-Douglas debates preceding the Civil War, if the dare was accepted.
He made a pounding attack on Mr. Roosevelt as a President and leader and Mr. Willkie proposed to carry it on. He charged that the President “distorted” liberalism and was leading the United States down the road toward destruction and dictatorship trod by France under the regime of Leon Blum, who may face trail in France.
Gallup Poll on the Presidential Contest
The second nation-wide Gallup poll on Willkie vs. Roosevelt will appear next Sunday in The Press.
He said Mr. Roosevelt employed political persecution through taxes, that he inclined class against class and that the New Deal had distributed poverty instead of the more abundant life among the people.
**“Because I am a businessman connected with a large company, the doctrinarians of the opposition have attacked me as an opponent of liberalism,” he said. “But I was a liberal before many of these men had heard of the word and I fought for many of the reforms of the elder LaFollette, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before another Roosevelt adopted – and distorted – liberalism.”
Mr. Willkie called the roll of spending and unemployment.
“Where is the recovery?” Mr. Willkie asked.
On that theme, he based his first campaign appeal. Burt he endorsed substantially great areas of the New Deal fabric. Specifically, he committed himself to that much of the New Deal policy as id covered in the following quotation from an address by President Roosevelt:
We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation, and at the same time we will harness the use of those resources in order that we, ourselves in the Americas, may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and any defense.
Mr. Willkie said that is a pledge of material aid to Great Britain in a life-or-death struggle with Nazi Germany.
I should like to state that I am in agreement with these two (Roosevelt) principles, as I understand them—and I don’t understand them as implying military involvement in the present hostilities. As an American citizen, I am glad to pledge my wholehearted support to the President in whatever action he may take in accordance with these principles.
That led Mr. Willkie to a slashing attack on Roosevelt foreign policies.
“I cannot follow the President–”, he said.
There have been occasions when many of us have wondered if he is deliberately inciting us to war. I trust that I have made it plain that in the defense of America, and of our liberties, I should not hesitate to stand for war.
But Mr. Willkie said the President had “dabbled in inflammatory statements and manufactured panics” instead of fulfilling the first duty of a President – “to try to maintain peace.”
He said Mr. Roosevelt had caused bitterness and confusion “for the sake of a little political oratory,” secretly meddled in European affairs and unscrupulously caused other nations to hope for more aid than the United States could offer.
“Walk softly and carry a big stick” was the motto of Theodore Roosevelt. It is still good American doctrine for 1940. Under the present administration the country has been placed in the false position of shouting insults and not even beginning to prepare to take the consequences.
But while he has thus been quick to tell other nations what they ought to do, Mr. Roosevelt has been slow to take the American people into his confidence. He has hesitated to report facts, to explain situations, or to define realistic objectives.
If I am elected President, I plan to reverse both of these policies. I should threaten foreign governments only when our country was threatened by them and when I was ready to act; and I should consider our diplomacy as part of the people’s business.
Candor in these times is the hope of democracy.
In few more than a score of words, Mr. Willkie disposed of conscription – the draft – which has had Congress in throaty uproar for many days:
Some form of selective service is the only democratic way in which to secure the trained and competent manpower we need for national defense.
'Go Get ‘Em’
He drew terrific applause with his challenge to Mr. Roosevelt to appear on the same platforms to debate the issues of the day with him.
There were shouts of “Go get 'em! Win!” and the applause lasted two minutes.
If Mr. Roosevelt accepts Mr. Willkie’s challenge, it will be the most significant political debate since Abraham Lincoln contested in a historical senatorial campaign in Illinois in 1858, just before the Civil War.
His barb at Mr. Roosevelt’s third term bid also brought cheers which again interrupted his speech, and he had to repeat part of the sentence which had been drowned out by the applause.
Mr. Willkie, enjoying his day of triumph in his hometown, kept his coat on despite the terrific heat, and the perspiration rolled down his cheeks in big drops as he spoke to the cheering throngs.
“Honestly face our relationship with Great Britain,” he urged – and demanded admission, frank and open, that the loss of the British fleet would greatly weaken our defense and perhaps enable Germany to dominate the Atlantic Ocean.
This would be a calamity for us.
We must face a brutal, perhaps, a terrible fact. Our way of life is in competition with Hitler’s way of life.
This competition is not merely one of armaments. It is a competition of energy against energy, production against production, brains against brains, salesmanship against salesmanship. In facing it we should have no fear. History shows that our way of life is the stronger way.
Free men are the strongest men. But we cannot just take this historical fact for granted. We must make it live. If we are to outdistance the totalitarian powers, we must arise to a new life of adventure and discovery.
I promise, by returning to those same American principles that over-came German autocracy once before, both in business and in war, to out-distance Hitler in any contests he chooses in 1940 or after.
And I promise that when we beat him, we shall beat him on our own terms, in our own American way.
But Mr. Willkie warned that the “American way” as he would direct it would be the hard way of toil and taxes, sacrifice and suffering and that every man and woman would feel the biting fatigue of emergency effort.
Assails New Deal
You will have to be hard of muscle, clear of head, brave of heart.
I shall not lead you down the easy road. I shall lead you down the road of sacrifice and of service to your country.
Mr. Willkie centered his attack on Mr. Roosevelt and suspected motives and ultimate ends of the New Deal rather than a total challenge to the accomplishments of the Roosevelt administrations to date. He identified himself as a “liberal Democrat” and called the roll of his own liberalism in a terse benediction upon many major policies of the New Deal.
“I believe that the forces of free enterprise must be regulated. I am opposed to business monopolies,” he said – and in series he endorsed: Collective bargaining, minimum wages and maximum hours standards and their constant improvement; Federal regulations of interstate securities, markets and of banking; adequate Federal old age pensions and unemployment allowances; Federal responsibility in equalizing the lot of the farmer with that of the manufacturer; co-operative buying and selling; full extension of rural electrification.
Touches Farm Issue
If equality for the farmer cannot be achieved, “by parity of prices,” Mr. Willkie said, “other means must be found, with the least possible regimentation of the farmers affairs.”
“The Government, we were told, must care for those who had no other means of support,” he said, referring to Mr. Roosevelt’s statement of relief policies in 1933.
With this proposition all of us agreed. And we still hold firmly to the principle that those whom private industry cannot support must be supported by government agency, whether federal or state.
But that did not take of Mr. Roosevelt’s “forgotten man,” Mr. Willkie said. He contended that the American jobless man wanted work and a living wage – “this right to take part in our great American venture.”
“But this administration never remembered that,” Mr. Willkie said. “It launched a vitriolic and well-planned attack against those very industries in which the forgotten man wanted a chance.”
It carried on a propaganda campaign to convince the people that businessmen are iniquitous. It seized upon its taxing power for political purposes. It has levied taxes to punish one man, to force another to do what he did not want to do, to take a crack at a third whom some government agency disliked, or to promote the experiments of a brain-trust.
He pledged that the Republican tax plan would have two simple principles, only: to levy taxes in accordance with ability to pay and primarily to levy merely to raise money.
“Under the New Deal,” Mr. Willkie said, “American industry has been stationary for a decade and for the first time in our history.”
Cites Unemployment
He said it was “a statement of fact and no longer a political accusation,” that “the New Deal has failed in its program of economic rehabilitation–nine million or 10 million jobless; approximately six million families on relief; 60 billion dollars spent.”
And I make this grave charge against this administration:
I charge that the course this administration is following will lead us, like France, to the end of the road. I say that this course will lead us to economic disintegration and dictatorship. I say that we must substitute for the philosophy of spending, the philosophy of production. You cannot buy freedom. You must make freedom.
Challenges Roosevelt
This is a serious charge. It is not made lightly. And it cannot be lightly avoided by the opposition.
I, therefore, have this proposal to make. The President stated in his acceptance speech that he does not have either “the time or the inclination to engage in purely political debate.” I do not want to engage in purely political debate, either. But I believe that the tradition of face to face debate is justly honored among our American political traditions. I believe that we should set an example, at this time, of the workings of American democracy. And I do not think that the issues of stake are “purely political.” In my opinion they concern the life and death of democracy.
I propose that during the next two and a half months, the President and I appear together on public platforms in various parts of the country, to debate the fundamental issues of this campaign. These are the problems of our great domestic economy, as well as of our national defense: The problems of agriculture, of labor, of industry, of finance, of the government’s relationship to the people, and of our preparations to guard against assault.
And also I should like to debate the question of the assumption by this President, in seeking a third term, of a greater public confidence than was accorded to our presidential giants, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.
Accepts Nomination
I make this proposal respectfully to a man upon whose shoulders rest the cares of the state. But I make it in dead earnest.
And then, with his speech almost ended, Mr. Willkie said simply that he accepted the nomination of the Republican Party for President of the United States. Acceptance speeches weeks after nominating conventions are part of the tradition of our pioneer past, Mr. Willkie explained.
You all know that I accepted at Philadelphia the nomination of the Republican Party. But I take pride in the traditions and not in charge for the mere sake of overthrowing precedents.
Notified by Martin
Mr. Willkie was notified formally of his nomination by Representative Joe W. Martin of Massachusetts, Housed Republican leader and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Mr. Martin told Mr. Willkie that “the fate of the free republic established by the founding fathers at Philadelphia when they wrote the Constitution hangs in the balance” and that it was the grave responsibility of Republicans to see to the defeat of the third term effort of “men burning with an insatiable lust for power.”
“You are not the hope of one political party; you are the hope of a majority of the American people,” Mr. Martin said.
They want you boldly to lead this great fight, this battle to perpetuate free government in this land of liberty, to restore equal justice, opportunities and jobs to the American people; to keep this country safe and secure from attacks within and without our boundaries.
Ovation at School
Before his address at Callaway Park, Mr. Willkie made a brief appearance for his “home coming” on the steps of the Elwood High School.
The crowd which had stood in front of the school for hours to welcome him gave Mr. Willkie a full-throated ovation of “We want Willkie” when he mounted a platform and stood beneath a stone inscription, “The hope of our nation,” over the door.