Stokes: Quiet campaign
By Thomas L. Stokes
Milwaukee, Wisconsin –
If the mood of the people here is any guide, political campaigning in this critical war year is likely to be subdued and restrained.
This is an observation from watching Wendell L. Willkie’s campaign here for convention delegates to be elected in the April primary.
He has spoken to dozens of audiences. His hearers have been attentive rather than noisy and exuberant.
Wisconsin people are not, by and large, of emotional caliber. But there seems to be a deeper seriousness in their attitude. There is little hurrah and excitement, even though Mr. Willkie is not holding himself in. He discarded, after his first two formal speeches, the use of prepared manuscripts, and is speaking extemporaneously, and, in his best, he has power to lift an audience.
He never was better nor more effective in his platform manner in the opinion of this writer who followed him throughout his 1940 campaign.
But the blanket of war seems to have dropped down to muffle the usual sound and fury of political campaigns.
Servicemen not interested
You can see why when you look over the audiences. They are mostly middle-aged and old people who have other things on their minds now – those boys far off fighting somewhere.
Incidentally, the audiences are devoid of men in the service, those at home on furlough – and you see them in the streets – prefer apparently the more delectable pleasures of home, the girl on the sofa, or across the table at the cocktail bar.
The war hangs over everything.
All this leads one to wonder whether, in these times, there will be much sympathy for a type of political campaigning in which some Republican leaders of the old school seem ready to indulge themselves, a type of campaigning that Mr. Willkie has denounced.
This is the exploiting of the necessary sacrifices on the home front, what Mr. Willkie called “seeking to build strength on the people’s transitory wartime complaints and discontents,” and appealing to groups of nationals of other countries here who may be discomfited by some phase of foreign policy affecting their homeland, such as the Irish and the Poles.
Invitation to defeat
Mr. Willkie struck at such tactics as unworthy of the Republican Party. They will invite defeat, he said, and if the party resorts to them, it deserves defeat.
National Republican Chairman Harrison Spangler has predicted that nationality groups in this country would desert the Democratic Party in large numbers because of administration policies affecting smaller nations, and National Committeeman Werner W. Schroeder of Illinois has stressed taxes, rationing, and wartime regimentation.
Typical excerpts of Mr. Schroeder’s speech follow:
America today is bound in the chains of taxes and bureaucracy. The tax collector is the most grasping partner in every business; the greediest eater at every table; the most expensive child in every household.
With him, as the unbidden guest of every American, is his blood brother, that son of the New Deal, the bureaucrat. He is with you at every meal, telling you what coffee, sugar, bacon, canned goods and other foods you can and cannot consume.
He prescribes the shows you buy and the cut of your suit. He limits your tires and gasoline, while Lend-Leasing it to all the world–