The Pittsburgh Press (April 7, 1944)
I DARE SAY —
Travesty
By Florence Fisher Parry
Wendell Willkie is through. That’s what people are saying, the stunned ones and the gloating ones alike.
The Republican Party does not want him. Four years ago, it did. Four years ago, 22,304,755 people voted for him – the greatest number of people who ever cast their votes for any one man, except Franklin D. Roosevelt, for President. No Republican total for any elected President had ever been so high.
But that was four years ago. How could an honest man, a forthright and outspoken man, not afraid to speak the unpopular truth, think for a moment that he could last four years?
Now he is through at 52 years. He finds himself repudiated, denied, unwanted by American people who four years ago whipped themselves into a frenzy of determination that he was to be their President.
It is an American trait. It can happen only here. It is one of the oldest traits in human nature, but elsewhere it has not the opportunity to function so unimpededly. Only here, only in this free, unbridled land, can fickleness function with such utter ruthlessness.
Suicide
There are those, of course, who even now are saying he brought it on himself. He would not listen. And they are speaking truly. That is so. Wendell Willkie is an unmanageable man. His party could not manage him. Even the small and dedicated coterie of disciples who were so willing to work and die for him could not manage him.
Always there were those who were saying to him, “But Wendell, you can’t afford to do this and you cannot afford to say that.”
Looking back upon it now, one might have known he was bound to fail, for, realist though he was, he possessed one fatal trait. He believed with an almighty passion in the American people’s basic common sense; and that belief led him into making the fatal mistake of putting that common sense to too severe a test. He overestimated our intelligence. He lost out because he believed us faithful.
I knew. I knew on the last day of March what would happen in that Wisconsin primary. I knew it by a simple token. This is how and why I knew it:
I was standing by my window looking down at the shoppers. The streets were as crowded as they had been on Christmas Eve. Swarms of people were jamming into the stores and emerging from them heavy with bundles. The streetcars sagged with their human loads. The restaurants were packed. No merchant, no restauranteur, no salesgirl, no policeman had ever known such an Easter shopping frenzy. It was the day before the new tax on luxuries went into effect.
The nightclubs and hotels could not understand such Lenten business! For this, dear reader, was Lent in wartime, on the zero hour of our Allied invasion in Europe. Lent. Invasion. And a frenzied spending spree. And the Red Cross couldn’t meet its quota.
And there was Wendell Willkie up in Wisconsin, pumping his heart out hoarsening his voice again, trying to be heard, trying to make them listen, telling them what they were going to be in for in sacrifice and taxes and post-war burdens. Warning them. Telling them the truth. Exhorting them to face and prepare for what was to follow the war and its crushing, unavoidable, unending cost. Trying to sell them the fantastic idea that I-am-my-brother’s-keeper. Trying to sell them a map of One World.
Campaigning like that! Can you beat it? Pumping his heart out, ruining his chances, killing himself, this American, this man Willkie!
The great loss
Well, they say he had it coming to him. Didn’t he know when to shut up? Would he never know what was good for him?
Look at that man Dewey now, for example. Close-mouthed, noncommittal, Tom Dewey. Now there’s a candidate for you… a man who knew how to avoid taking risks, a man so slick that he couldn’t make a damaging statement or offend a voter! Tom Dewey, our Republican No. 1 prospect for the office of the President of the United States. A wonder boy. The Manhattan go-getter. The GOP’s pet, now.
But I and millions of others are unreconciled. We have not so many great men in this world that we can afford to render one impotent for the work that is ahead.
His prophetic warning should burn into our hearts, pound at our ears, and give our minds no peace, the fearless and honest speech of a man who knows no fear who will not be intimidated, who counts his country’s welfare greater than his own. And who in a moment of his acknowledged defeat, stands still among the great Americans we have today.