The Pittsburgh Press (February 4, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
Two Americans
By Florence Fisher Parry
Very close together came the deaths of two of America’s finest liberals: Wendell Willkie and William Allen White. Both men were Republicans, but Republicans with a difference. They were also Democrats in the intrinsic sense, not the party sense, of the word. They believed in the democratic system; they held dear our republic and worked and prayed to keep it a republic. They believed in free enterprise. They knew – and preached – that the capitalistic system was the only way to preserve true democracy in our country.
They were men without prejudice, they invited the opinions of those with whom they did not agree and respected those opinions although not holding to them themselves. Both men voted against Franklin D. Roosevelt; held his philosophy of government to be impracticable. Yet they were his friends, not his enemies; and were quick to concede to him those virtues and accomplishments which most other Republicans begrudged and were loath to acknowledge.
Looking back now at the careers of Wendell Willkie and William Allen White, we realize that they were Americans born – not before their time – but in its very midst, not prophets, but interpreters of the very present.
We need only consider how short a time ago it was that Mr. Willkie died to have it borne in upon us how we have changed since – how we have come up to him, as it were – in our thinking.
Were he to have burst upon the public consciousness now – as he did just before 1940 – nothing in his philosophy of One World would have been unacceptable to us – no, not even to the most conservative Republican. And, on the other hand, his Republicanism – his respect for and championship of free enterprise and the capitalistic system in its most rigorous application, would have been acceptable to growing numbers of Democrats who today view with suspicion and fear the growing revolution already openly avowed by its militant disciples in our labor parties.
Autobiography
I regard Wendell Willkie’s death – at this tragic crisis in our history – the most lamentable loss this country has sustained since the death of Abraham Lincoln. The difference is that Lincoln had already served his country and set the pattern for our reborn republic before his death precipitated the tragic era that dogged the South; while Wendell Willkie died before the promise of his leadership and strength was given fulfillment.
We need only picture what this country would be like now with a man of Willkie’s strength and good will to lead it out of discord into harmony, to realize the fearful loss his death dealt this America.
In William Allen White we had quite another kind of personality: a blend of Mark Twain and Willkie and – yes – even Roosevelt, in his makeup. You know it was said of him that “he was a New Dealer three and a half years out of every four, reserving the other six months to supporting the Republican candidate.”
I am delighted to know that we soon shall have his autobiography. It ought to be one of the greatest testaments to the American way of life yet written. For although he was a great editor and a powerful political influence, he remained, all his life, a small-town man, making felt in his incomparable editorials in the Emporia Gazette the very pulse of America – not the uneven and often fevered pulse of her metropolises, but the steady heartbeat of her small towns and farms and the grass roots of her.
Warning
The other day I read a so-called advertisement, full-page, in Newsweek. The sentiment it expressed seemed to me to have sprung right from the pen of William Allen White; and I fancied I could hear its strong ring in the voice of Wendell Willkie as he reminded us, as always was his wont, what we had in this America, and how easily we could lose it, even as other peoples lost their freedom by listening to the voices of iconoclasts who called themselves saviors…
This is what the ad said:
“If communism and socialism are so wonderful (as many people would have you believe) then why do the largest and most experienced communistic country in the world (Russia) and the largest socialistic country in the world (England) have to come to this capitalistic country to borrow money?
“America is the only major country where people have been able to produce enough for their own wants and have a surplus. The countries with the ‘more abundant life’ want and seem to need that surplus.
“Doesn’t it look as though this capitalism is something so good we had better keep it? If we think so, we had better act like it, for there are many things going on here that will (and are intended to) kill capitalism.
“And there won’t be any country we can borrow from.”
Reading this prophetic warning, Mr. Willkie and Mr. White would have nodded, I know.