Almost President (48 page)

The problem with the
Digest
sample was that automobile and telephone owners in 1936 were the well-to-do, and the country was still in the grips of the Great Depression. The wealthy were more likely to vote Republican. Further, the
Digest
depended upon a voluntary response, which increased the bias because those angry at the status quo have a greater incentive to respond. The angry turned out to be in the minority.

Landon, an oil man who had served two terms as an effective progressive governor, ended up winning only two states, Vermont and Maine. He believed many New Deal programs were poorly executed and wasteful but supported their and Roosevelt's aims. While surrogates charged FDR was leading the nation into socialism, Landon said, “I do not believe the Jeffersonian theory that ‘the best government is the one that governs the least' can be applied today.” He was therefore criticized for a lack of passion and for a lack of effort on the campaign trail. Landon later looked at the results, with Roosevelt winning nearly 61 percent of the vote, and countered, “I don't think that it would have made any difference what kind of a campaign I made. . . . That is one consolation you get out of a good licking.”

Landon never ran for office again but remained a progressive voice in the Republican Party, later endorsing portions of Lyndon Johnson's “Great Society,” particularly Medicare. Known as the “Grand Old Man of the Grand Old Party,” Landon lived to be one hundred, old enough to enjoy watching his daughter, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, be elected to the U.S. Senate in 1978.

Meanwhile, Americans still argue over polls, baffled that a sample of as few as five hundred voters can usually accurately predict a presidential election and wondering when a new development, such as the failure to poll people with only cell phones and not landlines, will cause some pollster today to suffer the humiliation the
Literary Digest
felt in 1936. The
Digest
, by the way, failed in 1938 after nearly fifty years in business.

Donald R. McCoy,
Landon of Kansas
(University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1966).

WENDELL WILLKIE

1940

In his novel,
The Plot against America,
Philip Roth paints a frightening portrait of what might have happened had America elected an isolationist for president in 1940. In the novel, the president is Charles Lindbergh, who is unrealistically portrayed as a Nazi sympathizer. In reality, there were no men running for president in 1940 who sympathized with the Nazis. But there were men intent upon taking decisive steps to keep America out of the growing war in Europe—men thwarted by Wendell Willkie's improbable capture of the Republican presidential nomination, an event that newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann called “the decisive event, perhaps providential,” in ensuring an Allied victory in World War II.

This mildly extravagant claim is based on the key support Willkie gave President Franklin Roosevelt's relatively modest preparations for American entry into World War II. Several of Willkie's primary opponents, including Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, were determined, at least before Pearl Harbor, to not only prevent American entry into the war, but also to block any assistance FDR intended to provide Great Britain and other allies in the fight against fascism.

The Republicans' nomination of Willkie was improbable because he had never run for any elected office before, he was virtually unknown outside the business community, and, until 1938, he had been a registered Democrat! But Willkie had gained Republican admirers through his strong but thoughtful critiques of the New Deal. Willkie, an attorney who had risen to become president of utility giant Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, was particularly critical of the Tennessee Valley Authority and won impressive concessions from the Roosevelt administration, protecting Commonwealth and Southern's shareholders.

Willkie also had a magnetic personality. A large bear of a man who had sophisticated tastes, he nonetheless liked to play the part of the Indiana country boy, which led Roosevelt's curmudgeonly secretary of the interior Harold Ickes to memorably label Willkie “a simple, barefoot, Wall Street lawyer.” Still, a survey taken in April 1940, just six weeks prior to the Republican National Convention, found that only 15 percent of the American people knew who Willkie was.

But the week the GOP convention was held was also the week France fell to German troops. Suddenly, the isolationists' stock fell, too, and delegates yielded to the packed galleries that incessantly screamed, “We want Willkie!” Willkie won on the fifth ballot and undertook a memorably vigorous campaign that still failed to deny Roosevelt an unprecedented third term.

Roosevelt liked and admired Willkie and was determined to enlist his help in ending American neutrality. Shortly after the election, Roosevelt sent Willkie to Great Britain as a symbol of American unity and then called Willkie back to testify before Congress on behalf of the proposed “Lend-Lease Act.” Willkie's riveting testimony was crucial to the passage of legislation that allowed Britain to fight on. Later, Willkie used his prestige to persuade Congress to maintain the military draft, which Congress came within one vote of ending six months before Pearl Harbor.

Returning from a world tour in 1943, Willkie wrote the influential best-selling book,
One World,
which argued for creation of a United Nations. Roosevelt allegedly tried to persuade Willkie to return to the Democratic Party and be his running mate in 1944. Whether Roosevelt was serious or simply toying with Willkie and the Republicans remains a matter of debate. Willkie was still weighing his political options when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in October 1944.

Conservative Republicans were furious at Willkie's hijacking of the party and his alliance with Roosevelt. One disillusioned follower was the objectivist novelist Ayn Rand, who said Willkie was “the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt.” Far more believed he helped prepare America for the fight that destroyed fascism.

Mary Earhart Dillon,
Wendell Willkie: 1892–1944
(J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and New York, 1952).

James H. Madison, ed.,
Wendell Willkie: Hoosier Internationalist
(Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992).

Steve Neal,
Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie
(Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1984).

Charles Peters,
Five Days in Philadelphia: 1940, Wendell Willkie, and the Political Convention That Freed FDR to Win World War II
(Public Affairs, New York, 2005).

Philip Roth,
The Plot against America
(Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 2004).

Wendell Willkie,
One World
(University of Illinois Press, Urbana and London, 1966).

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

1968

Hubert H. Humphrey was vice president, one of our nation's most influential and productive senators, the Democratic nominee for president in 1968 (losing to Richard Nixon), and three other times a serious candidate for his party's nomination. His most important contribution to the nation occurred, however, while still a young mayor of Minneapolis. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Humphrey changed the course of the Democratic Party and the nation when, against all odds, he persuaded the Democrats to finally adopt a platform strongly in favor of civil rights for African Americans, an issue Humphrey would champion throughout his career.

Humphrey was an unusual choice to lead the cause of civil rights. Born above his father's drugstore in a small town in South Dakota where there were few African Americans and only slightly more Democrats, young Hubert inherited his father's gift of gab and a commitment to help the underdog. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Humphrey pursued his graduate studies at Louisiana State University. There, he was “dismayed” by the discrimination he saw—“stately homes on manicured lawns in the white sections, the open sewage ditches in black neighborhoods.”

One biographer likened Humphrey's awakening to that experienced by young Abraham Lincoln, when he had rafted down the Mississippi and witnessed a New Orleans slave auction. “My abstract commitment to civil rights was given flesh and blood during my year in Louisiana,” Humphrey said, adding that the experience “also opened my eyes to the prejudice of the North.”

Humphrey parlayed his experience as assistant director of the Minnesota War Manpower Commission and a strong relationship with organized labor into election as mayor of Minneapolis in 1945 when he was only thirty-four years old. Franklin Roosevelt had died weeks before Humphrey's election, making Harry Truman president. Truman had appointed a civil rights commission but, for fear of alienating the South and ruining his chances for election in 1948, he dragged his feet in implementing the commission's recommendations, including a call to desegregate the armed forces.

Attending the Democratic National Convention in 1948, Humphrey was on the platform committee, but his bid to include a strong civil rights plank, opposed by the Truman administration, was rebuffed by a vote of seventy-eight to thirty. Despite fears it would split the party and doom his own senatorial race that year, Humphrey pledged to bring the issue to the floor of the convention the next day.

Having lost fifteen pounds that week from not eating, Humphrey stayed up all night to lobby convention delegates, consult with allies, and craft an eight-minute address that would become the most dramatic speech given at a convention since William Jennings Bryan's “cross of gold” speech in 1896. In a stroke of political genius, Humphrey and his friends decided not to criticize Truman for inaction, but to credit Truman for the action he had taken to date.

Sweating profusely in the ninety-three-degree heat in the Philadelphia convention hall, Humphrey put forward his four proposals: outlaw lynching, ensure black voting rights, guarantee fair employment, and integrate the military. He told the crowd:

To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights—I say to them, we are 172 years late. To those who say this bill is an infringement on states' rights, I say this. . . . The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

A raucous demonstration followed, and when the roll was called, even though minority planks are always doomed to failure, Humphrey's proposal was approved by a vote of 651½ to 582½. Southern delegates from four states, led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, walked out to prepare an independent presidential campaign.

Twelve days later, Truman embraced the Democrats' new position on civil rights and finally issued his executive order, directing the armed forces to integrate. The process was laborious, and the real catalyst to integration was the Korean War. Large numbers of African-American enlistments proved vital in plugging holes in previously segregated units that had suffered appalling casualties. By October 1953, the Army was finally able to announce that 95 percent of African-American soldiers served in integrated units. It took a long time, but it would have taken much longer without Humphrey.