Political courage may be hard to find these days, but Wendell Willkie had it in spades. As chronicled by David Levering Lewis in The Improbable Wendell Willkie, the GOP's 1940 presidential nominee was unafraid to stake out positions that, while not always popular or correct, were undoubtedly courageous.
As the president of a power utility company in the 1930s, Willkie stood up to the executive overreach of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. At the center of the battle was the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency created by FDR to provide flood control and cheap electricity along the Tennessee River.
A lifelong Democrat up to that point, Willkie was initially supportive of the program but grew frustrated by the heavy-handed tactics of FDR's lieutenants. His primary criticism arose from what he viewed as government-sanctioned competition meant to destroy private utility companies like his own. By 1935, Willkie was accusing FDR of fomenting "new fear" of private enterprise.
Although historians have pointed out that Willkie had a vested interest in opposing the TVA, his advocacy on behalf of the business community occurred at a time when public opinion regarding the private sector and private utility companies was at an all-time low.
The national attention raised by Willkie's battle with FDR and the TVA positioned him to step into the political vacuum formed by the Republican Party's rout in the midst of the Great Depression. The party, which only won eight electoral votes in the 1936 presidential election, was frustrated by ideological and geographic divisions between the coasts and the heartland.
Lewis attempts to debunk a charge made by David Halberstam in The Powers That Be that "Wilkie's political career was invented by a cabal of rich newspaper and magazine publishers educated at elite eastern institutions." But rather than refuting the charge, Lewis inadvertently grants it credence.
As Lewis describes, Willkie's transformation into a credible political candidate was abetted by the GOP's liberal eastern establishment, composed of figures like Henry Luce of Time and Ogden Mills Reid of the New York Herald Tribune. Luce and Reid, taken with Willkie's unabashed internationalism, put the might of their media empires behind making the utility executive a plausible alternative to the New Deal in 1940.
The glowing media coverage was further aided by a cast of Northeast Republicans who conspired to create a grassroots enthusiasm for a Willkie nomination. Whether or not that support "sprang from a thousand country clubs," as Alice Roosevelt Longworth famously quipped, is left unclear.
Regardless of support from Republican regulars, friends and backers secured Willkie his nomination at the GOP convention in Philadelphia in June 1940 by a combination of luck, stealth, and sheer force. Outside of Willkie the leading contenders for the nomination were openly isolationist and wary of the war brewing in Europe, mirroring the party's base.
Willkie himself acknowledged his internationalism wasn't shared by the party but appeared unfazed as he planned to accept the nomination—although he would bow to isolationist pressure by the end of the campaign.
"I stand before you without a single pledge, promise, or understanding of any kind, except the advancement of your cause, the preservation of American democracy," Willkie told the convention shortly after it entrusted him with its presidential nomination. The fact that Willkie was a Democrat in good standing with New York's Tammany Hall until 1939 wasn't lost on anyone when he referred to those in attendance as "you Republicans."
Willkie's campaign for the nomination was more successful than the general election. Even though he started the campaign against FDR as a favorite, especially as no president had ever been elected to a third term at the time, Willkie eventually only carried 10 states and lost the popular vote by five million ballots.
Despite the loss, Willkie's popularity and influence emerged stronger after the election. Only months after being trounced, Willkie crossed party lines, endorsing FDR's Lend-Lease program to provide military aid to Britain and its allies battling Nazi Germany. The decision, which ultimately ensured the program's passage, was widely unpopular among the very Republicans who supported his presidential ambitions.
Willkie continued his bipartisan support of FDR when the United States entered the war effort, even undertaking foreign trips on the U.S. government's behalf as a goodwill ambassador. Those travels would eventually form the basis of his book, One World, advocating for world federalism and international cooperation between nations.
Lewis also shows that Willkie was an early and vocal supporter of civil rights, going as far as to argue that if the United States wanted to be seen as a beacon of freedom across the globe it would have to first address the status of African Americans at home. To this end, as a presidential candidate, Willkie made a concerted effort to court the African-American vote. After the election, Willkie urged FDR to integrate the armed services and, as chairman of Twentieth Century Fox, worked with the NAACP to improve the way African Americans were portrayed in the film industry.
Willkie was not always popular, and he wasn't always right—but he was courageous. Today's politicians could learn something from him.