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We Don’t Want Willkie!

Many pages toward the end are devoted to building up Wendell Willkie—a man risen from the world of business, like Hoover (and like him called a “wonder boy”)—as a sympathetic, charismatic anti-Roosevelt, but it all comes to anticlimax with Roosevelt’s easy electoral victory, for an unprecedented third term, in 1940. Willkie in his campaign indicted […]

Many pages toward the end are devoted to building up Wendell Willkie—a man risen from the world of business, like Hoover (and like him called a “wonder boy”)—as a sympathetic, charismatic anti-Roosevelt, but it all comes to anticlimax with Roosevelt’s easy electoral victory, for an unprecedented third term, in 1940. Willkie in his campaign indicted the President’s “philosophy of distributed scarcity” and asserted that it was only “from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power.” These seem to be Amity Shlaes’s views also, but in 1940 there was no breaking the bond between Franklin Roosevelt and the bulk of the American people. Time, which had backed Willkie, summed it up: “Whether Mr. Roosevelt is Moses or Lucifer, he is a leader.” ~John Updike

Most of Updike’s review is unremarkable as a description of Shlaes’ argument.  He does seem to marvel at the idea that anyone would have something good to say about Calvin Coolidge.  For her part, Ms. Shlaes seems to treat the subject of Depression revisionism as something that has never been done before, which would be misleading if that is her view.  The most striking thing about the review is this mention of Shlaes’ approval of Wendell “One World” Willkie, a former Roosevelt delegate and preposterous New York internationalist who had been a Republican in 1940 for a shorter period of time than has Mike Bloomberg.  While Roosevelt was actively lying to the public that their sons would not be sent to fight in any foreign war, Willkie provided a suitable bipartisan echo that was appropriate to someone who had been in FDR’s party until 1939.  As FDR continued to nudge and pull the country towards conflict, the GOP offered up token opposition in the ’40 election.  There may have been a candidate somewhere in the country that could have broken “the bond” between FDR and a majority of the public, but it obviously wasn’t the ridiculous Wendell Willkie.

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