Five Days in Philadelphia

FIVE DAYS IN PHILADELPHIA: The Amazing “We Want Willkie” Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World. By Charles Peters. PublicAffairs.

274 pp. $26

To most of us, Wendell Willkie is little more than a name and perhaps a famous image—Life magazine’s panoramic photo of the charismatic presidential candidate standing in an open car as it moves through a welcoming throng on a dusty Midwestern street. If Willkie is remembered at all, it’s as the third hapless Republican to be steamrolled by Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the process of losing the 1940 election, though, Willkie played a surprising role in winning the looming war. That’s the story Charles Peters, the founder and longtime editor of The Washington Monthly, recalls in this riveting book.

The political battles of 1940 took place in a country that’s in many ways unrecognizable today. The vast majority of Republicans—and many other Americans—were committed isolationists, adamantly opposed to any overseas “adventures,” even as Hitler conquered Europe and prepared to invade Britain. The leading contenders for the GOP nomination were all different flavors of isolationist: Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, of Ohio and Michigan, respectively, and Thomas Dewey, the famed prosecutor from New York State (shades of Eliot Spitzer!). It’s astonishing to be reminded that former president Herbert Hoover—perhaps the strictest isolationist of them all—still entertained hopes of securing the nomination and retaking the White House.

Had any of these men captured the nomination, Peters argues, the Republicans would have made a major campaign issue out of any effort by FDR to aid Britain and set up a peacetime draft, perhaps thwarting the president. Willkie, by contrast, was a liberal internationalist, strongly committed to fighting Hitler.

The Indiana-born head of a Wall Street utility holding company, Willkie was a virtual unknown who had never held office and, in fact, had been a registered Democrat only the year before. The Washington wit Alice Roosevelt Longworth was on the mark when she quipped that his candidacy sprang “from the grass roots of a thousand country clubs,” and a small but influential band of media magnates openly promoted his cause, including Henry Luce of Time-Life. It’s another unrecognizable characteristic of 1940 America that most of the news media were controlled by Republicans. Yet Willkie was anything but a polished Wall Streeter. A shambling bear of a man in a rumpled suit and “country” haircut, he possessed enough brute magnetism on the podium to convert prominent political figures to his cause in an instant.

In 1940, Peters was a 13-year-old boy from West Virginia whose lawyer father took him along to the Democratic convention in Chicago, and he has the perfect politics-in-his-bones pitch for narrating these events and capturing the texture of the times. Those were the days when the national political conventions, soaked in sweat and booze, really mattered, so much so that fistfights could break out on the convention floor—and that was at the Republican conclave, held in Philadelphia.

After Willkie’s triumph, on the sixth ballot, the campaign itself was something of an anticlimax. The candidate came out in favor of the draft, which Congress approved on September 14, and kept quiet about FDR’s hugely controversial plan to send Britain 50 aging but desperately needed U.S. destroyers, though he sharply criticized the president for using his executive authority to carry out the deal without congressional authorization. As FDR’s lead widened in the polls, Willkie did resort to playing an isolationist card by warning that the president would lead the country into war, but the draft and destroyer deals were already done.

Peters is persuasive in arguing that any other GOP nominee would have made it very hard for FDR to help the British and win approval of conscription, with consequences that are unknowable. This is marvelous history—speculative, vividly written, engrossing—of a kind, sad to say, that few professional historians dare to attempt.

—Steven Lagerfeld