ambitions. But above all, it was a manifesto that outlined a plan for avoiding the mistakes of the past. “I live in constant dread that this war may end before the people of the world have come to a common understanding of what they fight for and what they hope for after the war is over,” wrote Willkie, a veteran of World War I. “I was a soldier in the last war and after that war was over I saw our bright dreams disappear, our stirring slogans become the jests of the cynical, and all because the fighting peoples did not arrive at any common postwar purposes while they fought. It must be our resolve that this does not happen again.”
Willkie called for “a council of the United Nations—a common council in which all plan together, not a council of a few, who direct or merely aid others as they think wise.” And that council, he argued, must be serious about the work of “the freeing of the conquered nations.” This was a specific reference to Willkie’s belief that “a war of liberation” must be about more than ending the occupation of countries overrun by the Nazis and the Japanese. It must be about ending colonialism and “giving to all peoples freedom to govern themselves as soon as they are able, and the economic freedom on which all lasting self-government inevitably rests.”
Denouncing Western imperialism, Willkie explained that the people of other regions “may not want our type of democracy … but they are determined to work out their own destiny under governments selected by themselves.” He accepted that among the United Nations there would be governments with which the United States disagreed ideologically and practically, including the Soviet Union. Willkie was a capitalist in good standing, yet he refused to bow to Red Scare hysteria at home. He even went so far as to personally represent former Communist Party organizer William Schneiderman before the U.S. Supreme Court, pro bono, in a 1943 case that wound up overturning a deportation order based on Schneiderman’s views. “Of all the times when civil liberties should be defended, it is now,” Willkie told the court. And he was ardent in arguing during the war that “it is possible for Russia and America, perhaps the most powerful countries in the world, to work together for the economic welfare and peace of the world.” To those who fretted about cooperation with Stalin and the “Reds,” Willkie replied: “No one could be more opposed to the Communist doctrine than I am, for I am completely opposed to any system of absolutism. But I have never understood why it should be assumed that in any possible contact between Communism and democracy, democracy should go down.”
Willkie’s One World vision featured a sharp rebuke of British prime minister Winston Churchill, an old-school imperialist who announced in the midst of the war, “I did not become His Majesty’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Willkie’s objection, however, was not confined to foreign leaders who mouthed the language of “freedom” and “liberation” while scheming to maintain the violent arrangements of suppression and discrimination. The people of the United States, he argued in the language of one of his chapter titles, would need to address “Our Imperialisms at Home”:
A true world outlook is incompatible with a foreign imperialism, no matter how high-minded the governing country. It is equally incompatible with the kind of imperialism which can develop inside any nation. Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin. We cannot, with good conscience, expect the British to set up an orderly schedule for the liberation of India before we have decided for ourselves to make all who live in America free.
Willkie wrote that at a time when the United States Congress refused to condemn lynching, when Northern cities were rigidly segregated and when Southern states maintained an American apartheid.
Willkie, the Republican, rejected the compromises that Roosevelt accepted in order to hold together the Democratic Party. “We have practiced within our own boundaries something that amounts to race imperialism,” Willkie declared. “The attitude of the white citizens of this country toward the Negroes has undeniably had some of the unlovely characteristics of an alien imperialism—a smug racial superiority, a willingness to exploit an unprotected people. We have justified it by telling ourselves that its end is benevolent. And sometimes it has been. But so sometimes have been the ends of imperialism. And the moral atmosphere in which it has existed is identical with that in which men—well-meaning men—talk of ‘the white man’s burden.’ ”
He added: “Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight the forces and ideas of imperialism abroad and maintain any form of imperialism at home. The war has done this to our thinking. Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment. But it required a disastrous, internecine war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single hour. We are finding under the pressures of this present conflict that long-standing barriers and prejudices are breaking down. The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent.”
Willkie maintained that there could be no return to the “normalcy” of the prewar era. Normalcy, he argued, had not served America well, historically or in the current fight. “Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequities self-evident,” he said. “When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored. If we want to talk about freedom, we must mean freedom for others as well as ourselves, and we must mean freedom for everyone inside our frontiers as well as outside.”
This was the language of radical hope, of a belief that immense sacrifice could generate immense progress. Yet, despite his best efforts, Willkie had no real hope of advancing this agenda within a Republican Party that rejected his 1944 presidential candidacy unceremoniously and unequivocally. Rather, the last great hope that the postwar era might “begin the world over again” rested with another man: the vice president of the United States.
So it was that Henry Wallace opened the fight against American fascism.
“You Drew Blood from the Cave Dwellers”
Wrestling with Demagogueryand the Wealthy Men WhoFinance Authoritarianism
Those who write the peace must think of the whole world. There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis. And we cannot perpetuate economic warfare without planting the seeds of military warfare. We must use our power at the peace table to build an economic peace that is charitable and enduring.
—Henry Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” speech given in New York before the Free World Association, May 8, 1942
[Henry Wallace] is a human being who has become a statesman … driving into the minds of the American people certain truths made clear as no other statesman in this period has done.
—Eleanor Roosevelt, “Henry Wallace’s Democracy,” New Republic, August 7, 1944
What began as a battle between one Henry and another evolved into the most revealing American debate of the World War II era. One Henry, magazine publisher Henry Luce, was in the words of his able biographer Robert E. Herzstein, “the most influential private citizen in America of his day.” He used his bully pulpits, Time and Life magazines, to make himself, in the words of historian of journalism James Baughman, “America’s single most powerful and innovative mass communicator.” In this capacity, he advanced the agenda of empire-building capitalism favored by the class warriors of the Grand Old Party. The other Henry, Vice President Henry Wallace, was the second most influential public citizen of his