Читать книгу The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party - John Nichols - Страница 9
ОглавлениеFour Freedoms, OneWorld and the Dream ofOvercoming Our Imperialisms
Men need more than arms with which to fight and win this kind of war. They need enthusiasm for the future and a conviction that the flags they fight under are in clean, bright colors.
—Wendell Willkie, One World, 1943
Ours must be a generation that will distill the stamina and provide the skills to create a war-proof world. We must not bequeath a third bloodbath to our children.
—Henry Wallace, America Tomorrow, 1943
America has always had a radical streak, going back to the days when Thomas Paine began his call for the revolution of 1776 with the words: “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”
Paine proposed a radical response. “O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression,” he wrote in Common Sense, which would inspire not just the American Revolution but revolutions in France, Haiti and beyond. “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”
General George Washington ordered that another of Paine’s pamphlets, The American Crisis, be read aloud to the soldiers huddled in the cold at Valley Forge. What distinguished Paine’s writings from the traditional call to arms, however, was a vision of what might come after victory. This is not merely the fight for survival. This is what writer Rebecca Solnit meant when she described “hope” to me as “a seizing of possibilities and an embrace of uncertainty, a sense that the future is yet to be determined, and our interventions may help determine it.” It is the “why” in “Why We Fight”—the promise that the struggle is not to renew an old order but to initiate a new one.
Perhaps this is why, after many years of neglect in which he was virtually written out of American history, Paine was brought back into the picture by FDR. In the early days of World War II, historian and Paine biographer Harvey Kaye recalls: “Americans faced their gravest crisis since the Civil War. The Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor had propelled the United States into the Second World War, a global conflict in which the very survival of freedom, equality and democracy were at stake. And things did not look good at all. Germany had conquered most of Europe, Japan had overrun East Asia, and on every front from the Atlantic to the Pacific the Axis powers were advancing. At home, the reports of military disasters and setbacks triggered criticism of the government’s handling of the war, rumors of invasion and a sense of despair, if not defeat.”
Kaye explains: “Roosevelt understood that he needed to firmly engage American collective memory and imagination. Rallying support for the New Deal, he had regularly evoked historical images and personages such as Jefferson and Lincoln. But on this occasion, the nation’s 32nd president would reach even more deeply into America’s Revolutionary heritage, to the very crucible of war out of which the United States had emerged.”
Just ten weeks after America’s entry into World War II, on February 23, 1942, with a bow to the 210th anniversary of George Washington’s birth, FDR gave one of his “fireside chats” on national radio and identified “a most appropriate occasion for us to talk with each other about things as they are today and things as we know they shall be in the future.” Speaking on a day when a Japanese submarine shelled coastal targets near Santa Barbara, California, the president was remarkably frank in spelling out the details of the new crisis. “We have most certainly suffered losses—from Hitler’s U-boats in the Atlantic as well as from the Japanese in the Pacific—and we shall suffer more of them before the turn of the tide,” he conceded. “But, speaking for the United States of America, let me say once and for all to the people of the world: We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it. We and the other United Nations are committed to the destruction of the militarism of Japan and Germany. We are daily increasing our strength. Soon, we and not our enemies, will have the offensive; we, not they, will win the final battles; and we, not they, will make the final peace.”
This was an example of the lofty rhetoric that the president who popularized the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” in the midst of the Great Depression was capable of employing in dire circumstances. But for the conclusion of one of the most important addresses of his presidency, FDR turned to the words of another wordsmith in another time of war.
“The task that we Americans now face will test us to the uttermost,” he said, acknowledging the challenge that lay ahead. “Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ ”
Roosevelt noted, with only slight embellishment, that:
Tom Paine wrote those words on a drumhead, by the light of a campfire. That was when Washington’s little army of ragged, rugged men was retreating across New Jersey, having tasted naught but defeat. And General Washington ordered that these great words written by Tom Paine be read to the men of every regiment in the Continental Army, and this was the assurance given to the first American armed forces.
The United States was not just waging a necessary fight against fascism, Roosevelt made clear; it was fighting to begin the world anew. “We of the United Nations are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek,” he told tens of millions of listeners. “The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.”
Even before the United States had entered into the war, FDR devoted time and energy to crafting a vision of what would come after. This was vital work, as his was a war-weary and war-wary land. The experience of World War I, a fight of kings and kaisers into which the U.S. had been drawn at immense human and material cost, had soured Americans on seemingly distant conflicts. The “war to end all wars” had enriched munitions merchants but it had left a generation of young men shell-shocked and receptive to the isolationist appeals of Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee.
Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation magazine, recognized the challenge. “Before its total, uncompromising demands are laid upon them,” she explained as the daunting prospect of American involvement in a second world war emerged, “the people of America must learn that this war is their war.” Labor unions and civil rights groups, leaders like A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and H.L. Mitchell of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and dramatist Lillian Hellman, all championed the view that America must fight not merely to defeat fascism but to win a new world in which the root causes of bigotry, demagoguery, inequality and injustice would be addressed.
The poet Langston Hughes put it more bluntly, writing in a 1943 reflection on the racial violence that had flared in cities such as Beaumont, Texas, and Detroit, Michigan: “You jim crowed me/ Before hitler rose to power/ And you’re STILL jim crowing me/ Right now, this very hour…/ Yet you say we’re fighting/ For democracy/ Then why don’t democracy/ Include me?” The Pittsburgh Courier, a widely circulated African-American newspaper during the war years, launched what it referred to as the “Double V” campaign, which demanded victory over fascism abroad and racism at home.
Woody Guthrie, whose guitar featured the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists,” joined the Merchant Marine and the National Maritime Union, a militant CIO union with multiracial leadership from its founding in the 1930s, and became a member of the unionized fighting force that braved U-boats to deliver supplies and save soldiers and sailors. In “Talking Merchant Marine,” he sang of preparing to drop a depth charge on the Nazis:
Walked to the tail, stood on the stern,
Lookin’ at the big brass screw blade turn;
Listened to the sound of the engine pound,
Gained sixteen feet every time it went around.
Gettin’ closer and closer, look out, you fascists.
I’m just one of the merchant crew,
I belong to the union called the N.M.U.
I’m a union man from head to toe,
I’m U.S.A. and C.I.O.
Fightin’ out here on the waters to win some freedom on the land.
Roosevelt saw this bigger picture. He knew that the politics of the moment demanded a bold assertion not merely of military necessity but of postwar possibility—a vision rooted in the premise that the fascist threat had to be met with weapons and with ideas. It was a call to arms as urgent and meaningful as that of the battlefield trumpet.
FDR was not alone in this understanding. Indeed, it was the essential premise of liberal and progressive thinking in the early 1940s, and the basis for the essential divide in debates about the contribution that the Democratic Party would make to postwar politics. Americans, Henry Wallace counseled in 1943, expected a serious response to the question “What will we will get out of the war?” The answer could not be a transitory period of “peace” characterized by the recessions, depression, authoritarian power grabs and simmering conflict that marked the interlude between World War I and World War II. “We shall decide sometime in 1943 or 1944 whether to plant the seeds for World War No. 3,” Wallace contended. To avert that prospect, FDR’s vice president argued his party and his country must champion “the new democracy, the democracy of the common man,” embracing “not just the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy and democracy in the treatment of the sexes.” Author Max Lerner wanted a crusade on behalf of “militant democracy” as an antidote to authoritarianism, while Kirchwey proposed “A New Deal for the World.” Historian Norman Markowitz argues that “social liberals came to enthusiastically define the war as a revolutionary struggle and to look to America to redeem her own revolutionary heritage by uniting with the forces that sought the destruction of colonialism and by working to construct international organizations to eliminate the social and economic inequalities that produce war.”
These arguments extended from the vision that Roosevelt outlined in the “Four Freedoms” speech, his epic 1941 State of the Union address to Congress and the American people in which he outlined his own radical hope. Recently re-elected to an unprecedented third term as president, FDR recognized lingering economic challenges at home, but he was increasingly focused on global threats. The United States was not at war, but the president knew that the conflicts raging across Europe and Asia would soon go global.
To a greater extent than any president since Lincoln, FDR was an obsessive speedwriter. He was capable of delivering off-the-cuff comments that charmed the reporters who covered him and the politicians who debated with him. But when he delivered speeches to conventions or the Congress, he devoted hours of his precious time to identifying each epic turn of phrase. According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum account of the drafting of the “Four Freedoms” address, “as with all his speeches, FDR edited, rearranged and added extensively until the speech was his creation. In the end, the speech went through seven drafts before final delivery.”
Roosevelt worked late into the night in the White House study with aides Harry Hopkins, Robert Sherwood and Samuel Rosenman. According to the FDR Library, the president said he had an idea for how to close the speech. “As recounted by Rosenman: ‘We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling. It was a long pause—so long that it began to become uncomfortable. Then he leaned forward again in his chair. … He dictated the words so slowly that on the yellow pad I had in my lap I was able to take them down myself in longhand as he spoke.’ ”
These were the words that Roosevelt dictated:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
• The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
• The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
• The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.
• The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
Roosevelt saw the Four Freedoms as program, not preachment. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he told Congress. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception—the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.”
The president framed this as an innately American project. “Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change—in a perpetual peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions—without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch,” he said. “The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”
Before the year was finished, FDR would lead the United States into the war with his post–Pearl Harbor designation of December 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.” It would be a fight for the future. America would make itself “the arsenal of democracy,” but the emphasis would be on achieving sufficient democracy so that the arsenal—all arsenals—would become less necessary. FDR understood the American disinclination toward war; if it was necessary to fight against the aggression of Hitler and Mussolini, then the fight needed to have as its end “a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.” This was a contemporary restatement of the Paine-ite impulse: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
The “Four Freedoms” were not Roosevelt’s final word on what the United States would fight for in World War II. In 1944, in the midst of the war, he would use another State of the Union address to outline a “Second Bill of Rights,” which would come to be referred to as an “Economic Bill of Rights.”
But the Four Freedoms speech set the stage for FDR’s win-the-war, win-the-peace message, by providing what the president believed to be “a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” His vice president, Henry Wallace, would crystalize the message in July 1943, as the war raged in Europe and the Pacific. “Along with Britain, Russia and China,” he said, “our nation will exert a tremendous economic and moral persuasion in the peace.”
But, added Wallace, who was speaking that day to a multiracial audience in Detroit, “many of our most patriotic and forward-looking citizens are asking: ‘Why not start now practicing these Four Freedoms in our own back yard?’ Yes, they are right! A fuller democracy for all is the lasting preventive of war. A lesser or part-time democracy breeds the dissension and class conflicts that seek their solution in guns and slaughter.”
That debate about how to prevail in the conflict at hand and prevent the next engaged the United States in the early 1940s. The war had to be won. But, so, too, did the peace. To achieve both ends, FDR believed it was necessary to secure the high ground in American politics going forward. In 1944 he sought re-election as an ailing man, aged beyond his years, so that he might shape the future as the leader of a new Democratic Party. That new kind of party, he hoped, would link liberal Democrats, liberal Republicans and progressive independents in a movement that might finally overwhelm the Southern segregationists and the conservatives of both the old parties. Roosevelt, Wallace and many others believed that the end of World War II could be a pivot point in American history, where the greatest generation, having beaten fascism overseas, would return with a determination to beat reaction at home.
The great political debate of the war years gave rise to two clear camps, which formed in and around the two major parties. One side sought a postwar regression toward the America that existed before the war and before the New Deal, as was the fervent hope of right-wing fabulists such as Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. Even then, the country had its “Make America Great Again” contingent.
The other side saw the New Deal and the united front against fascism as a blueprint for postwar progress. They might quibble about approaches and agendas, but these liberal internationalists seemed to have the upper hand. For a brief moment during World War II, the isolationists were isolated, as prominent Republicans such as Wendell Willkie and New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia aligned with Roosevelt. The best of the liberal internationalists knew that greatness could be achieved only when segregation, sexism and poverty were addressed. America was “the hope of the world” and had to continue to acquit itself as such, announced La Guardia, who was elected to his position as the nominee of the party of Lincoln but identified as a New Dealer. An ardent advocate for social-welfare programs at home and abroad, La Guardia served after World War II as the director general for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, putting into practice a view he had expressed from his days as a young congressman serving after World War I: “You cannot preach self-government and liberty to people in a starving land.” La Guardia was a frequent ally and sometime candidate of the Socialist Party, like a number of progressive Republicans in that time, and he preached that economic security was necessary for the full enjoyment of freedom. “Only a well-fed, well-schooled and well-housed people can enjoy the blessings of liberty,” he argued.
The son of an Italian Catholic immigrant father and a Jewish immigrant mother from Trieste whose own sister was interned in a Nazi concentration camp, La Guardia was a predictable Republican ally of FDR and the visionary politics of the World War II era. Wendell Willkie was not. As president of the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, the nation’s largest utility holding company, during the 1930s Willkie emerged as an outspoken critic of the Roosevelt administration’s ambitious Tennessee Valley Authority, which supplied electrical power to Southern and border states in competition with Commonwealth & Southern. Willkie, himself a former Democrat, became such a prominent and effective critic of Roosevelt’s policies that Time magazine identified him as “the only businessman in the U.S. who is ever mentioned as a presidential possibility in 1940.” A grassroots mobilization by Willkie for President clubs across the country captured the imagination of Republican leaders and secured him the nomination in one of the great political upsets of the 20th century. In the words of biographer Bill Severn, Willkie “openly admitted that the New Deal had accomplished many needed reforms … and approved most of the goals if not the methods of the Roosevelt foreign policy.”
As a challenger to FDR, Willkie’s appeal was his freshness. Roosevelt, a man aged beyond his years by struggles with polio and other physical maladies, faced enormous demands as he wrestled with an unstable economy and global threats. The president remained personally popular, yet there were doubts about his policies—especially when it came to preparation for a war that a great many Americans hoped to avoid. FDR’s decision to seek an unprecedented third term brought an outcry from critics inside his own Democratic Party and inspired hope among Republicans. The GOP had suffered the worst defeat in the party’s history in 1936, but there was a sense that Roosevelt might be vulnerable to the right challenger in 1940. Ten years younger than the incumbent and possessed of a boyish charm that softened his image as a titan of industry, Willkie projected a combination of youth and competence.
Roosevelt countered the Willkie challenge with a political masterstroke. He replaced the uninspiring vice president of his first two terms, John Nance Garner, and made the Democratic ticket fresh, and young, by insisting that the party nominate as his running mate a candidate who projected just as much energy and idealism as Willkie—and who, like the Republican nominee, had never before sought elected office. The man FDR chose as his new running mate was Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.
While Wallace’s addition to the 1940 Democratic ticket frustrated the big-city bosses and segregationists, it electrified the CIO union activists, rural populists, African Americans and young people who had come to see Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture as the keeper of the New Deal flame. The first of FDR’s close associates to publicly champion a third-term candidacy, Wallace had framed the 1940 election campaign even before it began as a struggle for political and economic democracy. And against fascism.
Roosevelt “wanted a leading outspoken, anti-fascist on the ticket given what he knew we were up against in the 1940s,” explains historian Peter Kuznick. Wallace saw the rise of Hitler and Mussolini as an existential threat, and he warned about it in passionate terms at a time when groups like Friends of New Germany and the German American Bund openly celebrated Hitler and prominent figures like Charles Lindbergh were peddling crude nativism and anti-Semitic tropes at huge “America First” rallies. The Iowan shared the concerns expressed by popular authors like Sinclair Lewis, whose 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here imagined the election of a demagogue to the presidency and an American turn toward fascism.
Wallace openly scorned the America First rhetoric that was mouthed not just by Republicans but by prominent Democrats. “We must remember that down through the ages one of the most popular political devices has been to blame economic and other troubles on some minority group,” Wallace warned in a 1939 speech in New York. The text of that speech, according to biographer Russell Lord, “aroused fervent interest among important leaders, intellectual and political, of racial minority groups,” and was circulated in the White House by a key adviser to the president, Samuel Rosenman, a New York Supreme Court justice who was a prominent member of the American Jewish Committee.
“The survival and strength of American democracy are proof that it has succeeded by its deeds thus far,” Wallace continued. “But we all know that it contains the seeds of failure. I for one will not be confident of the continued survival of American democracy if millions of unskilled workers and their families are condemned to be reliefers all their lives, with no place in our industrial system. I will not be confident of the survival of democracy if half our people must be below the line of a decent nutrition, while only one tenth succeed in reaching good nutritional standards. I will not be confident of the survival of democracy if most of our children continue to be reared in surroundings where poverty is highest and education is lowest.”
After FDR made Wallace his running mate, he focused on the work of the presidency, while Wallace hit the campaign trail with a vigor that led New York Times columnist Arthur Krock to refer to him as “the best of the New Deal type.” The Roosevelt-Wallace ticket swept to victory, defeating Willkie and his running mate by five million votes nationwide. In the Electoral College, the Democrats gave the Republicans a 449–83 thumping.
Wallace would be the new vice president. But the other new man of 1940, Willkie, would have his own role, as a frequent ally of the New Dealers. Before the war was done, Willkie and Wallace would be appearing together as champions of a strikingly parallel vision for the postwar era. They even joined up to address the topic in a December 1943 national broadcast that was part of the radio series Beyond Victory, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Willkie called for an end to colonialism while Wallace proposed a global New Deal designed to raise the people of the world out of poverty. The former rivals were singing now from the same hymnal about laying the foundation for a postwar era that would not repeat the mistakes of the past. That same year, Wallace and Willkie both contributed to a popular book, Prefaces for Peace, on the need for a new international order dedicated to economic, social and racial justice.
There could be no greater measure of the extraordinary moment that developed during the course of World War II than the shared efforts of Willkie and Wallace on behalf of the Four Freedoms vision that FDR had outlined. While Wallace entered the 1940s as a progressive of long standing, stretching back to his support of Robert La Follette’s groundbreaking 1924 independent presidential bid, Willkie evolved toward the ardent liberalism that would frequently align him with the administration.
Barely two months after the 1940 election, Willkie was telling Republican groups to abandon isolationism and embrace the global struggle against fascism. “Whether we like it or not America cannot remove itself from the world,” he warned in a January 1941 speech to New York Republicans. “I take issue with all who say we can survive with freedom in a totalitarian world. I want to say to you even though some of you may disagree with me, and I say it to you with all the emphasis of my being, that if Britain falls before the onslaught of Hitlerism, it will be impossible over a period of time to preserve the free way of life in America.”
Historian Howard Jones asserts that Willkie “had more influence on causing the American people and government to turn away from isolationism in the years from 1940 to 1944 than anyone other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Roosevelt, impressed by Willkie’s sincerity, made him a roving ambassador to the allied countries that FDR had begun to refer to as “the united nations,” a group that included the Soviet Union. Willkie did much more than merely carry messages to Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek, however. He began to formulate arguments for “winning the peace” that were more radical than those advanced by any other prominent figure, save Wallace.
Willkie argued that Americans would need “to accept the most challenging opportunity of all history—the chance to create a new society in which men and women the world around can live and grow invigorated by independence and freedom.”
Willkie made that appeal at the close of One World, the book he wrote after making a seven-week, 31,000-mile journey through war zones and national capitals in the summer and fall of 1942. The trek allowed him, he wrote, “to see and talk to hundreds of people in more than a dozen nations, and to talk intimately with many of the world’s leaders. It was an experience which few private citizens and none of those leaders have had. It gave me some new and urgent convictions and strengthened some of my old ones. These convictions are not mere humanitarian hopes; they are not just idealistic and vague. They are based on things I saw and learned at first hand and upon the views of men and women, important and anonymous, whose heroism and sacrifices give meaning and life to their beliefs.”
One World, which topped the New York Times best-seller lists for four months in 1943 and sold more than 1.5 million copies during the period, was many things. A travelogue. A report from the front. An assessment of leaders and their 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.
