Rabid versus patriotic partisanship
Talking with a friend recently about the 1940 presidential campaign – the same campaign I wrote about two weeks ago in this space – the campaign that pitted the incumbent president, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, against the Republican challenger, Wendell Willkie – it occurred to me that I had overlooked something important about the campaign that touches on politics today.
The 1940 campaign was waged in the shadow of World War II. That summer the German army under Adolf Hitler swept into Paris. The fall of France was not just swift, it was shocking. Britain stood alone. How long would it be before Hitler turned his sights on us?
The war debate in the United States was between internationalists led by Roosevelt and isolationists like Charles Lindbergh who wanted the U.S. to stay clear of European affairs.
“Willkie was an isolationist,” my friend surmised.
“No, he was an internationalist,” I corrected him. “He stood with Roosevelt mostly.”
I continued: “So much was going on. There was the destroyer deal with Britain, lend-lease. Late in October, there was the first ever peacetime draft. Nobody liked the draft.”
I explained that the draft, however, did not become a campaign issue. Willkie supported the draft.
“Too bad for Willkie,” my friend said. “That was pretty stupid.”
Thinking later about this exchange, I assumed that Willkie’s decision was so manifestly patriotic and so evidently correct from a national interest standpoint that he was above reproach. But I can appreciate that in the context of the slash and burn politics of 2024, it was extraordinary.
Things were different in 1940. Politics could be hard, even cruel, but there was still room for the notion that some things transcended party politics.
Such a characterization fits as well the actions of two big time Republicans who linked arms with the Democrat Roosevelt in the summer of 1940 by joining the Roosevelt cabinet.
The two – Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox – were thorough-going Republicans. Knox, appointed by FDR to be Secretary of the Navy, had been his party’s vice presidential nominee four short years earlier. The Landon-Knox ticket was wiped out in the Roosevelt landslide of 1936.
Stimson was 73 years old in 1940 and had served in two Republican cabinets. He had been secretary of war under William Howard Taft and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover. He returned to the War Department under FDR.
The appointment of these two men came on the eve of the 1940 Republican National Convention – the convention that chose Willkie to run against Roosevelt.
FDR framed the appointments in light of the war scare, declaring they were “in line with the overwhelming sentiment of the nation for national solidarity in a time of world crisis and in behalf of our national defense,” but that’s not the way some historians have portrayed the matter.
As Richard Ketchum in The Borrowed Years puts it: “There could [not] be the slightest doubt that the move was planned to embarrass the Republicans and grab the headlines.”
Roosevelt customarily moved simultaneously on two tracks, and in this case it’s highly likely that FDR relished the idea of stealing some of the GOP’s political thunder.
At the same time, neither Stimson nor Knox were rubes; they did not make themselves available for the president’s political amusement. These were serious men seriously engaged in world and national affairs. Even if his motives were purely political, Roosevelt could not have treated with them otherwise. In that event, his offer would have been promptly spurned. The fact that the jobs were offered and accepted speaks volumes.
Could such presidential appointments be made today? Could Willkie’s acquiescence to the draft take flight in today’s scorched earth politics, as practiced particularly by such seriously unserious people as Donald Trump, Tim Scott, Elise Stefanik, and House Republicans members of the Freedom Caucus?
The answer, I think, is self-evident.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.