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
