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
