Roosevelt, Churchill, and … Willkie? Charles Peters on how a little-known utilities executive saved civilization

Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing "We Want Willkie!" Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World By Charles Peters Public Affairs; $26.00

The big difference between Charles Peters, founding editor this magazine, and those of us who came to work for him over the years is this: He believes in idealism while we want to believe in idealism.

Peters is part of the celebrated Greatest Generation that lived through the Depression, World War II, and the New Frontier--a time when the American political process called forth leaders who inspired the public to service and sacrifice. We, on the other hand, members of the generations that followed, came of age in very different times--Vietnam, Watergate, the Carter and Reagan years, the Clinton wars--when something like the opposite spirit has been ascendant. We look back on the character of that earlier era with admiration and some envy. We wish the country could be like that again. We know that the immense challenges America faces today--rising oil prices, the war in Iraq, the coming fiscal train wreck--will be very difficult to overcome if Americans and their political leaders cannot rise above their self-interest for the greater good. But little in our experience of American politics makes us think this will occur or even allows us to imagine how it might occur.

Thankfully, Peters has written a book that vividly recreates how, once, it did happen--the American electoral process, amidst bitter partisan divisions and backroom manipulation, produced a stunningly wise, beneficent, and forward-looking result. Five Days in Philadelphia is about the 1940 Republican convention. Peters brings this largely forgotten event delightfully to life with details plucked from archives, his own memory of the times, and a persuasive, How-the-Irish-Saved-Civilization-style argument that the convention was a pivotal moment in world history.

In Philadelphia that July, an isolationist and conservative GOP, desperate to deny Franklin Delano Roosevelt a third term, chose as its candidate a liberal internationalist, Wendell Willkie. And though Willkie did not in the end defeat FDR, he did something almost as consequential: He gave the president the crucial political running room he needed to ask the voters to make sacrifices in preparation for war. "If we can understand how and why people rose to their best," Peters writes, with characteristic clarity about the point he's trying to make, "then maybe we can make it happen again."

Conventional wisdom

It is hard to exaggerate how desperate the world situation was in the run-up to the convention. In April, Hitler's forces conquered Norway and Denmark. In Ma% they invaded Holland and Belgium. FDR knew that it was crucial for America in supply France and Great Britain with weaponry and to build up its own military forces. He also knew that time was running out. Yet over 80 percent of the public still opposed getting involved in the war. Congress had put severe restrictions on the president's ability to arm the allies. And going into the GOP convention, the party's top three presidential candidates, Arthur Vandenberg, Robert Taft, and Thomas E. Dewey, were all isolationists.

There were a few in the GOP who understood the gravity of the Nazi threat. Many were New York-establishment types--Wall Street bankers and media luminaries with business and personal connections in Europe. These individuals were looking for a candidate who shared their internationalist outlook, but whose biography and personality would appeal to the party's small-town base and to voters at large.

Their attention quickly focused on Wendell Willkie, an Indiana-born utilities industry executive who, though politically astute and involved, had never run for public office. Willkie lived in Manhattan, moved easily among the literati, and was in most respects a liberal; indeed, Peters's research shows that he did not switch his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican until 1939 or 1940. But he had broken with FDR over federal regulation of the power industry. He hailed from a small town in Indiana and still cut his hair "country style," like Will Rogers, with one lock falling onto his forehead. And by all accounts, he was tremendously impressive and likable. "He was a big, shambling, rumpled, overweight, carelessly dressed man," wrote one of his New York friends, Marcia Davenport, "and he radiated a stunning combination of intellect and homely warmth."

The brain trust that soon gathered around Willkie came up with a strategy for winning the nomination that any outsider candidate today would do well to study. Sam Pryor, a Republican national committeeman from Connecticut, wrested control over what was, in those days, one of the key resources to winning the nomination: tickets into the convention hall. Media mogul Henry Luce used his magazines to promote Willkie's candidacy shamelessly. New York Herald Tribune book editor Irita Van Doren, Willkie's mistress, helped the candidate hone his message. A young lawyer named Oren Root Jr. organized Willkie Clubs around the country--historic precursors to Howard Dean's Meetups.