A vignette by Meadow and Lord Roem.

INDIANAPOLIS: Stop The Presses
Friday November 15th, 1940
It is said that Cordell Hull’s team still do not understand how this happened.
On paper, the outgoing Secretary of State seemed tailor-made for the Presidency. A long stint as the nation’s chief diplomat with a string of foreign policy successes under his belt, extensive experience in both state and federal politics, closely linked to a popular two-term incumbent of the White House, how could they have possibly lost?
It is not just Secretary Hull’s shell-shocked team in Tennessee who are staggered by such a shellacking. The whole world stands in various fits of confusion and bafflement, least of all the new President-elect, Mr Willkie. A telegram sent to all newspapers as the results came on on Tuesday night couldn’t have been clearer;
“Such a beautiful and important evening EXCLAMATION The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again STOP We will all come together as never before STOP”
To get to the heart of this most extraordinary of elections, it is worthwhile to return to the last time the Republicans entered the White House after two terms of Democratic Progressivism. Twenty years ago last week, a tall, hard-working Democrat of thirty-eight was in the midst of a speechmaking campaign throughout the United States. No vast crowds attended his meetings, no swarms of reporters hung on his words. The atmosphere was heavy with the powerful speeches of William Borah and Henry Cabot Lodge, and only a fitful flickering came from the Democratic Presidential nominee, Governor James Cox of Ohio. The illness of Woodrow Wilson filled Washington with rumors; war-sickened citizens wanted above all to get back to normal. Nobody paid much attention to the young Assistant Secretary to the Navy, apparently chosen mainly for his name and minor familial connection to the late Theodore Roosevelt.
Yet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt threw himself into the campaign like a man possessed, crisscrossing the country with such energy that - even for a party bracing itself for a landslide defeat - he roused the energies of almost everyone he met. It was a passion that would see him recover from sickness, carrying him to the Governor’s Mansion in Albany, then to Washington, and through eight years of one of the most radical administrations of our time.
If only Mr Hull had been able to grasp even a fraction of that zeal. Instead, a tired campaign that seemed to be against everything and for nothing came down the road to defeat, despite going up against the most controversial candidate of the modern era. His legacy as Secretary of State in ruins, Mr Hull will now be known as the man who lost the Presidency to the first President with no military or political experience whatsoever. To add insult to injury, the President-elect's hair has infused the entire race with a sense of farce.
Only a couple of months ago, it seemed that Mr Wilkie’s long-shot candidacy was on the verge of collapse, with dozens of Republicans bolting from the ticket in favour of the conservative third-party efforts of Reed Smoot, the former Senator from Utah. Mr Willkie, reports said, had become unhinged since being brained by a falling light on the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. His remarks about primary rival, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, certainly bore witness to that view.
“Vandenberg’s father was at the McKinley assassination. We don’t talk about that. Why aren’t we talking about that?”
When Mr Willkie was criticised by American hero and darling of the right Charles Lindbergh, he dismissed the world-renowned pilot. “I prefer the guy whose kid doesn’t get kidnapped” was just one of the dozens of moments that were, at the time, described as “the final nail in Willkie’s coffin”. Now Mr Willkie’s coffin will, whenever he reaches it, be that of a President of the United States.
Yet every time the
New York Times declared that “Groucho Marx Just DISCOMBOBULATED Mr Willkie’s Campaign”, Mr Willkie continued to build momentum and brush aside any and all opponents. This was, after all, the candidate who entered the race with a highly controversial and poisonously-authored article demanding “an immediate internment” of all Japanese-American persons in the continental United States, “should a state of war come into being between the United States and the Empire of Japan”. From President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull to Senators Taft and Vandenberg, the proposal was widely and almost unanimously condemned. But crude polling showed Mr Willkie’s support skyrocketed.
On the campaign trail, his answers veered between the confusing and the objectively ridiculous. Asked in San Francisco to comment on the rising power of Japan's navy, Mr Willkie responded “my son, he's 21 years old, he's so good at swimming. I'm so proud of him”. “My foreign policy is going to be Dunkirk plus plus,” Mr Willkie insisted in his eve-of-polling speech. Many of Mr Willkie’s supporters - clad in their red-white-and-blue fedoras which proudly declare “Make America Stand Again” - see Britain’s withdrawal from Europe as an example to follow. Willkie is believed to consider it a priority to place pressure on London to cease hostilities with the Reich as soon as is possible.
It was this pressure that led to the first of many remarks prematurely declared “the end of Wendell Willkie”. Pressed to expand on his plans for dealing with Britain after two weeks of promising “a secret plan to bring peace to Europe”, Willkie snorted with derision and cried, “I’m l-l-l-looking forward to m-m-meeting the K-king of England!” This vicious mockery of the sovereign’s speech impediment met with genuine outrage from newspapers both at home and abroad - but seemed to do little to dent Mr Willkie’s campaign. With hindsight, this was surely obvious - a man whose campaign slogan was transparently a vindictive, cruel and tasteless attack on the rumoured health problems of the incumbent President was never going to be brought low by more of the same behaviour.
Then, in the final stretch of the campaign, it finally looked like he might. The dreaded ‘October Surprise’ seemed to arrive: a letter from Willkie to the then-Governor of New Hampshire, Styles Bridges, in which he commented on interracial coupling. “Any negro with pure intent seeking courtship with a white lady,” the younger Willkie had written, “just has to grab her by the hand.”

The explosion in public feeling could not be compared to anything since the end of the Great War. Willkie sought to clarify his comments, calling them “college talk”, but as headlines proclaimed the impending horror of “The first openly non-racist President since Reconstruction”, his campaign looked to have finally achieved the implosion declared inevitable during the summer. “GRAB HER BY THE HAND?” was emblazoned on placards and posters across the South, and various northern cities too. By contrast, only a few column inches were expended on the apparent contradiction between Willkie’s letter and his support for Mr Hitler in Germany. “Mr Hitler’s a good guy, he’s doing what needs to be done out there, when I’m in office I will say to him that he can do what he needs to do to get rid of the Communists. I will. That’s what I’ll do, it’s what he’ll do. He’s not a guy I know personally. But he can do things. The very best things.” This seam was mined further by Mr Willkie’s rhetoric describing Hull as “the father of the USSR”, and the Democratic response to accuse Mr Willkie of receiving intelligence from the Abwehr.
Indeed, Mr Willkie made a bizarre public call for Germany’s Admiral Canaris to “take a good look at Secretary Hull’s diplomatic cables”.
But with the nation divided on how to deal with - or make a deal with - Mr Hitler, this issue proved less divisive than Mr Willkie’s rumoured non-racism. Other letters were promised, including some that may even have voiced opposition to Jim Crow laws, but they proved illusory. As leading Republicans distanced themselves in the aftermath of “grab her by the hand”, Vice Presidential candidate Governor Arthur James allegedly wrote a letter resigning from the ticket but did not, in the end, sign it.
Mr James will be thanking his indecisiveness tonight, as he prepares to become the 33rd Vice President and the 2nd from the great state of Pennsylvania. He entered headlines once again when, two nights ago, the cast of
The Dancing Years directed an unexpected plea to his box in the Adelphi, asking that he remind his running mate of the Bill of Rights. President-elect Willkie was so offended when he heard the news, he sent a telegram to every post office in the land.
Even the psephological community were caught out by the unstoppable rise of Mr Willkie. Fresh from his success in correctly calling Mr Roosevelt’s landslide election over Governor Landon four years ago, George Gallup found himself criticised by the political editor of
The Atlantic for even daring to suggest that the Republican candidate had even the slightest chance of success over Mr Hull. A furious letter to the
New York Times brought further complaints, but Mr Gallup will at least feel somewhat vindicated - even if his final prediction still suggested a handsome electoral college victory for the Democratic Party ticket.
Indeed, Mr Willkie’s success did not occur in isolation. A hapless effort by Mr Hull and his Running Mate, Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, will surely go down as one of the most lamentable presidential campaigns of recent decades. Despite an administration that had presided over sustained and substantive recovery from the Great Depression, the perception was that Mr Hull - a foreign policy expert - was simply not in tune with the interests of ordinary voters in the same way that Mr Willkie appeared to be. Shrugging off the insurgent and surprisingly strong primary challenge from Idaho Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Mr Hull’s clear failings as a candidate were manifest, but apparently ignored by a complacent Democratic Party leadership. As the results came in last Tuesday night, Senator Wheeler and his supporters would be forgiven for feeling irked at the end-result of the uninspiring technocratic campaign they had warned against. An attempt to fire up the Democratic base by calling Mr Willkie’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” can now be said to have objectively backfired.
After-all, even Al Smith managed to win Massachusetts.

The foreign reaction has been hysteria, both panicked and gleeful. In the Reich, newsreels allegedly cut by Goebbels himself played footage of the President-elect’s insane grin and smug Democrats proclaiming him unable to win, with Grieg’s ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’ playing at an uncomfortable volume. In England, grave concerns were raised in parliament and Winston Churchill, only recently installed as Prime Minister, may face a vote of no confidence now his transparent hope for American entry into the European War will never be answered. The first British figure to meet with the President-elect was William Joyce, better known to Englishmen as Lord Haw-Haw, who boarded a plane from Berlin as soon as the result became clear. In a garish meeting in Mr Willkie’s expensive home in Rushville, Indiana, Mr Joyce was photographed with Mr Willkie, Mr Subhas Chandra Bose of India, and British aristocrat the Duke of Hamilton. A telegram sent shortly after the meeting notes how strange the new Transatlantic Partnership might be:
“Many people would like to see Will Joyce represent Great Britain as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States STOP He would do a great job EXCLAMATION.”
Republican leaders are still deciding how best to work with a President-elect that they had never really felt to be one of them. Mr Willkie, who endorsed then-Governor Roosevelt for the White House in 1932, has broken numerous times with the traditional orthodoxies of the the party, going so far as to call former President Hoover a “jackass”.
President Hoover, it is rumoured, cast his vote for former Senator Smoot.
Despite this, Senate Minority Leader Charles McNary will take some solace in his gamble to filibuster the appointment of William O. Douglas to the Supreme Court. Despite being harangued by Majority Leader Barkley, Senator McNary’s careful lobbying of Southern Democrats and continued support from his own caucus frustrated the best efforts of the President to select a liberal replacement for the outgoing Louis Brandeis. The business lobby will no doubt be delighted at the prospect of a new Supreme Court that will have the potential to “repeal and renew” the New Deal.

In a final humiliation for Mr Hull, the Democratic ticket comfortably won the popular vote, with huge margins in the East Coast cities and the old reliable states of the solid south. However, despite a campaign that was haphazard where it existed at all, Mr Willkie was still able to eke out tiny margins of victory in key states in the industrial Midwest, with his populist campaign also carrying every state west of the Rocky Mountains. Echoes of the old efforts of William Jennings Bryan were on display, further aiding Mr Willkie in the Plains. More than a few members of the Democratic Party are ruing the decision by Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, not to have challenged Mr Hull for the nomination, and it seems that reports of a so-called “New Deal” coalition were entirely misguided. Voters, it appears, wanted to vote for President Roosevelt, not surrogates for President Roosevelt.
While the nation’s cartoonists provide levity to the broken-hearted half of the country with images of Wallace and Roosevelt engaging in schoolyard tomfoolery (a photograph of Wallace grinning warmly at a guffawing Roosevelt inspired the trend shortly before election day), some desperate Democrats are calling on the electoral college to be abolished in favour of a nation-wide vote. It would be news indeed to Mr Willkie, who proposed the same thing when the
Literary Digest suggested that Governor Landon could win the popular vote, but lose the state-level contests four years ago. It is not a sentiment he has expressed since.
Democrats (and, perhaps, democrats with a lower-case ‘D’ around the world) are praying that there are many other ideas he will stop talking about now he has won the highest office in the land. As the authority to command the US Navy is handed over to Mr Wendell Lewis Willkie of Indiana this January, Japanese-Americans fearing internment will not be the only ones living in fear.