THE CAMPAIGN: The Issue

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". . . Nobody understands better than I do the necessity of the United States maintaining a certain position in world affairs but I still believe that the primary issues of this campaign are American issues—what is going to happen to America." It had taken Willkie three days to get angry, but when he got mad he stayed mad: public slurs had been circulated about his wife, his father, his family. He began giving each train-platform audience a history of each of them—his father's belligerent advocacy of civil liberties, his father's attempt to enlist in 1917 at the age of 60, his mother's years of work in the Red Cross, his sister's wartime Government work as a translator of confidential war documents, his own enlistment, that of his oldest brother Robert, the war work of another brother in airplane manufacture, his youngest brother's service in the Navy, his younger sister's Washington work for the Red Cross. It was extremely affecting talk. Even hard-boiled reporters were moved. One old newshawk, tough as a boot, confessed to a throat lump big as a doorknob. Willkie himself had wet eyes. At long last, and perhaps in spite of himself, Wendell Willkie was finding out that a Presidential candidate must do more than grind away at his ax: he must dramatize himself.

Only three weeks were left of the campaign. But at last the voters' position was clearing. For the first time in U. S. history, U. S. citizens were being asked to judge between the State's rights and the citizen's. That such a historic decision was due to be made in 1940, of all furious, distorted years—this imminent fact stretched up as the major news of the day. Voters this year, if never before, could cast their votes and mean it.