Debates about what should be America’s role in the world are not new—neither is the slogan “America First.” So as the presidential election nears, we spoke with Samuel Zipp, whose book, The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World, is a dramatic account of the former Republican presidential nominee’s worldwide plane trip to rally U.S. allies to the war effort to fight fascism. His journey to many nations inspired him to challenge Americans to fight a rising tide of nationalism at home and to reject the “America First” doctrine.
What made you want to write about Wendell Willkie and his 1942 around-the-world trip?
I had long known about the popularity of One World—it’s one of those things that gets a mention in historical accounts of the World War II domestic home front. Often it’s just mentioned as a fleeting upsurge of interest in world affairs during the war. In recent years, there’s been lots of interest in understanding how the United States has, for its entire history, been enmeshed in the world at large, even if many Americans have failed to recognize it or even hoped to deny it. What, I wondered, was the mass popularity of One World really about?
Meanwhile, in a previous book, I had written about the building of the United Nations headquarters building and discovered a strain of popular internationalism in American culture celebrating the arrival of the UN and its mission on American shores—even in the face of the nationalism that underpinned the dawning years of the Cold War. Willkie, his trip, and One World appeared to me to be the greatest mainstream flowering of this set of commitments. This becomes particularly fascinating when you read the book and find that it’s full of attacks on colonialism and racism, positions I had mostly associated with the African American internationalists of the era. It turned out to be a great story, full of unexpected political and cultural complexities and surprising scenes from his journey across the planet, from West Africa to Cairo to the Middle East to Russia and China.
All this seemed even more pressing as politics in the here and now veered rightward and a slogan from those wartime years, “America First!”, reappeared as a nationalist rallying cry. It is clear that we are in another time of pitched rancor surrounding America’s place in the world—the pandemic has only deepened this sense, of course—and that a look at how Americans faced these dilemmas at a previous time of global crisis could help us understand the terms of our own lives.
Willkie ran against President Roosevelt in 1940 as the Republican presidential candidate, yet Roosevelt trusted him enough to send him to foreign capitals as an unofficial ambassador, “Private Citizen Number One.” What made Roosevelt select Willkie for this role?
The idea for the trip was actually Willkie’s, not Roosevelt’s. They had a kind of wary friendship, and they were both what was in 1940 and 1941 called “interventionists”—they believed that the U.S. was going to have to get into the war on the Allied side at some point. A Democrat for most of his life, Willkie had long been an internationalist. He thought the U.S. should have ratified the League of Nations charter back in the 1920s and that it should take an active and cooperative role in the world. He distrusted Roosevelt’s New Deal because he headed up a utilities holding company during the Depression, and the President’s Tennessee Valley Authority threatened to put it out of business, more or less. His advocacy on behalf of the power companies, and his internationalism, brought him to the attention of liberal Republicans—an all but forgotten political beast!—who wanted the Republican Party to embrace internationalism and the anti-fascist cause rather than what Willkie would call “narrow nationalism.” Willkie switched parties to run, but during the campaign, and after, he tended to support FDR’s calls for war preparedness. This didn’t help him win, but it led to him earning the President’s trust. He had made a trip to London during the closing days of the Blitz and had so rallied morale there that a group of American reporters in Moscow in 1942 wrote to him suggesting he visit the beleaguered Soviet capital. Willkie ran with it and made the invitation a much bigger jaunt. Roosevelt saw the trip as a kind of public relations junket for the U.S. war effort, but Willkie would make much more out of the journey.
Willkie was awakened to the ugliness of American imperialism during his brief experience working in Puerto Rico as a young man. How did that incident shape his world view?
A year or so after college Willkie spent a few months working as a “junior chemist” for an American sugar company in Puerto Rico. One day he was out on a horseback ride with the manager of one of the big sugar plantations when a starving cane worker—most likely a fugitive, hiding out after a recent revolt of exploited cane laborers—emerged from the brush at the side of the road. With no hesitation, Willkie’s companion drew his cane knife and attacked the worker, nearly severing the man’s arm. According to friends, Willkie talked about this moment for years. Son of a labor lawyer, he had grown up in a family in which sympathy for the underdog was expected, but he would later say that this brutal moment was when he realized he had to develop a social conscience. Whether this incident caused him to recognize the larger structure of exploitation in which he himself worked that summer—the sugar companies were the main instruments of U.S. empire on the island—is less clear, but the story sets the stage for one of The Idealist’s primary dilemmas: will Willkie’s anti-colonial ideals—also inculcated in him since childhood—bring him into conflict with the U.S.’s longstanding imperial power?
How did Willkie’s thinking about international affairs, and America’s role in the world, change over the course of his 1942 trip?
Over the course of the trip, Willkie began to understand just how much the positions the United States took towards the postwar peace would shape the future of global relations. And he also began to realize that it was crucial that Americans recognize the actual state of global affairs. The war had pushed the problem of empire back onto the world stage and given colonized peoples new hope for freedom during a conflict to end fascism and militarism. As he traveled—across the Middle East to Russia and China—he intuited something that we now take for granted—World War II was the hinge of the twentieth century and so much depended on the U.S. recognizing and granting the expectations and demands of the world’s people for freedom. The trip gave him the insight he needed to convert his earlier belief in civil rights, equality, and freedom for all to a strategic vision, one in which the U.S. would cooperate with the Soviet Union to help end colonialism and usher in a new cooperative future for the globe.
One of Willkie’s blind spots, you argue, was his belief that American colonialism was fundamentally benign in comparison to European colonialism. Why were Willkie and so many other Americans unable or unwilling to see their country as an empire?
Willkie was opposed to American empire in name, but failed to see how it was changing at midcentury. In fact, he and others like him assumed that the U.S. was in the process of giving up its territorial empire. They were encouraged by the fact that American leaders had promised freedom to the Philippines—independence that would arrive formally just after the war. But the U.S. hung on to most of its colonies and even added some new ones in the Pacific as a byproduct of dismantling the Japanese empire. The U.S. was also in the process of reshaping the nature of its power, displacing the British Empire as the guardian of the global capitalist system—and doing so not by way of territorial gains but through new kinds of far-flung economic, military, and cultural influence. Capitalism was ailing in the 30s and 40s, so this was difficult for many to see.
But probably more important was the way that Willkie, like so many Americans, assumed that his country was a non-imperial nation. It was the country that had overthrown the British, got democracy up and running, and lifted the light of freedom for so many. Willkie opposed many of the manifestations of American empire, but tended to see them as exceptions or aberrations, not fundamental parts of the making of the United States. This led him to eagerly attack European colonialism, and the problem of American racial discrimination at home, but it tended to leave him less prepared to see American empire itself as an evolving system. This, I think, tended to encourage the same blind spots in his vast audience, and gives us a vivid illustration of why many Americans were willing and even eager to embrace a role as world power in the years after the war, but could not see this power as a form of empire.