The Idealist: Wendell Willkie's Wartime Quest to Build One World by Samuel Zipp (review)

Reviewed by: The Idealist: Wendell Willkie's Wartime Quest to Build One World by Samuel Zipp Cynthia M. Koch The Idealist: Wendell Willkie's Wartime Quest to Build One World By Samuel Zipp (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 393. Notes, index, illustrations. Clothbound, $35.00; e-book, $35.00.) Little remembered today, Wendell Willkie was one of his era's best-known figures. As president of Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, the nation's largest electric utility holding company, he battled the New Deal Tennessee Valley Authority in congressional hearings and in the courts, gaining a national reputation as the premier spokesman for the private electric power industry. Samuel Zipp's book concerns itself with the last chapter in Willkie's life when he became an international symbol for "One World." Willkie had been the Republican nominee for president in 1940 and at the time of his tour was considered a likely contender in 1944. A Democrat until 1939, he was an unlikely Republican standard-bearer, but secured the nomination on the strength of his pro-business critique of the New Deal and as the only Republican contender who favored coming to the aid of Britain after the fall of France. As a politician Willkie touted his Indiana roots to distance himself from his career as a Wall Street lawyer. He was born in Elwood, Indiana, in 1892 and graduated from Indiana University in 1913 and the Indiana University School of Law in 1916. He married Edith Wilk from Rushville, where he maintained a home and was buried. A large man, he was known for his rumpled suits, country-style haircut, and Indiana twang. He was charming, well liked, and appealing as a sort of American everyman. Zipp tells the story of Willkie's celebrated forty-nine-day worldwide tour in August to October 1942. He recounts the daring trip, describing in detail Willkie's journey with prominent journalists Gardner ("Mike") Cowles Jr. and Joseph Barnes on a U.S. Army LB-30 christened the Gulliver. As described by Zipp, "They traveled via recently opened and occasionally unscouted air lanes over Africa, the Middle East, the Soviet Union and China—often well within range of enemy aircraft." Willkie visited the front in Egypt, Soviet Russia, and China, but his personal contacts were the most important part of the trip. "Willkie and his companions [met] face-to-face with Soviet factory workers, Siberian peasants, Arab nationalists, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles de Gaulle, and the shah of Iran" (p. 2). Willkie went with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's full support. Although political rivals, the two men shared much in common. Both were charismatic public figures, progressive on social issues, and internationalists determined to correct the mistakes of the ill-fated League of [End Page 175] Nations by creating a durable global organization after the war. In Zipp's telling, Willkie's trip became a sort of international referendum on the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of war aims issued by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the conclusion of the Atlantic Conference in August 1941. The charter included eight agreed-upon "common principles," but it was the joint commitment to "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live" that caught the attention of people in the Middle East and Asia living under the oppression of imperial regimes. While Willkie's "job" on the tour was to bolster support for the Allies, he found that people in the Middle East and China believed an end to imperialism was a far more compelling wartime goal than the defeat of fascism. Willkie's trip was widely reported on, and upon his return he broadcast a "Report to the People" to a radio audience of 36 million. One World, published in April 1943, sold a million copies in its first month and remained on the bestseller lists throughout the summer. The book came out at a moment when public optimism for a world organization to govern the postwar world was at an all-time high. Willkie quickly became the most prominent spokesman—after Roosevelt—for a new, more equitable world order. According to Zipp, Willkie issued a "challenge...