Our History

Wendell L. Willkie

Wendell Willkie was an unlikely candidate for president in 1940 on the Republican ticket. He was an attorney, a businessman, a Democrat (until 1940) and never before held public office.

Born into an unusually accomplished family for the period--both parents were attorneys; his father was also a school superintendent--Willkie grew up in Elwood, completed his education at Indiana University and worked in the family law firm from 1916 until he enlisted in the army during World War I. Subsequently he established himself in Akron, Ohio, serving as an attorney with the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company before entering private practice. Willkie was a Freemason and a member of Quincy Lodge # 230 in Elwood, IN. In 1920 he joined several sojourning Masons from Firestone Tire & Rubber and South Akron, took a demit from Quincy Lodge, and became a Charter Member of Coventry Lodge # 665 Free and Accepted Masons of Ohio. He maintained his membership in the fraternity and was a member in good standing when he passed away in 1944.

In 1929 Willkie moved to New York City, joined and soon presided over a large electric utility company (Commonwealth and Southern), made headlines and personal converts through his outspoken opposition to TVA (a key element in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs) and became a Republican. Stimulated by the hundreds of Willkie Clubs that sprang up in 1940, he pursued the GOP nomination in the months preceding the party's convention in Philadelphia in June 1940. Nominated by Congressman Charles A. Halleck, R-Ind.), Willkie was chosen on the sixth ballot. His running mate was Charles L. McNary of Oregon.

Willkie waged a vigorous campaign from headquarters established in Rushville, Indiana (his wife's hometown), which began with a huge rally in heat-stricken Elwood in August, but his opposition to Roosevelt's domestic programs, while supporting his foreign policies and refusing to focus on the third-term issue, was lost in the troubled war clouds over Europe. Willkie received 45 percent of the popular vote but carried only nine other states besides Indiana.

His greatest services as a statesman came following America's entry into World War II, when he served as FDR's personal emissary abroad. Willkie reported on his world tour of 1942 in a best-selling book, One World, a plea for international cooperation, peace and freedom.

In the 1944 presidential election Willkie once again sought the Republican nomination, choosing his wife's hometown, Rushville, Indiana as his campaign headquarters. But his liberal progressive views gained little support due to the rightward shift of the Republican Party. Willkie did not support the eventual 1944 Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey.

After surviving several, heart attacks, Willkie finally succumbed, dying on October 8, 1944 at age fifty-two. Eleanor Roosevelt in her October 12, 1944 My Day column eulogized Willkie as a "man of courage.... (Whose) outspoken opinions on race relations were among his great contributions to the thinking of the world." She concluded, "Americans tend to forget the names of the men who lost their bid for the presidency. Willkie proved the exception to this rule." Willkie is buried in Rushville, Indiana.