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Ray Clapper is a middle-sized man with wise eyes, stooped shoulders, and a burning conviction that journalism is the most important profession in the world. In themselves, these attributes would not make him unique. The quality that long ago lifted Scripps-Howard's Clapper out of the ruck of columnists is his knack of translating some event into sound sense on the very day that people want to hear about it. Somehow he manages to move mentally a half-step faster than the mass mind. Farmers rocking on their porch chairs in the evening, clubmen lounging beside an afternoon cocktail, come to Clapper conclusions almost exactly the day he does. With the same painful care that his daily readers were exercising, he had been trying to spell out very simply just what was the central issue in the 1940 campaign. The war had obscured the issue, Candidate Franklin Roosevelt talked about loftier things, Candidate Wendell Willkie some how couldn't seem to make it plain.
Last week Mr. Clapper made up his mind what the fight was about, pecked his findings into his dilapidated typewriter: "The sharp difference between Willkie and the New Deal centres on the place of capitalism in our national life. Roughly, Willkie believes private capitalism can carry the ball alone. New Dealers believe private capitalism alone is inadequate and that public spending must supplement it. The more extreme New Dealers go even further and question whether private capitalism is not a waning influence destined not to disappear perhaps but to play a far less controlling part in our national life."
Wendell Willkie had finally clarified the issue by his speech last week at Providence, R. I. In that speech he took an uncompromising stand, directly opposed to New Deal philosophy, asserted that industry, given its head, could give jobs to everyone.
Not only Ray Clapper but the U. S. had gradually learned what sort of a strange, uncompromising, unpolitical rugged character the G. O. P. had nominated.
The issue was rooted in the man's own obstinate independence. Independence was basic in the Willkie character—a tough, chip-on-the-shoulder independence that ranged from brute stubbornness to a rooted belief in the individual rights of man. Out of it had come the philosophy of his campaign: that the individual is greater than the State; that the purpose of Government is to make men free, since only free men will be able to build a productive and prosperous society. At Elwood he had said: "Only the strong can be free and only the productive can be strong."
That independence had gotten him many a black eye and bloody nose in the days when he was one of the four rough Willkie boys at Elwood, Ind., a talent for trouble that rose from pushing over Elwood outhouses (sometimes with outraged citizens in them), on through college, when he was so pugnaciously nonconformist as to organize the "barbs" against the fraternity men. He had always eventually conformed, but always on his own terms. In his last year as a turtleneck-sweatered roughneck at Indiana University he did join a fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, best on the campus, whose requirements were: a slick blond pompadour and more money than brains. Willkie had neither.