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Invariably his pugnacity and his conviction led him into trouble, whether it was in trying to paint his class numerals on an Elwood gastank or in delivering a valedictory address on the theme that the faculty was incompetent to teach law. In one case he got a broken arm; in the other his degree was withheld 24 hours.
The Willkie family, under Herman Willkie, lawyer, book lover, Prussian-hater, had grown up in an atmosphere of argument that began when Father Willkie woke the boys with a bellowed quotation (a favorite of Lincoln's): "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" and lasted until the evening hour, when he would read to them from one of the 6,700 books that lined the spreading, maple-shaded house.
Willkie took then, as he still does, his thirst for argumentative ideas into his reading. He has always had great difficulty in finishing a book. A footnote in the first chapter sends him to another book, a second reference to a third, until, lounging on a couch, shoes off, he wallows happily in cascades of books. He has never read books in the usual sense—he argues his way through them.
As an Akron lawyer he refused to try to keep-up-with-the-Joneses. As counsel and then president of Commonwealth & Southern Corp. he refused to conform to the established slick norm of utilitycoons. He carried that spirit into his battle with the Government over TVA; his old talent for trouble sought out what he considered the biggest enemy of his business.
Gradually his belief in independence began to take a political turn. For him, the cause of Commonwealth & Southern be came the cause of business against Government, then the cause of the people against the New Deal, and finally, the cause of democracy and freedom against all collectivism and totalitarianism. His progress was simple and definite: at the time of the Philadelphia Convention, Wendell Willkie had more friends for his ideas in the U. S. than Republican wardheelers could conceive. For what has been generally termed the miracle of Philadelphia was a miracle only in this sense: that a widely held U. S. belief had triumphed over entrenched Republican stupidities.
To Wendell Willkie it was no miracle that that belief had triumphed; it was a matter of common sense. Last week he still believed that the campaign was a matter of logic; that the national problem should be debated; that the voters were debate judges; and that he could win the debate.
No one could prove to him that a campaign is something both less and more than a debate, that the 45,000,000 voters, feel, as well as think, and that a crusade is perhaps not compounded of rational ideas. In 1932 Herbert Hoover told a Nevada audience on the night before Election Day: "If the thinking people of the United States go to the polls tomorrow I will be re-elected President of the United States." Thirty-three million people voted next day, but he was not reelected.