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As every newsman on the Willkie train knew, Wendell Willkie would rather be right than be President. To gain 10,000 votes in a crucial area he would not compromise a single belief. Willkie's conviction of rightness, coupled with his understanding of the seriousness of the times, had led him deliberately to take an attitude of sober seriousness. Day in & day out, he refused to make fireworks speeches. It was not that he couldn't; he wouldn't. He clung almost mulishly to his conviction that plain, serious talk will convince the voters, for the voters of 1940 are serious people who want the truth unvarnished.
Deliberately Willkie had divested himself of any possible glamor; distrusting heroics and grandiosity, he had stripped his speeches to bare, plain statements. But the people who had shouted "We Want Willkie!" were not hoping for a simple, humble fellow but for a great, forceful leader, a torchbearer, a prophet, a hero.
Only Willkie himself and his narrowest partisans refused to believe that he had disappointed in some measure most of the audiences he had addressed—hundreds of them now, all over the country. Always the people, unsatisfied, shouted "More!" again & again in the hope that this time, this time, at last, he would sound the call they could march to.
But now the issue had come clear. Partisan Willkiemen saw it as a choice between freedom and collectivism; partisan Rooseveltians saw it as an effort by a Wall Street wolf to don New Deal lamb's wool. The temperate saw it, as Columnist Clapper had clearly stated it, as a struggle between two basic philosophies.
The candidates themselves showed the gulf between them most clearly one night last week. In what some men thought his greatest speech, Franklin Roosevelt orated mellowly of hemisphere defense and freedom of the seas, while Wendell Willkie bellowed huskily about plant amortization as a bottleneck in the defense program. Not many of the 45,000,000 U. S. voters can define the word amortization, but even in far-off South America listeners could appreciate the President's vibrant "Viva la Democracia!"
Whether or not Willkie's listeners, like Clapper, began to see what he was driving at, he kept on driving. For the home stretch he mapped a killing itinerary. Before the campaign's end he would cross and crisscross the vital regions, smashing more & more boldly into Democratic citadels, ending with a bombardment of New York City.
Over the weekend came the first clear encouragement to those who want him to fight, not chat: Willkie got mad. The smear by the Colored Division of the Democratic National Committee got his dander up. He smashed hard at the "high professions and low performances" of the New Deal. At Schenectady, beside the railroad tracks, he roared to 2,000 people: "The opposition party's strategy has now become perfectly obvious. It is to have the National Committee deal in the lowest type of politics and smear; to deal with the most corrupt of political machines, while the candidate himself engages in lofty speeches and expression about world leadership and his knowledge of foreign affairs.