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In the tenth month of war, the Party of Business gathered at Philadelphia for one of its most historic conventions. Running its Resolutions Committee, favorites for its nominations were men most of whom did not believe in the emergency the President had proclaimed. They were isolationists: Taft, Dewey, Vandenberg, James, MacNider. Suddenly the Republican Party awoke. Aroused by the fall of France, the smaller, younger, more imaginative believers in Business scattered the bosses, nominated Wendell Willkie. If he had had only Big Business' support, Wendell Willkie would have got no further than Frank Gannett. Instead, he led the most fervent crusade the U. S. had seen since William Jennings Bryan. On some 300 platforms he boasted of the fact that he was a businessman. After eight years in the doghouse, other businessmen were also blinded by the light.
The Willkie crusade was Business' chance to stop the Revolution. But the Revolution could not be stopped. Willkie was for helping the farmer, for the Wagner Act, for aid to the old, the poor, the unemployed. He might have been for all these things and still have stopped the Revolution. But he could not recognize the emergency and still stop the Revolution—for the emergency is political and its very force gives politicians control over businessmen. It was a fact that he had to face. In facing it he and his supporters gave two-party sanction to the Government to spend, tax, unbalance the budget, control industry for the duration.
Willkie's version of the Revolution would have been different from the New Deal's. He promised a new atmosphere, a new friendliness, a new and more efficient Government personnel, but most of all, he tacitly promised that the Revolution would end when emergency ended. He awakened Business' conscience, restored (for a few months) its belief. It was in fact his cause, democratic capitalism, which the U. S. was arming to protect. Yet Willkie failed to identify himself with that cause in the public mind. And the cause of Business' prerevolutionary, isolationist right wing was meanwhile left without a champion.
After it was over, Mrs. Elizabeth (The Red Network) Dilling, who voted for Willkie, decided that all the time he had been a New Deal stooge.
The third revolutionary businessman of 1940 was William S. Knudsen. When Franklin Roosevelt in May reached past the queue of Business' front men and picked the production genius of General Motors for the Defense Advisory Commission, a shrewd New Deal insider grunted: "Knudsen's a hostage for at least 2,000,000 votes." To many a citizen tired of New Deal Business-baiting, he was a symbol of the hope that Business and the New Deal could work together.
Knudsen was no front man. Every speech he made contained a few grammatical crudities (although he speaks half a dozen languages). His enormous frame and hands suggest a son of toil (although he plays Mozart on a spinet). He was a trouble shooter who reeked pleasantly of lubricating oil. When he went to Washington, Business put its know-how at the disposal of the Revolution. Before summer was out, some 100 important executives had joined Bill Knudsen in the $1-a-year-or-less brigade.