It is a document of his world travels and meetings with many of the Allies' heads of state as well as ordinary citizens and soldiers in locales such as El Alamein, Russia, and Iran. The main idea of the book is that the world became one small inter-connected unit and Isolationism is no longer possible:
When you fly around the world in 49 days, you learn that the world has become small not only on the map, but also in the minds of men. All around the world, there are some ideas which millions and millions of men hold in common, almost as much as if they lived in the same town.[2]
Wendell Willkie One World Pdf
He sought to extend the Atlantic Charter beyond West Europe to all world. "That was one of the reasons why I was so greatly distressed when Mr. Churchill subsequently made his world-disturbing remark, 'We mean to hold our own. I did not become His Majesty's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.'"[10]
He warned on the Soviet rule over East Europe: "The failure of Mr. Stalin to announce to a worried world Russia's specific aspirations with reference to Eastern Europe weighs the scales once more against the proclaimed purposes of leaders."[12]
Especially emphasized is the position of China in the world after World War II; involved in a civil war between Nationalists and Communists, Willkie prophesies that whichever power achieves victory will make China a force to be reckoned with. It is the duty of the United Nations (the Allies[note 1]) to make sure that the power is friendly to American and other Allied interests but also that it is powerful enough to help the Chinese, the world's most populated nation.
FDR saw the trip as a fact-finding mission and a morale-building effort. But his former opponent made it much more than that. Across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Willkie discovered, the war was not just a struggle against Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism, but potentially a colossal turning point in world history. A whole generation of anti-imperial nationalists saw a war fought for democracy and freedom as a chance to persuade the great European empires to finally relinquish their hold on the globe.
Canadian Review of Amencan Studies Volume 24, Number 2, Spring 1994, pp. 87-104 87 Remembering Wendell Willkie's One World Philip Beidler Fifty years ago, people were purchasing the best-selling American book of World War II by the millions. Today, a handful of specialists could identify it. The book was Wendell L. Willkie's One World. A plea by the unsuccessful 1940 Republican presidential candidate for an enlightened postwar American internationalism, it was also an account of the author's globe-girdling 1942 tour of major war fronts-via a converted army air force bomber supplied by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his likely opponent again in 1944-and of his talks with Allied leaders. Appearing in April 1943 in simultaneous cloth and paperbound editions, the book sold a million copies in two months and doubled that figure by the end of the year. Translated into sixteen languages, it shortly added another million to the sales total worldwide. Central to the uniqueness of the phenomenon was the persona of the politician-author himself. On all counts, Willkie was a colorful enigma. Born in Indiana, this Wall Street utilities executive who had never held political office, was also a former Democrat who had voted for Roosevelt in 1932 and who had waited as late as 1939-and then, according to one biographer, partly at the urging of his son and wife1 -to actually register as a Republican. He quickly rose to prominence by gaining a reputation as a liberal internationalist in a party dominated by such prewar conservative isolationists as Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenburg and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. As something of a surprise nominee, he in turn seemed to mark out positions on dominant questions of international policy, especially as to intervention or nonintervention in the burgeoning global conflict, that were not all that different from Roosevelt's. 2 That Willkie 88 Canadian Review of American Stu.dies secured the nomination under such circumstances was generally explained by his curious combination of populist enthusiasm and a gee-whiz folksiness with a solid record as a corporate executive in defending Republican bigbusiness interests against creeping New Deal socialism. Indeed, he had come to prominence on Wall Street and among conservative business interests as head of Commonwealth and Southern (C&S), a giant utilities holding company, on whose behalf he had achieved in pitched battle against the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a 78 million dollar settlement from TVA for C&S properties (Blum 1976, 263). "This," Roosevelt biographer Ted Morgan (1985) observes, "was no tousle-haired Hoosier," as the Democrats were quick to proclaim, "but a bare-knuckled Wall Street man" (534). Or, as Alice Longworth is said to have quipped to Joseph Alsop about Willkie's attempts to create his unique hybrid appeal, his support came "from the grass roots of ten thousand country clubs" (Neal 1984, 99). In any event, the Willkie phenomenon met with success. If he had outsmarted mainstream Republicans, he genuinely frightened Roosevelt or at least key advisors such as Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes, who late in the campaign forced the president out of the role of busy statesman-incumbent and onto the hustings. ("The President cannot adjourn the Battle of Britain in order to ride circuit with Mr. Willkie, 11 Ickes was reported as saying early on [Morgan 1985, 535].) Events proved that Roosevelt came out on a campaign swing just in time (539). The popular vote proved disturbingly close, albeit with a final margin of nearly five million-27,244, 160 to 22,305,198. At the same time, there was no threat in the electoral college-449 electoral votes for Roosevelt , 82 for Willkie (540). Still, Willkie's relative success seemed to mainly suggest that a proven leader had been chosen over an attractive unproven one. And, it also explains how Willkie, looking ahead to 1944, was anxious enough to exchange good publicity for cooptation-not to mention an absence from off-year Republican politics-and how Roosevelt was concerned enough about Willkie's popularity for both to happily concoct Willkie's One World travel scheme to coincide with the 1942 congressional and gubernatorial elections. 3 Remembering Wendell Willkie's One World a...
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I have recently completed a study of popular internationalism, empire, and race during World War II that centers around Wendell Willkie and his "one world" ideals. I am in the early stages of a long term investigation of the relations between "selfhood" and metropolitan form.
My first book, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford, 2010), offered a new look at the politics and culture of urban renewal in Manhattan in the twenty years after World War II. I focus on the ways that superblock planning and modernist architecture remade the cityscape of the postwar city and were themselves remade by resistance to their overweening imposition on the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Urban renewal, I show, was at the heart of New York's simultaneous rise to "world city" status and fall into the "urban crisis."
For instance, the French people were just as brave and intelligent as the Germans. Their armies were considered the best in the world. France and her allies won the last war. They possessed all the material resources they needed. They had wealth and reserves of credit all over the earth. Yet the Germans crushed France like an eggshell.
France believed in the forms of democracy and in the idea of free-dom. But she failed to put them to use. She forgot that freedom must be dynamic, that it is forever in the process of creating a new world. This was the lesson that we of America had taught to all countries.
And I say that we must henceforth ask certain questions of every reform, and of every law to regulate business or industry. We must ask: Has it encouraged our industries to produce? Has it created new opportunities for our youth? Will it increase our standard of living? Will it encourage us to open up a new and bigger world?
Several such collective action problems dominate much of international politics today, and scholars of course debate their importance and relevance to world government. Nevertheless, a few obvious ones stand out, notably the imminent danger of climate change, the difficulty of addressing terrorism, and the complex task of humanitarian intervention. All of these are commonly (though not universally) regarded as serious problems in need of urgent solutions, and in each case powerful states have repeatedly demonstrated that they would prefer that somebody else solve them.
The solution to the collective action problem has long been known: it requires the establishment of some kind of authoritative regime that can organize common solutions to common problems and spread out the costs fairly. This is why many scholars and activists concerned with acute global problems support some form of world government. These advocates are not so naïve as to believe that such a system would put an effortless end to global warming, terrorism, or human rights atrocities, just as even the most effective national governments have not eradicated pollution or crime. The central argument in favor of a world-government approach to the problems of globalization is not that it would easily solve these problems, but that it is the only entity that can solve them. 2ff7e9595c
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