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Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie, by Steve Neal Doubleday, 371 pp., $17.95 ‘On a sweltering August afternoon in 1940, Wendell Lewis Willkie returned to his boyhood home of Elwood, in north central Indiana, and accepted the Republican presidential nomination. What was said to be the greatest crowd in political history— nearly 200,000 persons—had converged on the small town for Willkie’s day.” So begins Steve Neal’s excellent and revealing biography. Neal is a journalist as well as an established biographer, and he has not written an academic sandbag but a taut and readable book. In one of the stirring moments of American political history, the charismatic Willkie had come roaring out of the West by way of Wall Street to seize, against every expectation, the 1940 Republican nomination from such established political figures as Taft, Dewey, Vandenberg, and Herbert Hoover. From the start, Willkie had had a populist-radical side. His strong mother “was unsentimental, had a quick mind, and [was] something of a non-conformist, [being] the first woman in Elwood to smoke cigarettes.”

Willkie went to the local high school, also Culver, and on to Indiana University, where he “challenged the faculty’s rigid conservatism and contributed to a campus magazine called Bogus, which was iconoclastic.” Then a law degree, at the top of his class, from Indiana, and service in World War I: Wilsonian idealism and an “almost religious belief in the League of Nations.” His abilities as an attorney brought him to high corporate attention, and, moving to New York in 1929, he rose rapidly as a defender of private utilities against the hostility of the New Deal. By the age of 41, he was president of Commonwealth and Southern, and a powerful spokesman for American business. On the night of January 6, 1938, on the weekly radio show America’s Town Meeting of the Air—which had a large and literate audience—he trounced Robert H. Jackson, a bright New Deal star. A little later, he successfully took on Felix Frankfurter at a debate at the Harvard Club. He was still nominally a Democrat, but powerful Eastern Republicans had appraised him with intense interest.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie, by Steve Neal Doubleday, 371 pp., $17.95 ‘On a sweltering August afternoon in 1940, Wendell Lewis Willkie returned to his boyhood home of Elwood, in north central Indiana, and accepted the Republican presidential nomination. What was said to be the greatest crowd in political history— nearly 200,000 persons—had converged on the small town for Willkie’s day.” So begins Steve Neal’s excellent and revealing biography. Neal is a journalist as well as an established biographer, and he has not written an academic sandbag but a taut and readable book. In one of the stirring moments of American political history, the charismatic Willkie had come roaring out of the West by way of Wall Street to seize, against every expectation, the 1940 Republican nomination from such established political figures as Taft, Dewey, Vandenberg, and Herbert Hoover. From the start, Willkie had had a populist-radical side. His strong mother “was unsentimental, had a quick mind, and [was] something of a non-conformist, [being] the first woman in Elwood to smoke cigarettes.”

Willkie went to the local high school, also Culver, and on to Indiana University, where he “challenged the faculty’s rigid conservatism and contributed to a campus magazine called Bogus, which was iconoclastic.” Then a law degree, at the top of his class, from Indiana, and service in World War I: Wilsonian idealism and an “almost religious belief in the League of Nations.” His abilities as an attorney brought him to high corporate attention, and, moving to New York in 1929, he rose rapidly as a defender of private utilities against the hostility of the New Deal. By the age of 41, he was president of Commonwealth and Southern, and a powerful spokesman for American business. On the night of January 6, 1938, on the weekly radio show America’s Town Meeting of the Air—which had a large and literate audience—he trounced Robert H. Jackson, a bright New Deal star. A little later, he successfully took on Felix Frankfurter at a debate at the Harvard Club. He was still nominally a Democrat, but powerful Eastern Republicans had appraised him with intense interest.