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David L. Lewis
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The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order Kindle Edition

by David Levering Lewis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 102 ratings
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From a two-time Pulitzer-winning historian comes an “insightful, compelling portrait” (New York Times Book Review) of Wendell Willkie, the businessman-turned-presidential candidate.


Hailed as “the definitive biography of Wendell Willkie” (Irwin F. Gellman), The Improbable Wendell Willkie offers an “engrossing and enlightening appraisal” (Ira Katznelson) of a prominent businessman and Wall Street attorney presidential candidate who could have saved America’s sclerotic political system. Although Willkie lost to FDR in 1940, acclaimed historian David Levering Lewis demonstrates that the story of this Hoosier- born corporate chairman’s life is “a powerful reminder of practical bipartisanship, visionary internationalism, and committed civil liberties and civil rights” (Katrina vanden Heuvel). Popular for his downhome mid-western charm and unaffected candor, Willkie possessed a supple intellect and a concealed disdain for political opportunism that, had he not died prematurely, would have revolutionized American politics with its advocacy of bipartisanship and social responsibility. “Meticulously researched and brilliantly written” (Douglas Brinkley), The Improbable Wendell Willkie “brings the now largely unknown Willkie to a new generation” (The New Yorker), reclaiming the legacy of an American icon.
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  1. Print length
    416 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Liveright
  5. Publication date
    September 18, 2018
  6. File size
    38539 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Absorbing and all-too-timely...Lewis has painted a compelling portrait."

-- "Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America"

About the Author

David Levering Lewis is University Professor at New York University and a former president of the Society of American Historians. His work reflects the mutual dependence of African and African American history, as well as the utility of biography in the exploration of American race, class, and politics. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Parkman Prize, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, his two volumes on the life of W. E. B. Du Bois won the Pulitzer Prize, the only time in the history of the award that both volumes of a biography have won. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, his M.A. from Columbia University, and his B.A. from Fisk University.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B073VXXWMB
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Liveright; Reprint edition (September 18, 2018)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 18, 2018
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 38539 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 102 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
102 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

A Connecticut Yankee
5.0 out of 5 stars A Singular American Visionary's Story
Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2018
Verified Purchase
On this election day some 74 years after Willkie’s death, his story well-retold by David Levering Lewis is as vital and timely as it is improbable. Despite his brief public life, the list of Willkie’s prophetic sayings and writings is long. Among them, if you’re looking for a reason to get to know this unique, personable guy today, perhaps none beats this one from his 1942 radio address and 1943 book “One World”, anticipating Hubert Humphrey’s moving civil rights speech by 5 years, the widespread American civil rights movement by about 20 years, and even (in near-poetry) our own fraught political era by 75 years:

“[I]t is only common sense to safeguard jealously the rights of minorities. For minorities are rich assets of a democracy, assets which no totalitarian government can afford. Dictatorships must, of necessity, fear and suppress them. But within the tolerance of a democracy, minorities are the constant spring of new ideas, stimulating new thought and action, the constant source of new vigor. . .

“For now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.

“Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads. It has been woven over many centuries by the patience and sacrifice of countless liberty-loving men and women. It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and gentile, of foreign- and native-born.

“Let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed, where or when man will find its protective warmth again.”*

*The gender thing in the quote above was an unfortunate convention of that time, to which I’ll only counter that Willkie’s 1940 GOP platform included an Equal Rights Amendment plank. Yes – you read that correctly – that was once the GOP!

In short, David Levering Lewis’s book provides a new opportunity to become acquainted with this fiercely benevolent champion of American values, for whom E Pluribus Unum was no mere slogan. It’s an opportunity well worth taking!
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Californian34
5.0 out of 5 stars FORGOTTEN HERO EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD BE PROUD OF
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2019
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In a time when so many Americans are so deeply despondent, thinking our democracy has totally jumped the tracks in a headlong plunge toward doom . . . every American owes it to themselves to read this marvelous book about an almost totally forgotten American hero . . . who is exactly the sort of leader we so desperately need today.

Wendell Willkie, a "liberal" Republican . . . (yes, Virginia, once upon a time there actually was such a rare and exotic animal) . . . appalled the Republican "Old Guard" ultra-conservatives by winning the 1940 GOP nomination to run against Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal reforms. As president of one of the largest electric utilities in the U.S., Willkie was one of the strongest defenders of free enterprise in American history. But he warned his fellow Republicans that Roosevelt's New Deal reforms -- like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and bank account insurance to guarantee that never again would Americans lose their life savings in bank runs -- were excellent ideas and should not be overturned.

The day after he lost the 1940 election to FDR, Willkie extended his hand to Roosevelt and offered to work with him as the loyal opposition to win World War Two against the Nazis. In an extraordinary demonstration of bipartisanship that could NEVER happen in today's super-polarized politics, Willkie became one of FDR's most trusted advisers, traveling the globe to enlist the help of other countries in winning the war. It was as if Donald Trump had suddenly embraced Hillary Clinton as his closest adviser. Impossible. But it actually happened.

What a guy!!! That's the way American democracy is supposed to work . . . but doesn't anymore.

Toward the end of the war, Roosevelt and Willkie actually talked secretly about running together on the same ticket in the 1944 presidential election, joining together to reject the moss-back reactionaries in BOTH parties.

This wonderful story . . . which few Americans today have ever heard of . . . which few Americans today can even CONCEIVE of . . . is part of our country's lost history, revived by this book. It's a must-read.
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Tuscanwino
4.0 out of 5 stars A joke no more
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2018
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When I was a kid (1940s) we used to joke about 'Willkie Buttons." I'm very glad I read this bio, therefore, because this guy was no laughing matter. The seriousness with which he was taken, and his capabilities, are impressive. Were not FDR his opponent, I bet he would have been president.
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PoliSciJunkie
5.0 out of 5 stars A Candidate to be Proud Of
Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2021
Verified Purchase
You come away from this book with a very favorable view of the 1940 Republican nominee. But it's also an honest book, even raising questions about some chicanery in securing his nomination at the convention. Before knowing much of anything about him. Wendell Willkie is interesting of course because of the historical parallels with Donald Trump. The businessman, longtime Democrat, who comes out of nowhere to win the Republican presidential nomination.
But he's much deeper than that. He changed the direction of the Republican Party on international issues that shaped the way Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes engaged the world stage. Willkie was also a strong civil rights advocate. African Americans would have very likely been better off had he beaten FDR. He did better than other candidates against FDR, but still lost a crushing defeat. Willkie should get due credit for being an important loser by helping shape history.
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Top reviews from other countries

Vigilantius
4.0 out of 5 stars Remarkably influential leader, despite failing to win power
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 30, 2019
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Wilkie really was improbable:

* a successful lawyer-business man, with no political pedigree in the days when that mattered, who nearly became President of the USA at the most crucial time, in World War Two;

* a free-thinker, a strong advocate of equal rights in racist America, who won the Republican nomination despite having been a party member for less than a year, and a Democrat activist before that;

* a staunch supporter of rapid American military intervention on the side of the UK, at a time when isolationism was still so strong in the USA that even Anglophile President Roosevelt had to disguise his instincts.

* an almost complete novice to political traditions and the need to persuade party grandees, who nevertheless brought about a seismic shift - after losing the 1940 Presidential election - in ensuring bi-partisan support for Roosevelt during the war years;

* a poor political organiser who nevertheless attracted a raft of dedicated supporters who did the necessary groundwork for him, such as the young lawyer, Oren Root, who single-handedly created the Wendell Wilkie Clubs which swept up the Republican nomination for Willkie.

* and lastly, the unlikely liberal internationalist leader of the Republican party, and the former adversary of Roosevelt, who after 1940 became increasingly Rooseveltian, touring the world to promote a new international order, only to die prematurely in 1944.

As endorsed by Lewis and recounted in Willkie's wikipedia entry, the writer Walter Lippmann believed Willkie's nomination to have been crucial to Britain's survival in WW2: "second only to the Battle of Britain, the sudden rise and nomination of Willkie was the decisive event, perhaps providential, which made it possible to rally the free world when [Britain] was almost conquered. Under any other leadership but his the Republican party in 1940 would have turned its back on Great Britain, causing all who resisted Hitler to feel abandoned."

The renowned historian David Levering Lewis does full justice to this impressive man - a might-have-been who perhaps had more influence on world affairs - including the USA's embrace of an outward-looking, generous world role after WW2 - than any other American, except Roosevelt.

This biography gives the fullest detail on Willkie's political trajectory, especially the complicated inter-lacings of different movers and shakers in and outside the Republican party.

Lewis is good at highlighting the originality and unusualness of attitudes which in retrospect appear inevitable, when in fact history might have been very different but for Wendell Willkie, who is now virtually invisible. Willkie's integrity stands out all the more.
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