Tag Archives: wendell willkie

Franklin And Wendell

Many of us worry about the United States becoming a socialist country.  A little known accident of history, the untimely death of Wendell Willkie, scotched a plan to do just that.  After the 1940 presidential election between a liberal Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a liberal Republican, Wendell Willkie, FDR, frustrated, as he saw it, by the southern conservative Democrats, began talks with Willkie with the intent of forming a new Liberal party, uniting the liberal wings of the Democrat and Republican parties, leaving the rest to shift for themselves.  Had it happened, the result would likely have been a three party system, with a rump conservative southern Democrat party, a rump conservative Midwest Republican party, and a dominant Liberal party.  It never happened because WWII intervened, Willkie died, and less than two years after that FDR died.  So it never happened, but it could have, with disastrous consequences for the US.  As late as 1968 George Wallace could accurately say, of our two dominant parties, that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.  Had FDR and Willkie succeeded, there would most assuredly have been a great deal of difference between them.  The United States would have had political parties on the British model, and our politics and country would have been completely different, dominated as it would be by a far left political party.  That is where we now are, with the Democratic party captured by the far left, and leading us down that dank, dark road of socialism that leads inevitably to the cliff.

 

 

Washington said no more than two

To which all did agree

Till FDR said oh pooh pooh

I think I’ll go for three

The GOP guy in that year

Had Wendell for first name

Which tells you all you need to hear

About his chance for fame

Well FDR had up his sleeve

A scheme to flip the donkeys

And then without a by your leave

Unite with Wendell’s flunkies

To make a Liberal party that

Would rule the land forever

And guarantee whoever sat

In White House left it never

The Liberal flag remained unfurled

The thought just died aborning

‘Cause Wendell Willkie left this world

To very little mourning