IT’S ROOSEVELT IN A ROUT. So much for the "closest election since 1916," or the prospect of another 1888. It now looks like the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket has won 39 states with 468 electoral votes. The popular vote for the President is around 25,700,000, versus 21,400,000 for Willkie-McNary. Strangely enough, though, reports also tell us that as far as the popular vote is concerned, this actually is the closest election since 1916. And Willkie has surpassed President Hoover’s 1928 vote total of 21,390,000, giving him the distinction of having the highest number of votes of any G.O.P. candidate in history. Some comfort.
The Republicans have done no better in Congress. They’d hoped to take control of the House for the first time in ten years, or at the very least to pick up some seats -- but it looks now like the Democrats will add to the 259 seats they now have. The G.O.P. may pick up a few Senate seats, but that won’t put much of a dent in the 69-to-24 margin in seats that the Democrats had going in to Tuesday.
One of the popular lapel buttons this past year has been "Republican Victory Year -- Life Begins in ’40." There were high hopes that the party could build on its huge victories of 1938 and regain control of both Congress and the presidency this year. The results are depressing, but we don’t have the luxury of dwelling on it in this critical year. As the New York Herald Tribune says, "There is an old American tradition of good losing. It was never more important than today, with a desperate world war raging overseas and the fate of every democracy endangered."
WILLKIE’S CONCESSION. I thought it a bit queer that Wendell Willkie didn’t concede on election night, even though he was running some three-and-a-quarter million votes behind the President by the early wee hours, and the electoral college returns had left no doubt of the outcome. Instead, according to Robert C. Albright in Wednesday’s Washington Post, he predicted the "horse race" would go on into the next day, went into a midnight meeting with advisors. Then he spoke to a gathering of his supporters in New York City and via radio hookup to the rest of the nation, saying things like "I never felt better in my life." Meanwhile, also rather queerly, Charles McNary conceded Tuesday night from Salem, Oregon, at 10:30 local time.
But when Willkie did come before the microphones about 9 a.m. Wednesday morning to concede, he did get off at least one good line. He pledged to continue fighting "for the unity of our people in the completion of our defense efforts, in sending aid to Britain, and in an insistence upon the removal of antagonisms in America, all to the end that a government of free men may continue and may again spread throughout the Earth." The President couldn’t have said it any better. Here’s hoping both parties ignore the rantings of their isolationist factions and work aggressively together toward all those goals.
Could the C.B.S. have been showing a bit of pro-Roosevelt bias in their coverage of the concession? After Mr. Willkie finished his statement, I distinctly heard the network announcer finish the news bulletin by saying, "And so speaks Wendell L. Weak...ah, Willkie."
"UNGRUDGING SUPPORT" FROM THE TIMES. A New York Times editorial Wednesday says it superbly --
"This newspaper does not regret that in the campaign just ended it supported a Republican candidate for the first time in thirty years. We have believed that violation of the American tradition against a third term would create a precedent certain to trouble the people of this country deeply for many years to come. We still hold that belief, now that the votes are counted. We have believed, and continue to believe, that on the other major issues of the campaign – the question of how to secure an adequate national defense, the problem of how to create the conditions of a confident and expanding business, the hope of checking the reckless fiscal policies of the last seven years short of national bankruptcy – the strongest arguments were on the side of Mr. Willkie. We disagree with the decision that has now been made. But we glory in the fact that ours is still a system of government in which the will of the majority prevails, and the minority gives ungrudging support to the majority in the achievement of every truly national purpose."
THE TRIBUNE TURNS ITS BACK ON WILLKIE. Well, that’s gratitude for you. The Chicago Tribune beat the drum for Wendell Willkie incessantly and unashamedly in its news pages throughout the campaign. Tuesday’s banner front-page headline summed up what’s happened to the Tribune’s "news" judgement -- "Prosperity! No War! Willkie." Their front-page voter guide even helpfully suggested, "If you need transportation to your polling place, telephone Republican county headquarters, CENTral 7802." Articles and editorials and cartoons for the last four months have touted the virtues of this fine man and how he would save America from getting embroiled in a foreign war.
But as the Republican ticket slid toward defeat Tuesday night, the editors abruptly turned on their favored candidate with breathtaking fickleness. A Wednesday editorial concludes as follows -- "A strong non-interventionist platform carried the [Republican] party to victory in Illinois. If the national platform and the national candidate had taken the same line it seems reasonable to believe they would have enjoyed an equal measure of success."
In other words, how could Willkie have dared fail us by not being a pie-eyed isolationist? On the other hand, at least the Tribune finally got around to acknowledging what readers of many other newspapers have known all along – that Willkie endorsed the peacetime draft, supports aid to Britain short of war, and pledged to carry out the Roosevelt Administration’s foreign policy in general. His fight with the President was over who could do a better job at administering those policies and thus keep the nation out of war. And some of us supported Willkie precisely for those reasons, and not out of agreement with the Tribune’s bizarre logic that he could have gotten more votes by narrowing his appeal to a smaller number of party faithful.
GREEKS ON THE OFFENSIVE. The New York Times’ election coverage pushed their war stories onto page 25 Wednesday, but the United Press dispatch on the fighting in Greece was worth looking inside the paper for. Greek forces are now said to be closing in on the Italian invasion base of Koritza, Albania. And that’s far from all --
"Other frontier dispatches said Greek columns converging on Koritza had encircled an entire Italian division [about 15,000 men] and its base in the mountains north of Biklishta. Italian planes were reported trying to feed from the air another Italian column allegedly surrounded in the mountains....Dispatches from Ohrid, Yugoslavia, east of Koritza, said that after capturing the Albanian villages of Zagradec and Tren the Greeks continued to advance last night, occupying the Albanian village of Pogri on the Devol River, thus completing encirclement of the Italian division. During the operation, the Greeks were reported to have captured forty Italian soldiers, three officers and three tanks."
Plus, there are unconfirmed reports of popular uprisings against the Italians by Albanian peasants. Can it really be that Mussolini’s latest aggression is turning into a complete disaster, even more so than the initial Russian attacks on Finland?
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