Re-Imagining History

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On October 8, 1944, Wendell Willkie died at the age of 52 of heart disease.  He was best known as the Republicans' choice in 1940 to deny Democrat Franklin Roosevelt a third term as President of the United States.

A corporate attorney who had never run for public office before, Willkie had been a lifelong Democrat until disagreements with FDR's New Deal policies prompted him to change parties in 1939.

Despite having more votes than any other Republican presidential candidate up to that time, Willkie lost to Roosevelt because, with the Second World War well underway and the U.S. remaining on the sidelines, voters felt this was not the time to turn things over to someone else.

I'm reminded of this because of a program I heard on WCCO radio some years ago.  It was called "Imagination Theater", one of those attempts to bring radio drama into the modern era..  On this particular episode (this may not be entirely accurate), a man goes into a small California town and finds hostility and suspicion.  He hears news bulletins from the Blue Network (an actual radio network which was the predecessor to ABC) reporting that the Germans were bombing the East Coast while the Japanese were invading the West.

The man was told that Willkie was elected President in 1940 after FDR had died..

That got me wondering, Were the people behind "Imagination Theater" implying that, had anyone other than Roosevelt been President during World War II, the United States would have lost?

According to Wikipedia, Willkie has been used as a fictional character in other so-called "alternative histories" such as Phillip Roth's novel The Plot Against America.  In that book, Charles Lindbergh defeated Willkie for the presidency on the promise of keeping the country out of war.

I'm not a big fan of "alternative history" books, which tend to ask such provocative questions as:  What if the South had won the Civil War?  Or, what would have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated into nuclear war?  Do we really want to know the answers?

Willkie tried to run again in 1944, but got stiffed by a Republican Party that didn't like his cozying up to Roosevelt's wartime policies.  Instead they went with Thomas Dewey, who proceeded to lose to FDR's drive for a fourth term in the general election.

Let's cook up a little "alternative history" of our own:  Had Willkie been elected in '40 instead of Roosevelt, the new president would have been dead one month before he was up for re-election, throwing the country into a constitutional crisis.  Also, he would not have seen the end of World War II.  Then again, neither did FDR, who died a few weeks before the Nazis surrendered.

In this age of partisanship gone amuck, it's useful to be reminded that what happened happened, and we can either learn from history or we won't.  Leave the "alternative history" to the fiction writers.